I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again

It's so beautiful.

How about you remain competitive by fixing your shit? I've met a lead data scientist with access to hundreds of thousands of sensitive customer records who is allowed to keep their password in a text file on their desktop, and you're worried that customers are best served by using AI to improve security through some mechanism that you haven't even come up with yet? You sound like an asshole and I'm going to kick you in the jaw until, to the relief of everyone, a doctor will have to wire it shut, giving us ten seconds of blessed silence where we can solve actual problems.

The only thing I'm holding against this guy is him buying into the AI doom, and I'm attributing that to him getting lost in the sauce regarding data science.

Everything else was this guy channeling his inner Kendrick and giving the AI bubble the beatdown it so richly deserves.

It really sounds like they only buy into it as far as “we don’t really understand where this thing is going, so in the realm of infinite possibility we can’t in good conscious say it WON’T kill us all SOMEDAY.”
- They said the same thing about stuffed crust pizza, and look where we are now.

thanks to this article specifically, Ludic’s going on a podcast with Robert Evans:

I just agreed to go on a podcast on a whim, then a friend told me it is with the host of Behind the Bastards, and I spat tea everywhere.

My to-do list today said "go for piano class" and "prepare for rental inspection".

I am unprepared for this level of prime time.

This is brilliant and I’m saving it and will post a link to it the next time someone at work asks why we can’t “just use AI to do it” when a ticket gets rejected for being stupid and/or unreasonable.

However:

The first is that we have some sort of intelligence explosion, where AI recursively self-improves itself, and we're all harvested for our constituent atoms […]. It may surprise some readers that I am open to the possibility of this happening, but I have always found the arguments reasonably sound.

Yeah, I gotta admit, I am surprised. Because I have not found a single reasonable argument for this horseshit and the rest of the article (as well as the others I read from their blog) does not read like it’s been written by someone who’d buy into AI foom.

data scientists can have little an AI doomerism, as a treat
- Look, I know what this subject is about, but hear me out here, what if we replace the AI doomer data scientists with A.... WHO AREYOU? WHY ARE YOU IN MY HOU... ARGH
Yeah, that juxtaposition makes no sense to me. How does the machine that remixes existing text and makes it worse become anything that can "recursively self-improve"? Show your work.
- You got Schmidhuber'd! A Gödel machine would fit the bill. Nobody's built one yet, but the hard part -- proof search through something like Metamath (particularly Metamath Zero) -- is long-since solved. It wouldn't take over the world, though; it would just sit in a corner and get really good at maths over the next few centuries.

A masterpiece, no notes.

Also, I read this in SecUnit's voice.

I would read the fuck out of SecUnit's take on 21st century AI doom / AI hype.
- The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Goon
  
  Edit: I thought to myself, "deborah's post would be a great fanfic prompt! SecUnit decides to look up the ol family history, and BOOM, it exposes itself to these TESCREAL characters. It would be appalled!"
  
  Throwing caution to the wind, I went to look up Murderbot on AO3 and now I'm scheduled to get my No Regerts tattoo inked-over next week. It's still a great idea, though!

Lol look at the reception on HN.

First off it was too cool and real to be allowed by their rules*, so there are like six [flagged][dead] copies, then Dang allowed it through with the title Please Don't Mention AI Again, as a weird attempt at humor, and then half the comments were all just about how aggressive the article's tone is.

Basically: what a bunch of squares.

* Actually I just read through the rules and it doesn't actually violate any of them, but I guess there are unwritten rules too.

No doubt this is because the title is a tad afoul of the site guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) so we had to change it. I thought it would be amusing to change it to something as meek and passive-aggressive as the original is, er, forthright, so I did.

what a terrible fucking moderator. the original title doesn’t violate any of these guidelines (it’s not clickbait by any real definition of the term) so dang and the orange site’s shitty community decided to try and limit the article’s impact by flagging it (which didn’t work) and editorializing its title (which has search indexing and discoverability implications beyond just being lame as fuck and an enforcement of a rule that dang hallucinated)

half the comments were all just about how aggressive the article’s tone is

ah. I’ll brace for even more orange site fuckwits to come here and try and tone police Ludic’s writing
"is hn being attacked?" (source)

ah, yes, it cannot possibly be that people actually liked the post that takes aim at the glorious and correct thing that is chatgpt telling you to guzzle drain cleaner for a minty fresh smile. no, it can obviously only be an attack. that's totes the most likely thing, outstripping all others.

Bookmarked. When the question comes up again, this article will be a good reply because it really brings many of my own thoughts to the point.

I left the field, as did most of my smarter friends, and my salary continued to rise a reasonable rate and sustainably as I learned the wisdom of our ancient forebearers. You can hear it too, on freezing nights under the pale moon, when the fire burns low and the trees loom like hands of sinister ghosts all around you - when the wind cuts through the howling of what you hope is a wolf and hair stands on end, you can strain your ears and barely make out: "Just Use Postgres, You Nerd. You Dweeb."

How do I hire this person, this is something I'd like embroiled in gold letters over my desk. And on the tombstone.

He has a consultancy now!

I just got back from a trip to a substantially less developed country, and really living in a country, even for a little bit, where I could see how many lives that money could improve, all being poured down the Microsoft Fabric drain, it just grinds my gears like you wouldn't believe. I swear to God, I am going to study, write, network, and otherwise apply force to the problem until those resources are going to a place where they'll accomplish something for society instead of some grinning clown's wallet.

Amen. We always need more insiders who are ready to take up the cause of not doing stupid shit with the ungodly accumulation of resources our society has permitted, especially when we are currently leaving so much of the world to play catch-up while we continue to leech them dry.

Hmmm, piledriving....

multiple people have pinged me with this one on social media too

Bravo!

You're not a real data scientist unless you've written your own libraries in C??

I couldn't get past the inferiority complex masquerading as a confident appeal to authority.

Maybe the rest of the article was good but the taste of vomit wasn't worth it to me.

Edit:

Ok, I read the whole thing. I agree with all of it. None of the domain specific content is objectionable (or uncommonly held views) from a technical standpoint, and the ties to misuse and misunderstanding by business is something we're all watching at our respective employers I'm sure.

But I stand by original point that it's an arbitrarily low-blow to snipe his competitors for never having implemented a C library. Why not x86? Why not an ASIC implementation? What must I do to be a true fucking Scotsman?

You're not a real data scientist unless you've written your own libraries in C??

no one said this

if you had actually read the article instead of just reacting to it, you would probably understand that the purpose of the second paragraph is to lead to the first section where he tears down the field of data science as full of opportunistic hucksters, shambling in pantomime of knowledgeable people. he's bragging about his creds, sure, but it's pretty clearly there to lend credence that he knows what he's talking about when he starts talking about the people that "had not gotten as far as reading about it for thirty minutes" before trying to blindly pivot their companies to "AI".

I couldn't get past the inferiority complex masquerading as a confident appeal to authority.

hello? oh, yes, i'll have one drive-by projection with a side of name-dropped fallacy. yes, reddit-style please. and a large soda

Maybe the rest of the article was good but the taste of vomit wasn't worth it to me.

"not reading" isn't a virtue
- i've always enjoyed* the style of HN comment "I stopped reading when I got to [basic historical fact I misread]"
- I'm not God's gift to the field, but I am clearly better than most of my competition - that is, practitioners who haven't put in the reps to build their own C libraries in a cave with scraps, but can read textbooks and use libraries written by elite institutions.
  
  I agree not reading isn't a virtue, but after reading something that caused my eyes to roll entirely out of my skull, I had to choose to cut the damage to my optic nerves.
  
  Maybe the rest was good. That was bad. My critique is constrained to that specific, nauseating paragraph.
that's because you need to get good and read the entire works of Lucidity to improve yourself

sorry, it's you
- Is it a common theme to shit on people for not having rollied their own C implemtations or was that a one off lapse of judgment on their part?
1000 Years Thought Leader Jail