(e: wrong. damn. tab.)
(e2)
this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2025
24 points (100.0% liked)
TechTakes
2087 readers
212 users here now
Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.
For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
the students in my cs department are overwhelmingly promptfondlers and even my strong students are doing the "qualified praise" thing.
fuck me why did i go into computer science
fuck me why did i go into computer science
That's a question I ask myself sometimes. It usually ends with "I focused too much on trying to make easy cash". Fuck it, I'm going to write out a sidenote:
On a wider front, part of me expects the AI bubble will inflict a serious blow to computer science/programming's public image after it bursts.
On one front, there's the heavy number of promptfondlers in computer science and other related fields. which will likely give birth to a stereotype of prorammers/software engineers being all promptfondlers who need a computer to think for them.
On a related front, the heavy damage this bubble's dealt to artists, and AI's continued and uniquely severe failures in creative fields (plus promptfondlers' failures to recognise said failures), has all combined to produce the public perception that promptfondlers are artless at best and hostile to art/artists at worst - a perception I expect will colour public perception of programmers/software engineers as a consequence of the previous stereotype I mentioned above.
The reason I do CS is because a professor of computer science lied to me about the kind of work I'd be doing to get me to enroll in the CS PhD program instead of math. Guy later physically threatened me in his office and plagiarized my work, but I'm not sure if this reflects poorly on computer scientists, academics, or CS professors.
Anyway I have a chip on my shoulder.
I'm sorry, that's messed up.
Thank you for the expression of sympathy. The good news is I actually love computer science, it fucking rules.
Also, I recorded this professor screaming at me and have documented all the plagiarism. I am waiting to officially leave the university to file a formal complaint. He may not get in any real trouble (universities will always go to bat for abusive researchers as long as they bring in grant money), but news will get out eventually.
I hope you whoop his ass (legally speaking)
I am waiting to officially leave the university to file a formal complaint
I am internally screaming
not that I blame you for this choice (in fact I get it), but it fucking suuuuuuuucks how many places and structures are overly protecting abusers. and it sucks even more how many people are being harmed out of that path as a result.
echoing what o7 said: sorry, this is messed up, it shouldn't be this way
<3
That’s a question I ask myself sometimes. It usually ends with “I focused too much on trying to make easy cash”.
I studied computer science because I was a huge computer nerd growing up. I always loved programming and learning everything I could about how computers worked. Learning new programming languages felt like uncovering a new universe of knowledge -- knowledge I could use to create things. I spent endless hours studying computers and learning to do amazing things with them. It was fun. It still is.
So when I see people using LLMs to create things instead of doing it themselves, I can't relate. Why do that when you can get the pleasure from doing it yourself? I guess if making money is the primary motivating factor, then it makes sense. But for me it is totally self-defeating.
Very similar situation to mine, but i went into electronics engineering instead of CS because i didn't think i would like to write software for a living. I now write software for a living, go figure.
Also agreed on the "doing it" thing. I hear people around the office talk about letting AI write things for them and i'm like no, i want to write it myself. i like doing things.
So when I see people using LLMs to create things instead of doing it themselves, I can’t relate. Why do that when you can get the pleasure from doing it yourself? I guess if making money is the primary motivating factor, then it makes sense. But for me it is totally self-defeating.
I have a theory (similar to that "it's been vibe coding all along" post) that it's a combination of wishful thinking, lack of knowledge of real science, and a lack of any liberal arts skills, that altogether produces this farce.
I think it's a good explanation for "the code has been battle tested because it's so old and widely used, if it had bugs/security issues, we would have discovered them by now", as well as the widespread "we invented a tech solution that is just a worse engineering solution". Looking at you, chain of self-driving cars.
Remember FizzBuzz? That was originally a simple filter exercise some person recruiting programmers came up with to weed out everyone with multi-year CS degrees but zero actual programming experience.
Picked up a sneer in the wild (through trawling David Gerard's Bluesky):
You want my take, Kathryn's on the money - future expectations on how people speak will actively shift away from anything that could be mistaken for sounding like an LLM, whether because you want to avoid being falsely accused of posting slop, or because the slop-nami has pushed your writing habits away from slop-like traits.
kinda related but wouldn’t it be fun to believe that LLMs were invented by Big Em Dash as a conspiracy
I fucking hate them for ruining the em dash, I liked to use it from time to time
somewhere out there, there's a writer who really likes the em dash, the word "delve," and answering questions with a one-word hyper-chipper affirmative, followed by three sentences of people pleasing. He can't get a job because he keeps being accused of using AI
It's not just blank, it's blank
Forgot to save who said it, but on bsky somebody said they or their friends had come up with a slur for people who use genAI for everything: sloppers.
More people should have read Zima Blue.
Zima Blue
Didn’t know it was something readable! I just know it as an episode of Love Death + Robots. It was a standout episode in an otherwise pretty boring first two seasons.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zima_Blue_and_Other_Stories it is, I still have not watched love death + robots, so I only knew it from the story collection.
Forgot to save who said it, but on bsky somebody said they or their friends had come up with a slur for people who use genAI for everything: sloppers.
Finally, a slur my British ass can sling at people guilt-free
Copilot will be given a little avatar with a "room" and will "age". In other words: we have now reached the Microsoft Bob stage of the AI bubble.
Fuck you Microsoft, I'm gonna have to pretend to be autoplag's dad now, at least have the courtesy not to make it look like a cum blob.
This sounds like the plot of an oglaf comic
This is literally just a Tamagotchi but worse
EDIT: This was supposed to be an offhanded comment, but reading further makes me think Mustafa Suleyman has literally never heard of a Tamagotchi
Those who do not study history are doomed to recreate neopets.
Neopets but it's an animated blob of cum with a smiley face.
They wanted a sexy avatar, turns out Oglaf.com is in the training set. "Mistress!"
Neopets at least brought joy to a generation of nascent furries. Copilot is fixing to have the exact opposite impact on internet infrastructure.
Of course, it is now funded by growth at all cost VC people, they do not understand fun or joy, all they want to see is n = n+1
At least Microsoft Bob gave us comic sans.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-the-astral-codex-ten lol but good for lore:
The most toxic the comments section has ever got (beyond the very early days) was on the post Gupta on Enlightenment. I feel like the comments section on this post should be part of the ACX main canon because it is so cosmically hilarious. It concerns a man name Vinay Gupta (founder of a blockchain-based dating website) and his claims to have reached enlightenment. Some people in the comments are sceptical that Vinay Gupta is indeed an enlightened being, citing that enlightened people don’t typically found blockchain-based dating websites. A new forum poster with the handle ‘Vinay Gupta’, claiming to be Vinay Gupta and writing in a very similar style to the actual Vinay Gupta, turns up and starts arguing with everyone in an extremely toxic way (in the objective sense that his comments score very highly on the toxic-bert scoring system), which provokes more merriment that a self-described enlightened being would deploy such classic internet tough-guy approaches as ‘I don’t think much of a four-on-one face off against untrained opponents’ (link) and ‘this board is filled with self-satisfied assholes who feel free to hold forth on whatever subject crosses their minds, with the absolute certainty that they’re the smartest people in the room’
(in the objective sense that his comments score very highly on the toxic-bert scoring system)
That's an ML model. Like I searched and toxic-bert is just a github repo.
"objective" go fuck a cow
Sidenote: I almost ended up working for the company almost a decade ago now lmao. The board was full of other characters we all know and love here. The €€€ offer was high for EU, but I still laugh at the growth potential of my 10000 dollars yearly equivalent in their tokens. The website was unique in that it scrolled... up. I think it's still on archive dot org
this board is filled with self-satisfied assholes who feel free to hold forth on whatever subject crosses their minds, with the absolute certainty that they’re the smartest people in the room
If your system flagged that as toxic, makes me wonder about the system. Also check your bias against people saying this because it def comes off as true. (And hey if this truth hurts, remember that he didnt claim yall are not the smartest people, yall have 130+ iqs remember).
Just because it's true, that doesn't mean it's not rude. Now I might condone being rude on ACX but I'm also not claiming to have reached enlightenment.
Buddha, just seconds before enlightenment:
-you know what actually fuck those guys heavenly light
Victorian Sufi Buddha Lite, if it is true, it can't be rude. ;)
(E: im just joking btw, I agree with you it can be rude, and tbh this does come off a bit rude, but not the worst, no idea why this would score high on their scoring system, it def isn't nice, but it is also not that bad in regards to comments).
Damn you, Scott! Stop making me agree with people who created blockchain-based dating apps!
I've met Vinay, he's great in person. But should not post.
I try to talk to ChatGPT for 2 straight hours but go crazy and have to stop | Daniel Hentschel
I'm here to help in whatever way I can. Just let me know what you'd like to do next.
What I'd like to do next is fucking hang myself. Oh shit I shouldn't have said that. No, I'm joking. That was a joke. I was joking about that. Joking.
I'm sorry he feels that way. I'm here for him if he wants to talk about anything, just let me know.
The guy who thinks it's important to communicate clearly (https://awful.systems/comment/7904956) wants to flip the number order around
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KXr8ys8PYppKXgGWj/english-writes-numbers-backwards
I'll consider that when the Yanks abandon middle-endian date formatting.
Edit it's now tagged as "Humor" on LW. Cowards. Own your cranks.
Likewise, flipped-number ("little endian") algorithms are slightly more efficient at e.g. long addition.
What? What are you talking about? Citation? Efficient wrt. what? Microbenchmarks? It's certainly not actual computational complexity. Do you think going forward in an array is different computationally from going backward?
Okay what the fuck, this is completely deranged. How can anyone's intuitions about reading be this wrong? Is he secretly illiterate, did he dictate the article?
load more comments
(7 replies)
I didn’t see this article here yet, but I just saw it elsewhere and it’s pretty good: Potemkin Understanding in Large Language Models
view more: next ›