nfultz

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/untenable-middle-ground-responsible-ai-use-emily-m-bender-8jyfc/

So what is the best way out of that uncomfortable, untenable space? I think one key step is disaggregating the (non-coherent) set of technologies sold as "AI". If you don't call the stuff you work with "AI", you aren't saddled with trying to defend any of the rest of it.

The most recent iteration of this conversation I was involved in turned in part on a strange, over-expansive definition of "genAI" which included, for ex, optical character recognition (OCR).

OCR can be a useful tool for many research projects! OCR is also the kind of technology that gets better with better language models, i.e. more fine-grained models of which word(parts) go where. That has been true since before "genAI" and will be true after.

Just because you can use the synthetic media extruding machines to approximate the task of OCR, however, doesn't mean that that task can or should be used to justify the use of "genAI" in research.

I interviewed at two different glorified-OCR startups pre-pandemic (?pre-AI?) for an ML role, and neither CTO knew what a spline was. That is my OCR story.

New findings in Bayesian tragedy

The inspection is being led by the chief prosecutor of Termini Imerese, Angelo Vittorio Cavallo. According to Italian news outlets, the technical and investigative team is evaluating whether the crew underestimated the rapidly worsening weather conditions and whether the measures taken to weather the storm were adequate.

The Bayesian went down in the early hours of 19 August 2024 near Porticello, close to Palermo, while at anchor. The tragedy claimed seven lives, including British tech entrepreneur Mike Lynch, his daughter Hannah, ship’s cook Recaldo Thomas, Morgan Stanley International chair Jonathan Bloomer and his wife Judy, and attorney Chris Morvillo and his wife Neda.

The yacht’s captain, James Cutfield, along with crew members Tim Eaton and Matthew Griffith, are under investigation.

time to update our priors

https://www.fastcompany.com/91562297/daters-say-ai-dependence-gives-them-the-ick h/t naked capitalism

Younger daters are especially likely to view AI reliance as a red flag. While 56% of Millennial respondents said they wouldn’t date someone who uses AI regularly, that figure rose to 64% among Gen Z.

More than half of Gen Z daters surveyed said they’d consider it a dealbreaker if someone used AI for career advice or spending decisions, compared with 46% and 44% of Millennials, respectively.

? the kids are alright ?

I'll yes-and you, Ukraine faces higher costs also, ie https://dronexl.co/2026/05/11/ukraine-fiber-optic-spool-price-ai-data-center-demand/

now serving with Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces, said in a May 10 post on X that his unit used to buy 50-kilometer fiber optic spools for $300. Today, he said, “it’s easily $2,500.”

China makes money on both sides, plus the data centers you mentioned. Compare/contrast with Iran, who switched from GPS to Chinese nav to also get around jamming because leashes don't get that long... and China also makes money.

But locally, my BIL who runs fiber for a rural ISP, says basically they still make way more on recycling the copper wire they pull out than they pay for fiber. IDK.

The op-ed https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/17/opinion/ai-dangerous-openai-anthropic.html

Newport I mostly know for pretty mid lifehack / business books for the Tim Ferris crowd, pre-pandemic. "Doom trolling" does have a better ring to it than "critihype." Maybe he was holding his tongue until he got tenure or something.

gwern:

I've been browsing /r/LessWrong for many years, due to having toggled on 'subscribe' and never quite getting around to leaving. I will be leaving shortly, but before I do:

I think this subreddit has gotten so bad over the years it should be shut down or rebooted with a new set of moderators.

https://www.reddit.com/r/LessWrong/comments/1uabnlx/proposal_shut_down_rlesswrong/

lol

a coworker set up an argument, almost a syllogism, I can't quite fill it in, maybe yall can

1. enshitification
2. shit rolls down hill
3. therefore: ?

I was flipping through this month's magazine on the bus, don't worry, they have a solution for reviewers...

https://cacm.acm.org/research/from-volunteerism-to-duty-reforming-peer-review-with-tokens/

:(

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/coquinn_saw-a-guy-watering-his-lawn-this-morning-share-7469886051847766016-rhHD/

Saw a guy watering his lawn this morning. Just standing there, hose in hand, dumping potable water onto grass that exists for no reason other than to be looked at and complained about.

Sir. Do you understand that a single hyperscale data center can drink millions of gallons a year keeping GPUs from cooking themselves while they generate a poem about a sad robot? That water has a HIGHER calling. That water could be evaporating off a cooling tower in service of someone’s RAG pipeline that returns the wrong answer with tremendous confidence.

And here you are. Hydrating Kentucky bluegrass. In a region where the grass was never supposed to grow in the first place.

I asked him if his lawn had an SLA. He said no. I asked what his lawn’s uptime commitment was. He looked at me like I was the unreasonable one. Meanwhile that turf is sitting at four nines of being green and producing exactly zero tokens per second.

We are pouring concrete across three states to host inference workloads, and this man is allocating municipal water to a crabgrass cluster with no monetization strategy. No usage-based billing. Not even a freemium tier.

Anyway I reported him to nobody, because there’s no one to report him to, which is honestly the most damning part of this entire ecosystem.

Touch grass, they said. He did. Look where it got us.

NOT EVEN A FREEMIUM TIER. that got me.

see also the old ludicity snowflake post https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/i-accidentally-saved-half-a-million-dollars/ and everything by corey quinn LastWeekinAWS.com - there's like this learned helplessness in corporate america IT (perhaps Graeber is right and more budget validates your self importance even if it's wasted cloud spend), or they think its monopoly money or something. or, both.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/79948695/how-can-i-avoid-using-llms-as-a-software-developer

For me, the ideal usage case for LLMs are not prompts like "write this app" or "write this functionality" which indeed will often wreck havoc, but instead write simple functions. Sure, I can implement a matrix multiplication algorithm or search for optimised versions of it, but so can the LLM in a matter of seconds.

Please, just fucking don't, BLAS and sparse pack and the netlib exists for a reason. Matrix multiply only sounds simple to you because you don't actually care that much. The last thing anyone wants or needs is to start a new job and have to debug your awful regurgitated Numerical Recipes In C, incorrectly ported to python, AT SCALE.