yellowcake

The major shift of not needing SaaS middleman products because AI can spin them up instantly at scale never happened. Instead we see lay-offs to pay for AI tokens while quality plummets and services offered do not increase.

Bunch of missing stops and unlabeled dots on the green lines. Even with MBTA green line projects this is wrong. Boston metro is full of turbo transit nerds who argue nightly at breweries about how to build a proper spoke-hub model for the T so these clowns could have popped into any of the many local establishments and had about a dozen experts chime in to volunteer help. But of course AI is used by the non-experts because if they do not know it already then that means no one knows it.

Wasn't there also a local celebrity MBTA expert on a reality dating show too? Cmon MA officials, do better.

Sold to private equity a few years ago and then purchased by Sony most recently

The slop startup dubs this "Audience Intelligence" and claims pixar experience. There are two "interactive movies" by them, Pickford AI. No employee there should even consider themselves adjacent to artists.

Alamo Drafthouse built a reputation on strict viewing rules to provide a pleasant immersive experience at their theaters.

All of that is gone. They switched to you using your own phone to order food/drink so people are on the phones more often than a regular theater. And now they are doing AI "audience immersive presentations" where the audience remains on their phone to submit prompt garbage to AI generate dumb movies.

Support your local theater. This chain got too much love the last decade. Being in the northeast we only recently got an Alamo but plenty of small local theaters exist in and around the city (brattle, coolidge, west newton all if you are in Boston).

My vibes based thoughts on Quantum bubble: it’s been tried before and never stuck. It’s too science-y for the common folk to buy-in. AI sold fear, crypto sold “ownership” and “banking freedom” and of course “FOMO to invest early like imagine buying Apple when it was a $1!”, and dotcom sold anything computer.

But now everyone has computer, crypto questions never answered so it remains in a small capacity still on the “ya but what if”, and AI isn’t able to actually replace anyone after trillions of dollars poured in so it’s going the way of crypto (will still be around but not in our faces at every turn).

Quantum just never had and never will have those pulls. Like I remember the attempt to sell fear a decade or more ago when everyone was like “passwords and encryption become meaningless!” But it was still all hypothetical. Being hardware is a huge part of the fizzle. Software you can make pretty interface and spin up a PoC that doesn’t do anything but you can have someone use the prototype to get the “omggghg it’s real” feeling. Without hardware being accessible it just looks like nerds in lab coats and no one cares.

A friend at a former workplace was in a discussion with that company leadership earlier this week to understand how and what metrics are to be used for promotion candidates since the office is directed to use “AI” tools for coding. Simply put: lots of entry and lower level engineers submit PRs that are co-authored by Claude so it is difficult to measure their actual software development skills to determine if they should get promoted.

That leadership had no real answers just lots of abstract garbage (vibes essentially) and followed up with telling all the entry levels to reduce the code they write and use the purchased agentic tool.

Along with this a buddy at a very famous prop shop says the firm decided to freeze all junior hiring and is leaning into only hiring senior+ and replacing juniors with AI. He asked what will happen when the current seniors leave/retire and got hit with shock that would even be considered.

Ian Lance Taylor (of GOLD, Go, and other tech fame) had a take on chatbots being AGI that I liked to see from an influential person of computing. https://www.airs.com/blog/archives/673

The summary is that chatbots are not AGI, using the current AI wave as the usher to AGI is not it, and all around dislikes in a very polite way that chatbot LLMs are seen as AI.

Apologies if this was posted when published.

I remember popping into IRC or a mailing list to ask subsystem questions to learn from the sources themselves how something works (or should work). Depending who what and where definitely had differing experiences but overall I felt like there was typically a helpful person on the other side. Nowadays I fear the slop will make people a lot less willing to help when they are overwhelmed with AI generated garbage patches or mails losing some of the rose-tinted charm of open source.

It’s unfortunate that the bug bounty payout removal is probably the best immediate remedy for some filtering but with curl being everywhere resume padders are still going to rush to generate slop reports or patches. I hope they are more fast and direct with communication as well. Their current patience and politeness is admirable.

Reading through some of the examples at the end of the article it’s infuriating when these slop reports have opened and when the patient curl developers try to give them benefit of the doubt the reporter replies with “you have a vulnerability and I cannot explain further since I’m not an expert”. Oh but for sure it’s broken and you are expert enough to know? One of the examples the reporter kept replying with how a strcpy() could be unsafe and the curl devs were kindly explaining that yes in general that function has potential for issues but their usage was not such a case. Reporter just repeats without paying attention. Insanity.

I love working in systems writing C and assembly but I’ve grown many gray hairs over the years being yelled at that “C is the worst” or “lol memory bug” or the classic “this thing isn’t working perfectly for me so it must have been written in C and we need to rewrite it entirely in (alpha) language which is for sure better than the collective centuries of expertise in C existing now”. These LLMs sure do amplify these obnoxious voices because now the fancy chatbot says so.

If there’s any good news to pull from this, people are doing buy now pay later on AI powered burritos but skipping the pay later portion.