My cute lizards thread also broke containment. I think my toots might soon begin to autonomously attack internet infrastructure, and before 2030 I calculate there is a 10% chance they will develop bioweapons and annihilate humanity.

I suppose I can deliver some pictures of lizard cuteness myself. My usual provider went to sleep early today, so I must substitute random internet lizards instead.

I don't like PHP. I used to work as a professional PHP programmer, and after that, I *really* don't like PHP.

But - even if this thought is deeply disconcerting - PHP is critical infrastructure at this point. And the people who just worked their arses off to fix vulnerabilities in PHP systems are deserving of respect and solidarity, even if you think the PHP language is bad.

(Many of those people also don't like PHP).

Igor has gone to sleep early.

I require pictures of lizards being cute.

I swear, I'll scream next time some headline mentions what Sam Altman "thinks" or what Dario Amodei "believes".

Please stop anthropomorphizing AI executives.

They're not sentient and they can't actually think. They just predict the next token using statistical patterns scraped from LinkedIn, X and the Financial Times. The apparent "understanding" is simply a parlor trick: They produce text strings that *sound* plausible, but they don't actually have any understanding of the world.

I'll grant that they became a lot more technically impressive when Reinforcement Learning from Investor Sentiment pipelines were introduced, but fundamentally they're still just stochastic bullshit generators. Running them in a loop and giving them access to the internet will end up being the most expensive mistake in the history of technology.

This is a bit of a long shot, I guess, but if there's *anywhere* it might hit, it's fedi.

Does anyone have access to an early-00s era word processor? An ancient copy of MS Word is fine.

I need a couple of screenshots with some text pasted in.

"tech is screwed. and also depressing. i should find something else to do."

(realizes there literally is nothing else he can do)

well fuck

Note: I'm not interested in LLM hater forums. They may not be *for* LLMs, but they're still *about* LLMs.

I just want to nerd out with programming.

Do you know any programming forum / news site / aggregator / whatever that *isn't* all about LLMs? I'd be very happy with one where LLM discussion is explicitly considered offtopic.

I can get my LLM news from Lobsters, HN, or - increasingly - the national public service newsfeed here. Or the lunch break at work. Or bus chatter during my commute. Or family get-togethers. Probably the local dive bar.

(Outside of this little bubble, the actually-correct answer is "a symptom of peripheral artery disease". It's when your muscles cramp up or hurt during exertion, because gunked-up arteries can't bring sufficient oxygen to them.

But it *sounds* like what Linus is doing to the kernel, and a RHCP song.)

The entirety of Wirth's Oberon System - a multitasking OS, compiler, runtime and TUI library - would fit in the Pi 4's L2 cache. And there'd be room enough left over for...

~4 more copies of the entire Oberon System.

("very likely", because industrial-grade microSD cards actually solve many of the problems of consumer ones. Some of them will handily outlast whatever device you put them in.

They're terribly expensive, though - and still physically fragile, small and fiddly.)

Something I occasionally think about, and then proceed to be horrified to my core, is this:

A Raspberry Pi 4 *vastly* outperforms an Amiga 4000. Or a Symbolics XL1200. Or an SGI Octane. A typical microSD card is *much* faster than a Seagate Cheetah Ultra320 SCSI HDD you might have found in a high-end Unix workstation back in the day.

But the Pi 4 is barely able to run modern-day office software or browse the mainstream web. The microSD card is mostly considered a slow piece of junk (which it very likely is, though for other reasons than its performance).

What the fuck are we even doing here?

Let's say none of that Tesla Roadster show was faked or "assisted". It's all completely real, and Tesla now has a car that can do jet-propelled kickflips and a sweet building-sized halfpipe.

That is some very impressive technical capabilities! But are there any practical applications beyond making 13-year-old boys of all ages go "whooooa!"?

"Claudication" is...

"but you'll be left behind!". yes. i probably will. so go ahead and leave me behind.

When a bunch of weird Christians 20 years ago kept telling us all that we'd be staying here on Earth while they all got raptured away to heaven, i felt much the same way: if *you lot* are going to heaven, then please, by all means, go ahead without me.

go ahead. leave me behind. you keep saying i'll be left behind, fuckin' do it already.

on the subject of old, dead, German philosophers:

I've read a lot of Schopenhauer. There's a lot to disagree with, but I morbidly enjoy the radical pessimism - and how he manages to wrest a deeply humane, and compassionate ethics from his conviction that we live in the worst possible world and that the universe is a penal colony where we are punished for being born. He was way ahead of his time on animal rights (he was perhaps the first European philosopher to even take the subject seriously); animals are our fellow inmates - if they have a somewhat dimmer awareness of the nature of their punishment than we do, then it is still only right to treat them with compassion.

But if I ever reference or recommend him, I always add a caveat: He was rather badly misogynist.

Why do I single out the misogyny, given that he was also a bit of a racist and an antisemite? Mostly because the time he lived in was quite different from ours, and he wasn't any more racist or antisemitic than the cultural baseline (if anything he was *less* racist in practice; he was fiercely opposed to transatlantic slavery and European colonialism). But even for his own time, he was a misogynistic troglodyte. He *really* hated women, and actively fought against the advances of the women's suffrage movement. You could dig up 2000-year-older dead Greek philosophers and *still* find Schopenhauer to be a regressive throwback in comparison.

Sometimes I think about what historical philosophers would have been like if they'd grown up in the modern day, but still had the same foundational guiding values or ideas as they did. Eg. nu-Plato wouldn't have had kooky physics, but he'd still have been an idealist and an authoritarian. And I think if we did that to Schopenhauer, we'd get a nu-Schopenhauer who probably wasn't racist or antisemitic at all, but who'd probably be posting angry rants on manosphere forums.

back when I was in university doing my CS degree, I enjoyed slumming it with humanities people when I had the opportunity. A friend of mine was doing her philosophy degree at the same time, and every now and then I'd sit in on some of their discussions if it was something I found interesting. (Having grown up with a philosophy major mum sort of predisposed me to this, I guess).

And this is perhaps why, when I read all the many discussions about programmer misery at the moment, I feel like there's an important term (with its supporting body of theory) missing. For example, there was a bunch of talk about how a lot of ongoing programmer misery is not *really* burnout, though people certainly are exhausted - it's more about a feeling of loss of meaning. That it's getting harder to care about what we work on, and on our work itself, because we keep being increasingly removed from the purpose of the work; it's hard to feel your work has meaning if you're only abstractly aware of what it's for and what it's about. Perhaps we're all lodged into "administrative sediment" (a term coined by a medical professional; it might well describe life in their discipline) rather than "burnout"?

The word we're grasping for is "alienation". A dead old German guy wrote a bunch about it; he's currently unfashionable, but we'll be hearing about him again soon; his corpse tends to be exhumed every time there's a big financial crisis.