i don’t think of myself as a young person (i’m closer to 40 than 30), but i agree with the sentiment. i often worry that it’s just don quixote energy and the windmills aren’t going to thank me when i’m in the ground with work experience that employers look at and scoff. 🤷

saw a family member today for the first time in three years. they immediately told me “with your background bro you should just go work in AI and get super rich.”

told them that the ai shit doesn’t work and that everything involving LLMs is downright unethical. they respond

“i had a boss that gave me the best advice: you can either be right or you can be rich.”

recently, i saw someone use the phrase “got my bag nihilism” and i feel it really captures the moment. i just don’t understand how people can engage in this kind of behavior and even live with themselves, let alone ooze pride. it’s repulsive.

(family member later outright admitted that his job is basically selling things to companies that they don’t need.)

promptfondler: would you like a shit sandwhich?
human: no
promptfondler: don’t worry, here is the ingredient list, i even included where they were sourced

• shit (from my butt between my ears)
• bread (from the store)

to ensure there are no issues i will prepare the sandwich in public view

I replied basically “I am disappointed, LLMs are bad, what the shit” and got this reply:

Thank you for your feedback, this is the info Bitwarden can provide.

With an open source development process, Bitwarden provides the most trusted and transparent approach available. If you have any further questions, please don’t hesitate to ask.

oh your code is open source guess that resolves everything then

well, i’m learning three months late that bitwarden has begun allowing slop into their server code. emailed customer service about my concerns and they replied

Bitwarden uses AI tooling for development purposes, not within the product itself. No code ever gets placed into the product without a human review, whether that is augmented by AI or a human. All code has and continues to go through multiple layers of review, both human and tool driven.

gotta find a replacement. keepassxc, the alternative i would have suggested a year ago, is now a slopshop.

fuck me i am so god damn sick of this shit

It is computer science in the southern united states (though I am open to finishing my PhD in Europe, especially because cryptography is an area of interest). Sorry for not mentioning this in the original post.

a field that will accept a second go at a PhD, but won’t accept a well documented HR complaint against a supervisor, is not one worth working in.

Thank you, I think this is something I needed to hear (read).

Off topic: I am looking for some advice. I enrolled in a PhD program several years ago. After years of verbal abuse, I left my advisor’s lab. Shortly after, he tried to get me kicked out of the program by giving me a failing grade, then he tried to physically intimidate me in his office (moved across the room to get in my face and scream at me). I reported this to the campus police but they said nothing could be done because he didn’t touch me or explicitly threaten violence. Later that day, he removed my name from work I had done for him, which is definitely plagiarism and a violation of the academic honesty policy.

I have an audio recording from that day of him screaming at me, as well as him basically admitting to retaliating by giving me a failing grade (I filed a grievance about this with the university and they changed my grade). I also recorded a long exchange that may not be incriminating but reinforces that he is an overbearing asshole.

I tried changing advisors but the options of available professors were limited (and the university decided that my abysmal $500 USD a week salary would get dropped to something like $300 a week), so I mastered out.

I was hoping to eventually finish my PhD elsewhere and I fear that I won’t be able to (that no advisor would want to risk working with me) if I go public with this. At the same time, the thought of him continuing to teach there and not suffer any accountability is killing me. (In my grievance, I requested a public apology and he refused, telling the chair that he would instead be comfortable with a meeting moderated by the chair — absolutely farcical.)

Does anyone have advice? Would it be worth going public (e.g. reaching out to the local press or the student paper)? I suppose I could just email human resources with the information and see what happens. Experience in this precise situation is probably limited (although academia has a lot of abusers, so maybe not).

(A week ago I was confident I would go public sometime soon. Now I just feel apprehension.)

this is why i only self-host low risk crap and it’s all behind my tailnet

half the time i put my shirt on backwards, i am not going to put my password db on the public internet myself

one thing i did not see coming, but should have (i really am an idiot): i am completely unenthused whenever anyone announces a piece of software. i’ll see something on the rust subreddit that i would have originally thought “that’s cool” and now my reaction is “great, gotta see if an llm was used”

everything feels gloomy.

cleaning the egg off my face (but egg prices are pretty high rn so i may just keep it)

thanks @swlabr@awful.systems for the link and @blakestacey@awful.systems for the skeptical post, my dumbass dropped the ball there

old gell-mann amnesia problem

I didn’t know this had a name. Thank you!

I think, if you can wait long enough, there is a chance employers will be champing at the bit to hire people who actually know what the fuck they are talking about and whose ability to think hasn’t been short-circuited by a tool that pretends to think for them.

That’s what I am counting on. Could just be (definitely is) copium.

Very out of my depth here but thank you for this post and the links. This was delightful to read. 💖

in the fall of 2024, i was getting teams messages from my students that were clearly llm-generated

The purpose of this block of code is to efficiently BLAH FUCKING BLAH WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU EVEN TALKING ABOUT

i have to assume it’s only gotten worse

no need to apologize, i understand what you mean. my experience with mathematicians has been that this is really common. even the theoretical computer scientists (the “lemma, theorem, proof” kind) i have met do this kind of bullshit when they finally decide to write a line of code. hell, their pseudocode is often baffling — if you are literally unable to run the code through a machine, maybe focus on how it comes across to a human reader? nah, it’s more important that i believe it is technically correct and that no one else is able to verify it.

I don’t like how taking an approach of mediocre software engineering to mathematics is becoming more popular

would you be willing to elaborate on this? i am just curious because i took the opposite approach (started as a mathematician now i write bad python scripts)

The least-worst of the Chrome reskins is Vivaldi, which has no AI. It has its own adblocker, but it’s not as good a blocker as FIrefox with uBlock Origin. And Vivaldi’s not open source. But they’re relatively non-evil.

this made me cackle

very nice

I used Firefox for largely political reasons (summarized as “Google needs a competitor”), but it was becoming harder and harder to justify. Eventually, I just switched to a Chromium-based browser. I will say that, as an almost-good-enough solution until I wake up from this nightmare to a functioning Servo (🙏🙏🙏) , DNS level ad blocking (using Mullvad’s DNS servers) + uBlock Origin Lite (filtering mode set to “complete”) has been sufficient for me. It even blocks Spotify ads. I think it blocks YouTube ads as well, although I barely watch YouTube on my browser.

Ungoogled Chromium supports MV2 extensions and seems like a good choice if Firefox becomes unusable or you get fed up. I use Trivalent, a security hardened Chromium-based browser, but it may be tough to install if you aren’t on Secureblue. Also it only supports MV3 extensions.

this shit is so fucking frustrating, just leave our browsers alone. we want security updates, not an unethically sourced bullshit-and-vulnerability-generator stapled onto the biggest attack surface on our fucking machine

https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/windows-11/my-goal-is-to-eliminate-every-line-of-c-and-c-from-microsoft-by-2030-microsoft-bets-on-ai-to-finally-modernize-windows

My goal is to eliminate every line of C and C++ from Microsoft by 2030. Our strategy is to combine AI *and* Algorithms to rewrite Microsoft’s largest codebases. Our North Star is “1 engineer, 1 month, 1 million lines of code”. To accomplish this previously unimaginable task, we’ve built a powerful code processing infrastructure. Our algorithmic infrastructure creates a scalable graph over source code at scale. Our AI processing infrastructure then enables us to apply AI agents, guided by algorithms, to make code modifications at scale. The core of this infrastructure is already operating at scale on problems such as code understanding."

wow, *and* algorithms? i didn’t think anyone had gotten that far