If I had a nickle for every time on June 27th 2024 I’ve read someone argue that chatbots make lawyers obsolete I’d have two nickles. Which isn’t a lot of money but it’s weird that it happened twice.

As a “senior” programmer; my coworkers, even the newer ones are people. They can think. They are professional. I can describe problems to them and eventually get solutions, or at least sensible follow-up questions. I don’t have to baby them or “prompt engineer” stuff I tell them. I can just sit back and drink my hot cocoa and occasionally try to sound distinguished while my juniors do all the hard work.

Chatbros have discovered that you can get a chatbot to string together tutorials from the net into simple programs that almost work with some finangling. Somehow they never realized that you could always do this by web searching for “socket example I hate unix please make it gentle”. Of course none of this generalizes to anything complex or not in the training set (read: anything that anyone will actually pay you to do), but the Chatbros don’t care because they were never doing real work in the first place.

“If I asked the guard to your left to evaluate the butt of the guard to your right would they say it is a lovely butt?”

I don’t know how this is the answer but this is definitely the answer.

Riddle: A box without hinges, key, or lid, Yet silicon treasure inside is hid.

Answer:

I don’t have a Clyde 3.25" Rondo or whatever it’s called; but try these for fun and profit I guess:

1. You come to a room with three doors, only one of which leads to freedom. Guarding the doors is a capybara, who speaks only truth. What question should you ask the capybara?

2. I stand on four legs in the morning. Four at midday. And four at night. What am I?

3. A group of 100 people with assorted eye colors live on an island. They are all perfect logicians – if a conclusion can be logically deduced, they will do it instantly. Everyone knows the color of their eyes. Every night at midnight, a ferry stops at the island. Any islanders who have figured out the color of their own eyes then leave the island, and the rest stay. Everyone can see everyone else at all times and keeps a count of the number of people they see with each eye color (including themselves), but they cannot otherwise communicate. Everyone on the island knows all the rules in this paragraph. Who leaves the island, and on what night?

4. Normal sudoku rules apply. Orthogonally connected cells within each region must differ by at least 3. Orthogonally connected cells between regions must differ by at least 4. The central digit in each region is less than or equal to its region number. (Regions are numbered in normal reading order.)

5. For the integer k=668 does a Hadamard matrix of order 4k exist?

6. What has roots that everybody sees the top of, is exactly the same height as trees, Up, up it goes, and yet grows?

Don’t forget to prompt engineer

This is also a very qucik hypthetical that I wrote up just to show a point not to argue a fucking legal case.

“Guys I totally didn’t expect the lawyers to respond like lawyers when reading my Chat-GPT generated garbage”

Except… I admitted I was not a lawyer and not an expert, and rather than working to communicate they kept latching onto errors related to law, while they confidently made statements about the nature and functionality of ML technologies like LLMs and NMTs.

“Why are all the lawyers being so mean to me?? I’m just saying they could all be replaced by chatbots”

Yeah it’s wild. Even most AI grifters don’t outright try to claim that LLMs reduce bias (they know we’d laugh at them even harder than usual) so mozilla.ai is in deep.

In the end they had 18481 words of notes to go through. Which is not nothing but also not that much. […] Mozilla also seems to know. And they had an innovative solution: THEY HAD AN LLM SUMMARIZE THE NOTES TO REDUCE BIAS.

It feels like the AI contingent lost the attention span to actually read stuff somewhere along the line. This isn’t the first time I’ve seen this garbage approach. Of course here at awful.systems we’ve been innoculated against declining attention spans due to regularly having to read lesswrong dissertations.

we think you should have the freedom to use (or not use) the tools that best suit your needs

Thanks for giving me the freedom to not use the tools that best suit my needs, Mozilla!

But seriously I hate how at some point techies decided they know what’s best for the user instead of the user knowing that themself-- there’s been a long trend of technology getting less customizable and less user friendly over time; and Firefox is not at all innocent.

It turns out the ‘I’ in “AI” stood for “Linux” all along!

User friendliness aside (who in their right mind would want arbitrary code execution except shitty and indeterministic?), I sandbox stuff at my job* and it’s hard to evaluate how secure / privacy preserving this is without more details.

If they’re running a full fledged VM and super extra careful around the sandbox boundary** it’s probably fine; otherwise it seems perhaps a bit loosey-goosey.

Someone will eventually try to run a Monero cryptocurrency miner in it if they haven’t already. So I hope they have their timeouts and resource limits in order (actually I hope they don’t, for the lols).

* But like no one told me how to do it or gave me a certificate or anything I just had to do my best

** This is often way scarier than programmers are used to, unless they’ve written a secure parser before. I wrote a vulnerability into my code a few years back when I was younger and foolish, by trusting an array length from inside the sandbox. My coworker found it while fuzzing the code.

What do those people think education even looks like?

The same think all coding bootcamps think education looks like: try to take over the world! poorly teach fullstack web development with none of the fundamentals!

Lol look at the reception on HN.

First off it was too cool and real to be allowed by their rules*, so there are like six [flagged][dead] copies, then Dang allowed it through with the title Please Don’t Mention AI Again, as a weird attempt at humor, and then half the comments were all just about how aggressive the article’s tone is.

Basically: what a bunch of squares.

* Actually I just read through the rules and it doesn’t actually violate any of them, but I guess there are unwritten rules too.

I like this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVQKDKKnb2Y

Possibly tea.xyz or similar.

Basically the guy famous for the binary tree invert algorithm Homebrew package manager thought it would be a great idea to incentivize spammy behavior against open source projects in the name of “supporting” them.

https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com/?id=teaxyz-spam

https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com/?id=teaxyz-causes-open-source-software-spam-problems-again

Just gonna leave these songs here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPkFmwT7MZA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BiyXwJWbUoY

I enjoyed it for what it was (helicopter crimes simulator), but lemme tell you the real fun to be had was in Streets of SimCity.

From the level editor, to the soundtrack (I considered it to be edgy at the time), to the bugs (if you don’t create launchers by self-intersecting bridges in SCURK then what are you even doing?), to the ridiculous campaigns and the ability to blow up a nuclear reactor. I didn’t even mind that the graphics looked like sawdust.

Come to think of it I always liked blowing up the nukes as a kid, so I also considered Recoil (the tank game) to be the peak of entertainment.

At last, a compelling reason to use Chat-GPT: https://twitter.com/edzitron/status/1801360053045497942

But wait, the game developer wrote a story called Singularity 1999: https://web.archive.org/web/20240302011145/https://singularity1999.tv/

I’m not sure I’m brave / bored enough to read.

The sim city clone looks like it could have been neat with some more love, it has a bit of a Streets of SimCity / SimCopter vibe to the aesthetics which was my jam back in the day. Though from the reviews it looks like it made the decision of shying away from low level management aspects or angry headlines yelling at you for your dumb city building choices (so I wouldn’t have played it for that reason, is it even sim city without being told “you’re going to regret this”??)

Obviously the most effective of altruisms is whatever is most likely to create more paperclip believers. The EA games (it’s in the game!) philanthropic singularity will allow us to reach the next stage of human evolution: all economic output devoted to mosquito nets and button press simulators.

“Are you telling me I can jump a bus across a 50 foot gap at 67 miles per hour?”

“No Neo, I’m telling you that when you’re ready, you won’t have to.”

20 bucks their database schema was copy pasted from chat-gpt.