Want to wade into the sandy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid.
Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
He has got a dramatic and vitriolic style, but as dgerard says, he has also dug through the numbers. I see lots of criticism of Ed’s style, but not nearly so substantial criticism about the hard numbers he has come up with. The LLM companies put out contradictory and obfuscated numbers, and taken naively they seem to contradict Ed’s numbers, but as Ed has shown, many, many times, when you start trying to un-obfuscate them they start looking really bad for everyone betting on LLMs.
So more and more coders are coming around to “actually AI code is okay”… but as we’ve seen repeatedly with LLM generated content, it is very easy for people to “Clever Hans” themselves and convince themselves LLMs are contributing more than they actually are, so I am not going to trust anecdotal reports.