self

of course big parts of the orange site are tripping over themselves to call this language clever and… maybe I’m in a particularly bad mood, but I just don’t see it. the syntax looks like a fucking disaster (and I like ML-style languages) and the features seem to be a grab bag of features from existing languages and CS research. it’s basically the kind of testbench language you design to explore the problem space and never release, but here it is with a webpage and a name and papertrail in the docs that point to the designer being a real shithead.

it’s possible I’m being unfair to the language (its designer definitely seems like a shithead) — is there anything coherent here that I’m just missing?

I will quote the entirety of Max’s website here:

MAX HOWELL is a legendary open source developer. Creator of Homebrew, used by tens of millions of developer around the world. Founder of tea protocol a decentralized technology protocol that enables open source developers to be rewarded for their software contributions for the benefit of all humanity. He is known for his careful approach to software development that results in delightful products that solve their niches perfectly.

what a fucking metric. I’m a lot closer to being a legendary open source developer than I thought.

also I found his TED talk on AGI while I was looking that up:

Max Howell draws back the curtain on the reality that artificial super intelligence will be here sooner than we think, and shares his approach to thinking about how it might impact our future. Max Howell has a master’s degree in chemistry, but after a year in the profession, abandoned it upon realizing chemistry is “super boring”. He began exploring open source coding. After working at Last.fm, then TweetDeck, Howell created Homebrew, an open source software manager that is today used by about 50 million people. He also authored a tweet about the interview process in the software industry that has been viewed more than 3 million times. Last year, he and his wife started a mobile app development company in Savannah.

here’s a hacker news thread that talks about it. to be fair to Max, the question (and the Google-style interview in general) is absolute bullshit. to be entirely unfair to Max, he seems like a fucking asshole and his recent projects have been crowd-sourced consent violations.

your posts really are all like this huh

I hope so! this is something I’d like to implement, once I’ve got some free deployment resources and time.

Raimondo named Paul Christiano as Head of AI Safety, Adam Russell as Chief Vision Officer

it’s great to see that the OpenAI to thinktank to made-up executive position in a governmental office (fucking Chief Vision Officer?) pipeline is already moving at record speed

it was such a weird choice of an article from our esteemed guest, and that they considered the article particularly complex or hard to understand revealed so much about their quality as a supposed programming tutor (though the weird anti-math stuff also did them no favors)

like, is this really the most complex algorithm that the LLM could generate convincing bullshit for? or did their knowledge going in end here and so they didn’t even know how to ask the thing about slightly harder CS shit? I really hope their whole tutoring thing is them being an unhelpful reply guy like they were in our thread and they’re not going around teaching utterly wrong CS concepts to folks just looking to learn, but the outlook’s not too bright given how much CS woo has entered the discourse as a direct result of people regurgitating the false knowledge they’ve gotten from LLMs.

speaking of chatgpt not knowing about games, please enjoy the classic that is chatgpt vs stockfish

just like with crypto, there’s already a long list of cliches that AI fanboys use to excuse how shitty their favorite technology is:

• that’s because you’re using GPT-3.5 Turbo. if you just pay an exorbitant amount for early access to GPT-5, you’ll see it does so much better (please ignore all previous claims of GPT-3 being revolutionary)
• the model doesn’t work as well as I think it used to, but I will still insist there’s no scaling problem or hidden human labor
• you’re prompting it wrong
• the LLM sucks because it’s being censored. please ignore that all of the uncensored models fucking suck too, when they’re not just ChatGPT with a spicy initial prompt
• multi-modal LLMs will fix this. wait no, multi-agent LLMs. fuck it, I’ll just link a bunch of research papers that read like press releases and OpenAI blog posts that are press releases
• making mistakes like a shitty computer program only makes the LLM more human-like, because my mental model for people is that they’re all shitty stupid computer programs that fuck up and lie all the time too

for me it’s a clear indicator that you’re talking to a nethack fan mid-delve

I’d say TechTakes is the best fit since Microsoft has always come off as less motivated by Rationalist ideals and more by fuck-you-got-mine opportunist objectivism

yeah, you’re still doing everything you can to dodge the articles we’ve linked and points we’ve made showing that the fucking things just make up plausible bullshit and are therefore worthless for learning, and you’ve taken up more than enough of this thread repeating basic shit we already know. off you fuck