hot off the heels of months of “agentic! it can do things for you!” llm hype, they have to make special APIs for the chatbots, I guess because otherwise they make too many whoopsies?
this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2025
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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In collaboration with cryptocurrency outfits Coinbase, MetaMask, and the Ethereum foundation, Google also produced an extension that would integrate the cryptocurrency-oriented x402 protocol, allowing for AI-driven purchasing from crypto wallets.
what could possibly go wrong
In either case, the goal is to maintain an auditable trail that can be reexamined in cases of fraud.
Which is a thing that you only need to worry about if you use these types of agents.
Which in any case you can't, because
The protocol is built for a future in which AI agents routinely shop for products on customers’ behalf and engage in complex real-time interactions with retailers’ AI agents.
Getting pretty far afield here, but goddamn Matt Yglesias's new magazine sucks:
The case for affirmative action for conservatives
"If we cave in and give the right exactly what they want on this issue, they'll finally be nice to us! Sure, you might think based on the last 50,000 times we've tried this strategy that they'll just move the goalposts and demand further concessions, but then they'll totally look like hypocrites and we'll win the moral victory, which is what actually matters!"
@PMMeYourJerkyRecipes @BlueMonday1984
The guy from the Federalist *doesn’t* want more ideological diversity in academia, he wants *less*. But he’ll settle for more as an interim goal until he can purge the wrong-thinkers.
We need a word for when they make up a guy who doesn't exist and then get mad at him.
Pretty sure that's a strawman.
I mean, I think the relevant difference is that rather than trying to argue against a weak opponent they're trying to validate their feelings of victimization, superiority, and/or outrage by imagining an appropriate foil.
It's a straw man that exists to be effectively venerated rather than torn down.
Since this is the solo version, strawmasturbating
Wolfram has a blog post about lambda calculus. As usual, there are no citations and the bibliography is for the wrong blog post and missing many important foundational papers. There are no new results in this blog post (and IMO barely anything interesting) and it's mostly accurate, so it's okay to share the pretty pictures with friends as long as the reader keeps in mind that the author is writing to glorify themselves and make drawings rather than to communicate the essential facts or conduct peer review. I will award partial credit for citing John Tromp's effort in defining these diagrams, although Wolfram ignores that Tromp and an entire community of online enthusiasts have been studying them for decades. But yeah, it's a Mathematica ad.
In which I am pedantic about computer science (but also where I'm putting most of my sneers too, including a punchline)
For example, Wolfram's wrong that every closed lambda term corresponds to a combinator; it's a reasonable assumption that turns out to not make sense upon closer inspection. It's okay, because I know that he was just quoting the same 1992 paper by Fokker that I cited when writing the esolangs page for closed lambda terms, which has the same incorrect claim verbatim as its first sentence. Also, credit to Wolfram for listing Fokker in the bibliography; this is one of the foundational papers that we'd expect to see. With that in mind, here's some differences between my article and his.
The name "Fokker" appears over a dozen times in my article and nowhere in Wolfram's article. Also, I love being citogenic and my article is the origin of the phrase "Fokker size". I think that this is a big miss on his part because he can't envision a future where somebody says something like "The Fokker metric space" or "enriched over Fokker size". I've already written "some closed lambda terms with small Fokker size" in the public domain and it's only a matter of time until Zipf's law wears it down to "some small Fokkers".
Also, while "Tromp" only appears once in my article, it appears next to somebody known only as "mtve" when they collaborated to produce what Wolfram calls a "size-7 lambda" known as Alpha. I love little results like these which aren't formally published and only exist on community wikis. Would have been pretty fascinating if Alpha were complete, wouldn't it Steve!? Would have merited a mention of progress in the community amongst small lambda terms, huh Steve!?
I also checked the BB Gauge for Binary Lambda Calculus (BLC), since it's one of the topics I already wrote up, and found that Wolfram's completely omitted Felgenhauer from the picture too, with that name in neither the text nor bibliography. Felgenhauer's made about as many constructions in BLC as Tromp; Felgenhauer 2014 constructs that Goodstein sequence, for example. Also, Wolfram didn't write that sequence, they sourced it from a living paper not in the bibliography, written by…Felgenhauer! So it's yet another case of Wolfram just handily choosing to omit a name from a decade-old result in the hopes that somebody will prefer his new presentation to the old one.
Finally, what's the point of all this? I think Wolfram writes these posts to advertise Mathematica (which is actually called Wolfram Mathematica and uses a programming language called Wolfram BuT DiD YoU KnOw) He also promotes his attempt at rewriting all of physics to have his logo upon it, and this blog post is a gateway to that project in the sense that Wolfram genuinely believes that staring at these chaotic geometries will reveal the equations of divine nature. Meanwhile I wrote my article in order to ~~win an IRC argument against~~ make a reasonable presentation of an interesting phenomenon in computer science directly to Felgenhauer & Tromp, and while they don't fully agree with me, we together can't disagree with what's presented in the article. That's peer review, right?
Having followed PLT stuff online for more than a quarter century now, I can state with confidence that basically everyone writing about lambda calculus online is doing it to glorify themselves.
New edition of AI Killed My Job, giving a deep dive into how genAI has hurt artists. I'd like to bring particular attention to Meilssa's story, which is roughly halfway through, specifically the ending:
There's a part of me that will never forgive the tech industry for what they've taken from me and what they've chosen to do with it. In the early days as the dawning horror set in, I cried about this almost every day. I wondered if I should quit making art. I contemplated suicide. I did nothing to these people, but every day I have to see them gleefully cheer online about the anticipated death of my chosen profession. I had no idea we artists were so hated—I still don't know why. What did my silly little cat drawings do to earn so much contempt? That part is probably one of the hardest consequences of AI to come to terms with. It didn't just try to take my job (or succeed in making my job worse) it exposed a whole lot of people who hate me and everything I am for reasons I can't fathom. They want to exploit me and see me eradicated at the same time.
https://www.kqed.org/arts/13981240/nvidia-california-college-of-the-arts-partnership
Clove cigarettes to be replaced with vapes.
I’m convinced the proliferation of AI art comes from a generation of digital inhalants.
Nvidia and California College of the Arts Enter Into a Partnership
Oh, I'm sure the artists enrolling at the CCA are gonna be so happy to hear they've been betrayed
The collaboration with CCA is described in today’s announcement as aiming to “prepare a new generation of creatives to thrive at the intersection of art, design and emerging technologies.”
Hot take: There is no "intersection" between these three, because the "emerging technologies" in question are a techno-fascist ideology designed to destroy art for profit
In fairness, not everything nVidia does is generative AI. I don't know if this particular initiative has anything to do with GenAI, but a lot of digital artists depend on their graphics cards' capabilities to create art that is very much human-derived.
Given how gen-AI has utterly consumed the tech industry over these past two years, I see very little reason to give the benefit of the doubt here.
Focusing on NVidia, they've made billions selling shovels in the AI gold rush (inflating their stock prices in the process), and have put billions more into money-burning AI startups to keep the bubble going. They have a vested interest in forcing AI onto everyone and everything they can.
Sneer inspired by a thread on the preferred Tumblr aggregator subreddit.
Rationalists found out that human behavior didn't match their ideological model, then rather than abandon their model or change their ideology decided to replace humanity with AIs designed to behave the way they think humans should, just as soon as they can figure out a way to do that without them destroying all life in the universe.
That thread gives me hope. A decade ago, a random internet discussion in which rationalist came up would probably mention "quirky Harry Potter fanfiction" with mixed reviews, whereas all the top comments on that thread are calling out the alt-right pipeline and the racism.
I have no hope. The guy who introduced me to LessWrong included what I later realised was a race science pitch. Yudkowsky was pushing this shit in 2007. This sucker just realised a coupla decades late.
Regarding occasional sneer target Lawrence Krauss and his co-conspirators:
Months of waiting but my review copy of The War on Science has arrived.
I read Krauss’ introduction. What the fuck happened to this man? He comes off as incapable of basic research, argument, basic scholarship. [...] Um... I think I found the bibliography: it's a pdf on Krauss' website? And all the essays use different citation formats?
Most of the essays don't include any citations in the text but some have accompanying bibliographies?
I think I'm going insane here.
What the fuck?
https://bsky.app/profile/nateo.bsky.social/post/3lyuzaaj76s2o
All of those people, Krauss, Dawkins, Harris (okay that one might've been unsalvageable from the start, I'm really not sure) are such a great reminder that you can be however smart/educated you want, the moment you believe you're the smartest boi and stop learning and critically approaching your own output you get sucked into the black hole of your asshole, never to return.
Like if I had a nickel. It's hubris every time. All of those people need just a single good friend that, from time to time, would tell them "man, what you said was really fucking stupid just now" and they'd be saved.
Clout is a proxy of power and power just absolutely rots your fucking brain. Every time a Guy emerges, becomes popular, clearly thinks "haha, but I am different, power will not rot MY brain", five years later boom, he's drinking with Jordan Benzo Peterson. Even Joe Fucking Rogan used to be significantly more lucid before someone gave him ten bazillion dollars for a podcast and he suffered severe clout poisoning.
Huh, I wonder who this Krauss guy is, haven't heard of him.
*open wikipedia*
*entire subsection titled "Allegations of sexual misconduct"*
*close wikipedia*
image description
Screenshot of Lawrence Krauss's Wikipedia article, showing a section called "Controversies" with subheadings "Relationship with Jeffrey Epstein" followed by "Allegations of sexual misconduct". Text at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Krauss#Controversies
"As a scientist..." please stop giving the world more reasons to stuff nerds in lockers.
Always so many coincidences.
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