How AI slop is causing a crisis in computer science | Nature h/t naked capitalism
One reason for the boom is that LLM adoption has increased researcher productivity, by as much as 89.3%, according to research published in Science in December.
Let's not call it "productivity" - to quote Bergstrom, twice as many papers is not the same as twice as much science.
AI Jobs Apocalypse is Here | UnHerd h/t naked capitalism
feels a bit critihype, idk
So, what happens to American politics when the script is flipped, and we enter a new era of white-collar precarity? We can look back to the recent past and recall that, after the 2008 recession, it was young men who got especially angry. Downwardly mobile urban millennials drifted toward radical Left-wing politics, including the Occupy Wall Street movement and both Sanders campaigns, myself included. In the current decade, the Gen-Z men shut out by elite institutions often join their grandfathers and turn toward MAGA, or worse, into Groypers. But an AI-driven white-collar apocalypse has no equivalent of the American Rescue Plan around the corner, and it will move faster through institutions because the people experiencing it — journalists, lawyers, policy staffers — are the ones who produce political legitimacy itself. When that class loses faith in the system’s stability, the political climate may quickly become volatile.
As I get older I am more and more disturbed by the selective memory of the GFC; no mention of the tea party or the fallout from the austerity measures they pushed in the middle of the country; no mention how the bailout saved banks not homes. The Tea Party won, not Occupy, and the current government is doing things beyond the Koch's wildest dreams.
If and when there is a crash, these dumbass CEOs deserve /nothing/. Let them lose their vacation houses. And, maybe grow some balls and send the fraudsters to jail where they belong.
sigh
https://old.reddit.com/r/indieheads/comments/1r6x1ix/fresh_failure_the_air_is_on_fire_from_location/
I looked it up, and this one is credited to Glen Wexler, who is an actual artist with a pretty distinct style and yes, he's been incorporating AI into his process lately, and I guess he did use it here (those windows on those buildings are sus as hell, and the overall sharpness of the image just screams AI).
So it's not outright slop, but still pretty disappointing and incongruous coming from this band. Their last two records were examining our society's alienation through technology, at times to the point of "phone bad!" level nagging, but using the most literally destructive technology of them all is fine, as long as it helps keep the costs down, I guess?
And it just doesn't look good, but come to think of it, most of their albums have bad cover art, it's almost like they do it on purpose. Love the music, though.
It's too bad if true, I can't unsee it now. for reference: https://failureband.bandcamp.com/album/location-lost
https://softcurrency.substack.com/p/the-dangerous-economics-of-walk-away
- Anthropic (Medium Risk) Until mid-February of 2026, Anthropic appeared to be happy, talent-retaining. When an AI Safety Leader publicly resigns with a dramatic letter stating “the world is in peril,” the facade of stability cracks. Anthropic is a delayed fuse, just earlier on the vesting curve than OpenAI. The equity is massive ($300B+ valuation) but largely illiquid. As soon as a liquidity event occurs, the safety researchers will have the capital to fund their own, even safer labs.
WTF is "even safer" ??? how bout we like just don't create the torment nexus.
Wonder if the 50% attrition prediction comes to pass though...
Most of the routine data analysis has already been "vendorized", AI won't make a difference. Why run an A/B test manually when you can drop Optimizely on to your page and let it run. I mean, /I/ know why I would, but I doubt a PM would.
I remember this paper from last summer, the authors put up a followup right when school started that distances it from the AI replacement theory: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/applicability-vs-job-displacement-further-notes-on-our-recent-research-on-ai-and-occupations/
I work a lot with the underlying data set they used, ONET is really carefully designed but easy to misinterpret; and also I wanted to mention that it is produced by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, which has been DOGE'd since then. Future research into jobs, AI or regular, will probably degrade as this continues.
Have to get a new apartment, I did not understand that you have to apply via AI application screening now for so many buildings. I don't know why it won't read my statement from the credit union. I hate this so much.
Dear rentier class, maybe don't force people to upload PDFs your bot can't even open, swear to god someday you will make someone mad enough they inject some prompts into the files metadata and go from there.
I did a five line PR to a little shell util I've used for a decade or so, and bickered with the stupid PR bot. Fuck you kody, you have bad taste, go away, go back to enterprise.
I want to force feed it Worse is Better until it chokes, surely that's in its corpus somewhere.
ok done venting
Requiem for a film-maker: Darren Aronofsky’s AI revolutionary war series is a horror | The Guardian
On This Day has already made headlines for being a little bit of a cop-out, since all the voices are performed by human actors, who presumably needed to feed their families more than they wanted to protect their profession from annihilation. And this is telling, because these voices are by far the most convincing part of On This Day, especially when deployed in voiceover, because then you aren’t distracted by the way the movement of their mouths doesn’t quite match up with the noises coming out of them.
Too bad, I liked about half of his films, esp The Wrestler.
Goodhart's law in action.