Hoasi

Posting this out of curiosity. All the guests here have good points; however, they are also biased, each in their own way. But they are doing an important job in the discussion around AI, in particular by debunking the prominent anthropomorphising discourse. This is software: companies should be responsible for their products, humanity is not doomed, and the singularity is essentially BS.

Also interesting regarding the breakthrough announcements in maths and science: what is the actual amount of genuine innovation vs. sensationalism or even possible fraud?

Then the discussion turns to economics, where the guests all agree this is a disaster in the making. Some might argue it's a little harder to see the actual ROI of these LLMs.

Strange naming strategy. I might pass on that one.

Facebook is not the internet.

And here I am, still using Tachyons.css (Tailwind's precursor in many respects)

Interesting framing from the get-go:

> With billions of people experiencing hunger in 2025 and unable to afford a healthy diet, food insecurity remains a critical global challenge.

You know where this is headed.

Haha, classic, sounds almost plausible, as anyone using PayPal painfully knows.

> Feels like the early stages of societal collapse.

Strongly agree, there is hardly any intelligent discussions with diverging opinions left anymore. People are too deep into their own propaganda, agenda, and echo chambers. Peak bullshit is near.

> Finally, Deckard must question what he is doing, and really what is the essential difference between him and them? And, to take it one step further, who is he if there is no real difference?

Honestly, that is still what I get from Ridley Scott’s version.

As reliable as telling a pachinko machine: don’t lose my money!

What if you played Pachinko for two hours? Even if you won two dollars, you basically wasted your time.

I’ve heard this gatekeeping argument before, but it’s not convincing. Nobody prevents anyone from doing anything with any tool of their choosing; nobody prevents anyone from writing (or doing art or any other business, really). There is no gatekeeping or democratization of art needed either. If you just prompt an image, it has zero value, and if your blog is just a copy-paste from any LLM, what’s even the point?

Prompting an entire article is a waste of time for everyone. Just outsource all thinking already. Oftentimes a generated illustration signals that. Laziness, lack of discernment. Low consciousness, cheating. (Not always of course, sometimes you just want an illustration for your blog, no big deal! Use AI!) That said, writing doesn’t need to be streamlined like a production line. People immediately feel when you haven’t put the work.

This point against “gatekeepers” is a very lazy argument.

And the same can be said about taste. Taste comes from learning and learning is practice. No wonder people are put off by generated “content”.

Of course we know it. It’s been obvious since at least 2023. Everyone in AI oversells, except a few companies that built an actual business with revenue, like Midjourney. There is no AGI coming anytime soon no matter how much hype is being thrown around. We are not in the singularity. However, peak bullshit is NEAR.

How is this secretive if venue is public?

Not that surprising since the whole LLM ecosystem is based on plagiarism.

To be fair, raising money takes a certain skill, that few people possess; and in many cases, it’s essential for a startup to even exist.

Of course, there is no way that a wasteful company like IKEA, that basically sells overpriced plastics and cheap aggregates does actually benefit humanity as a nonprofit implied purpose would. The waste it creates is very substantial on many levels, not even mentioning wasting people’s time and fostering bad taste through short-lived production cycles. Transitioning to a nonprofit obviously has a lot to do with taxes evasion and maybe a little bit of communication posturing too.

Same here. I have multiple sites working on Jekyll for almost 10 years as well. I’ve considered moving on to other frameworks such as 11ty and tried local versions for the sake of learning and “upgrading”. But in the end Jekyll still works flawlessly and is very easy to maintain. I use a newer version of Ruby though.

The erosion and further diffusion of responsibility is the trend that worries me the most, since it’s already how all mid-size organisations, businesses and institutions alike, operate by design, and LLMs are likely to make that much worse.

Another meaningless, extremely cringeworthy, tweet, hailed as a messianic message by many at the time.

Platforms have always been liabilities. First you trade privacy for convenience, and soon after, you trade ownership for reach, and ultimately you lose both.

Have your own website and re-publish on platforms, if you must.

Maybe they should start scanning users' irises.

My bet is that there will be ads for both groups. The paid group is arguably more valuable from an advertiser’s standpoint, and you can target heavy users with more granularity.

> The prompts/pipelines are boring and/or embarrassing and showing them will dispel the myth that agentic coding is this mysterious magical process

You nailed it. Prompting is dull and self evident. Sure, you need basic skills to formulate a request. But it’s not a science and has nothing to do with engineering.

> I think this is a weird wording. I dont think you need to limit the ick factor to "Westerners" There are an awful lot of people out there who would feel the "ick" factor.

Of course, this has nothing to do with “Westerners.” No one in their right mind would want farm animals to be fed insect powder. The fact that the company was allowed to operate and to receive massive funding is the real issue here.

“Make something people want” was supposed to be the motto.

Anything goes, these days…

LinkedIn is one the most useless app ever. I have trashed it countless times, but I do use it now and ten to keep up with companies and respond to a few solicitations. There is almost never anything of value in my feed, between the fake jobs and the low value self-promotion AI-written posts. Who even reads this? Not even mentioning the political, and pseudo-activist posts. And this happens despite systematically marking all of these posts irrelevant or “inappropriate for LinkedIn”. This app is beyond repair. Uninstalling.

> Not that their craft would die out, but it would be mutilated

This is spot on, exactly how it felt for illustrators/designers.

With disruptive technologies, the correct response is to use the tools in unintended ways. And thus reappropriate them.

So they've missed the innovation train due to regulation, and now they are likely to axe the side-effect benefit of said regulation.

> I love the idea of this but the mention of Hedy Lamarr could be confused as parody too

Exactly, that was a bit puzzling.