PantaloonFlames

Related:

Jan 2026 https://www.theatlantic.com/science/2026/01/ai-slop-science-...

"For more than a century, scientific journals have been the pipes through which knowledge of the natural world flows into our culture. Now they’re being clogged with AI slop."

Sept 2026 https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/09/college-education-...

Academia, particularly the university system, is an untenable collection of interests. The triple stresses of COVID, AI, and funding withdrawal seem to presage what will be a significant disruption.

Gauging state of the art against what is available for free or for very cheap per token cost is like gauging the maximum theoretical transport potential by riding a bicycle.

You’re using something that is very energy efficient; you cannot extrapolate that experience to conclude that SOTA models are not doing something much different.

That level of revenue is apparently not enough for them to feel confident in the stability of their competitive position.

The potential of AI may give us the opportunity to graduate to a post-capitalism, or to move to a sort of neo-capitalism, which is governed by different rules.

Capitalism thrives in the realm where there is a scarcity of resources, either physical or informational. Imagine breakthroughs in energy science such that the cost of energy drops to zero, which means the cost of physical resources declines precipitously. Ok so where is the capital now? Must we retain a model based on the premise of scarce physical capital?

It wasn’t the shock of Little Boy that ended the war. That was just a final chapter of a 10+ year journey of horror, despair, and destruction, and the impact of Little Boy cannot be considered outside of that journey.

Europe had been destroyed by June 1945, and yet the empire of Japan continued to fight.

If that pattern holds, a single malicious AI substantially disabling a single world power won’t end the AI race. Participants don’t learn by the defeats of others.

If you’d like to apply a metaphor maybe the 10+ years of world war is more appropriate, after which basically every participant save one was exhausted.

Move to Italy!

I think that was the question: What is the problem it is solving ?

You’ve asserted “THIS is not a solved problem,” which suggests everyone is clear on what THIS means. I think that is not a good assumption.

a slightly different metaphor. Copilot suggests it is next to you, helping you pilot... something else. The computer? The system? But "piloting the LLM" changes the relationship. The LLM is the thing that is being piloted.

The article is confused. The opinion is, it's so much safer _now_ than it was in the 1970s, it makes no sense to restrict children's wanderings.

But the article doesn't consider whether restricting children's wanderings is the REASON it is so much safer for children now.

"We have so many fire-safety rules in the building codes in Seattle. But get this: we haven't had any major fires since 1889! It's obvious we don't need these rules!"

It's true there is a cost to restricting children. But let's be a bit more realistic about the tradeoffs.

Why is iMessage "more conversational" than RCS? and "more human"??

I don't get the distinction you're making. I'm not an expert in mobile messaging so maybe I am missing something obvious.

And what about WhatsApp?

It's too simplistic to imagine the tension is between robot patrol dogs vs automating drudgery. If automating drudgery suddenly puts 30% of people out of work, it has huge broad negative impact on people who are currently alive and working in the current system. Innovate, but do it with awareness.

Are you fairly confident that they’re missing teeth because of drug use? Could it alternatively be caused by lack of access to proper dental care?

Darren Brown paying with blank paper. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Vz_YTNLn6w

Your first counterpoint seems unnecessarily picky.

> So while it is a suitable DSL for many things (it is also seeing new life in web components definition), we are mostly only talking about XML-lookalike language, and not XML proper. If you go XML proper, you need to throw "cheap" out the window.

But the TWE did not embrace all that stuff. It’s not required for its purpose. And to call it “xml lookalike” on that basis seems odd. It’s objectively XML. It doesn’t use every xml feature, but it’s still XML.

It’s as if you’re saying, a school bus isn’t a bus, it’s just a bus-lookalike. Buses can have cup holders and school buses lack cup holders. Therefore a school bus is not really a bus.

I don’t see the validity or the relevance.

Can you give specifics on what Claude code built for you, in the way of missing features ?

Yes and

Carnegie Technical Schools was founded in 1900 based on a $1m donation from Andrew Carnegie,

Mellon Institute of Industrial Research was originally founded in 1913 by Andrew and Richard Mellon.

Carnegie Mellon was created by combining the two institutions in 1967.

Wait - how are skills dependent on python?

Isn’t python just an option ?

You can publish scripts with skills you author, right? With carefully constructed markdown that should allow the agent to call tools the right way.

I don’t understand how “running it in a vm” Or a docker image, prevents the majority of problems. It’s an agent interacting with your bank, your calendar, your email, your home security system, and every subscription you have - DoorDash, Spotify, Netflix, etc. maybe your BTC wallet.

What protection is offered by running it in a docker container? Ok, It won’t overwrite local files. Is that the major concern?

“AI changes everything!”

Cmon man. “Consumers” in aggregate. Not “every consumer”. But you knew that.

It's literally why Leon bought Twitter. A Mass influence vehicle.

It used to be that the common model in the USA for tv was, one cable bundle with 500 channels. That has now evolved to a combination of

- cable bundles

- aggregate streams (Netflix, Prime, Apple TV)

- pay per view (Prime or YT TV)

And somehow all of these models now coexist.

Yes and if you have o(1000) prs or issues in a single day, I guess you have a different scale of problem and will need to automate triage and management, probably through an ai-powered tool.

Even if it is 0.01% per day it’s still a very high volume. At that point it’s not a hobby. Millions of users maybe would point toward a more formal management and governance approach.

See Gemini-cli for example. Or a bunch of Microsoft projects. They use ai to triage and respond to tickets. (And they pocket veto many of them)

I did not know that. Path expressions for access control?

You can invest a lot and get minimal results, OR, it’s possible they invested in 71-odd tools and only 17% produced results, but those results were as desired or expected so they didn’t actually need the other 83% of the tools they tried.

The number of tools that were deemed effective is not proportional to the “the effect”.

That’s helpful information but it doesn’t mean the use of Gemini is unwelcome. A human could have rendered the initial analysis too, and then you could have just replied to the human, correcting him or her. Why is the source of the analysis such an issue?

I don’t know you but I like you.

Courtesy costs very little.

This is what I come here for. Terrific.

You’ve sidestepped the important part of the question.