What I'm reading 08/17-10/03

2025-10-03

"When you compare two Uncertain values, you don't get a definitive true or false. You get an Uncertain<Bool> that represents the probability of the comparison being true."

"The general mood which most distinguishes the Rugby scene from American football is that of temperance; and this temperate mood is made possible to a considerable extent by the simplicity of the game."

"So artificial intelligence promises to do what an authoritarian regime does: take our place. They're two sides of the same coin—one political, the other technological—both forfeitures of human possibility. We're surrendering our ability to act as free agents of a democracy at the same moment we're building machines that take away our ability to think and feel."

"The problems mainly lie within and can only be solved from within."
"There are still in-house professionals with relevant skills, but management & shareholders openly discuss letting go of these people. This greatly undermines the morale of these professionals, who must constantly fight for their own right to exist. The (good) people who can easily leave do so in the meantime, because there is nothing fun about working for an employer who would rather see you go."

"On close examination, gamblers are less addicted to winning than to the 'world-dissolving state of subjective suspension and affective calm' that machine play offers."

"What keeps the software alive are the programmers who have an accurate mental model (theory) of how it is built and works."
"A successful software project is grown from a small living thing to a larger living thing. Building the project large from the start and will never come to life. Replacing the gardeners that brought it to life will lead it to whither."

"Day by day, however, the machines are gaining ground upon us; day by day we are becoming more subservient to them; more men are daily bound down as slaves to tend them, more men are daily devoting the energies of their whole lives to the development of mechanical life."
"War to the death should be instantly proclaimed against them. Every machine of every sort should be destroyed by the well-wisher of his species. Let there be no exceptions made, no quarter shown; let us at once go back to the primeval condition of the race."

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/chatgpt-ai-stein-erik-soelberg-murder-suicide-6b67dbfb?mod=hp_lead_pos7

"A Chinese food receipt contained symbols representing Soelberg's 83-year-old mother and a demon, ChatGPT told him. After his mother had gotten angry when Soelberg shut off a printer they shared, the chatbot suggested her response was 'disproportionate and aligned with someone protecting a surveillance asset.'"

"Why would real programs used by other people even be a good advertisement? Shipping software means you had to cross the finish line. It means that the entirety of the software development process had to be realized, not just the intellectually stimulating 80% part."
"...there really is a dearth of programs that one can easily find in languages like Lisp or Haskell, which means Lisp and Haskell are relegated to being spoken about exclusively in terms of its hypothetical—or perhaps historical or mathematical—benefits."

"I'm furious. I'm really angry. I'm angry in a knocking down sandcastles and punching Daniel LaRusso in the face and talking smack about him to his girl kind of way."
"I discovered that the data isn't statistically significant at any meaningful level. That I would need to record new datapoints for another four months just to prove if AI was speeding me up or slowing me down at all. It's too neck-and-neck."
"The most interesting thing about these charts is what they're not showing. They're not showing a sudden spike or hockey-stick line of growth. They're flat at best. There's no shovelware surge."

"Many systems force the user to express structure that isn't relevant for the task at hand, or, in the early stages of an idea, isn't clear yet."

"In tourism, productivity is effectively the same as it was in the time of the Pharaohs. Cooking meals, serving drinks, making beds, and cleaning toilets is labor-intensive and has proven deeply resistant to productivity gains from automation and new technology. This is undoubtedly partially because part of the very appeal of tourism is to be temporarily pampered by servants."

"It might be the ugliest effect of Trump's return—the rapid normalization of spectacular corruption, the desensitization to lawless power, the acceptance of moral collapse. Eventually it will coarsen us all."