x74sys

If you’re using flakes: nix flake update && sudo nixos-rebuild switch —flake .# in the directory of your flake.nix

That’s one of the dumbest articles I‘ve ever read. Glad the author realized it themselves.

If you ask me personally, I don’t think that any of this has a benefit for anyone. I don’t think this is an advancement. It doesn’t make us work less, it just makes us achieve more in the same amount of time, or at least most people feel that way. It doesn’t make me more productive, it’s rather the opposite.

And what good is it to us if we achieve more? The only benefit it has is for those god damned capitalists. Great for them. The pay we get stays the same, and it probably even gets less.

OpenClaw? Why the fuck would I let an AI use my computer? I want to use my computer. I want to read my emails and I want to answer them. I want to research stuff and I want to learn. Why would I let an AI do all of those things? Hire a human because AI can’t touch grass? Seriously?

It‘s all just so gimmicky, and yes it’s interesting and amazing that those things are possible, but it’s like flying humans to mars, it is really cool? Yeah. Will it have any real benefit? No.

To me, this is all just fucking sad and will probably mark the advancement from late capitalism stage into hopefully complete economic chaos.

So yeah, when it comes to AI, I‘m probably not the best one to ask.

But what they’re also implying is is that most people just can’t keep up. But they can, apparently.

About the security stuff, I don’t think it is a question of whether AI could do it or couldn’t do it, it just wasn’t extensively used for it. For a long time there have been LLM bots trying to automatically identify security vulnerabilities in hopes of making “free money”, but it wasn’t effective. Now there’s people actually trying to find real issues. And I would argue that AI is not good at it. You can just let it ponder for as long as you can feed it with money, and you will definitely find vulnerabilities. The false-positive rate is very likely high. If I try to roll a dice 12 times, and 3 out of those were 6, then that doesn’t make me a good dice roller.

I think it’s just more the act of discovering what we can do with AI. It’s like openclaw, that could’ve been around last year, it’s not like AI wasn’t capable enough at that point, it’s just that no-one thought of using it like that (or at least no-one built it to the extent of openclaw and got it that popular).

Not even every bug AI finds is a bug.

But then you’re primarily extracting text, which you don’t need LLMs for. OCR tools will do the job much cheaper and more effective.

That problem isn’t even specific to computer science, it’s specific to most engineering fields. Programmers are just extremely good at automating, so they automate themselves out of existence.

At least in Germany, people with higher-education on-average also have more political awareness - but the more engineering their field contains, the more that awareness jumps out of the window (what I mean by that is that of all the people with higher-education, engineers have the highest rate of politically right-leaning people, which in my world-view equates to being incompetent).

Which imo comes from another problem: Computer Science had a huge boom, and now we ended up with a lot of businessmen who can hussle 70h/week to get their degree in 4 semesters, so that they can start their path to their first million. Basically, computer science got invaded by capitalists and the nerds just went to another corner in hopes not to be bothered. Not that they could have done much about it, there are way more capitalists than there are computer nerds.

Try to optimize this away, sucker:

echo "level full-speed" | sudo tee /proc/acpi/ibm/fan

Luckily I have a ThinkPad, I just run the following program and hold the fan vents against my face:

int main(void) {
  while (1);
}

GNU is a trusted quality stamp. Me see GNU, me go GET.

And I want to add: even though LLMs can identify cybersecurity risks, it doesn’t mean they are good at cybersecurity. They’re probably just as bad as in any other area. Also questionable if the actual positives outweigh the labor required to flag all the false-positives.

Just because they‘re used everywhere doesn’t mean that we just have to accept them. Also doesn’t mean that LLMs are a good thing.

I think LLMs can be used as an (additional!) cyber security analysis tool, that’s honestly the only area in which it seems to be actually useful (right now). And most projects don’t reach the size in which spotting security risks spanning across many different modules is a relevant skill to have. So it should be used sparingly, on things like the linux kernel. Then the cost of it might even be worth it (but I also don’t want to know about the amount of hallucinated bugs it finds).

Adwaita

Yeah, apart from the fact that I imagine that people who need alt text don’t appreciate LLM output. It‘s very boring. It’s either extremely technical and ice-cold or so cringe that you have to stop reading. Just what I think.

At least for me, if I realize that I’m reading an AI blog article or AI generated text in some other form, I don’t read it.

In my opinion, no. It has to be heavily curated. You’re not saving yourself a lot of work if you have to read it word by word (and probably correct stuff) anyway.

I think just one very short sentence describing what’s on there (it doesn’t have to be detailed) is a lot better than whatever an LLM will give you.

I don’t really have any problem with the thing by itself, I honestly don’t even know that much about it. I just hate everything that gains publicity just because there is a certain name behind it. Which is what happened with omarchy.

Didn’t know that it was AI slop as well. That’s kinda sad…

Yeah, honestly if I notice something has AI in it, I don’t use it anymore. Open source projects with a CLAUDE.md or whatever in them? No, thanks.

The amount of assumptions they make are really one big issue what makes them suck so bad. In the end you just have more work. Instead of getting done 80% of the work in 20% of the time, now you get 30% of the work done in 1% of the time, but good luck getting the remaining stuff done at all.

Yeah, at most you can let them manage a 1k loc python script (the free tiers or Gemini Pro at least), but more than that and it starts to really eat your tokens without achieving what you asked or breaking functional behavior.

I extremely doubt that Coding Agents will see a future like promised. LLMs are still so expensive to run, and the useful larger models will probably never be affordable (if they charged for them what they cost). Apart from the fact that even their output can be utter garbage (and mediocre at best). You can already see it everywhere. Websites break in weird ways, ways in which it’s clear that either a complete beginner wrote that or an LLM did. Look at Shazam a few weeks ago. UI design? Horrific. Extremely inconsistent. Ugly. There are many other examples. It just shows that it doesn’t work. And no, the next model will not solve those issues. LLMs are flawed for this task from the ground up, the approach is outright wrong, we can make up so many bandaids and they will still suck, forever.