We are talking about a genie here, not like they want to help you out (depending on the lore).

You are assuming you’ll even be allowed to utter specifc numbers at all.

Think a genie scenario would have you utterly blocked before the first syllable that could possibly be helpful.

A fine career as a lawyer awaits you

Still same boat, you are compelled to conform with whatever the actual truth is.

will be… impossible to know will be… a sequence of numbers between 1 and 69

You could be compelled to say any number of unhelpful things instead of the numbers.

“next week lottery numbers are… impossible for me to know”

“the best thing I can do with my life right now is … something I wish I knew”

The curse can be stubbornly unhelpful no matter what.

I’m realizing it’s not GenAI itself that I necessarily am bothered by, it’s that it just makes everyone that already annoyed me even worse.

People that flood the internet with low-value clickbait? Well now they can flood even more, even more text, lots of video.

People that see a popular content creator that puts out good stuff and then tries to do a knock off? Now I might see that knock-off for 15 seconds before I realize that the thing is trash.

People that like to tell everyone else how to do their jobs that they themselves have no experience about? Well here’s GenAI to make them claim they can do someone’s job better.

Megalomaniac billionaires with messiah complexes? Well, GenAI makes them think they are gods. Elon’s Grok even just casually drops Elon praise into content for no reason.

Executives that view themselves as “thought leaders” and are dismissive of their employees? Yeah, they are itching to lay off some people.

I’m surprised it takes so long, honestly. I keep seeing a progression of people who think they uniquely figured out how to avoid the pitfalls of GenAI mistakes and then getting hit with the same mistakes everyone gets hit with and having shocked Pikachu face when the LLM does something it “promised” not to do. They will not believe anyone telling them that LLM generating the phrase “I commit to avoiding deleting any data” doesn’t mean it actually committed to anything. Even when that fails, they think the LLM saying “I have made a mistake, and I have learned from it and I won’t allow it to happen again” means something, and shocked again as, surprise, that also doesn’t mean anything.

Of course, just last week someone was asking me if I had tried some GenAI stuff and they had been thinking about trying it. Shockingly some people have managed to avoid it and I guess they have more folks to burn through…

My kid never really thought it was useful from the onset for fact based material and/or understood that the point of the work was to actually learn something and that the output doesn’t matter and is utterly meaningless if AI generates it.

I have used it to accelerate double checking their math homework. If it agrees, I assume the homework was done right. If it disagrees, then I do the math manually myself and of the disagreements, about 70% is the AI getting something wrong.

My kid did however for a time use it for entertainment, but decided pretty quickly that the chatbots added nothing to the experience my kid did not bring to the experience, so stopped that as well.

Very firmly anti-AI slop too.

Caused some friction when my wife got into a GenAI story for a few days but my wife got bored of the concept too.

The delay is discouraging because it means either she’s open to payoff to disclose it, or her information isn’t really novel or useful and she’s just teasing it out like a marketing campaign instead of trying to do real damage because she’s got nothing.

Won’t even impeach him this time.

One thing that concerned me a bit was just how many of the commenters were totally there for it. The central figure of their preferred filesystem turns out to be off his rocker and a gate number of people seemed to be roughly “if this guy made such a good filesystem, and he claims he has a mathematical proof of consciousness, will, guess there must be something to it…”

Sure there seemed to be people with more expected reactions, but surprised he had any traction at all…

I’ve no idea about correlation with AI psychosis and FOSS or even software development in general, I’ve only read about a handful and this is the first developer that cropped up, but it’s not like I’ve been actively looking. Don’t know if I’ve seen any pattern, some have been alone and have had built a family, some young and some much further along in life. Some fairly anonymous and then there’s this guy with fame and a following and quite the ego… Many who by all accounts never exhibited mental health problems before… It’s just weird.

Wow, flags don’t get redder than that. Dude has issues…

On top of everything else. He asserts that he made his LLM a “real girl” by feeding it a “mathematical proof” that it is a conscious being… That he has figured out this whole conscious AI thing 15 years ago…

Dude has some severe LLM psychosis… And thinks he’s such a hot shot smart person that such a problem couldn’t apply to him…

This is really a sad and worrying example of a whole mess of incoming mental health problems…

Of course I also see that the go spawns python and does stuff with that…

And there’s lots of other dubious issues that look like an odd mismash of intro level programming stuff with unfortunate performance implications, and a very strong vibe code smell, though the commit interval is a bit larger than I would have presumed with vibe coding, but the volume of changes seem AI sloppy…

Well, broadly it looks like slop, probably AI slop, but either way I wouldn’t go anywhere near this project…

 unzip; touch; strip; finger; mount; gasp; yes; uptime; umount; sleep

With fish, you just need to fight more to earn that kill.

Meanwhile, I’d be “welcome to the team, you’d do fine here”.

Don’t get the white-knighting for Windows of all things. If you need Windows, ok, but that doesn’t mean everyone needs windows.

refuse to work on Toyotas.

Nah, the analogy that would be closer would be if the shop said you must use some overpriced but notoriously fragile tools and you’ll be on the hook for any tool that breaks and any delay you incur will be your fault while they go buy a new tool. Plus the tools tend to have sharp edges on the handles for some reason and are just painful to use.

Now if the job is “you need to administrate the group policy of the company systems”, then “I refuse to run Windows” is a pretty stupid take. But frequently the job is rooted entirely in Linux based infrastructure for internet facing stuff, and Windows on the entry point is just horribly awkward for that job. You can kind of/sort of get there but I haven’t found a single decent ‘Terminal’ even compared to that being pretty trivial with Mac and Linux. WSL starts to provide something useful, but it is kind of fragile and WSLg sucks with the worst window management possible, even by the standards of Windows broadly. Meanwhile, starting from a Linux system you can use a desktop shell that is probably better for your productivity than anything Windows allows.

There’s not really a whole lot of logic for a lot of “Windows required” jobs in tech. Office365 is mostly fine through a Linux browser. Onedrive works with Linux. If you have some applications that are Windows only, again, sure, but a lot of tech folks don’t need any Windows only tools.

Recent example from my real world, someone was around my desk and asking questions about stuff that required me to hop between a few contexts. They were shocked how quickly I could navigate a bunch of the windows in the discussion, and asked how in the world I got Windows to do that. Of course, I couldn’t.

Besides, the general tone of the conversation could have been just full of redflags about how tortuous the company was going to be. One company blocked SSH between anything saying SSH was insecure, and said that, somehow, we had to do everything through the graphical console of the Linux instances. Which meant no rsync, no scp, having to create some file serving facility to upload files to and then download from. If my daily workflow depended on such draconian crap, I’d be out of there too.

Sure, but also it becomes very unfunny even without that facet due to the awkward pauses. The pacing just gets mutilated as they ‘pause for laughter’.

A common trope is that some scene is just ‘funny’ with the laugh track, but without it, people just seem psycho, because they sit there, noiselessly after so many sentences.

I was about to say that as bad as Outlook was, I actually used its search to figure out some Jira ticket because just… damn trying to find a Jira ticket based on a few keywords is just a pain in the ass…