by th0ma5 | 2025-05-28 04:27:46+00:00
I guess I see the overton window in the other direction from this? If I had a coworker who made a random insult machine that emailed other employees random, but deeply personal insults, and some people thought it was funny, and the CEO said that we should reflect on those insults and learning something, I would most definitely begin my emails with probably a stronger tone. And that is the reality of the fatigue that I see, in my professional circles, system architects, as they constantly have to re-litigate every new AI idea that is fundamentally incompatible with deterministic systems.

When I try to bring up this reality, the entire argument is triangulated "people find the insults funny," "maybe you should learn the history of roasting people," "my friend at the other large corp is insult maxing and it is the future, maybe the insults will get less devastating..." I look at people like Ed Zitron, who point out that even if they were five nines accurate how corrosive that would be, and I guess I see my rhetoric here as tame. It was literally from that context, so it did feel entirely appropriate, and honestly still does. And anyone who has asked the models deep questions that they know the deep answers can attest to, these are insult machines.

It really does feel like an invasion of the body snatchers for a lot of people, and I do believe this is completely invisible to non-practitioners, managers, junior people and others in many spaces. I've been trying to give voice to this, as have others on here in even starker (but perhaps more cordial as to be unnoticed) terms. I have a lot of theories about this, like there are just so many overloaded terms between the different groups of people in technology. A model that has doubled its accuracy is still very far away from even the most basic of traditional systems, like say a 555 timer is something that seems to be a missed idea in many places.

I'm writing this with hopefully a more business tone, but this language sure does seem to understate the extent of the problem, and the triangulation of the discourse now does like you say maybe doesn't have room for honest expression. I also feel the need to be almost insultingly verbose because it also seems like my sentiments should be obvious, because in other circles they are boring and not new.

My own non-productive quagmire is the constant exploration of all of these vendors and these techniques and seeing them make errors that are so hard to find as to be antagonistic, and vendors who think they are in control but can only push hidden bias. There's also a rhetorical problem with complex issues you start to look and sound like the crazy wall meme from It's Always Sunny, so, I understand there is a limit to effectiveness of describing the problems, I guess I think of Ed Zitron being hard to parse by most anyone... or I think of Jeff Goldblum's character in The Lost World being frustrated that he uses plain simple language but yet the danger does not seem to be communicated.

Bless you if you even half skimmed this, and thank you for your time.

Edit: Sorry, specifically with Simon's posts, I believe Simon to be genuinely curious but he's very happy to appropriate this situation on the side of the shovel seller and allude to these problems, but the audience for these posts are directly inspiring people to think of these tools as appropriate in contexts where we already know they fail, and so, I see this posts what like at least once a week now on here? And it always brings the most people triangulating the arguments like stated above, and I've had an ongoing feedback to Simon and it is puzzling, like his most latest post where he first said they were understanding things, and then when I said they don't, he said, essentially yeah I know but believing that is why I like them and I just don't know what to do with that kind of disingenuousness, unless people are literally talking about faith then I think people should talk about the pseudo religious things going on and stop describing those things as rational.