CIRCLE WITH A DOT

@peter #Alt4You
Screen capture image from reddit's BetterOffline forum with heading and body text.

Heading: WTF is going on

Body text: I am the tech lead in my company and I am seeing PR reviews from my team members. Person A makes a PR and add AI slop description in the PR. Person B reviews the PR and all of the changes are AI generated out of which 90% don't make any sense. Person A responds back to these messages with AI with false confidence.

No one understands the codebase and how it works. Bugs and half assed features are popping off everywhere.

I am also forced by my managers to keep using AI for everything.

Where the hell are all of the humans and proper cognitive intelligence?

I will just go to a forest and meditate until this bubble pops.

@luckytran The NSF 2027 budget request bottom line numbers are awful.

Non-capital-equipment research grants down almost 60% from 2025. Combined discretionary funding down 55%. Overall funding down 43% (after a brand new $900m line item for an Antarctic research vessel).

And this isn't the actual final funding. This is the *ask*.

Carnage.
#NSF

@Tamtam @britt Also people who had to attend an in-person medical appointment or went to get vaccinated and caught it there.

I'm careful - still masking in an N95 when I leave the house, masking in the house when delivery people come by (and rarely leaving the house in the first place) - but I caught it twice because my husband brought it home from work.

Even for people who test: people are still contagious before the tests turn positive, and the tests themselves still miss 20% or more of infections.

(In my most recent, doctor-confirmed reinfection, I tested negative on rapid tests for 21 days while my family was sick with PCR-confirmed Covid, both the week before and through the entire course of my symptoms.)

And there are a number of people in support groups struggling because they blame themselves for the actions (risky or not) that led to them getting sick.

Telling people "don't catch covid" in a culture of "my government made it legal for police to require me to take off my mask" is completely divorced from reality.

@baldur There's a difference between people in the world of LLM development and marketing and the world of tech in general.

This is important because I think the crux of the problem is that many of the people who are drawn specifically to developing and marketing LLMs are drawn *because* they are seduced by the illusion that there is no difference between the software world and the physical world.

As a roboticist, I was at a conference (years ago now) where I sat across from a grad student who said, unironically, "So robotics is just a subfield of computer science, right?"

First I burst out laughing (the only class I ever withdrew from was a CS class, and I took it for one day before knowing I needed to find an alternative).

Then I patiently explained that robotics is at the intersection of a Venn diagram including computer science, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, and domain expertise. In the last ten years, that list has expanded to include systems engineers and mathematicians.

The LLM developers and marketers are the result of a generation of students who never really grasped that things outside the computer have an independent and important existence.

Who still believe that anything that uses software is basically "just a subfield of computer science."