Eric S. Raymond

Yes, I *am* that ESR. Well, it's the question people usually ask.

Programmer, wandering philosopher, accidental anthropologist, troublemaker for liberty.

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@WildbillPH @CynicalPublius The Enemy Below.

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@apstrusus84 @justalexoki Interesting, even though it doesn't sound like a method I can easily replicate.

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@apstrusus84 @justalexoki Er. How do you know you have an IQ of 178? This is not a hostile question - I too am outside normal measurement range and I am extremely curious about any method or proxy that can produce reliable and repeatable measures.

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@adammocklerr Crime rates have been dropping even as rates of gun ownership have been skyrocketing and laws restricting weapons carry have been loosening.

If there's a causal link, it's operating in the opposite direction from what you expect.

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@FlashForFreedom "Plod" has never been current slang for a patrol policeman in the US. At that time an American would have used "Fuzz", "Coppers", or "Flatfeet"

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The code is all going to be published in open source anyway, so I have no privacy worries there.

As for the other stuff, I have a theoretical worry, but not a practical one. It will turn practical if there's an actual breach of this kind.

Eventually, I expect to be running an LLM locally for most of my work. Until then, it's either except some theoretical risk or be paralyzed.

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So, I upgraded to ChatGPT 6.0 today. And, as is my habit, I immediately sicced it on one of my projects that has a pending bug report: Super Star Trek, in this case, which has a minor issue in its color handling when running on Windows.

When I do this, I don't just have robot friend fix the pending bug. I give it the prompt "Audit this code for bugs and suggest improvements".

Here's what's bothering me. The last time I did this, with 5.5, I went through and resolved all the audit reports until robot friend couldn't find anything else left to gripe about.

Today, on the same code, it's reporting 16 issues. And...it's been like this every time. I think I've gone through four of these cycles. What I'm wondering is: when does the process converge?

I mean, a program can only have a finite number of bugs, right? Right?

SST is very old and somewhat grotty code. Started out as mainframe Fortran in 1973, was translated to C at some point before it passed to me, and I moved it first to Python and then to pedantically strict typed Python. But that doesn't seem like an explanation to me. Especially since I've seen the same pattern of more bug finda from every new LLM version on projects I wrote from scratch. It's never huge terrible bugs anymore, but it's almost never the empty set, either.

This is more disturbing because I'm actually *good* at writing reliable code - by human standards, anyway. I actually got an award with prize money attached to it for that, once upon a time. If *my* code looks like an infinite pit of bugs, I shudder to think what the state of the rest of the world is.

Anyway, I now think I have a personal benchmark for AGI. The first time I run a new model iteration on Super Star Trek and it says "No bugs, boss", I will know that the previous one achieved AGI.

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@FlashForFreedom We Yanks don't know about that undone bottom button because we never had a Crown Prince who was an absolutely colossal tub of lard.

Some imitations of royalty should probably be left to die quietly after the first century.

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@dhh @Matthewrogers @teej_dv The vimcentricity is a major reason that I didn't consider Omarchy; I am Emacs ride or die. 😁

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This is a pattern-recognition exercise for computer scientists. Consider these names:

David Parnas
Fred Brooks
Les Hatton
Eric Raymond
Jacob Bayless

Without consulting an AI, why might these names belong on one list?

I'll be interested to see if anybody catches the same connection I do.

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@2fast2feeless "He don't know me vewy well, do he!"

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@BarbarianDisco https://t.co/0PRy8km9Nc

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@DaleCloudman Mostly they do indeed seem to be increasingly rare edge cases. But occasionally a new model will turn up something that makes me go "What the fuck? How did the previous models miss this? How did I miss it?"

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@StephenFleming Dark blue on black is actually worse.

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@godlightgrace @grok Explain jury nullification to this ignoramus.

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@seanmdav Obviously what they're trying to do is stochastically recruit some troon to shoot him.

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@GoldAtomComics @ThomBrady5 Yeah, I remember watching Wired go to shit too.

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I was once a Scientific American subscriber. I loved that magazine; reading it was one of the highlights of my month. I canceled, and wept for what the magazine was becoming, when they published a theme issue that was a transparent political hit job.

Sounds like current news? No. That was 40 years ago. The hit job was on the Strategic Defense Initiative. Reagan was in the White House.

And I... I couldn't figure out why nobody was saying the obvious in public. That SciAm had been sock-puppeted by a Soviet influence operation desperate to keep the US from exploiting its technological advantage.

Ideological capture of the scientific establishment is not a new problem. As much as I hate the Communists behind it, I'm even angrier with all the scientists who averted their eyes and never pushed back while the capture was going on. Our civilization gave them a position of high status, privilege, and trust. A priori I don't think we were wrong to do that - until they failed in the duty that went with that trust.

It's difficult for me to express how personally painful I found this. I revered research scientists as a child and young man - I could not imagine any higher calling than to be one myself. Until they betrayed civilization, and in the process betrayed me.

So, this isn't a new problem. What's new is that the post-2014 woke insanity has made it too obvious to miss.

It's time for a dissolution of the monasteries. The culture of science, to the extent it is transmitted forward, must learn a harsh and terrible lesson about the consequences of allowing scientific neutrality to be abandoned for a mess of politics.

[Steven Pinker @sapinker]

The degeneration of Nature, Science, NEJM, and Scientific American into woke propaganda dispensers (and their refusal to publish normie, centrist, common-sense responses) is a scientific scandal.

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@peterrhague It's bold of you to assume this clown's brain can actually reason forward to second-order consequences. Most sub-Saharan Africans are below the IQ threshold required for that.

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@sanga_thief I didn't know whether SDI was viable or not. I didn't need to know that in order to recognize the stench of a political hit job.