Harrison Souchereau

Astronomy PhD candidate at Yale - Jellyfish Galaxies and Ram Pressure Stripping - SMU Astro Alum - Views are my own

[Mitchell Hashimoto @mitchellh]

I strongly believe there are entire companies right now under heavy AI psychosis and its impossible to have rational conversations about it with them. I can't name any specific people because they include personal friends I deeply respect, but I worry about how this plays out.

I lived through the great MTBF vs MTTR (mean-time-between-failure vs. mean-time-to-recovery) reckoning of infrastructure during the transition to cloud and cloud automation. All those arguments are rearing their ugly heads again but now its... the whole software development industry (maybe the whole world, really).

It's frightening, because the psychosis folks operate under an almost absolute "MTTR is all you need" mentality: "its fine to ship bugs because the agents will fix them so quickly and at a scale humans can't do!" We learned in infrastructure that MTTR is great but you can't yeet resilient systems entirely.

The main issue is I don't even know how to bring this up to people I know personally, because bringing this topic up leads to immediately dismissals like "no no, it has full test coverage" or "bug reports are going down" or something, which just don't paint the whole picture.

We already learned this lesson once in infrastructure: you can automate yourself into a very resilient catastrophe machine. Systems can appear healthy by local metrics while globally becoming incomprehensible. Bug reports can go down while latent risk explodes. Test coverage can rise while semantic understanding falls. Changes happens so fast that nobody notices the underlying architecture decaying.

I worry.

[Harrison Souchereau @HSouch]

"Hey guys so we have to blow up the world and usher in a surveillance state because apparently China is going to blow up the world [citation needed] and usher in a surveillance state, so we need to do it first."

- Literally every big tech AI CEO and billionaire this year.

[Harrison Souchereau @HSouch]

The government that broke your legs is now trying to sell you the crutches.

Does anyone actually believe this guy has the best interests of regular Canadians in mind?

11 years of his party running things btw. Definitely not their fault.

[Mark Carney @MarkJCarney]

The cost of living: It’s the number one thing on most people's minds.

Canada's new government has a plan to fix it.

[Harrison Souchereau @HSouch]

"Well we don't code in assembly anymore, using agentic AI is just the next step in that evolution"

Last time I checked the Python/Rust/C/literally any other standard code compiler doesn't hallucinate bugs then gaslight you when calling it out when compiling your code.

[Harrison Souchereau @HSouch]

This moron is going to kill USMCA isn't he.

[Mark Carney @MarkJCarney]

We’re renewing Canada’s relationship with China.

As part of our new strategic partnership, China is granting visa-free travel for Canadians.

[Harrison Souchereau @HSouch]

I suppose it's great for me because it means job security moving forward, but I'm surprised at how little concern there is over the very real future where undergraduate degrees are rendered completely meaningless by LLM overuse.

[Harrison Souchereau @HSouch]

Shocking to watch academics cheer on the endumbification of an entire generation of undergrads because they can't be assed to encourage students to learn things without just conveyor belting assignments to ChatGPT.

If you are pulling the ladder up behind you, you are a ghoul.

[Harrison Souchereau @HSouch]

Wow no way the AI startup owner (who is hemorrhaging money) is saying that their startup is making you obsolete and the only way to survive is to use their totally working "agentic" model.

Please bro just one more model bro, AGI is literally here bro.

[Ryan Gerritsen🇨🇦🇳🇱 @ryangerritsen]

Has Nova Scotia banned lightning yet? They better get on that.

[Harrison Souchereau @HSouch]

If I had a nickel for every time a Trudeau became prime minister and the country was brought to the brink of total, foundational collapse following their resignation, I would have ten cents

(6 cents USD)

[Harrison Souchereau @HSouch]

It's a possible scenario that, since Trudeau knows his departure is certain, he is deliberately tanking critical sectors of Canada so thoroughly to ensure the incoming govt cannot clean up the mess during their tenure.

His true colours are spiteful. This wouldn't be new for him.

[Chris Lindsay @chris_j_lindsay]

New paper out today. 👀 We use asteroseismology to model 62 subgiant stars observed by Kepler and TESS, and study the fossil signatures left behind by their main-sequence convective cores🌟. Read about it here https://t.co/0ac1yddYvS.

[Harrison Souchereau @HSouch]

Nice to see Freeland squirm a bit though. She was so gleeful when announcing the government was seizing bank accounts of anyone supporting the protest.

She's probably *terrified* that this opens her up to liability. As it should. What they did should be criminal.

[Harrison Souchereau @HSouch]

The only people that are going to be mad about this are Trudeau + his cronies, and people who think that just because you dislike the reason or intention behind a protest that gives the government the right to wage war against its own citizens.

https://t.co/7Y35OoWSYg

[Harrison Souchereau @HSouch]

You can think the Ottawa protests were unjustified, unreasonable, un-whatever. That's your right.

That does not give the government the right to trample over the charter just because a protest is making them look bad + embarrassing Dear Leader.

[Harrison Souchereau @HSouch]

This has to be the highest Astronomers/square foot ratio in human history.

@astronomyontap

[Harrison Souchereau @HSouch]

And here comes AAS from the top rope to announce yet another covid-related policy rug-pull that drastically alters the nature of the conference mere days before it's set to begin.

[Harrison Souchereau @HSouch]

I'm actually quite surprised such a limit isn't already implemented.

I'm even more surprised that I'm seeing astronomers bragging about how many they're on as if it isn't stunningly immoral to game the system like that.

[Harrison Souchereau @HSouch]

Perhaps a hot take: Astronomers should be restricted to 1-3 PI'd JWST proposals per cycle, and they can be CoI on 5 more.

That's it.

Anything more and a random assortment should be discarded BEFORE THEY REACH THE TAC until the limit is reached.

[Harrison Souchereau @HSouch]

At least when it wasn't double blind, the TAC could go "well this group submitted a bajillion proposals so let's only pick the best few."

There's far fewer natural safeguards against this now.