Just came across this nice technical breakdown of what, exactly, R1 accomplished. Interesting news to me was that they had to bypass CUDA entirely and write optimizations in PDX. Good complementary reading if you're here from my DeepSeek post.
Once again I find myself writing about the latest AI outrage cycle, this one sparked by an NYMag article about the rampant abuse of ChatGPT in higher education. It should surprise no one that kids are using AI to cheat constantly and we are about to see a generation of functionally illiterate college graduates hit the workforce. Seems bad!
I feel obligated to point out that the article is a more than a little sensationalist and references a study claiming that 90% of students are using ChatGPT that isn't particularly rigorous. Its narrative also nicely cherry-picks a truly despicable guy
Independent of yesterday's dive into a "useful" application of AI, discourse erupted on Bluesky over Hank Green saying he didn't think the "useless" critique holds water anymore. For the most part people are very angry at the perception of ceding any rhetorical ground to Big AI, which is a fair position to take. Green also put it in a fairly condescending "just asking questions" kind of way, which doesn't necessarily help his case. I don't love the phrasing but there is something to his point: people are finding utility in these tools whether we like it or not, and I
In my self-appointed role as moral and practical judge of artificial intelligence and its uses I have rarely come across a product that I didn't end up finding boring or uninteresting after its novelty wore off. Most base or chatbot models are unreliable. Code models can be nice for tabbed autocomplete or boilerplate but I usually don't find them very helpful in the context of the large, complex, and often legacy codebases I work with professionally. I believe people who say they've found ways to make these useful in their workflows, but between the time it takes to establish a
I've been thinking more about vibe coding lately and getting pissed about the whole concept. I think there's something deeply wrong with the mindset behind "prompt, don't read the code, don't think about it." I have written in the past about how artificial intelligence is a tool that accelerates the worst impulses of capitalism, and vibe coding is the latest iteration on what is possibly the one I hate the most: sacrificing understanding for efficiency.
Here's the thing. I like learning. I know it's very east coast liberal arts elitist of me but I think there is inherent value in
Today I am questioning even my minimal attempts to give the benefit of the doubt to AI. A thing is ultimately what it does and dear god there is so little good coming out of this technology right now and so much bad.
As far as anyone can tell, the tariffs announced yesterday (which will, if upheld, most likely result in a recession at best) were literally just calculated based on asking a chatbot how to eliminate trade deficits. Gemini even prefaced its response with "this is a super bad idea, but if you want to, here's how you'd do