Want to wade into the sandy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youāll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
Check out this epic cope from an Anthropic employee desperately trying to convince himself and others that actually LLMs are getting exponentially better
https://www.julian.ac/blog/2025/09/27/failing-to-understand-the-exponential-again/
Includes screenshots of data where he really really hopes you donāt look at the source, and links to AI 2027.
I took a quick peek at his blog.
Oh dear, there is a dedicated rationality subsectionā¦
Oh god, he unironically recommends reading the sequences wtf š¤¢š¤®
Oh lol, I thought his name sounded familiar and yup, he was a concern troll in a Hackerspace I was in, some 12 years ago.
Surprise level: zero
I have a Petri dish to sell you
Links to the METR tasks w/ massive error bars at 50% level lmaou.
Someone in the comments rightly points out the comparison with covid isnāt apt. With covid, underlying mechanism caused an exponential effect in covidās spread
With LLMs the exponential trend is being caused by exponentially spending money and a healthy dose of targeting benchmarks, which is why people are calling the top. The money literally doesnāt exist for this shit to go on so you can create your 50% accurate mechanical turk.
Edit: idk the more I think about this the more it irks me. Like if I was allowed to pick and choose benchmarks that agree with my biases I would post something like thisā¦
ā¦ and claim model performance is actually getting worse over time.
https://xcancel.com/sayashk/status/1966144670561612202#m
The second screenshot goes to a chart where the Y axis is labelled
So theyāre just extrapolating an exponential, not actually measuring it.
Great response^
I think Julian is going to be mildly surprised that METRās chart keeps going up, and yet, will have relatively small effect on the majority of swe roles.
At the same time, he did create alphaZero so he has a big old noggin! I wonder, after his success at Go, was he swept up in the mania that we would quickly translate that success to create super duper ai?
In Dutch we have a saying (from a commercial, well done on the advertisers there) āWij van Wc-eend adviseren Wc-eendā (we from the company Wc-eend, suggest you get Wc-eend), which seems appropriate here. It is used in a sarcastic context when somebody gives advice with a clear conflict of interest.
Anyway, just going from the title, āX is exponentialā has been the pro AI cry since the singularity is near. (Which said, well individual tech follows an S-curve, but all the techs combined are exponential, and variants on that). All seems very hopeium, immortality is near!