This is just a bunch of questions, but no answers, except for that whole paragraph about compute capacity whose point I simply cannot penetrate.

Just admit you don’t know that it makes people faster, you’re just dancing around that issue not saying anything.

EDIT:

Also:

Anyway, you’ll see all this eventually, when some data gets published.

That is not a skeptical position.

You can’t possibly know what was in my head while going over internal data.

Motherfucker, you told me what you were thinking and I took that at face value. You want to pretend that there’s some super-secret personal trove of knowledge that I can’t access that tells you the truth about what future data will say? Cool, I call that blind faith. I don’t know how you can pretend it’s anything else.

O_o I had no idea. This is really useful.

Another assumption that I wasn’t skeptical.

It wasn’t an assumption:

Anyway, you’ll see all this eventually, when some data gets published.

That is not a skeptical position.

And my point is that given that the data shows objectively that it does fool people - even subject matter experts - it is reasonable to believe that effect continues until proven otherwise. We know it’s a feature of LLMs, and the fact you continue to push on with your blind faith undisturbed by this knowledge is truly alarming.

In the follow up study, first of all I want to point out that it’s not definitive that it made them faster, the error bars include regions where they were slowed down. And none of this includes the long-term effects of poorly made, unmaintainable code that was farted out in bulk by an overworked engineer who didn’t have time to properly review code that they didn’t write and don’t fully understand.

It also doesn’t include the effects of long term exposure to LLMs reducing their solo effectiveness. If you only measure the immediate delta, then it could look like the LLM is helping when actually it’s just making people dependent.

And the selected dev quotes are also alarming in light of that information:

“I’m torn. I’d like to help provide updated data on this question but also I really like using AI!” — a developer from the original study early-2025 when asked to participate in the late-2025 study.

“I found I am actually heavily biased sampling the issues … I avoid issues like AI can finish things in just 2 hours, but I have to spend 20 hours. I will feel so painful if the task is decided as AI-disallowed.” — a developer from the new study noting selection effects when choosing what tasks to include in the study.

“my head’s going to explode if I try to do too much the old fashioned way because it’s like trying to get across the city walking when all of a sudden I was more used to taking an Uber.” — a developer from the new study noting selection effects when choosing what tasks to include in the study.

These quotes don’t demonstrate that LLMs actually help, only that they are addictive, which we already know to be true. If you’ve ever tried to talk to an addict about their problem you’d recognise this language.

Especially the quote that they could do something in 2 hours with an LLM that would take 20 hours alone. That can’t be true, that person is definitely wrong about the effect of the LLM. If it were really that effective, LLM companies would be clamouring to show the data that proves how effective their products are. Why aren’t they?

The fact this data is so hard to find and so hard to fund when there are so many billions being dumped into this field should tell you something, it should be deeply disturbing, but you just carry on fully convinced that you’re right and that there’s nothing to what I’m saying, even though you admitted you would’ve agreed just 3 months ago. Again, if you can actually show that the difference is so dramatic, then show it. You’re not though. You’re just convinced that you don’t need to re-evaluate what you believe. That doesn’t say good things about where your head’s at.

If you truly weren’t trying to convince me, you could just stop. I don’t know what you’re trying to prove by continuing.

This is just a statement of faith in your ability to judge these things accurately. Nowhere in here do I see any evidence that you’ve even considered that the reason you’ve changed your attitude towards the tech is that it’s just gotten so good at fooling people that it’s finally got you.

You don’t gain much from trying to convince me, but you could gain a lot from being more sceptical. People invented science to address the fact that our intuitive understanding doesn’t always reflect reality.

Science and the collection of objective data stops us from doing this:

There are a bunch of things that our brains just don’t understand intuitively, so we need to check our intuition against measurement. There’s no shame in that, but when it’s pointed out, then you have a chance to check yourself.

But you don’t seem to understand that. When you say:

Anyway, you’ll see all this eventually, when some data gets published.

you are demonstrating that you are the perfect mark for this stuff, because you are not reflecting on your own thought process to see where it might be failing you.

You’ve been given evidence that people cannot trust their own perceptions of what these agents do, and you replied by telling a bunch of stories about why you think you personally can trust your perceptions. My 12-year-old did the same thing when I tried to explain this to them.

Engineers being spread thinner to manage a wider number of tasks whilst reviewing shitty LLM noise that they didn’t write is inevitably going to make horrible code that’s impossible to maintain and will cost massive amounts of time and resources in the long run.

And the idea that it allows more things to be done is just a bunch of “it makes you faster” assessments in a trenchcoat.

Agentic or not, they still have zero fidelity. Fidelity can only come from an internal model of reality that the network is comparing its inputs to, and I’m pretty sure you don’t get that without AGI.

The data we have till this point shows that they don’t help, they only create an illusion of helping. And until you can show that that has fundamentally changed, then you have to assume that the improvements you’re seeing are just improved illusions.

Data or you’re just getting fooled better.

whilst it is adding some productivity

Is it though? Like what’s the evidence of that? If it just feels like it must be true, I have some bad news about that:

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/07/study-finds-ai-tools-made-open-source-software-developers-19-percent-slower/

The most interesting part of this isn’t that it slowed them down when they expected to be faster, it’s that even after it slowed them down, they couldn’t tell and were fooled that they had been faster.

Look at the graph, especially the last two lines:

https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/aicodingchart-1024x507.png

My theory about this is that LLMs were tasked with giving useful output, but they couldn’t do that, because they have no fidelity, so instead they found a shortcut, which was to trick people into thinking they were being useful. They found the same loophole that conmen have used for millenia, and automated it. It’s the AI alignment problem, only for some reason people aren’t talking about it, maybe because they don’t want to believe that we’re this easily manipulated.

There’s no reason to believe LLMs have gotten any better at actually doing useful work in the meantime in the absence of any objective measure of it. I think the best explanation for their “improvement” is that they have simply gotten better at fooling us.

Somewhere along the way our neoliberal overlords figured out that they needed to teach people to hate annoyance more than evil, and it’s been crazy effective.

That hole already serves the function of pushing out squishy things though.

Documents can be replaced. They get lost, stolen, or destroyed all the time. You can explain to a clerk that your documents were stolen - technically the truth since they’re withheld from you without your consent - and if they press the issue you can explain that your abusive parents won’t give you access to them and you cannot ask them for access.

Think about how you frame the information - don’t say “my parents have them and won’t let me access them” because that sounds potentially benign to a bored clerk just trying to get through the day and not really paying attention. Say, “they were stolen by my abusive parents who I no longer live with,” since that front-loads the problem and frames you as the victim, rather than as someone’s child. If you can have a friend with you when you go to get your documents that can help. You haven’t said how old you are that I saw, so I’m assuming you’re still a teen, but even if you’re a young adult this can still matter. Okay, I see you said you’re an adult.

In an ideal world it shouldn’t make a difference, but the way you present what is technically the same information really does matter in getting bureaucrats to help you properly. They are people, and they don’t just follow rigid rules, they will be swayed by their emotions and learning to navigate that is a big part of getting the system to work for you.

Also documents like that usually have serial numbers. That’s so if they are stolen, they can be registered as invalid, so the thief can’t use them to steal your identity. So whatever is in the safe can be made worthless if you get that done. Getting replacements should automatically invalidate the old ones but not every system works the same, so double-check that the old copies will be invalidated.

It depends a little bit on where you are but in general I wouldn’t trust the cops to be helpful, unless you somehow know for a fact that they will help and not just return you to your family. I hate to say that but they fundamentally exist to protect property and a lot of them accept society’s logic that children are the property of their parents, and if you’re striking out on your own it’s important for you to learn that cops aren’t your frends. People like your dad & brother become cops specifically because it gives them power over others.

It’s also likely your parents will simply lie and try to convince the cops that you should be back with them. Not to say they will be successful, but once you’re away from the home I would absolutely try to eliminate any contact you make after that. I don’t want to scare you too much, but also these people have a pattern. They usually know how to talk to cops, since they tend to talk the same language. Your parents likely keep the documents away from you in order to keep you controlled, so they will know that this is an opportunity for them to reel you back in. I wouldn’t give them the chance.

I would look up teen shelters, and if you can find a group of people who you believe have your interests at heart then you can ask them for help. All of this will be a lot easier if you can find allies. If you can find any mutual aid organisations near you - “food not bombs” is a common name to look for - they may know other orgs willing & able to help, or they may just have people who are willing themselves.

Thanks for clarifying the pronunciation, I was confused.

I was floored by how perfectly they did the voice, then I looked it up and this song is literally by the original radio play voice actor Stephen Moore. Amazing.

Yes, they try to prevent unwanted outputs with filters that prevent the LLM from seeing your input, not by teaching the LLM, because they can’t actually do that, it doesn’t truly learn.

Hypotheticals and such work because the LLM has no capacity to understand context. The idea that “A is inside B”, on a conceptual level, is lost on them. So the idea that a recipe for napalm is the same whether it’s framed within a hypothetical or not is impossible for them to decode. To an LLM, just wrapping the same idea in a new context makes it seem like a different thing.

They don’t have any capacity to self-censor, so telling them not to say something is like telling a human not to think of an elephant. It doesn’t work. You can tell a human not to speak about the elephant, because that’s guarded by our internal filter, but the LLM is more like our internal processes that operate before our filters go to work. There is no separation between “thought” and output (quotes around “thought” because they don’t actually think).

Solving this problem I think means making a conscious agent, which means the people who make these things are incentivised to work towards something that might become conscious. People are already working on something called agentic AI which has an internal self-censor, and to my thinking that’s one of the steps towards a conscious model.

I’m not sure exactly why but I can’t think of anything after then that properly enriches my life.

Was that around the time you moved out of home?

We need to implement tarpits: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/01/ai-haters-build-tarpits-to-trap-and-trick-ai-scrapers-that-ignore-robots-txt/

There are examples yes, Dr Fatima on youtube talks a lot about the philosophy of science and how it’s not such a rigid, prescriptive process as a lot of people - including scientists - seem to think.

When Pseudoscience Beat Science: Three Stories About Knowing Things

That video has three stories of phenomena that were unknown to western science until ancestral knowledge revealed them. The first two you could argue are just traditionally acquired knowledge that has gained a veneer of supernatural language, but “voodoo death” is literally named after the fact that a voodoo curse can kill someone.

I’d reccommend her whole channel if this stuff interests you. Particularly Gravity is a Social Construct, and How Galileo Broke the Scientific Method.

Edit: the downvotes on this with absolutely no explanation of what’s wrong are a perfect example of why science struggles with these concepts. Anything that doesn’t immediately fit the schema of what western respectable rational people expect gets dismissed out of hand.

I know by making this edit I’m inviting the most incurious assholes to mansplain to me why I’m wrong, but maybe someone will actually engage with the points.

Literally anywhere that isn’t lemmygrad or hexbear will usually be better. You could go to an instance with open sign up until you find somewhere else, but they tend to house a lot of closeted reactionaries, I assume because those people like the anonymity. Personally I just looked up instances to see which ones I liked. They’ll have a description of who they are and if sign ups require an application you just say why you want to join their instance. It’s not a huge deal really.

Then I don’t know what you’re disagreeing with in my first comment, since you agree that fats aren’t actually bad.

In fact, since you’ve said that you need “all” for a balanced diet, it seems like you agree that fats actually are “good”.

Everyone needs calories, if you don’t get them from fats and oils, you’re left with carbs and sugars, both of which have a higher glycemic index.

So yes, it does mean fats are good, because you need energy to live. If you want to tell me there’s some other form of energy that you know about that’s better than any of those three, please let me know.

Until then, perhaps you could show me the science that proves how bad fats supposedly are.

Those foods won’t make you feel good unless you enjoy shitting yourself into a coma.