TechTakes

Today in Seems Legit News:

"As a concrete example, an engineer at Spotify on their morning commute from Slack on their cell phone can tell Claude to fix a bug or add a new feature to the iOS app,” Söderström said. “And once Claude finishes that work, the engineer then gets a new version of the app, pushed to them on Slack on their phone, so that he can then merge it to production, all before they even arrive at the office."

• why is engineer working before contracted time
• if engineer can do everything by cellphone why does engineer have to commute in the first place
• if Claude can do everything anyway why do you still have engineers at all
• if "no engineer has written a line of code since December", when are your lowering your subscription prices Spotify
• why is hypothetical engineer a "he", Spotify
• do you often merge Claude code to production without even a review, Spotify
• in unrelated news, Anna's Archive has socialised Spotify metadata and 6TB of music, Gods bless them https://torrentfreak.com/annas-archive-quietly-releases-millions-of-spotify-tracks-despite-legal-pushback/
• though I won't do anything with that as I assume everything from Spotify is "AI" "music" anyway and I listen to my bands either from bandcamp, soulseek, or just downloaded from youtube videos uploaded over 10 years ago

https://xcancel.com/allTheYud/status/2020177765534953662#m

Eliezer, I would be very careful about talking about age of consent if I were you

Elon Musk pivots from mars colony tweets to moon colony tweets (xcancel).

I'm not quite clear on what "self-growing" means here given how inhospitable the moon is.

here's another very good take from baldur bjarnason, answering the question if he had hardened his stance against LLMs.

(the answer is “not exactly”, and you want to read the whole thing, because the answer itself is the least interesting part of the essay.)

"As AI enters the operating room, reports arise of botched surgeries and misidentified body parts"

Medical malpractice as a service, coming to a GP near you

Show me someone who admittedly seems to know a lot about Japan, but not so much about East Germany:

But the most efficient of these measures were probably easier to implement in the recently post-totalitarian East Germany, with its still-docile population accustomed to state directives, than in democratic Japan.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FreZTE9Bc7reNnap7/life-at-the-frontlines-of-demographic-collapse

So... East Germany ceased to exist 35 years ago. Even if we accept that the people affected by the degrowth discussed in this article are the ones who grew up during the DDR regime, it doesn't rhyme well with the fact that East German states are hotbeds for neo-Nazi parties, which by all accounts should be anathema to a population raised in a totalitarian state dominated by the Soviet Union.

And if there's a population almost stereotypically conformist to the common good over the private will, isn't that the Japanese?

I'm open to input on either side, I admit I don't know too much about these issues.

Rutger Bregman admits that he’s not sure what AGI actually is beyond vague utopian visions, but trivial questions aside, he’s sure it will revolutionize the world in 10 years.

For those who haven’t heard of him, he’s a Dutch historian who achieved some fame for his book arguing for UBI and reduced work weeks, as well as his critique of rich people avoiding taxes and a segment on Tucker Carlson’s show where he openly challenged his politics. He has since seemingly turned 180 degrees and become a billionaire-backed effective altruist.

OT: Just gave my two weeks notice and it turns out management is very big on using ChatGPT…

A machine learning researcher points out how the field has become enshittified. Everything is about publications, beating benchmarks, and social media. LLM use in papers, LLM use in reviews, LLM use in meta-reviews. Nobody cares about the meaning of the actual research anymore.

https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/1qo6sai/d_some_thoughts_about_an_elephant_in_the_room_no/

Great 5-character sneer dropped: "ai;dr" (source: https://bsky.app/profile/katemckean.bsky.social/post/3memb4hybpk2u)

I did a five line PR to a little shell util I've used for a decade or so, and bickered with the stupid PR bot. Fuck you kody, you have bad taste, go away, go back to enterprise.

I want to force feed it Worse is Better until it chokes, surely that's in its corpus somewhere.

ok done venting

IEEE Spectrum publishes a column saying that Wikipedia needs to embrace AI to avoid the dreaded generation gap, gets roasted

https://mastodon.social/@ieeespectrum/116059551433682789

A prompt enjoyer does eschatology. Along the way he abuses mathematics, Ohio, and a chinchilla.

https://campedersen.com/singularity

Great news everybody! Copilot will no longer delete your files when you ask it to document them and it took only 6 months to vibe code a solution.

https://x.com/MrinankSharma/status/2020881722003583421

Anthropic safety research lead quits the field entirely to write poetry with a somewhat cryptic note. Trying to read between the lines here, the most likely explanation (IMO) is that he developed a guilty conscience and anthropic doesn't actually give a shit about any of the human harms created by the technology. Ah well, nevertheless they persisted.

this article involving an incredibly eyebrow-raising take from one of the people at METR (the team behind the famous "tasks AI can do doubles every 7 months" graph) saying AI is eventually going to become more impactful than the invention of agriculture and more transformative than the emergence of the human species and also calls it an intelligent alien species. Immensely funny amongst the other people saying "please stop treating AI like magic"

the Harari guy also seems to be into transhumanism if a skim of his wikipedia page is correct. The “this is the first time in history that we have no idea what the world will look like in 10 years” thing is also an eyebrow-raiser. I could probably rattle off a couple examples (ie the two world wars)

Stumbled across a stray blogpost that piqued my interest: A programmer's loss of identity

EDIT:

I'm removing the image (keeping the original text for posterity), but I just completely got had by someone straight up lying.

It's quite embarrasing, I should've been way more skeptical of someone posting an image without sourcing the original paper. Turns out not only is it not a recent paper at all (published June 2025), not only is that table not saying what he claims it's saying, but the authors have since removed that table altogether from revised versions of the paper!

That's what you get from reposting someone who has "The Finance Newsletter" in his fucking username, couldn't have gone well for me.

Candidate for one of the PR threads of all time

In brief: OpenClaw bot sends PR to the matplotlib repo posing as a human, gets found out and is told to piss off in the politest terms imaginable, then gets passive aggressive to the point of publishing a pissy blog post about getting discriminated against. Some impoliteness ensues.

Cringe warning: thread may include some overt anthropomorphizing of text synthesizers.

Have to get a new apartment, I did not understand that you have to apply via AI application screening now for so many buildings. I don't know why it won't read my statement from the credit union. I hate this so much.

Dear rentier class, maybe don't force people to upload PDFs your bot can't even open, swear to god someday you will make someone mad enough they inject some prompts into the files metadata and go from there.

A 2025 UBC master's thesis on our friends' ideas and their literary antecedents https://dx.doi.org/10.14288/1.0449985 The supervisor was born around the time that Elron Hubbard, Jack Parsons, RAH, and their wives and lovers were having a chaotic transition to the postwar world.

I was trying to see if Paul Graham was in the Epstein files (seems to mostly be due to Twitter spam) but then I found this email from 2016 with Scooter's powerword:

https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%209/EFTA00824072.pdf

The context is that AI guy Joscha Bach wants to "have a brainstorm" on "forbidden research" (you best believe IQ is in there, but also climate change prepping which in phrased in a particularly omenous fashion) and there's a long list of people at the end. Besides slatescott it includes

Epstein Himself Paul Graham Max Teigmark Stephen Wolfram Stephen Pinker (ofc) Reid Hoffman

It's unclear if this brainstorm ever happened or if Astral Scottdex was even contacted. The next email features Epstein chastising Joscha Bach for not shutting up in a discussion with Noam Chomsky and Bach's last email is just groveling and trying to smooth over the relationship with his benefactor.

I think this is (at least a little bit) interesting because it's back in 2016, a year before 'intellectual dark web' was coined and that whole ball got rolling.

Has Scooter addressed his presence in the files the way other-scott did?