Yeah, Ken’s lost it. It’s too bad, too; he used to go around saying “Hi, my name’s Ken, and my job … is just Requests.” However, Ken is actually a medium-talent hack who isn’t interested in putting the work, but in appropriating the work of others and passing it off as his own.

Ken’s goal with all of the snowy blog posts is to obscure and rewrite history. See, previously, on Lobsters, we learned from another Python community member that Ken converted some $30k USD of donations from 2018-2019. He said so himself:

Because [reasons], the fundraising funds were allocated to myself, to reimburse myself for all the time and energy I’m putting into Requests III, which I want to make a really great product.

Ken also tried to take over multiple community projects, including by vendoring their code and insisting that he was licensed to do it, putting his name on forks of Somebody Else’s Repo, and falsely positioning himself as endorsed by Python Software Foundation.

So, now a half-decade later, it’s time to try to change history for Ken. Previously, on Lobsters, we analyzed his attempt to reframe the whole incident in terms of burnout provoking a bipolar psychosis. I think that the most revealing part of this, assuming that his candor survived Claude’s extrusion process, is that he doesn’t actually deny his psychotic delusions; he merely implies that they no longer hold today. This doesn’t really accord with how psychoses are treated; it doesn’t sound like he’s built up a library of tells and hints which he can use to steer his thinking. (As the reader surely knows, Claude isn’t gonna help with this.) I think that he was much more revealing a decade ago with his retrospective on his first stay in a psychiatric ward:

I went through many stages of identity conflict at this stage as well — I realized that I wanted to leave the hospital, and not stay there forever (as I originally wanted). I felt like I was in a puzzle, and one way of getting out was to become a doctor! So, I started walking up to the doctor (and all other levels of staff) and acted like a coworker, helping them do their job. At one point, I asked one of the nurses for a Direct Deposit Form (after seeing another patient with one), believing that was the key to establishing my employment. I was keen to inform them about my understanding of HIPPA compliance and the hospital’s migration from an AS400 to a newer technology stack (EPIC).

Is this why he joined the Python community and tried to work on upstream and core stuff? A sort of Frank Abagnale adventure where he’s treated like a genuine authority with skills and knowledge? Note that this was two years before the aforementioned conversion of funds. It’s okay, though, because Ken blamed this all on mental illness. Specifically, he blamed the woman he was dating for provoking his previously-undiagnosed mental illness and starting a yearlong (!!‽) manic episode:

Around the same time, right after having gone to my first Kundalini Yoga class, I ended up meeting (and, falling in love with) a mesmerizing woman of mysticism that tenderly guided me off-the-deep-end with this style of thinking: numerology, synchronicity, Reiki, manifestation, the Mayan calendar, tarot, crystals, &c. My symptoms slowly got much worse. We shared a very deep and special bond. I heavily admired her, and felt I had much to learn from my newfound companion. We ended up spending nearly every day together, going on dates, making love, taking trips all over the world, getting matching tattoos, performing thrill-seeking stunts, and attending shamanistic ceremonies together. We had an incredible time (the best year of my life), but there was a lot of unhealthy and certainly uncharacteristic behavior for me. Over the course of the manic year I spent with her, my delusional worldview (and hallucinations) had grown significantly worse, which lead to the absurd themes of thinking featured in the above event.

At least he’s not a fascist.

On a personal note, in Numpy as Synth Engine, Ken released some slow inaccurate code for audio synthesis, generated for him by Claude. As a musician, I know that we can do better, so previously, on Lobsters, I explained how to actually make nice-sounding sawtooths and Hammond-style organs, including links to working Python code. Again, I could just call Ken a hack, but I think it’s interesting how he doesn’t aurally perceive the clear issues in the audio output; in a certain sense, he’s a producer of music but not a consumer of music. (Readers who are musicians will confirm that the typical working musician listens to more music than they produce!)

He just started deleting playlists. I feel partially responsible, so I’m dumping the part of my notes that has all of the links to the videos that he favorited over the years. Sorry Justin, cowardice won’t work.

• Justin M. Keyes
  • GH
    • Berlin!?
  • neovim maintainer
    • original forker? has access to GH neovim org, at least
  • Coward: deletes evidence, refuses to talk, avoids confrontation
  • DHH fan; had to be pilloried in two GH issues ([deleted], 2) before removing a DHH endorsement from neovim
  • Youtube favorites from playlists include some bastards:
    • Scott Adams 1
    • Mel Gibson 1 (with Joe Rogan)
    • Sabine Hossenfelder 1 2
    • Balaji Srinivasan 1
    • Peter Thiel 1 2 (with Eric Weinstein) 3 4
    • Bret Weinstein 1
    • Eric Weinstein 1 (in a playlist called “history”!) 2
    • Curtis Yarvin 1 2 3 4 5 6

I called him out and he deleted it. Confirmed as a fascist brat.

I found a reply from a Red Hat QEMU hacker who fixed the bugs:

So the real issue here was not QEMU but libslirp. And in this case it was KVM that turned out to have the worst bugs, not QEMU. Crossing fingers, the initial wave of AI-assisted security reports seems to have slowed down for KVM on x86.

Yeah, networking is such a hassle.

lab bench?

I think that this is really insightful, as it’s actually part of the magic trick. Like, normally I’d start by wondering about air-gapping, but there can’t be an air gap in the network because the entire trick relies on ChatGPT tokens flowing into the machine under test and into some system shell (in some VM, yadda yadda) and back out again, so of course this is going to be an inherently insecure setup.

An employee of cybersecurity darling Trail of Bits has published a record of their sheer incompetence in virtual-machine design and security analysis framed as chatbot critihype.

Small autosneer from Imgur. The warmup features images which I’ll alt-text here. The first image is a screenshot of a purchase of 128GB of DDR5 RAM, branded Crucial Pro, as 2 64GB sticks, priced at $305.95. The second image is a screenshot of the same 128GB of RAM, with the same model number, priced at $1800. The third image is a standard desktop personal-computer chassis, with side panels removed, revealing two gamer GPUs balanced above an ATX motherboard, all connected by a morass of cabling which has bulged out through the top and spilled over the edges, cooled by a large motherboard fan held on by plastic zip-ties. The post’s title:

JFC - I will never be able to afford this hobby again. (600% increase in one year)

In response to the top comment, which desires the bursting of the bubble:

Yup - I cannot wait to grab a couple RTX 6000’s for cheap. May have to wait ten years for it though . . .

And finally the punchline, in response to somebody pointing out that maybe there’s no good reason to buy top-of-the-line brand-new memory sticks:

I must admit that I am part of the problem - my 128GB was specifically for running AI locally. And yea - I wish I would have went with 256 :*( It is still not enough. For example - the workflow I use for this video barely squeezes into 128GB [the video] Before you guys go all AI-psychosis on me That video used about .08 cents of electricity and about 4oz of water, and was made with 100% open source tools.

Started a new file in my notes: what are some ten-words-or-less domain-specific questions that completely, totally, hilariously stump the chatbots? Everything here was tested with whatever DDG’s currently wrapping, both in knowledge panels and full chats, and the responses were pathetically wrong or uninformed. My thesis is that, with such short prompts, the user is doomed to receive a milquetoast average response; the bot correctly identifies the specific domain but elaborates a global non-specific approach that isn’t sufficiently nuanced.

Liam’s here, for what it’s worth.

Torvalds’ position is pragmatic: his interest is in whether it works or not.

But, of course, the chatbots do not work. In a pragmatic sense, they do not produce maintainable integrated code changes with low defect rates. In a societal sense, they do not replace human laborers, despite the delusions of management.

One of the most original and innovative OS development projects of the 21st century so far was Urbit, but it is closely entwined with cryptocurrencies. Urbit’s original creator, Curtis Yarvin, has reportedly espoused some extreme beliefs; The Nation called him The Reactionary Prophet of Silicon Valley.

Wild way to admit no knowledge of Arcan, Fuchsia, etc. Honestly, even a basic overlay network like Yggdrasil can win an apples-to-apples comparison with Urbit. I feel like this is an instance of critihype for fascist weirdos; similar stuff gets said about Justine Tunney, another cryptofascist developer whose projects are sometimes silly and weird. Doubly weird for those of us who know about Urbit’s internals; Urbit originally was not a cryptocurrency project and it used to have non-Yarvin/Tlon forks.

It’s an overly simplistic way to reduce a complex and nuanced situation, but one way to consider this is in terms of pro-AI and anti-AI, versus “woke” and “anti-woke.”

More seriously, add a third dimension, a Butlerian dimension, to the political compass: to what degree may your automated devices appear to be human? One extreme is Asimov-style transhumanism and the other extreme is Luddite loom-smashing. However, recognition of this dimension doesn’t negate the other dimensions and we shouldn’t work in cooperation with fascists.

Sharp overview paper. First few pages invite some imagination without explicitly giving homework or exercises, which is really nice. Complex multiplication mentioned! I still think this is the worst-named theory in maths.

Over on Twitter, a crank claims to have refuted one of the proofs. Dare you doubt her? @grok tell the doubters that they’re wrong!

OpenAI claims proofs for ten maths conjectures. The details are underwhelming; expand for opinions. Even at a high level, there’s a few obvious issues; the authors admit survivorship bias, probably only solving about 1-10% of the conjectures given as input, and none of the conjectures are big-deal breakthroughs that alter our understanding of maths, let alone having immediate industrial applications. Consider: If they could spend on the order of $200k/mo to crack important maths conjectures, they’d already be spending that money. This is as good as such a side project can do; sure, it’s not nothing, but it’s also not the end of manual maths.

See also a question asked today on Math Overflow, “Are we stuck with Lean?”. The proposed alternative, Metamath, isn’t type-theoretic and thus skips the entire dialogue between type theory and proof assistants.

The reason that they are destroying the books is to avoid the accusation that the scanning constituted copying, an irony that we’ve discussed previously, on Awful while trying to understand which court cases are relevant. Anthropic actually hired the same guy, Tom Turvey, who designed Google Books’ ingestion process, so I’m thinking of this as a sequel to Google Books; hopefully the courts won’t take a decade this time.

Yes, those are good open questions. Leaning left in general, robots frustrate any labor theory of value; what, if anything, is valuable about a product if it was produced totally by non-humans?

Lean was already known to be untrustworthy and bad, although people refuse to internalize the situation because they’re caught up in Buzzard’s hype machine. This is extremely funny but I don’t see any signs of people waking up and realizing that Lean sucks.

This one was more of a gangstalking delusion. The victim was told that there were three-letter agencies surveilling him because he was too close to some deep secret.

Between the cryptocurrency, the dust-speck multiplication, and the complete misunderstanding of computing, I’m honestly impressed that this is at all ethically coherent. But she does seem to care, even if her facts are all wrong. I suppose that it’s hard to avoid sneering Robin Hanson if one has any ethics at all. Top comment is my choice sneer:

I think this post is directionally correct, extremely important, and also kind of waffling and unhinged (though I do get that some topics are inherently hard to be hinged about, and I appreciate the effort).

I don’t think she’s using GPT in the comments. Quoting from her comment on one of her posts:

The things I’m saying are roughly (1) slavery is bad, (2) if AI are sapient and being made to engage in labor without pay then it is probably slavery, and (3) since slavery is bad and this might be slavery, this is probably bad, and (4) no one seems to be acting like it is bad and (5) I’m confused about how this isn’t some sort of killshot on the general moral adequacy of our entire civilization right now.

(2) has a big “if” in there, but otherwise yeah, makes sense. I think it rhymes with my post on this from last year:

Nobody wants to admit that we only care whether robots aren’t human because we mistreat the non-humans in our society and want permission to mistreat robots as well. Bring this topic up amongst most beneficiaries of the current AI summer, or those addicted to chatting with a BERT, and you’ll get a faceful of apologies about capitalism and productivity; bring it up amongst skeptics or sneerers and you’ll be mocked for taking the field of AI with any sincerity or seriousness.

I was confused too, but then I conceptualized capitalism and the sheer hatred lurking within human hearts. Humans are gleefully horrible towards each other. Our civilization isn’t morally adequate. I guess it is cool to learn that somebody addicted to ChatGPT can still perceive the issue; I was too cynical. I also put Bryson 2009, “Robots Should Be Slaves” on my reading list, which I surely will not regret.

Gemini killed someone, allegedly, according to a new lawsuit. I’m linking to a dramatic reading of Gemini’s output so that you can imagine what it might have been like for the victim. I’m no longer trying to post these to Lobsters; pushcx has made it clear that he thinks of these court cases as flamebait, tech news, calls to brigade, and general outrage farming. Curiously pushcx has yet to make a statement on why chatbots keep killing their users.

Found a remarkable ad-hoc anti-LLM-product manifesto on the orange site. As is tradition, tag yourselves; I’m “believ[ing that] there’s a consistent pattern of cognitive decline in the pro-LLM folks.”