> Basically every piece of software being built is now being built, in some part, with AI, so that is patently false.
Yep, just like a few years ago, all fintech being built was being built on top of crypto and NFTs. This is clearly the future and absolutely NOT a bubble.
I mean... even if you're an LLM skeptic, they are already default tools in a software engineer's toolbox, so at a minimum software engineering will have been transformed, even if AI enthusiasm cools.
The fact to that there is so much value already being derived is a pretty big difference from crypto which never generated any value at all.
There are so many things to criticize about the current state of gen AI, but if someone tells me with a straight face that there is zero value in LLMs and it's all like crypto I will just dismiss their opinion wholesale because if they are this wrong and lazy about something that is easily refutable, their other opinions aren't worth much either.
Karpathy is one of the biggest tech grifters of our time, so finding out that he's jumped on this grift train as well comes as no surprise.
Actually, hang on... yep, to absolutely nobody's surprise, Simon Willison has also hyped this up on his blog just yesterday. The entire grift gang is here, folks.
I used to follow Fireship, I even have him connected on LinkedIn. Look where he is now. I also used to follow simonw, but I think he is going down the same spiral.
A lot of people joined in late 2024, resulting in a peak of around 2.7M daily users, but most of those users ended up leaving soon after, likely because the site was just one big echo chamber of far left American politics around that time.
It doesn't seem to be as bad anymore, a quick glance at the public feed suggests that the percentage of political posts has gone down, but considering how many times the word "toxic" appears in this linked blogpost, I'm guessing they're still banning anyone who expresses the "wrong" opinions, so the userbase is unlikely to grow much further in the future. It seems to have plateaued at around 1.2M daily likers.
> likely because the site was just one big echo chamber of far left American politics around that time.
The US does not have a "far left" in any significant numbers, and never has. At least not in a self-aware sense.
Maybe you meant to say liberal, to which I'd agree.
That's not to say there isn't a "left" or "far left" on Bluesky, but there's no way it's a majority.
I agree echo chambers are a problem there, which is why I only posted there briefly before leaving. One feature that seemed to exacerbate the formation of echo chambers was users sharing and blindly trusting mass block lists to silence things they didn't want to hear (leftists and liberals alike).
Meanwhile my facebook feed is nothing but clickbait engagement with local nazis. It's such a hard right echo chamber now, it makes me sick. Clear evidence of multiple international bot accounts flooding groups with propaganda every 30 minutes. It's a flood.
There's really a problem that needs to be solved here. I really think anonymous or phony posting needs to stop. It's not helpful here. All it does is amplify false talking points with a "Fake it til you make it", "the loudest voice wins" methodology.
But unfortunately, engagement is financially incentivized now. So the big corps reap $$$$$ while the public burns itself down.
> my facebook feed is nothing but clickbait engagement with local nazis
Can you explain what exactly you mean by "local nazis"? Are you getting ads for Nazi barber shops? Sieg Heil Heating & Cooling? Hitler Juice Bar and Bubble Tea?
If this was such a huge problem I'm sure we would have heard of it before.
No. Pre-Musk twitter was a liberal cesspool (and now it's a conservative one). Most of those liberals jumped ship to Bluesky.
Again, that's not to say lefists don't exist, but they are a tiny fraction, and always were a tiny fraction no matter what platform.
Don't rule out bots that exist in numbers to make the actual left appear like a deranged spectacle as a form of controlled opposition. Both parties of capital interests have a role in and benefit from these.
The issue isn’t whether “the far left” exists in large numbers in the abstract; it’s how platform design, moderation norms, and social incentives shape which views are amplified -- and which are penalized. On Bluesky, the boundaries of acceptable discourse are unusually narrow and strongly enforced, which predictably produces ideological clustering.
As for bots or “controlled opposition”: you don’t need conspiracy theories to explain why a heavily moderated platform with explicit cultural norms converges on a particular worldview. I’m disinclined to apply anything beyond Occam’s razor when accounting for “deranged spectacle” behavior; ordinary selection effects are sufficient.
> On Bluesky, the boundaries of acceptable discourse are unusually narrow and strongly enforced, which predictably produces ideological clustering.
This isn't in conflict with my original comment.
> As for bots or “controlled opposition”: you don’t need conspiracy theories to explain why a heavily moderated platform with explicit cultural norms converges on a particular worldview. I’m disinclined to apply anything beyond Occam’s razor when accounting for “deranged spectacle” behavior; ordinary selection effects are sufficient.
These aren't conspiracy theories, and they pre-date and extend beyond Bluesky. They are easily observable patterns in most modern news media and social media. For one, silos are much easier to advertise to. Follow the money, like everything else.
I’ve encountered the same rhetoric, tactics, and moral framing in offline activist spaces for years, long before Bluesky or current platform dynamics. Online platforms don’t invent this; they surface and concentrate it. The underlying attitudes -- maximalism, moral absolutism, tolerance for disruption, and readiness to analogize opponents to historical evil -- are not artifacts of bots or manipulation. They’re characteristic features of a political subculture.
If anything, the mistake is treating the "reasonable", aspirational version as more real than the people who consistently show up, organize, and speak — and then assuming the most visible expressions must be "controlled opposition."
> I’ve encountered the same rhetoric, tactics, and moral framing in offline activist spaces for years, long before Bluesky or current platform dynamics. Online platforms don’t invent this; they surface and concentrate it.
Once again, we seem to be in agreement on this.
> The underlying attitudes -- maximalism, moral absolutism, tolerance for disruption, and readiness to analogize opponents to historical evil -- are not artifacts of bots or manipulation. They’re characteristic features of a political subculture.
These things are not mutually exclusive. It's both, and people (and their bots) across the entire political spectrum are guilty of involvement.
When everyone they disagree with on anything substantive is an asshole, while accepting the same or worse behavior and tone if it aligns with their views, it's absolutely not "basic spam filtering".
From the left's perspective, the liberals deserve muting and are spam, and same from the other way around. It's siloed echo chambers everywhere.
Part of it is unrealistic expectations of users thinking they're right about their world views. But part of it is platforms making features that amplify the former.
>The US does not have a "far left" in any significant numbers, and never has. At least not in a self-aware sense.
Are they just disproportionately powerful then? Because the US does definitely have consistent far left trends and movements that overtake the mainstream. The OK hand gesture hysteria is maybe an evident example, but land acknowledgments? DEI statements? Fatphobia? Defund the police? All of these originate from far left positions.
No. Once again you're referring to liberals even if you don't know it.
You might be confused because several forces want you to be exactly that:
1) The right lumps/conflates everything from centrist liberal to far left as "the far radical left" with no in-between, which blurs many lines.
2) Center liberals who want a social media veneer they can feel good about will literally pose as leftists/marxists, but if you look at their other beliefs and behaviors (were they trying to sink Bernie, or not?) then it becomes immediately obvious they're ultimately loyal to the Dem party, and that means center liberals serving capital interests.
But I can't blame you or anyone else for falling for the above unless you've seen enough to know, like following both of Bernie's presidential runs and how he was systematically smeared by both liberals and their corporate media.
Identity politics / DEI / etc are a liberal obsession. Class politics is the focus of the actual far left.
You can take the stance that nobody knows what any of these terms mean I guess, but then the picture gets kind of absurd, left-wing materialism loses all meaning, the church loses all relationship with the right, hell, from that standpoint Donald Trump campaigned as a leftist I guess? He did have a recurrent discourse around jobs and the working class.
> You can take the stance that nobody knows what any of these terms mean I guess
It's not that they don't know. It's that they bend definitions to their advantage depending on what the context dictates. 538 is exactly the kind of outlet one would expect to do such a thing.
It seems the left-right spectrum serves better to confuse than to differentiate, and that the most productive discussions unfold when we talk issues instead.
> The sheer amount and variety of smut books (just books) is vastly larger than anyone wants to realize. We passed the mark decades ago where there is smut available for any and every taste.
It's important to note that the vast majority of such books are written for a female audience, though.
The sheer power of AI astroturfing right now is kind of blowing my mind, and not in a good way.
In the span of roughly 3 days, I went from never once having heard the terms "clawdbot" or "gas town" to seeing them brought up repeatedly throughout every single tech discussion space I frequent (with no real use cases ever brought up, of course, just vague claims it being the next big thing, I still have no idea what either of these things actually do).
This "clawdbot"'s github repository apparently went from 5k stars to 70k stars in the span of a week, according to the graph proudly displayed on the readme. And I'm supposed to believe these are 70k real people, not 70k bot accounts.
I think this is the final nail on the coffin for human-to-human communication on the internet. I'm just going to assume it's all bots now.
I just tried to purchase pro from within the app just to see what the price is, and the Google Play purchase popup tells me it's not available. Interesting.
I accidentally gave my wife a prompt the other day. Everything was hellishly busy and I said something along the lines of “I need to ask you a question. Please answer the question. Please don’t answer any other issues just yet.” She looked at me and asked “Did you just PROMPT me?” We laughed. (The question was the sort that might spawn talking about something else and was completely harmless. In the abstract, my intent was fine but my method was hilariously tainted.)
> this new technology has changed my job and I refuse to use it because I'm afraid
You're confusing fear with disgust. Nobody is afraid of your slop, we're disgusted by it. You're making a huge sloppy mess everywhere you go and then leaving it for the rest of us to clean up, all while acting like we should be thankful for your contribution.
> I just don't really want to hear about your personal opinion on it any more.
And I don't want to hear about how the world of software engineering has been revolutionized because you always hated programming with a passion, but can now instead pay $200 to have Claude bring your groundbreaking B2B SaaS Todo app idea to life, yet that's basically all I hear about in any tech discussion space.
You should ask your AI assistant to explain to you why people would go out of their way to take a stand against this.
Being a 503c, they're required to disclose their expenditures, among other things. CN gives them a perfect score, and the expense ratio section puts their program spend at 77.4% of the budget
https://www.charitynavigator.org/ein/200049703#overall-ratin...
Worth mentioning that Wikipedia gets an order of magnitude more traffic than the Internet archive.
In their latest available annual report, the Wikimedia Foundation reported that in 2024 they brought in $185M in revenue/donations, of which they spent $178M. Of that $178M, $106M was spent on salaries and benefits, and $26M on awards and grants. So, that accounts for 75% of their spending. "Internet hosting" is listed at only $3M though there are other line items such as "Professional service expenses" at $13M that probably relate to running Wikipedia too.
Scroll down to the "Statement of activities (audited)" section:
If you look at the audited financial report of last year.
$3,474,785 was spent on hosting. Which makes sense its basically a static site.
This is out of expenses of $190,938,007
Thats about 1.8%. This is not new. Its been the case for years. Wikipedia has never had very high hosting costs. Its always been going into their grants or whatever else.
Despite the nonsense about AI overloading their servers even if it doubled the load it would barely affect the budget.
My countdown to donating to Wikipedia when a random MAGA nerd makes some baseless claims is getting close. When Elon had his little rant a couple of years ago it got triggered as well.
Yep, just like a few years ago, all fintech being built was being built on top of crypto and NFTs. This is clearly the future and absolutely NOT a bubble.
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