Remember Devin, the AI coding bot that turned out to be a complete scam?
Well, looks like Goldman Sachs decided to let it loose on its code base. In YOLO mode too, it seems.
this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2025
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It would be really funny if Devin caused a financial crash this way
LW:
Please consider minimizing direct use of AI chatbots (and other text-based AI) in the near-term future, if you can. The reason is very simple: your sanity may be at stake.
Perfect. No notes.
They're LWers, they already baked their psyche long ago
A hackernews muses about vibe coding a chatbot to provide therapy for people in crisis. Soon, an actual health care professional shows up to butcher the offender and defile the corpse. This causes much tut-tutting and consternation among the locals.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44535197
Edit: a shower thought: have any of yall noticed the way that prompt enjoyers describe using Cursor, tab completions, and such are a repackaging of the psychology of loot boxes? In particular, they share the variable-interval reward schedule that serves as the hook in your typical recreational gambling machines.
the psychology of loot boxes?
yep! https://awful.systems/post/4568900
the book is "Hooked" and it's Don't Build The Torment Nexus I'm Now Providing You A Detailed Blueprint Of
Ye gods! Also, great write-up!
Do you reckon that Altman recognized the gacha potential from the get-go? That Big LLM has always been FanDuel for dorks, but on purpose?
I’ve been making casual observation how a number of the adhd people I know to have addiction tendencies tend to get real into prompts, but hadn’t observed the lootbox thing
that’s going into the ponder bucket.
you should be read up on the gospel of @fasterandworse never shutting up about "Hooked"
Musk objects to the "stochastic parrot" labelling of LLMs. Mostly just the stochastic part.
Wake up babe, new alignment technique just dropped: Reinforcement Learning Elon Feedback
I have become aware that there is a very right wing Catholic podcaster who has a Catholicism AI chatbot app. It's called Truthly.
Your Trusted Catholic AI Conversation Companion Deepen your understanding, explore ideas, and engage in meaningful dialogue—anytime, anywhere.
If someone could call up Pope Leo and get him to excommunicate the guys who invented this, that would be great.
Nah, we just need to make sure they properly baptise whatever servers it's running on.
really, really thoroughly baptise. not just drops but fistfuls of water. the more water the more holy. the servers will love being really holy!
Just throw the whole unit into the font, just to be safe. Or better yet, a river!
Can’t find the angle to spin this out into a grown-up buttcoin post, but if I did, the title would be “Horse_ebutts”.
Anyway: recently I’ve been burdened with the knowledge that there’s a bunch of horse racing related crypto companies. They’re all obviously terrible.
- Zed Run: a play to earn (P2E) virtual horse NFT racing game. Defunct as of February, probably due to rug pulling, they are pivoting to “Zed Champions”, which is… pretty much the exact same thing, with likely the same fate.
- EquineChain: a blockchain platform for tracking horse care history, because apparently people don’t trust horse caregivers and need GPUs to remember how much ivermectin and ketamine their show-ponies have mainlined.
- BTX Racing: a blockchain platform for buying stake in horses. Not sure if you get to choose which cut of the horse you own. Also, not sure if when you liquidate your equine tranche you get cash or a bucket of glue.
Also, insert obligatory stablecoin reference here.
Wait wtf I once built a blockchain called equestreum *as a joke* https://github.com/hat-festival/equestreum I need to step away from the lathe
think of all the rug you could have pulled...
Zed Run: a play to earn (P2E) virtual horse NFT racing game. Defunct as of February, probably due to rug pulling, they are pivoting to “Zed Champions”, which is… pretty much the exact same thing, with likely the same fate.
They're also (indirectly) competing with Umamusume: Pretty Derby, which offers zero P2E elements, but does offer horse waifus and actual entertainment value. Needless to say, we both know who's winning this particular fight for people's cash.
EquineChain: a blockchain platform for tracking horse care history, because apparently people don’t trust horse caregivers and need GPUs to remember how much ivermectin and ketamine their show-ponies have mainlined.
It'd arguably be helpful if the caregivers are helping themselves to the stash, but I doubt there's anything stopping then from BSing the blockchain, too.
Yeah that "they can just input bs" has always been the whole issue with those whole logging bit on the blockchain stuff. Esp considering the costs and risk of implementing a thing like this and the low costs of normal existing logging I dont see how this could ever become mainstream viable. (And that is ignoring the ease of use).
They’re also (indirectly) competing with Umamusume: Pretty Derby, which offers zero P2E elements, but does offer horse waifus and actual entertainment value. Needless to say, we both know who’s winning this particular fight for people’s cash.
It's almost as if people don't want to spend money on bland low-poly 3D models of horses and would instead prefer waifu art with surprisingly intricate character design that I definitely do not know anything about*
*I actually do not, but for the bit, pretend that I do and am being defensive
I can honestly say that I have never played Umamusume Pretty Derby ^because^ ^on^ ^my^ ^PC^ ^the^ ^sound^ ^keeps^ ^cutting^ ^out^ ^and^ ^the^ ^cutscenes^ ^don't^ ^play^ ^which^ ^greatly^ ^disappointed^ ^me.^
https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-os-dev-study/
When developers are allowed to use AI tools, they take 19% longer to complete issues—a significant slowdown that goes against developer beliefs and expert forecasts. This gap between perception and reality is striking: developers expected AI to speed them up by 24%, and even after experiencing the slowdown, they still believed AI had sped them up by 20%.
womp, hold on let me finish, womp
had a quick scan over the blogposts earlier, keen to read the paper
would be nice to see some more studies with more numbers under study, but with the cohort they picked the self-reported vs actual numbers are already quite spicy
and n=16 handily beats the usual promptfondler n=1
Also the attempt to actually measure productivity instead of just saying "they felt like it helped" - of course it did!
HN commenters are slobbering all over the new Grok. Virtually every commenter bringing up Grok's recent full-tilt Nazism gets flagged into oblivion.
this particular abyss just fucking hurts to gaze into
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/JspxcjkvBmye4cW4v/asking-for-a-friend-ai-research-protocols
Multiple people are quietly wondering if their AI systems might be conscious. What's the standard advice to give them?
Touch grass. Touch all the grass.
What’s the standard advice to give them?
It's unfortunately illegal for me to answer this question earnestly
Username called "The Dao of Bayes". Bayes's theorem is when you pull the probabilities out of your posterior.
知者不言，言者不知。 He who knows (the Dao) does not (care to) speak (about it); he who is (ever ready to) speak about it does not know it.
LessWrong's descent into right-wing tradwife territory continues
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tdQuoXsbW6LnxYqHx/annapurna-s-shortform?commentId=ueRbTvnB2DJ5fJcdH
Annapurna (member for 5 years, 946 karma):
Why is there so little discussion about the loss of status of stay at home parenting?
First comment is from user Shankar Sivarajan, member for 6 years, 1227 karma
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tdQuoXsbW6LnxYqHx/annapurna-s-shortform?commentId=opzGgbqGxHrr8gvxT
Well, you could make it so the only plausible path to career advancement for women beyond, say, receptionist, is the provision of sexual favors. I expect that will lower the status of women in high-level positions sufficiently to elevate stay-at-home motherhood.
[...]
EDIT: From the downvotes, I gather people want magical thinking instead of actual implementable solutions.
Granted, this got a strong disagree from the others and a tut-tut from Habryka, but it's still there as of now and not yeeted into the sun. And rats wonder why people don't want to date them.
Dorkus malorkus alert:
When my grandmother quit being a nurse to become a stay at home mother, it was seen like a great thing. She gained status over her sisters, who stayed single and in their careers.
Fitting into your societal pigeonhole is not the same as gaining status, ya doofus.
Another comment that has been getting downvotes and tut-tuts begins,
The only thing that will raise fertility rates is to make it more affordable to have a child.
(Robot Santa voice) Wanting all women to be barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen? Evil! Not providing footnotes in your reply to a blog post? EXACTLY AS EVIL
LOL the mod gets snippy here too
This comment too is not fit for this site. What is going on with y'all? Why is fertility such a weirdly mindkilling issue?
"Why are there so many Nazis in my Nazi bar????"
Any time somebody edits a post to talk about the downvotes, it's cursed gold.
@gerikson @BlueMonday1984 "actual implementable solution" what the fuck is wrong with these people
it’s lesswrong, the list is lengthy and tedious
😳
El Reg: At last, a use case for AI agents with sky-high ROI: Stealing crypto
Two tastes that go great together!
It's possible we may be catching sight of the first shy movements towards a pivot to robotics:
https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/09/hugging-face-opens-up-orders-for-its-reachy-mini-desktop-robots/
Both developer kits, because it's always a maybe the clients will figure something out type of business model these days.
But how are they going to awkwardly cram robots in everywhere, to follow up the overwhelming success of AI? Self-crashing cars are a gimme, but maybe a "sealed for your protection" Amazon locker with a robot arm that handles the package for you?
I was in LA this time a couple years ago, and some robot delivery startup had already left their little motorized shopping carts littering the sidewalks around Hollywood. I never saw them moving, they just sat there almost like they were abandoned.
But how are they going to awkwardly cram robots in everywhere, to follow up the overwhelming success of AI?
Good question - AFAICT, they're gonna struggle to find places to cram their bubble-bots into. Plus, nothing's gonna stop Joe Public from wrecking them in the streets - and given we've already seen Waymos getting torched and Lime scooters getting wrecked these AI-linked 'bots are likely next on the chopping block.
Today's bullshit that annoys me: Wikiwand. From what I can tell their grift is that it's just a shitty UI wrapper for Wikipedia that sells your data to who the fuck knows to make money for some Israeli shop. Also they SEO the fuck out of their stupid site so that every time I search for something that has a Finnish wikipedia page, the search results also contain a pointless shittier duplicate result from wikiwand dot com. Has anyone done a deeper investigation into what their deal is or at least some kind of rant I could indulge in for catharsis?
I've seen conspiracy theories that a lot of the ad buys for stuff like this are a new avenue of money laundering, focusing on stuff like pirate sports streaming sites, sketchy torrent sites, etc. But a full scraped, SEOd Wikipedia clone also fits.
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