Unironically, a bit. These people are pure ego, and being booed is actually a thing they take great offense at

These folks just don’t get it.

Let’s put aside the discussion of whether their enthusiasm for the tech is merited or not, that is beside the point.

A commencement speaker is not there to talk about themselves or their favorite things. They are not there to teach the graduates anything or try to debate with the graduates.

A commencement speaker is there to honor and respect the graduates. To commend them on how far they have come and express optimism for what they will bring to society in the future. To make them feel appreciated for all they have done and are about to do. To feel inspired by what they have accomplished and the possibilities they bring to society. There has been and will be plenty of opportunity to educate, debate, and convince them, but this is not the venue for any of that.

Speaking about how “awesome” AI is and how they should be grateful for it is disrespecting them by failing to let them be the focus of their own graduation.

designed to respond to the question with some words while not actually answering the question.

Ok, I see why they are so enamored of LLM chat…

Oh sure they have to influence, but I would expect them to do so a bit more on the down low. If they have a whiff of self awareness, they know this will just do more harm than good to their interests.

Hell, that will happen at tens of millions. The magnitude of a billion is crazy.

Even if they are more driven to keep going, others turn to more philanthropic pursuits. Well before a billion the number becomes more like a high score rather than giving any quality of life improvements, so what’s the point of getting more? Most will want to mean more to the world than just some high score. So accumulated wealth starts getting directed away for all but sociopaths that relish the high score in and of itself.

A celebrity graduation speaker that actually has something thoughtful to say that is realistic, relevant, and inspirational to the graduates? That’s crazy, everyone knows celebrity graduation speakers are supposed to be self absorbed and prattling on about the stuff that excites them without connecting to the graduates, except maybe to be dismissive of the graduates and look down on them.

The Wozniak era of Apple was pretty much all upside. Whatever less than nice things to say at Apple almost certainly came about more than a decade after he had left them.

They will hit you with and underpayment penalty, and they’ll actually get a pretty decent amount more than they would have otherwise gotten from you…

Yes, because the democrats are the ones to blame for why it will never ever get to a senate conviction…

Neuralink I suppose is an example where his appetite for crazy risk might pay off or be terrible.

FSD implies no one else is trying for self driving, and that’s no shortage there for that ambition.

Humanoid robots at scale, they haven’t displayed a capability to suggest they have any better shot than others, and there’s plenty of less loud companies trying. None are particularly close, so Elon stands relatively alone in proclaiming success without the proof.

I don’t know that his crazy appetite for risk is on display with SpaceX. I would argue most of their real successes were relatively lower risk, and generally when the companies indulge musk at his craziest are like the other comment says, comparative failures.

The plague of work chats now:

Here’s what ChatGPT/copilot had to say:

People can ask for themselves, you answering that way adds no value. Just say you don’t know.

In group chats, keep your mouth shut and let people that actually know answer. Don’t drown out the actual expert answers.

And holy hell the ones that will die on the hill that they are right because chatgpt agreed with them even when they are totally wrong…

Sort of related, reminded me of a coworker that was big into metal expressing how profoundly disappointed he was after hearing of a group named “Savage Garden” and then hearing their music.

Also, a bunch of shit is about ready to burst out because they somehow decided to use wallpaper to hold a bunch of stuff to the wall instead of putting it in a closet. But it looked fine in the moment, so decided it was good enough.

Based on my experience with LLM and developers I personally know, my only assumption is they don’t have the skills in the first place…

In corporate world there are a lot of “developers” that actually act kind of like codegen. They just throw plausible sounding bullshit into an editor and hope for the best. Two examples:

Once asked to help a team speed something that ran slow, even by their low standards. Turned out they had made their own copy file routine instead of using the standard library one, and sucked the file into memory, expanding array 512 bytes at a time, and then wrote it out, 512 bytes at a time. I made the thing nearly instant by just making it a call to the standard library function to copy a file.

While helping with a separate problem, I noticed their solution for transferring some file with an indeterminate version number in the middle of the file name. It was a huge mess, but the most illustrative line was the line in their Java application declaring a string “ls /path/with/file|grep prefix.*.extension”…

Lots of human slop out there that AI can actually compete with.

I just don’t get it, even the purportedly best models screw things up so much that I can’t just leave them to the job without reviewing and fixing the mess they made… And I’m also drowning in pull requests that turn out to be broken as it proudly has “co authored by Claude” in it… Like it manages to pass their test case but it’s so messed up that it’s either explicitly causing problems, or had a bunch of unrelated changes randomly.

I feel like I’m being gaslit as I keep reading that there are developers that feel they successfully offloaded the task of coding.

Closest I got was a chore that had a perfect criteria “address all warnings from the build”. Then let it go and iterate. Then after 50 rounds each round saying “ok should be done now, everything is taken care of, just need to do a final check”. It burned though most of my monthly quota doing this task before succeeding. Then I look at the proposed change… And it just added directives to the top of every file telling the tools to disable all the warnings… This was the best opus 4.6 could do…

Now sure, I can have it tear through a short boiler plate and it notice a pattern I’m doing and tab through it. But I haven’t see this “vibe” approach working at all…

Certainly they knew, but did the same people who saw that knew it wasn’t supposed to be going there? Like you see millions going to a datacenter, but maybe you just assume that’s normal and have no idea that they aren’t being billed for it?