The Rundown - October 25, 2025
“[I]t’s hard to design a convincing fake study. Fake things look fake. Reality is overdetermined.”
Chris Kelley - “Vibes won’t cut it”:
From Carl Brown (The Internet of Bugs):
“ The building block task of programming, going back 40+ years, is writing a block of code that takes some input, does some processing as described by some requirements, and returns some output. Code generation AIs do this pretty well, even for some extremely hard programming riddles that coders (and AI companies) like to brag about solving. However, most of the advancements in programming languages, technique, and craft in the last 40 years have been designing safer and better ways of tying these blocks together to create larger and larger programs with more complexity and functionality. Humans use these advancements to arrange these blocks in logical abstraction layers, so we can fit an understanding of the layers’ interconnections in our heads as we work, diving into blocks temporarily as needed. This is where the AIs fall down. The amount of context required to hold the interconnections between these blocks quickly grows beyond the AIs’ effective short term memory (in practice, much smaller than its advertised context window size), and the AIs lack the ability to reason about the abstractions as we do. This leads to real-word code that’s illogically layered, hard to understand, debug, and maintain.”
My next tech/hobby project: MacintoshPi - Mac OS 7/8/9 for Raspberry Pi
“So the bubble is bad. Really bad. But even so, there will be things we can salvage from it: open source models, skilled programmers, cheap GPUs bought out of bankruptcy for pennies on the dollar. It would be better if we created that stuff without burning the world’s economy to the ground and emitting a heptillion tons of CO2, but ignoring the productive residue of the AI crash won’t bring the economy back, or suck the carbon out of the atmosphere.”