This is just a statement of faith in your ability to judge these things accurately. Nowhere in here do I see any evidence that you’ve even considered that the reason you’ve changed your attitude towards the tech is that it’s just gotten so good at fooling people that it’s finally got you.

You don’t gain much from trying to convince me, but you could gain a lot from being more sceptical. People invented science to address the fact that our intuitive understanding doesn’t always reflect reality.

Science and the collection of objective data stops us from doing this:

There are a bunch of things that our brains just don’t understand intuitively, so we need to check our intuition against measurement. There’s no shame in that, but when it’s pointed out, then you have a chance to check yourself.

But you don’t seem to understand that. When you say:

Anyway, you’ll see all this eventually, when some data gets published.

you are demonstrating that you are the perfect mark for this stuff, because you are not reflecting on your own thought process to see where it might be failing you.

You’ve been given evidence that people cannot trust their own perceptions of what these agents do, and you replied by telling a bunch of stories about why you think you personally can trust your perceptions. My 12-year-old did the same thing when I tried to explain this to them.

Engineers being spread thinner to manage a wider number of tasks whilst reviewing shitty LLM noise that they didn’t write is inevitably going to make horrible code that’s impossible to maintain and will cost massive amounts of time and resources in the long run.

And the idea that it allows more things to be done is just a bunch of “it makes you faster” assessments in a trenchcoat.

Agentic or not, they still have zero fidelity. Fidelity can only come from an internal model of reality that the network is comparing its inputs to, and I’m pretty sure you don’t get that without AGI.

The data we have till this point shows that they don’t help, they only create an illusion of helping. And until you can show that that has fundamentally changed, then you have to assume that the improvements you’re seeing are just improved illusions.

Data or you’re just getting fooled better.

whilst it is adding some productivity

Is it though? Like what’s the evidence of that? If it just feels like it must be true, I have some bad news about that:

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/07/study-finds-ai-tools-made-open-source-software-developers-19-percent-slower/

The most interesting part of this isn’t that it slowed them down when they expected to be faster, it’s that even after it slowed them down, they couldn’t tell and were fooled that they had been faster.

Look at the graph, especially the last two lines:

https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/aicodingchart-1024x507.png

My theory about this is that LLMs were tasked with giving useful output, but they couldn’t do that, because they have no fidelity, so instead they found a shortcut, which was to trick people into thinking they were being useful. They found the same loophole that conmen have used for millenia, and automated it. It’s the AI alignment problem, only for some reason people aren’t talking about it, maybe because they don’t want to believe that we’re this easily manipulated.

There’s no reason to believe LLMs have gotten any better at actually doing useful work in the meantime in the absence of any objective measure of it. I think the best explanation for their “improvement” is that they have simply gotten better at fooling us.

Somewhere along the way our neoliberal overlords figured out that they needed to teach people to hate annoyance more than evil, and it’s been crazy effective.

That hole already serves the function of pushing out squishy things though.

Yup, Behind the Bastards did an excellent two parter on forensic science in general:

https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236323/episode/part-one-the-bastards-of-forensic-170035753/ https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236323/episode/part-two-the-bastards-of-forensic-170702749/

They make a good point that real science is involved, but by the time it makes it into the police’s hands it’s mutated into essentially a mechanism to manufacture convictions. Grifters get hold of the science, and cops are like the perfect marks, because they’re just primed for anything that will confirm their existing biases, plus they’ve got massive state budgets to play with, and they’ll happily give the grifters legitimacy.

It would be nice if you could post something where we can examine the source. (EDIT: the link has been changed since I wrote this)

I found this article: https://www.techspot.com/news/108720-hidden-fingerprints-inside-3d-printed-ghost-guns.html

There they say that it’s not yet ready to be used in evidence, but the problem with that is that most forensic “science” is generally misapplied and nowhere near as conclusive as the police want us to think. They can usually massage the results to tell a jury what they want to be true. That would be my concern with this kind of technique.

Also, if you’re going to the trouble of making a 3d printed ghost gun that will be used in a crime, you could always hide the toolmarks with a sander. You could also treat the surface with resin which would make the markings practically unrecoverable. I’ve started doing both of these for my prints and I love the results just for the aesthetics, so it’s not such a stretch to imagine a gunsmith doing the same.

That’s the one! Thanks, that was un-googleable for me.

I guess the road-tyres-on-dirt-bikes thing was maybe a trend when I saw the sub.

I remember finding a motorcycle community on reddit that called themselves “squids” or “squiddies” or something like that.

Their whole thing was putting road tyres on dirtbikes and riding urban environments like they were offroad obstacles. You know, ramping things, except on concrete.

They loved to talk about how dumb & short-lived they were. I couldn’t ever find that group again, so maybe I misremembered the “squid” name, but I wanted to find them again, not to ever try it - fuck that - but because the bikes looked super cool. I just have a thing for gender-bent vehicles.

I think the special thing about this one is that it’s open source and you can build it from common components, which makes sense. You literally just need a stepper or servo motor with the correct algorithm and a few bits & pieces to apply that motor to the dial.

It should be easy enough to build this for no more than a hundred bucks, maybe less if you can get cheap parts or you’re building more than one. It’s actually less complex than a basic 3d printer.

The expensive part comes from the low volume production and the professional customers. Plus the software is probably proprietary. It takes expertise and to make a business out of that means high individual prices.

So it’s really a perfect candidate for open sourcing.

So your argument rests not on truth but on populism.

Even if you’re right in your wholly unsubstantiated claim, the way to get more people on your side is by persuading them, not by capitulating to their ill-informed beliefs. Giving in to their bullshit is how you join their side.

I would love to know what your media diet is.

That’s an extremely narrow point that isn’t worth bothering with, because nobody is confused about what you mean when you call them “nazis”.

Also it’s not one guy doing a zeig heil, it’s become a trend amongst them now. They have invited the comparison openly, and anybody getting all pissy about “you just call everything you don’t like nazi” is just a crybully who’s deliberately wasting your time. At this point anybody turned off of your cause by your use of the word “nazi” isn’t your ally in the first place.

Like sure they’re not exactly the same as the NSDAP, but the category still applies, and it’s not worth anybody’s time splitting hairs over the exact nature of the type of fascism they have, because “nazi” does the job and again, nobody is confused by it, because the original nazis are all resting in piss.

Do you have any argument as to why this matters, in any way, at all?

They are literally zeig-heiling.

You’re noticing that Gell-Mann Amnesia.

I looked it up yesterday because I kept seeing it in an Angela Collier video title and I realised that despite watching the video and re-checking the info several times, I could never remember what Gell-Mann amnesia was, and that was too ironic to be allowed to continue. So this time instead of looking it up and going “ooohh, that’s right, okay, nevermind”, I went, "okay, now repeat it to yourself until you’re sure you won’t have to look it up again".

Ah okay, so what I’m reading there is that it may be piratable, but a lot of software vendors don’t support it, so there’s a decent risk that software would just randomly stop working, which is the same problem you get with windows 10 long term. Oh well.

That site’s ai protection won’t let me through. But if the issue is needing a legitimate license them I’m sure that can be overcome in other ways.

Well I mainly want it to keep my VR headset running which nobody can get working in linux.

One of these days I’ll replace it and make sure the new one can run on linux, and then I won’t have much keeping me on windows anymore.

I discovered recently that they make the regular ISOs hard to access too. It didn’t want to let me download it from a linux machine.

But there’s always a way to access this stuff.

What are the legal issues?

What is Windows 10 LTSC? LTSC is the abbreviation of Long Term Servicing Channel. It is a stripped-down enterprise operating system based on a specific version of Windows 10. Windows 10 LTSC don’t have pre-installed apps such as Microsoft Edge, Cortana assistant, News, etc. Using the LTSC service model, you can delay receiving feature updates and only receive monthly device quality updates.

Holy SHIT they made a version with the worst stuff removed AND they’re going to maintain it longer? That is the version everybody should be using.

I’m slowly switching to linux but there are things I’m going to need Windows for for the foreseeable future, and I think I’ve found how I can make that happen. Thank you.