I have to rush to finish my series before AI will completely enshittificate the written knowledge and the classic discipline of programming, which is based on understanding and mathematical rigour. Yes, I seemingly overuse this word beyond the limits of a good style, but I like it, how it is awkward and ugly and yet perfectly captures what a generative AI is doing to a writtern knowledge itself. So, let’s try to build it all top-down, for a change. Bottom up is probably the better way, but it takes so long time before one begins to see the whole picture, which is, of course, the one and the same mountain (or an elephant) viewed from different angles and perspectives. ...

OpenAI has recently benedicted us with a 20 billion parameter “open source” model, which is a significant step up from the previous 7 billion parameter model. This model is designed to be more efficient and effective in understanding and generating human-like text, or rather to appear to do so. It is a total crap, by the way, at least compared to the online free-tier GROK (which is also very basic and limited). It is, obviously, “competing” with the DeepSeek’s “open source” offerings, and have a very similar “feel”. ...

I have noticed a resent dramatic change in the behavior of major GPTs online providers – most notably, Gemini is now providing just outline of code, full of stubs and “mocks” of real APIs, and not the full code. This is a significant change from the previous behavior where they would provide a semi-complete (but ridden with errors) code solution. Perhaps, mimicking the behavior of ChatGPT, which has been doing this for a while now – they “optimize” for more what appears to be a “dialogue” (more like a normie-level chat), to create a better illusion of “actually conversing with an artificial intelligence”. ...

We are living through a paradigmatic shift, the one described in the “Scientific Revolution” by Thomas Kuhn. As I mentioned many times, texts and even crappy code became very, very cheap, just like a processed junk-food or a low-effort street-food slop. This is the “shift” and the end of so-called “knowledge work” as we know it. At least this is the end of the pretentious “knowledge work”, when one just pretends to be an expert is social settings, using very straightforward verbal and non-verbal cues to signal their “knowledge” and “expertise”, just as a priest would do in the not so distant past. ...

Today’s bullshit was Surge CEO Says ‘100x Engineers’ Are Here. Yesterday it was “Gemini at IMO Gold level”. Again, mere appearances are not the facts of reality, but this realization requires a bit more education and old-fashioned intelligence, similar to that of Hesse or Sartre. What does it mean nowadays to be an engineer, and to be a 100x? It seems that the meaning is what they call “productivity”, which is time elapsed for putting together some spaghetti webshit .without any understanding whatsoever, from hundreds of lowest quality amateur node_modules in a few minutes. This is what 100x means for them, and this is, of course, bullshit. ...

Oh, look gold medal-level performance on the world’s most prestigious math competition—the International Math Olympiad (IMO) Lets be very careful with this very clever deceptive and suggestive wording. The model “solved” (came up with acceptable solutions) some of the problems and failed on some others. The claim is that this is a gold medal-level performance, as a response to Musk’s claim of a PhD-Level in all fields. The facts, however, are following: ...

Lets try to solve this too, at least in principle, because why tf not. This is a much easier but conceptually messier and over-burdened with implementation details problem. The partially-understood solutions are all over the place, ranging from Molecular and System biology to abstract Signal and System theories. Telecom, Packet Switches and Computer Hardware guys have their own working solutions. We will look at general universal principles and see what Evolutionary Biology came up with. This will be the best we can hope for (because Evolution already did all the trial-and-errors for us). ...

I understand a lot of complex things, maybe because I spent my whole life trying to understand and explain things around me, since 4 year old, when I used no name every single car on the road in a small Ukrainian Steel and mining town where I was born. Understanding cannot be “outsourced” or even safely “delegated”. One will always end up with a sort of “tragedy of commons”, when sterilization and modern technologies produced packaged foods which slowly but surely kill you. This is what happens when you “delegate” your own understanding. ...

The most difficult thing with the markets is not to take sides, even the rational one, and to never push against the current sentiment, however idiotic it may be. These three popular movies about “the insides of the financial markets” have conditioned lots of people in a wrong way, by presenting a naive, grossly oversimplified, but “seemingly fair” view, and distorted one’s perception of reality. Yes, these are all ponzis and yes, the market participants “have to do something” to earn their living, and institutions to roll on, until they become Lehman Brothers. ...