https://karpathy.bearblog.dev/year-in-review-2025/ In this episode @karpathy blessed us all with another blogpost. While his wording is much more careful and even nuanced, there is still a lot of bullshit in it. It way less outrageous bullshit as in the Friedman poocast and around that time, but still. Here are some excerpts: With vibe coding, programming is not strictly reserved for highly trained professionals, it is something anyone can do. … But not only does vibe coding empower regular people to approach programming, it empowers trained professionals to write a lot more (vibe coded) software that would otherwise never be written. ...

Okay, lets look at the “better side” of things. The good thing about using LLMs is that you do not have to deal with Google Search and any fucking Social Media. Imagine a painfully typical scenario – you want to clarify or better understand something you already vaguely knew or at least aware of. You type a query into Google Search, and you get… a fucking CEO fucked-up list of Ad-infested links to various web pages – either the largest social media containment boards (StackOverflow, Reddit, Medium), or some CEO’d blogs, when you are either greeted with a wall of text (usually directly pasted from tutorials and docs), ads, pop-ups, and other distractions, or some narcissistic asshole’s low-effort over-verbose crappy verbiage about “how fucking smart he is”. ...

Just like a spontaneous, “natural and organic” continuation to the previous post (which implicitly confirm that it has properly captured at least some aspect of reality [as it is]). I have had to delete some nice movies in order to download and try that over-hyped “5M downloads” Nvidia’s meme-model Nemotron-3-Nano-30B" I have a small set of highly sophisticated prompts which I use to measure the apparent quality of a generated slop of the 4 major data-center-sized LLMs. ...

Everything is broken and idiots are everywhere. There is a clown which attention whoring, sorry, publicly arguing (and gaining a lot of unwarranted attention) that one shall vapecode in C. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46207505 Basically, making such a claim is idiotic on so many levels that it is hard to know where to start. Almost the whole of classic non-bullshit programming language theory research is about how to correctly address C’s shortcomings and semantic issues, and how to avoid the inherent in the design of the language (and the ABI) problems. ...

So, it seems like this is the time to somehow sum up the current AI hype (way through the roof) and the immediate and long term consequences of it. First of all, a proper education – studying the fundamental underlying principles instead of particulars – which used to be an unofficial mantra of MIT, pays off again. One just sets particular constraints to a coding LLM and use it as a whole-data-center-powerful constraint satisfaction engine that spews out a slop, which then can be used for rapid prototyping and minimal-viable products. The properly constrained slop can even be used as the basis of a project, which then undergo proper continuous improvement and refinement by a human expert (who knows the whys). ...

What a shitshow – https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46154491. – HN midwits are outdoing themselves in trying to signal their virtues and unique snowflakeness. Turns out I know enough math, programming, LLM theory (including the underlying math) and trading (in the Elder’s tradition) to understand that this is an utter crap – “Everyone is a genius in a bull market”. This is bullshit at so many levels, and yet, someone paid for this and the “researchers” got the highest possible “living standards”, of course. ...

I think I have seen this before. Once in Varanasi, wandering around book stalls (most titles already “tourist books”, – oversimplified and westernized “tantric” bullshit), I found a whole book by some local publisher which describes in a minute details one single Brahmanic ritual (an elaborate sacrifice) which last almost a whole day. Hundreds of ingredients are being burn in a precise sequence, or rather a simphony of chants. motions, gestures (mudras) and many other elaborate details. The priests (brahmans) definitely knew what they are doing and why exactly this way is the only proper way. ...

I am a well-read Humbert. I even remember reading back then that Norvig’s essay about how all the “stupid” OO “design patterns” can be just higher-order functions, (which are, in turn, are just instances Barbara Liskov’s Abstraction by Parameterization principle). Yes, I have read her books too, and the Jackson’s, and Richard Bird’s and what not. Like Jelal in the Orhan Pamuk’s “Black Book” I have carefully selected and cultivated my “garden of memory” (or was it “memery”?) which is now begin to wither and to fade away. Was it all in vain? Well, everything is in vain in the long-enough run, but not like this. ...

Once upon a time I find it difficult to read these lecture notes in https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/1718/L28/materials.html because of ESL and math “fear”. Nowadays I could, probably, explain the fundamentals more clearly in just a few pages. The “End Of Knowledge” (of seeking to Understand) can be achieved by just a few simple realizations, which means attaining one’s own “Right Understanding” through direct experience and one’s own “a-ha moments”. Arguably, the “Upanishads” of Programming began with this book: Abstraction and Specification in Program Development by Barbara Liskov and John V. Guttag. No, a few years earlier Michael A. Jackson wrote Principles of Program Design, which emphasized the fundamental principle that one’s program structure should reflect (actually to be in one-to-one correspondence with) the problem structure (which can be defined as an inherent layered structure of complexity of the domain ). But Liskov and Guttag took it to a whole new level. ...

The thing I hate the most is when some of these fucking YouTube content “creators”, which decide to monetize an AI coding clickbait with low-effort subpar videos, say “aaand boom!” when another chunk of a slop has been spewed out by an AI. This “boom!” is an insult to the last 60 years of the programming languages research (including the math-based theory) and to the “old sages” which crafted their languages and standard libraries in the best possible, “just right”, perfect, in the sense of “nothing more to take away” by surveying all the available literature, non-bullshit papers and spending months of anguish and self-doubt. ...