This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
AI bros still in shambles, news at 7.
A few weeks ago, Anthropic made a post about their new model, Mythos. As has been done by other members of the AI industry as far back as the release of GPT 2, the creators of it said it was too dangerous to release. The headline feature of Mythos, at least as described by Anthropic, was not code generation. Instead, they specifically hyped it as the most amazing thing ever for finding security vulnerabilities in code.
Several people, including here on this forum, shared the hype. As usual, I remained unconvinced. I've mentioned elsewhere that I don't think AIs are inherently incapable of finding security vulnerabilities in code, my main skepticism is that they will generate lots of false positives in the process that will make them a lot less useful than the companies selling them have advertised. And more importantly, I think they are currently incapable of designing and maintaining any significant projects that go beyond a basic bitch CRUD application or things of that sort. I'm also skeptical that there is all that much room for growth or improvement beyond their current capabilities, for a number of reasons that I won't get into right now.
But enough about my opinions, I'm just a retarded code monkey doing API integrations for boring tax software. Enter Daniel Stenberg, the creator and maintainer of curl. For those who don't know, if you have a program or library that makes HTTP requests, there is an extremely high likelihood that it is using curl under the hood. It's basically one of the foundational pieces of modern digital infrastructure, a "project some random person in Nebraska has been thanklessly maintaining since 2003", as XKCD might put it: https://xkcd.com/2347/
Stenberg/curl was one of the projects that was offered early access to Mythos. However despite being promised access initially, it took several weeks to get it. And even then he suddenly was no longer being offered direct access, but was offered to have someone else run Mythos against his codebase for him and to then share the results with him. This is a big red flag for me, because if Mythos does actually generate a lot of noise/false positives, it would make sense that Anthropic would want to hide that by running it themselves as many times as they could until it actually generated some real, actionable results.
In any case, the results that Stenberg got back were underwhelming. Mythos claimed to have identified 5 vulnerabilities. After investigating all of them, Stenberg and his team determined that only one of those was a vulnerability, and a low severity one at that. In Stenberg's own words: "curl is certainly getting better thanks to this report, but counted by the volume of issues found, all the previous AI tools we have used have resulted in larger bugfix amounts."
Most damning from Stenberg is this: "My personal conclusion can however not end up with anything else than that the big hype around this model so far was primarily marketing. I see no evidence that this setup finds issues to any particular higher or more advanced degree than the other tools have done before Mythos. Maybe this model is a little bit better, but even if it is, it is not better to a degree that seems to make a significant dent in code analyzing."
So I'm asking @self_made_human and others who seem more on-board with the AI hype train: does this report from a knowledgeable and experienced developer change your opinions on the future trajectory of AI at all?
Full article by Stenberg can be found here:
https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2026/05/11/mythos-finds-a-curl-vulnerability/
So funny story. I've finally been pressed into using AI at work. I work on a closed network, but they run an LLM locally, so I basically use it the same way I use google these days, since all search engines have turned into LLMs. It's good enough when I have a quick question about syntax I've forgotten, or an API I can't access the documentation for. I still refuse on principle to have it write any code for me though.
Google appears to have actually dropped their full Boolean search functionality, I assume because of this.
It's going to become a huge problem (or, at a minimum, extremely annoying), particularly in parts of my line of work.
Well, crap. I may now be finally forced to shift to a different search engine because of this, but they all seem to be rushing full tilt like the Gadarene swine into AI-ifcation.
My expression right now: ðŸ˜
I may have overstated the problem - I need to test it more, I was having problems with the exact search function and it seems Google has a "verbatim mode" that might assuage my concerns - but I definitely am not happy with the overall trajectory.
Verbatim and minus have just meant "more/less of this please" to google for years now -- well before LLM influence. I'm not sure why exactly, but corporate policy seems to be that (even setting aside sponsored results) the algo knows what you want better than you do. And the algo is getting worse.
Usually in the past if I copy/pasted something into Google in quote marks, it would quickly point me towards the right thing.
A week or two ago when I was working on a project that required this, I had a weird experience. If I'm recalling the exact sequence right, it told me it didn't have any matches - but then, when I scrolled down, the correct match was something like third from the top - the algo seemed to only be checking the preponderance of the words, and thus even when it could correctly source what I was looking for, it wouldn't flag as a 100% match.
So even though it had exactly what I was looking for, it didn't act as if it did.
Even when it does point you to the right thing, it is also showing you other things now -- in the deep(ish) past, if you put something in quotes it would only show results containing that string. Similarly (although I think this went away first), a search for -(thing you don't want to see) used to result in zero results containing that term -- now if you search for "used cars -chevy" it probably shows you fewer chevys than otherwise, but you are still going to see some. Particularly harmful when you are looking for something with one extremely common straightforward set of results (that you are not interested in) and an alternate niche interpretation. (the thing you want to find!)
AI influence seems to be making this a bit worse, I suspect since the "this is probably what he really wants" is more strongly weighted -- but it might be corpus frequency effects too I suppose.
What's frustrating is that I am pretty sure a nonzero portion of this is simply due to boost ad revenue.
Death by a thousand straws on the back of the goose that laid the golden egg.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The version of this that I hate the most right now, merely due to exposure, is in Windows, where the bottom-right notification pop-up gets selected or ignored if you click on the area just a few pixels out of it, as if I had accidentally clicked just outside the borders of it. No, I clicked on that specific pixel on purpose, because that pixel had the specific UI element that the pop-up box covered up that I wanted to select! If I click on a pixel directly adjacent to the pop-up box, I want it to be interpreted no differently from if I clicked on a pixel 500 away from the pop-up box. The only justification I can think of is for touchscreens, but those pop-up boxes aren't exactly tiny, and making UI behave differently based on input device (mouse vs touchscreen) is something that should be very very possible in Windows.
I'm showing my age perhaps, but I swear there was a time when double-clicking a word in windows selected just that word -- I understand that sometimes people would also want the trailing space, but now even if you drag-select, that gets helpfully added in many programs (eg. Word).
Clippy lives on as a sloppy ghost in the machine...
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link