Tuesday, July 22

Geek

Daily News Stuff 22 July 2025

Trillions And Trillions Edition

Top Story



Tech News

  • I'm tired of talking about AI.  (Paddy Carver)

    Me too, Paddy.  Me too.
    LLMs have no theory of the system, and cannot form one.
    100% correct.  For all the talk about AGI - artificial general intelligence - the AI companies are not working towards any such thing.

    LLMs are pattern matchers, not model builders.  A complex enough pattern matcher can fake building a model, but it becomes infinitely fragile, as this user found:
    Claude 4 just refactored my entire codebase in one call.

    25 tool invocations. 3,000+ new lines. 12 brand new files.

    It modularized everything. Broke up monoliths. Cleaned up spaghetti.

    None of it worked.
    But boy was it beautiful.
    Paddy goes through various put-downs by the AI true believers, and gets to this one:
    You would've argued against smartphones or the internet.
    No.  But I would've argued against Chia Pets or Labubus.  (What is even the plural of Labubu?)


  • Speaking of LLMs: LLMs do not reason  (Reddit)

    Pretty open-and-shut demonstration here.

    Asked to write a program in the language Brainfuck - a deliberately and notoriously tedious language in which to achieve even the simplest tasks - to produce the text LLMs do not reason, ChatGPT and Claude produced "Hello world" and Google Gemini produced gibberish.

    The way to make LLMs reason is to have them run each step in a loop, checking their work as they go.

    This has been tried.

    The error rate goes into the ionosphere.


  • Microsoft has released an emergency patch for the Sharepoint severs that were being exploited all over the world.  (Bleeping Computer)

    Nice work, guys.  I guess.


Not Even Remotely Tech News

The big vtuber agencies in the West - since Nijisanji burst into flames - have come down to Hololive and VShojo.  (Yes, I'd count Phase Connect myself, but even the largest Phase talents don't have the subscriber numbers of a Hololive or VShojo talent.)

And then there was one: VShojo imploded today in a way that puts every other vtuber drama in the shade.  (MSN / Economic Times)

Ironmouse - possibly the most popular English-language vtuber in the world now that Gura has reincarnated - abruptly left the company and engaged lawyers over two alleged issues:

First, a tale as old as time, they were slow to pay their talents.

Second, and far more damning, the company was still holding on to half a million dollars in donations she raised a year ago for the Immune Deficiency Foundation, a cause close to her heart, literally, because she is immune deficient herself.

The company has gone into radio silence, and the talents and fans are rioting.  Kson - leading lady of VShojo Japan and former drug-dealing shitposting Yakuza dragon of Hololive's Gen 4 - is demanding answers.

Update: From what Kson has said, barring a miracle, VShojo - both US and Japan - is dead.



Musical Interlude




Disclaimer: The third one burned down, fell over, sank into the swamp, exploded, and sent us a bill for damages.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:26 PM | Comments (9) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 572 words, total size 5 kb.

1 Without taking anything away from Paddy Carver's main point, with which I largely agree, the fact that he claims to enjoy losing Go causes me to update my estimation of his trustworthiness on other subjects downward.

Posted by: Jay at Wednesday, July 23 2025 05:03 AM (KgeZB)

2 On happier news...Nimi announced her real life engagement...

...Which does lead to thoughts about whether her PL's disagreement about policy with a certain VTuber agency might be regarding personnel policies, at least in part.

Posted by: cxt217 at Wednesday, July 23 2025 06:46 AM (ZLF73)

3 I did argue against smartphones. It would have been in character for me to argue against the internet, I was having okay luck with the libraries before that point. I have a number of biases when it comes to new technologies, there is usually a method to my madness, and sometimes I might even be correct.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Wednesday, July 23 2025 09:33 AM (rcPLc)

4 Regarding the VShojo disaster - it has apparently cost Mint a lot in both owed payments and events and features that were in the works.

Posted by: cxt217 at Wednesday, July 23 2025 11:14 AM (ZLF73)

5 Yeah, it seems to have affected a bunch of people who weren't working directly for VShojo.  It sounds like they weren't paying anybody.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, July 23 2025 01:06 PM (PiXy!)

6 And they were still planning on bringing on new talents and promising them the world after they had already stopped paying the current talents.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, July 23 2025 01:17 PM (PiXy!)

7 Geega's stream last night was a really good overview of the matter within the limits imposed by N.D.A.s. She was really professional, she probably ought to have been running the place. 
Henya found out as her stream began that a lot of the talent she had gotten to do stuff had not been paid, so yeah the blast radius of this thing is BIG. 

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Friday, July 25 2025 06:36 AM (3NtfN)

8 Aaand it's gone.  No surprise there.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, July 25 2025 06:07 PM (PiXy!)

9 The least surprising development.  Given how much in loans they had outstanding, I doubt even outstanding competence in leadership would have saved the company without a Hololive-level success.

Posted by: cxt217 at Saturday, July 26 2025 12:46 AM (ZLF73)

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Apple pies are delicious. But never mind apple pies. What colour is a green orange?




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