tek’s weekend warriors: 3.3.26

“..it only took a weekend..” Suddenly, since December, a hashtag turns to a meme — meme-coding… vibe code an app, or a library over your weekend. the hack is back. ez enough for your ceo.

it seems folks are, again, trying to make something with less effort, offering proof of the improvement by publishing the cost to code. the gavel has fallen .. when the cost is zero, what comes next ?

do you take extra big gulps of air; why not, it’s free .

“… Tenzai found that applications built by five major AI coding agents — including Cursor, Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, Replit, and Devin — all contained significant vulnerabilities. The agents performed well on well-known vulnerability classes like SQL injection and cross-site scripting, but poorly on authorization logic and business logic..”

“– Silicon Valley is reporting for duty. No longer do we regard the military complex as destructive. It isn’t even complex. Just do it, quickly. Toss out the mistakes, or, perhaps leave it to the next round to cleanup. The Valley Brain is the new brain. The new MAN wears green. A willing warrior class of millionaires.

ooh, teach me how. let me play. when do I get my tattoo.

The initial cohort of this program will include the CTOs of Meta and Palantir, Andrew Bosworth and Shyam Sankar, respectively, as originally reported by The Wall Street Journal. It will also include OpenAI executives Kevin Weil, chief product officer, and Bob McGrew, chief research officer. This evening I will become an officer in US Army Reserve as part of Detachment 201, the Army’s Executive Innovation Corps,”

When the Nerd Reich marches into battle, it will be in a bunker behind a paywall. Say hello to the new fortunate son.

—–

Dr. Dobbs era, Hackers were coders without a license .. saw a need so built something to reveal a gap; to start the Pearl . Hackers also began with internal commitment . Dobb’s was a small mimeo publication in the days of smaller than small publications. A time of mail art. A time of flux among the commons. Intermixing of Snow’s culture.

Snow’s cultures

The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, the lecture argued that the breakdown of communication between the “two cultures” of modern society – the sciences and the humanities – was a major hindrance to solving the world’s problems. 

Have we seen this before? Everyone a programmer. Problem with your business, with your life… do something fast, before your competitor does.

just in, Knuth paper re Claude successful solution

seeing magenta

ask around the net for dye-transfer information. seek insights, perhaps advice, what you are provided by 2025 search-AI models is counter to insight — confusion is increasing. Dilution over diffusion flourishes. Clicks are the clique formers.

One simple example. Seeking specifics about Kodak’s magenta dye used in Dye Transfer printing.

NB: search used this tree [:: Photrio -> koraks ] getting to an answer about magenta dyes used in Kodak dye-transfer, imbibition printing. Photrio is large site with over a thousand posts related to dye transfer; koraks site is listed as sigline in posts by a moderator taking part in dye-transfer related threads over the past several years. I doubt that K~ has ever made a dye transfer, certainly hasn’t synthesized the dyes. Another example of dilution of knowledge.

The inference engine of AI cannot distinguish quality, meaning accuracy, applicability, from quantity, meaning the number of referral links made over time. [the specific information provided in this conversation is based on general knowledge and does not directly cite specific pages or sections from these references.] Different models often respond that the information on [dye-transfer] is collected from practitioners internet archives.

Kodak CIS-154 Magenta Dye in Imbibition Printing
example response: I want to be transparent that my previous responses were speculative and not directly based on the Kodak publication you mentioned. Providing more details will help me offer a precise and accurate interpretation of the source material.
[I used 5 different engines... none could provide useable, correct answers.. each required, in essence, that I give them direct references, which they then could summarize. ]

Provided that I correct enough, staying with the multiple AI engines, we get somewhere. However, I had to provide a page, a CAS number, then prompt the answer machine with guidance on selection criteria for synthesis. In other words, I had to know much more than any of the AI engines were able to source. I was provided patent references, incorrect, so taking additional time for me to read, and return to prompt for correction. The initial failure though, the one leading through the darkroom help forums sounded, to the untrained, inexperienced, like a correct answer. An answer which would be repeated by the novice.

Since the process is being used by mere handfuls who do gather and exchange information and support these aren’t significant practical matters. The failures keep the stalled busy, out of the way. The lesson is that small errors can be amplified sufficiently to distort information into a contorted arcade reflection of what was.