i looked into how much the "mr. beast feastables" chocolate bar is and they're literally 50¢ an ounce greater than the adjacent snickers bar. that's wild

made some pretty substantial edits to my previous post, specifically the parts on why i found gerard's post misleading, and being more clear about the subject of that post's (not david gerard) financial stake in ai

Hey David Gerard, long time follower second time caller. (Here's the first time.)

So I recently saw a post of yours—attached below—about a post from a lead developer of the "Julia language" trying out Claude Code (which I will call "Clode" for the rest of the post for no particular reason except it saves me keystrokes and is funny) and finding it "not very good".

David Gerard @[email protected] Aug 29, 2025, 12:11 PM Link to post

the extremely bottlenecked project lead for the Julia language tries out Claude Code. you'll be shocked to hear it's not very good.

https://discourse.julialang.org/t/the-use-of-claude-code-in-sciml-repos/131009/8

"Claude can only solve simple problems that a first year undergrad can do, it can’t do anything more, it’s pretty bad."

discourse.julialang.org Jul 24, 2025

The use of Claude Code in SciML repos

So it’s pretty public that for about a month now I’ve had 32 processes setup on one of the 64 core 128gb RAM servers to just ssh in, tmux to a window, and tell it to slam on some things non-stop. And it has been really successful!.. with the right definition of success. Let me explain. I think the first will answer the others. Basically, Claude is really not smart at all. There is no extensive algorithm implementation that has come from AI. I know some GSoCers and SciML Small Grants applicants...

I came into the post imagining from your description, perhaps, an overworked lead developer for the Julia programming language. Lead developers of open source projects are famously overworked and under-appreciated. In my mind, this lead developer, swamped with issues and feeling the crunch, opts to try using Clode to see if it lives up to the hype and if it could make his life easier. This developer finds it to be less than useless, and then writes a scathing critique of it on the Julia language forums. In my opinion, this is how the post is framed. However, it is not that.

The forum post is actually from Chris Rackauckas, a lead developer of SciML, which is an organization that's all about scientific machine learning.¹ While he seems to be part of the Github organization for the Julia language, he has only made 9 commits to the language itself, 6 of which were for the README. Since this Rakauckas is a lead developer of an organization that focuses on machine learning, it's unsurprising that he would be at least a bit AI curious.² In the forum post, Rackauckas states that, while he finds Clode useless for anything advanced, he still felt as though there was a niche that could save him time.

So from this one principle arose:

This claude thing is pretty dumb, but I had a ton of issues open that require a brainless solution.

Rackauckas continues on to say that Clode allows him to no longer have to spend 12 hours each week working on trivial Github issues. He solves this now by throwing "32 instances of claude at the problem for 8 hours."

I have had to spend like 4am-10am every morning Sunday through Saturday for the last 10 years on this stuff before the day gets started just to keep up on the "simple stuff" for the hundreds of repos I maintain. And this neverending chunk of "meh" stuff is exactly what it seems fit to do. So now I just let the 32 bots run wild on it and get straight to the real work, and it's a gamechanger.

I was planning on ending this post by saying that, despite everything, I didn't consider this post a win for AI boosters. I initially considered it to still have enough caveats to maybe not be an entirely positive spin for the groups of people who are personally or financially invested in the success of AI, but that was before I found Rackauckas' blog. As of time of writing, his most recent blog post is titled A Guide to Gen AI / LLM Vibecoding for Expert Programmers, written about a month after the forum post. In the blog post, he promotes the idea that you can treat AI as a cheap army of junior developers,³ he claims that expert programmers are the only people who should be vibe coding, that he pays for a $200/month Clode Max subscription, and that in one month he used enough tokens for $5,200 of compute. On top of all this, I was able to find out that he has a major role at two different AI companies. We are no longer talking about just some lead developer on an open source project. This guy is someone whose behavior can be explained through the lens of financial motivation. Boosting AI and keeping the bubble going means he will continue to get paid. Which perhaps matters since I still have no idea how he's paying for the 64-core 128gb RAM servers⁴ he is running all his instances of Clode off of. At this point, the only possible dunk on AI remaining is the potential own-goal of only saying that AI could save him 12 hours a week of trivial work, given how much financial stake he has in the success of AI.

Despite everything, there yet remains some hope. Rackauckas has submitted his own post to the Orange Site,⁵ and the reception seems to be... mixed. Negative comments include "this appears to me to be a surprisingly low-effort article" from polotics, "this may be the most 2025 blog post ever written" from ppqqrr, and "I've got a TONNE of low-hanging fruit that I can't give to an intern, but could easily sick a tool as capable as an intern on. This was not that." from jpollock While the comments section of an Orange Site post doesn't make for the most interesting reading, it still would've made for a more factual basis for a post than what you've written.

Thanks for reading, Evie Finch

(Pretend I have a really cool email signature here. Like the Paul Allen's business card of signatures. Trust me, it's really cool.)

i've been sick all day so i've mostly been sleeping but now i feel alright. huge win in evie town

Here's another piece where I'm publishing work I did years ago explaining entries on the Blaseball Iceberg, which I also made years ago. This one is way up near the top of the iceberg, so it's meant to be short and really simple to understand. This is good, because I'm not yet ready to explain eDensity.¹

Since the start of season 2 of Blaseball,² there has been a section of the website titled "The Book of Blaseball" (located under the book tab of the website, of course). Inside is what is supposedly the rules of the game, although they are heavily redacted. Of note is section 5b, which reads "If a team wins three championships, they, and Blaseball, shall ascend." This was noticed by the Society for Internet Blaseball Research, who decided to tweet about this topic at the Blaseball commissioner, at the time Parker Macmillan III, on September 26th, 2020.

Society for Internet Blaseball Research 🔮 @SIBROfficial Sep 26, 2020

@blaseball hey so what does ascension mean exactly

BLASEBALL COMMISSIONER @blaseball Sep 26, 2020

what

Society for Internet Blaseball Research 🔮 @SIBROfficial Sep 26, 2020 BLASEBALL COMMISSIONER @blaseball Sep 26, 2020, 2:58 PM

huh

After some debate on whether or not Parker had ever actually read the Forbidden Book, he replied with, “uh they go up or climb”, following up with “or like they rise through the air. ‘we had ascended 3,000 ft’”.

BLASEBALL NEWS NETWORK @BlaseballNews Sep 26, 2020

PARKER, HAVE YOU READ THE BOOK.

Society for Internet Blaseball Research 🔮 @SIBROfficial Sep 26, 2020

in fairness to parker, It is Forbidden

BLASEBALL COMMISSIONER @blaseball Sep 26, 2020, 3:02 PM

yea

📱New York Millennials📱 @nymillenials Sep 26, 2020

Yeah wait, you guys have read the book? You know that book is forbidden right?

BLASEBALL COMMISSIONER @blaseball Sep 26, 2020 Society for Internet Blaseball Research 🔮 @SIBROfficial Sep 26, 2020

okay but that was pre-discipline era surely you peeked once we opened it

Paula 🍳 📚Turnip @TurnipOnBlase Sep 26, 2020

parker has definitely read the book

BLASEBALL COMMISSIONER @blaseball Sep 24, 2020, 11:05 PM

a. The game of Blaseball should be played between two teams.

BLASEBALL COMMISSIONER @blaseball Sep 26, 2020

I mean I’ve looked at it since

Society for Internet Blaseball Research 🔮 @SIBROfficial Sep 26, 2020

parker what do you think happens when a team, and Blaseball, ascends

BLASEBALL COMMISSIONER @blaseball Sep 26, 2020

uh they go up or climb

BLASEBALL COMMISSIONER @blaseball Sep 26, 2020, 3:08 PM

or like they rise through the air. "we had ascended 3,000 ft"

Paula Turnip—a fan-run twitter account roleplaying as a blaseball player—noticed a potential source for this particular definition, the Google definition for “ascend”.

Paula 🍳 📚Turnip @TurnipOnBlase Sep 26, 2020

did you just google the definition of ascend?

BLASEBALL COMMISSIONER @blaseball Sep 26, 2020

no

Paula 🍳 📚Turnip @TurnipOnBlase Sep 26, 2020

so this is just a coincidence

Society for Internet Blaseball Research 🔮 @SIBROfficial Sep 26, 2020

oh I get it, the championship team becomes a credit union

Paula 🍳 📚Turnip @TurnipOnBlase Sep 26, 2020, 3:11 PM

thank you for figuring this one out sibr

This joke eventually even got referenced on the Blaseball website itself. After the Baltimore Crabs had won their first championship and were set to Ascend, the Shelled One³ taunts them by saying:

Part of my incentive for reuploading this is because the only source for any of this happening is the original Twitter thread. Twitter—currently X: The Everything App—is no longer indexed on Google or publicly accessible, and is no longer used by anyone who produced or was a fan of Blaseball. A number of former fans have since deleted their accounts in protest, disinterest, or due to general internet rot. Blaseball as a game is surprisingly well archived, in part due to the efforts of people at SIBR putting in the work to create persistent long-term archives of almost every part of Blaseball, including the game, the wiki, and many other parts of fan culture. However, a lot of Blaseball was the experience of being involved in the cultural event that was Blaseball, which has suffered a lot more rot. Part of my hope with this series was that I could help in archiving some of these piece of Blaseball history on a real website. If you would like to read the original twitter thread, you can read it at this link.

sure i do feel bad for failing blaugust but also surgery recovery has got hands

i am hoping now that increasing my transgenderism will make me better at netrunner. maybe one day good enough to make worlds

i can't really feel shit down there, probably due to the packing and also probably due to the pain. the worst part is actually the catheter. it's really quite awful. also the food is kinda mid but better than i expected. it's like worse than a dennys but still close to dennys tier.

i still gotta do my link roundup for friday so maybe i'll get to it closer to dinner

i got bottom surgery today sorry for the typos i'm very heavily medicated rn