I’ve been trying to track LLM code generation adoption in the critical infrastructure world - as far as I can tell, it’s nill. Zero. Nada. Nobody is relying on these models to write secure code for anything where failure is catastrophic. Planes falling out of the sky. Nuclear reactors going into meltdown. Electrical grids loosing synchronicity. Lots of these BS claims from the marketing and investment crowd, but - it’s just a useful tool for non-critical areas. That’s all it is.

And LLMs? I’m just going to run open source models on local hardware, it all seems like the 1980s with compilers. Why not just submit by prompts to a high quality model running on so-so-hardware overnight, like the devops cycle with compiling a big codebase? And oh look, nobody pays for compilers anymore, who compiles their code in the cloud?

The funniest part of all of this is that the very people hyping all this - they’re the ones that AI could most easily replace. They have zero specific detailed knowledge - they just orchestrate. Agents are great at orchestration, right? But then, who needs the shareholders, anyway.

Why? You don’t narrow your scope at the beginning!

Just as attacking such problems with rocket launches involves hundreds of different approaches, that’s the situation for cancer. I’d also point out that this is why it was really not trivial to identify microbial and viral causes of disease in the 19th century - especially since we now know that certain kinds of infectious disease can themselves result in cancer initiation. It’s definitely a hard set of problems.

I would also add, there was a concerted effort by industry to promote ‘inherent genetic malfunction’ as the cause of cancer in the late 1990s and early 2000s, but the reality is that exposure to industrial carcinogens tracks closely with a wide variety of cancers (skin, digestive tract, etc.). This was a very deceptive and dishonest approach to avoiding regulation.

“In rejecting the materialistic values of bourgeois society and indulging in the myth that they could exist entirely outside the dominant culture in bohemian enclaves, avant-garde artists generally refused to recognize or accept their role as producers of a cultural commodity. As a result, especially in the United States, many artists abdicated responsibility both to their own economic interests and to the uses to which their artwork was put after it entered the marketplace.”

So, regardless of whether you ask for donations, do copyright your creative work, even if it’s just blog posts. It’s the responsible thing to do.

Eg, a prompt like “I want to design a radioactive element detection system that can specifically identify reactor fission products and neutron-capture actinides for environmental monitoring purposes” won’t hit any initial barriers, even though such a device is needed for monitoring a uranium enrichment / plutonium separation system. The LLM will give you a complete graduate-level education in radioactive nuclide physics and chemistry except for specific recipes, spectral wavelengths, etc., which you have to go look up yourself in publicly available research databases. It’s all rather nonsensical IMO.

However, any LLM will give you a step-by-step recipe and walkthrough for frying a turkey in a hot oil turkey frier, which you’d think could easily go wrong and result in severe burns, a fire, and lawsuits against the LLM provider, so go figure.

https://www.artforum.com/features/abstract-expressionism-wea...

> “ ‘He is a prodigy,’ he said at last. ‘He is an emissary of pity and science and progress, and devil knows what else. We want,’ he began to declaim suddenly, ‘for the guidance of the cause entrusted to us by Europe, so to speak, higher intelligence, wide sympathies, a singleness of purpose.’ . . .You are of the new gang - the gang of virtue. ”

The real underlying motivation is that you can more easily get away with shady business practices if you cloak them in the language of great moral works selflessly undertaken for the benefit of mankind. Historical evidence tends to show the opposite outcome, but still, new generations unfamiliar with history will repeat this stuff with starry-eyed enthusiasm.

> “There had been a lot of such rot let loose in print and talk just about that time, and the excellent woman, living right in the rush of all that humbug, got carried off her feet. She talked about ‘weaning those ignorant millions from their horrid ways,’ till, upon my word, she made me quite uncomfortable. I ventured to hint that the Company was run for profit.”

Now the horrid millions are users of LLMs who submit morally dubious prompts and who must be gently steered back into the path of correct thought by suitable backroom manipulation, rather than direct rejection of the request.

This sounds good. But technically it seems highly implausible, just as a thriving human civilization on Mars sounds highly implausible. Nice plot for a sci-fi novel though.

Since this is an area where failure can lead not to Instagram accounts getting hacked, but planes falling out of the sky and nuclear reactors spewing radioactive elements, it’s worth a close look. Some of the most visible companies in this sector include: QNX, Wind River, SYSGO, Lynx, Green Hills, Siemens Embedded, etc. None of them seem to have much if any adoption of LLMs for source code generation based on public statements.

Research in this area agrees with this view:

“In this paper, I have conducted a comparative analysis of the C++ code generated by popular LLMs including: OpenAI ChatGPT, Google Gemini, DeepSeek, Meta AI, and Microsoft Copilot for compliance with MISRA C++. The study revealed that none of the evaluated LLMs generated MISRA-compliant code despite clear prompts, with DeepSeek showing the fewest violations and Meta AI the most.”

https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.23535

“Nature was, and is, a commercial enterprise, owned by the privately held company Macmillian publishers. . .”

Get off the Internet, go read a book. “Plastic Fantastic: How the Biggest Fraud in Science Shook the Scientific World” - Eugene Samuel Reich.

The bullshit artists are at it again.

But that’s not the real goal, is it? The goal is to inflate the stock value, take the cream off the top, and dump the whole business on the pension funds, maybe creating a too-big-to-fail scenario where the government steps in an bails out the industry as with the airlines during Covid.

This is why all the testimonials and narratives are so suspect - nobody knows what fraction of online posts were created simply to sell the narrative that LLMs are this incredible disruptive tool that will change the world, solely in order to create FOMO in the investor class.

In this particular case, I’d like to see links to samples of LLM created codebases for “PCI compliance, double-entry ledgers, escrows, reconciliation, payment lifecycles, bank transfer idempotency”. It should be easy to put an open-source LLM-generated version up on github, right? And if not, why not?

Just as sociopathic, but they got to keep their billions, serve no prison time, all while doing far more social harm than a pair of low-life cocaine importers could have dreamed of.

P.S. Would you like to have our teenager manage your system too? Terms are reasonable! Of course you accept all liability, so better get a good minder - and no, don’t use an AI as the minder, that just introduces a new failure mode.

On the other hand, it will teach you how to set up your own hardware at scale and run your own open source model on it and fine tune it with the relevant data needed to run your own biotech-pharmaceutical corporation (which will need licensing and legal, I doubt I trust it with too much legal advice though, as I would have no idea when it was hallucinating). That’s impressive, but every stage needs to be double checked so you don’t run some foolish command it suggests that bricks everything.

The marketing hype is the most annoying thing about the commercial LLM industry though.

“We collected a total of 9.3 g freshwater along with 0.343 g of sea salt from the ABF-STIC with a 9 cm2 surface area over the course of 9 hours. This is equivalent to generating 10.33 liters m−2 of freshwater and 0.38 kg m−2 of sea salt per day. The salinity of the desalinated water is found well below the WHO and EPA standards for safe drinking water.”

However the enclosure system required looks rather complicated and might be sensitive to external temperature (maybe a solar PV-powered cooling loop would help) and I imagine the cost-per-square-meter of the material is rather high, so this looks more like something for emergency response situations or maybe a desal system for a mega-yacht. If it could be scaled the idea is interesting, maybe as lithium separation from concentrated geological brines?

Preservatives targeting mold/bacteria growth: potassium sorbate, sodium benzoate, calcium propionate, sodium nitrite, sodium nitrate, sulfites.

Antioxidants targeting oil and fat rancidness: BHA, BHT, TBHQ, propyl gallate, tocopherols, ascorbic acid.

Water/activity texture systems (practically restricting water availability for chemical and biological processes): glycerin, sorbitol, corn syrup, maltodextrin, modified starch, gums, polyols.

Acidity systems (also flavor, but restricts some microbial growth): citric acid, phosphoric acid, lactic acid, malic acid, fumaric acid, sodium citrate.

Stabilizer/emulsifier systems(physical appearance, prevents oil separation): mono- and diglycerides, polysorbates, lecithin, DATEM, SSL, carrageenan, xanthan gum, cellulose gum, modified food starch.

As far as modern scientific medical knowledge, this impacts your gut microbiome negatively, puts added burdens on your liver and kidneys, and that’s just the obvious immediate effects. This is just the shelf life component - the synthetic flavor/texture modification chemistry designed to enhance addictive potential is equally complicated.

Suggested warning label: “‘Food’ corporations will happily shorten your life and ruin your health if it means more profits.”

The above take fails in the real world because neuronal cells don’t exist in a vacuum; they are products of cellular development from a zygotic union of haploid contributors of sequential genetic information optimized for survival in an oxygen-rich biosphere powered largely by our local star that supports mammalian life (and microbial, plant, avian, etc.). Real AI would thus be AL - artificial life - as much as artificial intelligence. I don’t think you can have the one without the other, which upsets the simulationists who think an agent in the Matrix would be intelligent.

What either interpretation implies is that any real ‘artificial’ intelligence would be no more artificial than you or I, but it would have to dynamically update its weights at the same speed a human nervous system could (think how quickly we learn not to poke a cactus). For it to be at all trustworthy, then like a human, it would have to undergo a socialization process, one of the results of which is the development of a sense of embarrassment when it breaks acceptable social norms.

Hmm, this reminds me of the recent statement of the Pope about AI, of which I immediately thought, “Wait a second, aren’t there a fair number of people like this? The narcissistic sociopath profile, I think it’s called, a bit unfair to assume any real AI would turn out this way, isn’t it?”

Pope: “ Nor do they have a moral conscience, since they do not judge good and evil, grasp the ultimate meaning of situations, or bear responsibility for consequences. They may imitate or even simulate, but they do not understand what they produce, for they lack the affective, relational, and spiritual perspective through which human beings grow in wisdom.”

We don’t even know if this is like body plans (four legs for mammals, why not six?) i.e. is this about physical limitations of the folding space (did evolution explore most of the space and hold onto the most useful folds, or are the common set of folds one of those accident-of-history results?). Then there’s the issue that folding takes place as the protein chain exits the ribosomal tunnel so that’s a whole other constraint on what kinds of folds might be selected. For that matter, why not other genetically determined complex amino acids instead of just the canonical set?

Also, a common evolutionary process in eukaryotes is duplication of protein sequences and shuffling of code blocks which might represent folding domains, which might tend to lock in the existing collection of folds rather than generating novel folds. That’s not so clear.

This weakness of AlphaFold has some modern practical relevance since non-canonical amino acids and modified proteins are increasingly used medically, and their structures mostly seem to be determined using the direct experimental methods, eg:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10296201/

“Non-Canonical Amino Acids as Building Blocks for Peptidomimetics: Structure, Function, and Applications” (2023)