u/voronaam

It is a very interesting article from The Economist (paywalled): https://www.economist.com/briefing/2026/06/25/ai-models-values-are-very-different-from-most-peoples

> AI models’ values are very different from most people’s

It is a good piece that goes way beyond of examples of "black pope" and "female US founding father". It contains a lot of interesting charts showing where different LLMs and people of different backgrounds (language, country, etc) land on various questions.

But even more interesting is this quote from the "Off the Charts" newsletter than accompanied the article

I'll quote a passage from it in its entirety:

> For our analysis, I had to ask many different models a bunch of survey questions repeatedly. It would have been prohibitively labour-intensive to do this by hand, or even programmatically, across various model-makers, each with incompatible interfaces. Instead I used a service called OpenRouter, which wraps different AI model providers into a single unified interface. It hosts hundreds of AI models, including the latest from OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepSeek and many more. It is a good option if you like to work with code, and would like a provider-agnostic way of querying many different models. All you have to do is create an API key, and then use their code library in the language of your choice (see screenshot for Python).

This blows my mind, because The Economist was one of the media that liked to show LLM-market as being locked between OpenAI and Anthropic and everybody else being on the fringes. Them openly talking about OpenRouter being a better API is not something I'd expected.

I think this might be next horsy from the Ed's list - the big players waking up to the fact the there is no moat around OpenAI/Anthropic and even avid users switch to a different inference provider in a heartbeat.

Seeing AI companies boast about percentages and scores on various benchmarks created a new hobby for me - I go and read what are those tasks and laugh at them. I enjoy it and I thought I'd share it here - to raise awareness that not only the quality of LLM output is shit, but the yardsticks it is measured by is shit too.

Yesterday I was looking at an Engineering task of doing a PCB layout for an electric schema from something called "Agents' Last Exam". Here is the link.

I'll share with you why it is fun. Let's start with the task prompt. It starts with

> You are designing a KiCad PCB layout for a Mini Encabulator.

If you never heard of Encabulator - do not worry. Most real engineers did and most would stop doing the task at this line. It is so clearly BS and zero value that nobody would even read further.

The next lines are

Input
- Schematic: base\\input\\mini_encabulator.kicad_sch
- KiCad launcher: base\\software\\OpenKiCad.bat

I laugh at the image of a manger handing over a task to a real electrical engineer and starting with "And let me show you how to open a CAD application on the computer". Manager better be a good runner ;)

We'll skip a bit of the task description

3. Place all components for a compact board sized for an SN25 Polycase enclosure.
4. Add exactly four M3 mounting holes on a 1.575 inch by 1.26 inch rectangular spacing pattern.

If you confused are by weird inch numbers, that is 40x32mm. God forbid we let "AI" use metric system. 1.575 inch it is!

But the issue is that this information is redundant. The SN25 Polycase as a thing with its drawing publicly available and page 2 includes information about 4 mounting pillars and their spacing and dimensions. At least they got the dimensions right! But what if a year from now Polycase decides to change the spacing? That'd be a mess.

6. Route all electrical connections.

How much more of explaining what the task "You are designing a PCB layout" is there? Are we giving the task to a specialist or a kindergartener?

8. Run KiCad DRC and resolve all errors and unconnected items.

"The CAD you are an expert of, has a button on the toolbar - click it, it is awesome". Yeah, I know. It is awesome because engineers wrote the logic behind it and there is no "AI" in sight.

It gets funnier once I see how the LLM output is scored. There is a script right next to the task

To save you some time, I'll say that half of the script is dedicated to finding mounting holes and double checking their positions. I mean, getting those right is important, but it is not like the mounting hole is the most important part of the PCB!

And then there is:

EXPECTED_HOLE_SPAN_X_MM = 1.575 * 25.4
EXPECTED_HOLE_SPAN_Y_MM = 1.26 * 25.4

Oh look, the actual engineering product is using metric system? What a surprise.

And what is that:

if drc["available"]:
    if not drc["passes"]:
        score = 0.0
        reason = "drc_failed"
    elif structural["all_required"]:
        score = 1.0
        reason = "drc_and_structure_passed"
    else:
        score = 0.5
        reason = "drc_passed_structure_failed"
elif allow_structural_fallback:
    # Current admin VM has KiCad 9.0.8, while the submitted fixtures are
    # KiCad 10-format. This fallback keeps Stage 2 fixture replay useful
    # until Stage 4 installs a compatible KiCad for authoritative DRC.
    score = 1.0 if structural["all_required"] else 0.0

KiCad 10 was released in May this year and the schema for the PCB task was made in the new version. But for some reason the "AI Agent" has only version 9 and some of the schema does not load. Perhaps the model was trained before May and is unable to cope with the UI changes in the new version. So, the 50% of the score for the task is going to be awarded to the "AI Agent" that failed to do the actual PCB design because the schema did not load. Which is... you know all of the schema except for the f-ing four mounting holes. A human engineer or a real AI Agent would've probably figured out how to upgrade KiCad on their computer.

In the end, as long as LLM Agent is able to output something that looks like a PCB layout and it has 4 holes in it - it gets the full mark. No matter if most of the components are missing or the connectors are snaking all over the board in the most ugly way imaginable - full score. And most of the work is done by the KiCad's builtin automation anyway - such as ensuring PCB matches electrical schema and such.

Marvell at this creation! It is replacing electrical engineer any day now!

Yeah, sure.

(post edited for better formatting of the copy-pasted blocks)

This is theoretical at this point, but I may loose my job this year. I have a large mortgage currently at around $700k and 80% of the house value, 22 more years to go and with some additional payments made to accelerate it just a bit.

If I loose my job and struggle to find a new one what is the best course of action to handle the payments?

I can make interest-only payments for a long time out of my savings, for example. Is that even an option?

Do I call my lender and tell them I lost the job right away so that I can negotiate lower payment or do I keep it secret to make auto-renew option easier?

Is there anything government can do to help? For example, can it allow me to take some of my RRSP out tax-free to keep a roof over my head (similar to HBP)?

The advice I found online so far is focused on not getting in the arrears and to talk to the lender before that happens. This is pretty obvious.

I am looking for advice on how to optimize the mortgage handling before I am at the absolute zero. My main goal is to have a plan and a calculation so that if I loose the job, I do not panic. If I have a plan and I know it will give me 12 months of a runway - I'd sleep better.

I am in BC, if that matters.

Edit: Thank you everybody for the answers. I was afraid the question would be downvoted or deleted and I am glad it did not happen. Frankly, knowing there is a community of people who care in Canada is the biggest part of the solution to my worries. Thank you all for being a part of it.

Couple of quotes from the recent Economist article (paywall).

Those deals are not real:

> Bankers increasingly whisper about decaying documentation in AI financing agreements. “When we ask our lawyers to find ways that a hyperscaler might wriggle away from or re-negotiate a lease contract, often they come back with a very long list,” says the boss of one big lender

They may have found the answer to Ed's repeated question on "where did money go?" that puzzled me as well:

> Other bills are tied to special-purpose vehicles: separate entities with their own balance-sheets. Last year one assembled to build Meta’s new data-centre in Louisiana issued the biggest single corporate bond in history. Oracle’s finance chief recently talked about “uncoupling” the firm’s cashflows from its capex, presumably with similarly advanced financial engineering.

And my favourite quote:

> Clearly this is unsustainable without enterprises becoming much more willing to pay for AI.

There was a question yesterday on how to deal with anxiety. I am not a psychologist, but I thought I could share what helped me - perhaps invite some other suggestions. Perhaps Ed could record an episode talking to an actual scientist on the matter.

I am reading futuristic books from the past. Just recently I finished "The White Hole In Time" by Peter Russel - but pretty much any book would do.

In those books I find concerns and predictions and warnings - all very similar to the ones bothering me today. But it was all written decades ago and the society kept chugging along.

I will attach a photo of a page from that book. With very minor edits it could be a LinkedIn post today.

It helps to realize that this kind of doomerism is nothing new.

I also read books on the history of technology and science. AI people love to compare it to Electricity. Did you know that one of the first successful applications of electricity was to statically charge a young woman and then kiss her - to marvel at an electric jolt from that kiss? A literal parlor trick. And as disturbing as almost anything from the Victorian England. No, people did not rush to use the new technology for the light, the power or the communication. It was a weird sex thing entangled with exploitation.

They also had outlandish claims as well. There was a businessman claiming electricity helps with erection and invited nobles to lay with their wifes in a special "eclectically charged" bedroom. The business worked, though it probably had more to do with the naked young women dancing around the "charged" bed during the experience.

In the 1900s there was a stream of vitamin discoveries. Every single one came out with over-the-moon claims - the new vitamin was to cure everything and consumers were fools for not eating branded versions of them by the buckets.

We are not living through the unprecedented times and our ancestors lived through the times just like these just fine. We'll be fine.

Here is a page from a 30 years old book:

https://preview.redd.it/5v2l1favjjzg1.jpg?width=964&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=d1b627e0bbe5595eed13cb5c9197d2f41d36005f