[HN Gopher] Slop Terrifies Me
___________________________________________________________________
Slop Terrifies Me
Author : Ezhik
Score : 317 points
Date : 2026-02-08 10:31 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (ezhik.jp)
(TXT) w3m dump (ezhik.jp)
| PlatoIsADisease wrote:
| >What if the future of computing belongs not to artisan
| developers or Carol from Accounting, but to whoever can churn out
| the most software out the fastest? What if good enough really is
| good enough for most people?
|
| Sounds like the cost of everything goes down. Instead of
| subscription apps, we have free Fdroid apps. Instead of only the
| 0.1% commissioning art, all of humanity gets to commission art.
|
| And when we do pay for things, instead of an app doing 1 feature
| well, we have apps do 10 features well with integration. (I am
| living this, instead of shipping software with 1 core feature, I
| can do 1 core feature and 6 different options for free, no change
| order needed)
| Ezhik wrote:
| The future you describe seems closer to the "Carol from
| Accounting" future I am hoping for in the blog post. My worry
| is that cost of everything goes down just enough to price out
| of existence all of the artists the 0.1% used to commission,
| without actually letting all of humanity do the same.
| bartvk wrote:
| I deeply hate the people that use AI to poison the music, video
| or articles that I consume. However I really feel that it can
| possibly make software cheaper.
|
| A couple of years ago, I worked for an agency as a dev. I had a
| chat with one of the sales people, and he said clients asked him
| why custom apps were so expensive, when the hardware had gotten
| relatively cheap. He had a much harder time selling mobile apps.
|
| Possibly, this will bring a new era of decent macOS desktop and
| mobile apps, not another web app that I have to run in my browser
| and have no control over.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| >Possibly, this will bring a new era of decent macOS desktop
| and mobile apps, not another web app that I have to run in my
| browser and have no control over.
|
| There has been no shortage of mobile apps, Apple frequently
| boasts that there are over 2 million of them in the App Store.
|
| I have little doubt there will be more, whether any of the
| extra will be decent remains to be seen.
| vrighter wrote:
| ai is trained on the stuff already written. Software has been
| taking a nosedive for ages (ex, committing to shipping
| something in 6 months before one even figures out what to put
| in it). If anything shit will get worse due to the deskilling
| being caused by ai.
| skzizjj wrote:
| This is just the outsourcing argument all over again. Maybe the
| degrees of difference matters this time?
| wtetzner wrote:
| I kinda feel like we're at a point where it would be much more
| valuable to have higher quality software than more software.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| I use AI/LLMs hard for my programming.
|
| They allow me to do work I could never have done before.
|
| But there's no chance at all of an LLM one shotting anything that
| I aim to build.
|
| Every single step in the process is an intensely human grind
| trying to understand the LLM and coax it to make the thing I have
| in mind.
|
| The people who are panicking aren't using this stuff in depth. If
| they were, then they would have no anxiety at all.
|
| If only the LLM was smart enough to write the software. I wish it
| could. It can't, nor even close.
|
| As for web browsers built in a few hours. No. No LLM is coming
| anywhere new at building a web browser in a few hours. Unless
| your talking about some super simple super minimal toy with some
| of the surface appearance of a web browser.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| This has been my experience. I tend to use chats, in a
| synchronous, single-threaded manner, as opposed to agents, in
| an asynchronous way. That's because I think of the LLM as a
| "know-it-all smartass personal assistant"; not an "employee
| replacement."
|
| I just enjoy writing my own software. If I have a tool that
| will help me to lubricate the tight bits, I'll use it.
| Tade0 wrote:
| Same. I hit Tab a lot because even though the system doesn't
| actually understand what it's doing, it's really good at
| following patterns. Takes off the mental load of checking
| syntax.
|
| Occasionally of course it's way off, in which case I have to
| tell it to stfu ("snooze").
|
| Also it's great at presenting _someone else 's_ knowledge, as
| it doesn't actually know facts - just what token should come
| after a sequence of others. The other day I just pasted an
| error message from a system that I wasn't familiar with and
| it explained in detail what the problem was and how to solve
| it - brilliant, just what I wanted.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> The other day I just pasted an error message from a
| system that I wasn 't familiar with and it explained in
| detail what the problem was and how to solve it_
|
| That's probably the single most valuable aspect, for me.
| Ezhik wrote:
| I'm less afraid of people using LLMs for coding well than I am
| of people not caring to and just shipping slop.
|
| This is the browser engine I was alluding to in the post:
| https://github.com/wilsonzlin/fastrender
| fancyfredbot wrote:
| > _You get AI that can make you like 90% of a thing! 90% is a
| lot. Will you care about the last 10%? I 'm terrified that you
| won't._
|
| Based on the Adobe stock price the market thinks AI slop software
| will be good enough for about 20% of Adobe users (or Adobe will
| need to make its software 20% cheaper, or most likely somewhere
| between).
|
| Interestingly workday, which is possibly slightly simpler
| software more easily replicable using coding agents is about the
| same (down 26%).
| twoodfin wrote:
| The bear case for Workday is not that it gets replicated as
| slop, but that its "user base" becomes dominated by agents.
|
| Agents don't care about any of Workday's value-adds:
| Customizable workflows, "intuitive" experiences, a decent
| mobile app. Agents are happy to write SQL against a few boring
| databases.
| beardyw wrote:
| I think this is far too nuanced. I am terrified by what the
| civilization we have known will become. People living in less
| advanced economies will do OK, but the rest of us not so much. We
| stand on the brink of a world where some wealthy people will get
| more wealthy, but very many will struggle without work or
| prospects.
|
| A society where a large percent have no income is unsustainable
| in the short term, and ultimately liable to turn to violence. I
| can see it ending badly. Trouble who in power is willing to stop
| it?
| lm2s wrote:
| Yes, that's why they are on the race to building the very
| advanced robots. To prevent the violence towards them.
| satisfice wrote:
| That is exactly the motivation. The problem with being a
| billionaire is you still have to associate with poor people.
| But imagine a world where your wealth completely insulates
| you from the resentful poor.
| gib444 wrote:
| How does a billionaire have to associate with poor people?
| They can live in a complete bubble: house in the hills,
| driven by a chauffeur, private jets, private islands for
| holidays etc...?
| aspaviento wrote:
| The people who cook for them, the people who clean for
| them, the ones who take care of their kids, the one who
| sell them stuff or serve them in restaurants...
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Also, they're not building the house or the jet, they're
| not growing the food, ... people close enough can be
| chosen for willingness to be sycophants and happiness to
| be servants. Unless you're feeding yourself from your own
| farm, or manufacturing your own electronics, there are
| limits to even a billionaires ability to control
| personnel.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| They have separate kitchens for the prep, the cleaners
| work while they're out on the yacht, they have people to
| do the buying, and the restaurants they visit have very
| well trained staff who stay out of the way.
| coldtea wrote:
| All that is irrelevant to the point: they still need to
| have those poor people around them, trust them, and even
| trust their security to them.
| pixl97 wrote:
| And this is all very easy to control.
|
| First is you get a particular group of people to work for
| you. You tell them they are better than all the other
| poor people out there, that is get them to be
| nationalistic/racist, etc. You also give them a little
| bit more than the abjectly poor so they have something
| they fear to lose. You also let them know if they upset
| the situation they are in retribution will be swift and
| brutal and affect anyone they know and love.
| direwolf20 wrote:
| And this is how _every_ societal hierarchy is structured.
| coldtea wrote:
| So easy to control that most rich people throughout
| history were murdered by their guards and close helper
| circle.
| pixl97 wrote:
| "Most rich people that were murdered" is a different
| statement from "most rich people"
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Epstein had a staff of 70 on that island kept mum
| shimman wrote:
| nah, if slave owners like Thomas Jefferson and George
| Washington could reorient their entire lives around not
| seeing the "ick" of chattel slavery I think modern
| billionaires can do the same thing even easier now if
| they wanted.
| nkrisc wrote:
| Unless they're living entirely by themselves, they will
| always be dependent on poor people.
| sh3rl0ck wrote:
| The poor maids and servants, the poor chauffeur, the poor
| chef, etc.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| The fact that people see that basically the singularity
| is happening but _can 't imagine that humanoid robots get
| good rapidly_ is why most people here are bad futurists.
| danaris wrote:
| > the singularity is happening
|
| [Citation needed]
|
| No LLM is yet being used effectively to improve LLM
| output in exponential ways. Personally, I'm skeptical
| that such a thing is possible.
|
| LLMs aren't AGI, and aren't a path to AGI.
|
| The Singularity is the Rapture for techbros.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| If you look at the rapid acceleration of progress and
| conclude this way, well, de nile ain't just a river in
| egypt.
|
| Also yes LLMs are indeed AGI:
| https://www.noemamag.com/artificial-general-intelligence-
| is-...
|
| This was Peter Norvig's take. AGI is a low bar because
| most humans are really stupid.
| danaris wrote:
| _What_ rapid acceleration?
|
| I look at the trajectory of LLMs, and the shape I see is
| one of diminishing returns.
|
| The improvements in the first few generations came fast,
| and they were impressive. Then subsequent generations
| took longer, improved less over the previous generation,
| and required more and more (and _more_ and _more_ )
| resources to achieve.
|
| I'm not interested in one guy's take that LLMs are AGI,
| regardless of his computer science bonafides. I can look
| at what they do myself, and see that they aren't, by most
| very reasonable definitions of AGI.
|
| If you really believe that the singularity is happening
| now...well, then, shouldn't it take a very short time for
| the effects of that to be _painfully_ obvious? Like,
| massive improvements in all kinds of technology coming in
| a matter of months? Come back in a few months and tell me
| what amazing new technologies this supposed AGI has
| created...or maybe the one in denial isn 't me.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| > I look at the trajectory of LLMs, and the shape I see
| is one of diminishing returns
|
| It seems even more true if you look at OpenAI funding
| thru 2022 initial public release to how spending has
| exponentially increased to deliver improvements since.
| We're now talking upwards of $600B/yr of spending on LLM
| based AI infrastructure across the industry in 2026.
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| If you think AGI is at hand why are you trying to sway a
| bunch of internet randos who don't get it? :) Use those
| god-like powers to make the life you want while it's
| still under the radar.
| Davidzheng wrote:
| how do you take over the world if you have access to 1000
| normal people? if AGI is by the original definition (long
| forgotten by now) of surpassing MEDIAN human at almost
| all tasks. How the rebranding of ASI into AGI happened
| without anyone noticing is kind of insane
| sunrunner wrote:
| > rapid acceleration
|
| Who was it who stated that every exponential was just a
| sigmoid in disguise?
|
| > most humans are really stupid.
|
| Statistically, don't we all sort of fit somewhere along a
| bell curve?
| pixl97 wrote:
| The bell curve of IQ and being stupid probably don't have
| much to do with each other.
|
| Think of stupidity as the consequences of interacting
| with ones environment with negative outcomes. If you have
| a simple environment with few negative outcomes, then
| even someone with a 80 IQ may not be considered stupid.
| But if your environment rapidly grows more complex and
| the amount of thinking you have to do for positive
| outcomes increases then even someone with a 110 IQ may
| find themselves quickly in trouble.
| afavour wrote:
| > If you look at the rapid acceleration of progress
|
| I don't understand this perspective. There are numerous
| examples of technical progress that then stalls out. Just
| look at batteries for example. Or ones where advancements
| are too expensive for widespread use (e.g. why no one
| flies Concorde any more)
|
| Why is previous progress a guaranteed indicator of future
| progress?
| pixl97 wrote:
| Just think of this as risk management.
|
| If AGI doesn't happen, then good. You get to keep working
| and playing and generally screwing off in the way that
| humans have for generations.
|
| On the other hand if AGI happens, especially any time
| soon, you are exceptionally fucked along with me. The
| world changes very rapidly and there is no getting off Mr
| Bones wild ride.
|
| >Why is previous progress a guaranteed indicator of
| future progress?
|
| In this case, because nature already did it. We're not
| just inventing and testing something whole cloth. And we
| know there are still massive efficiencies to be gained.
|
| For me the Concorde is an example of how people look at
| stuff incorrectly. In the past we had to send people
| places very quickly to do things. This was very expensive
| and inefficient. I don't need to get on a plane to have
| an effect just about anywhere else in the world now. The
| internet and digital mediums give me a presence at other
| locations that is very close to being there. We didn't
| need planes that fly at the speed of sound, we needed
| strings that communicate at the speed of light.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _If you look at the rapid acceleration of progress and
| conclude this way_
|
| There's no "rapid acceleration of progress". If anything
| there's a decline, and even an economic decline.
|
| Take away the financial bubbles based on deregulation and
| huge explosion of debt, and the last 40 years of
| "economic progress" are just a mirage filling a huge
| bubble with air in actual advancement terms - unlike the
| previous millenia.
| azan_ wrote:
| That's completely wrong. There was barely any progress in
| previous millennia. There was even economic Nobel prize
| for showing why!
| coldtea wrote:
| The GDP per capita of the world has been slowly
| increasing for several millenia. Same for the
| advancements in core technology.
|
| The industrial revolution increased the pace, but it was
| already there, not flat or randomly flunctuating (think
| ancient hominids versus early agriculture vs bronge age,
| vs ancient Babylon and Assyrian empires, vs later Greece,
| and Persia, later Rome, later Renaissance and so on).
|
| Post 1970s most of the further increase has been based on
| mirages due to financialization, and doesn't reflect
| actual improvement.
| azan_ wrote:
| > Post 1970s most of the further increase has been based
| on mirages due to financialization, and doesn't reflect
| actual improvement.
|
| Of course it does. It would be good if you would try to
| actually support such controversial claims with data.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Lol, wut?
|
| The world can produce more things cheaper and faster than
| ever and this is an economic decline? I think you may
| have missed the other 6 billion people on the planet
| getting massive improvements in their quality of life.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _I think you may have missed the other 6 billion people
| on the planet getting massive improvements in their
| quality of life._
|
| I think you have missed that it's easy to get "massive
| improvements in your quality of life" if you start from
| merely-post-revolution-era China or 1950s Africa or
| colonial India.
|
| Much less so if you plateaud as US and Europe, and live
| off of increased debt ever since the 1970s.
| pixl97 wrote:
| And yet in the US I can currently survive and illness by
| the means of technology where I would have died in the
| 70s. It can be really hard to see the forest from the
| trees when everything around us is rapidly changing
| technology.
|
| Increased debt is mostly on the good that technology
| cannot at least yet reproduce. For example they aren't
| making new land. Taste, NIMBYism and currently laws stop
| us from increased housing density in a lot of places too.
| Healthcare is still quite limited by laws in the US and
| made expensive because of it.
| darkerside wrote:
| Yes, and that's why surpassing it doesn't lead to a
| singularity except over an infinite timeframe. This whole
| thing was stupid in the first place.
| Recurecur wrote:
| In my opinion, LLMs provide one piece of AGI. The only
| intelligence I've directly experienced is my own. I don't
| consciously plan what I'm saying (or writing right now).
|
| Instead, a subconscious process assembles the words to
| support my stream of consciousness. I think that LLMs are
| very similar, if not identical.
|
| Stream of thought is accomplishing something
| superficially similar to consciousness, but without the
| ability to be innovative.
|
| At any rate, until there's an artificial human level
| stream of consciousness in the mix for each AI, I doubt
| we'll see a group of AIs collaborating to produce a
| significantly improved new generation of AI hardware and
| software minus human involvement.
|
| Once that does happen, the Singularity is at hand.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| LLMs aren't AGI and maybe aren't a path to AGI, but step
| back and look at the way the world is changing. Hard
| disks were invented by IBM in 1953 and now less than a
| hundred years later there's an estimated million
| terabytes a year of hard disks made and sold, and a total
| sold of Mega, Giga, Tera, Peta, Exa, Zetta ... 1.36
| Zettabytes.
|
| In 2000, webcams were barely a thing, audio was often
| recorded to dictaphone tapes, and now you can find a
| recorded photo or video of roughly anyone and anything on
| Earth. Maybe a tenth of all humans, almost any place,
| animal, insect, or natural event, almost any machine,
| mechanism, invention, painting, and a large sampling of
| "indoors" both public and private, almost any festival or
| event or tradition, and a very large sampling of "people
| doing things" and people teaching things for all kinds of
| skills. And tons of measurements of locations,
| temperatures, movements, weather, experiment results, and
| so on.
|
| The ability of computers to process information jumped
| with punched card readers, with electronic computers in
| the 1950s, again with transistors in the 1970s,
| semiconductors in the 1980s, commodity computer clusters
| (Google) in the 1990s, maybe again with multi-core
| desktops for everyone in the 2000s, with general purpose
| GPUs in the 2010s, and with faster commodity networking
| from 10Mbit to 100Gbit and more, and with SATA, then SAS,
| then RAID, then SSDs.
|
| It's now completely normal to check Google Maps to look
| at road traffic and how busy stores are (picked up in
| near realtime from the movement of smartphones around the
| planet), to do face and object recognition and search in
| photos, to do realtime face editing/enhancement while
| recording on a smartphone, to track increasing amounts of
| exercise and health data from increasing numbers of
| people, to call and speak to people across the planet and
| have your voice transcribed automatically to text, to
| realtime face-swap or face-enhance on a mobile chip, to
| download gigabytes of compressed Wikipedia onto a laptop
| and play with it in a weekend in Python just for fun.
|
| "AI" stuff (LLMs, neural networks and other techniques,
| PyTorch, TensorFlow, cloud GPUs and TPUs), the increase
| in research money, in companies competing to hire the
| best researchers, the increase in tutorials and numbers
| of people around the world wanting to play with it and
| being able to do that ... do you predict that by 2030,
| 2035, 2040, 2045, 2050 ... 2100, we'll have manufactured
| more compute power and storage than has ever been made,
| several times over, and made it more and more accessible
| to more people, and nothing will change, nothing
| interesting or new will have been found deliberately or
| stumbled upon accidentally, nothing new will have been
| understood about human brains, biology, or cognition, no
| new insights or products or modelling or AI techniques
| developed or become normal, no once-in-a-lifetime
| geniuses having any flashes of insight?
| danaris wrote:
| I mean, what you're describing is technological
| advancement. It's great! I'm fully in favor of it, and I
| fully believe in it.
|
| It's not the singularity.
|
| The singularity is a specific belief that we will achieve
| AGI, and the AGI will then self-improve at an exponential
| rate allowing it to become infinitely more advanced and
| powerful (much moreso than we could ever have made it),
| and it will then also invent loads of new technologies
| and usher in a golden age. (Either for itself or us. That
| part's a bit under contention, from my understanding.)
| wiseowise wrote:
| You're delusional if you think singularity is happening.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| That's like saying "you're delusional if you think we're
| affected by The Sun's gravity when it's a hundred million
| miles away".
|
| A hundred million years ago, every day on Earth was much
| like every other day and you could count on that. As you
| sweep forwards in time you cross things like language,
| cooperation, villages, control of fire, and the
| before/after effects are distinctly different. The nearer
| you get to the present, the more of those changes happen
| and the closer they happen, like ripples on a pond
| getting closer to the splash point, or like the whispers
| of gravity turning into a pull and then a crunch.
| "Singularity" as an area closer to the splash point where
| models from outside can't make good predictions keeps
| happening - a million years ago, who would have predicted
| nations and empires and currency stamped with a human
| face? Fifty thousand years ago, who could have predicted
| skyscrapers with human-made train tunnels underground
| beneath them, or even washing bleached white bedsheets
| made from cotton grown overseas? Ten thousand years ago,
| who could have predicted container shipping through the
| human-made Panama canal? A thousand years ago who could
| have predicted Bitcoin? Five hundred years ago, who could
| have predicted electric motors? Three hundred years ago
| who could have predicted satellite weather mapping of the
| entire planet or trans-Atlantic undersea dark fibre
| bundles? Two hundred years ago, who could have predicted
| genetic engineering? A hundred and fifty years ago, who
| could have predicted MRI scanners? A hundred years ago,
| who could have predicted a DoorDash rider following GPS
| from a satellite using a map downloaded over a cellular
| data link to a wirelessly charging smartphone the size of
| a large matchbox bringing a pizza to your house
| coordinated by an internet-wide app?
|
| In 2000 with Blackberry and Palm Treo and HP Journada and
| PalmPilot and Windows Phone and TomTom navigation, who
| was expecting YouTube, Google Maps with satellite photos,
| Google StreetView, Twitch, Discord, Vine, TikTok,
| Electron, Amazon Kindle with worldwide free internet book
| delivery, or the dominance of Python or the ubiquity of
| bluetooth headphones?
|
| Fifty years ago is 1975, batteries were heavy and weak,
| cameras were film based, bulbs were incandescent, betamax
| and VHS and semiconductors were barely a thing - who was
| predicting micro-electromechanical timing devices,
| computer controlled LED Christmas lights playing tunes in
| greetings cards, DJI camera drones affordable to the
| population, Network Time Protocol synchronising the
| planet, the normality of video calling from every laptop
| or smartphone, or online shopping with encrypted credit
| card transactions hollowing out the highstreets and town
| centers?
|
| The strange attractor at the end of history might be a
| long way away, but it's pulling us towards it nonetheless
| and its ripples go back millions of years in time. It's
| not like there's (all of history) and then at one point
| (the singularity where things get weird). Things have
| been getting weird for thousands and thousands of years
| in ways that the people before that wouldn't or couldn't
| have predicted.
| pixl97 wrote:
| If your every other animal on the planet other than
| humans, the singularity already happened.
|
| Your species would have watched humans go from hairless
| mammals that basically did the same set of actions and
| need that your species had to an alien that might as well
| have landed from another planet (other than you don't
| even know other planets even exist). Now forests
| disappear in an instant. Lakes appear and disappear.
| Weird objects cover the ground and fill the sky. The
| paradigms that worked for eons are suddenly broken.
|
| But you, you're a human, you're smart. The same thing
| couldn't possibly happen to you, right?
| coldtea wrote:
| That fact that people see "the singularity happening"
| based on LLM results, is why most people are the kind of
| ignorant cheerleaders of tech that predicted robot
| servants, flying cars, and space colonies by 2000 in
| 1950.
| jeremyjh wrote:
| This feels different. In the 1950s rapid technological
| progress had been driven by the pressures of the second
| world war and produced amazing things that held a lot of
| promise, but few appreciated the depth of complexity of
| what lay before them. A lot of that complexity had to be
| solved with software which expanded the problem set
| rather than solving it. If we have a general solution to
| the problem of software, we don't know that there are
| other barriers that would slow progress so much.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| Tomy made the Dustbot robot vacuum in 1985, Electrolux
| made the Trilobite robot vacuum in 1996, and then washing
| machines, dishwashers, tumble-dryers, microwaves,
| microwave meals, disposable diapers, fast fashion, and
| plug-in vacuums, floor steamers, carpet washers, home
| automation for lights and curtains, central heating
| instead of coal/wood fires and ash buckets, fridge-
| freezers and supermarkets (removing the need for canning,
| pickling, jamming, preserving), takeaways and food
| delivery, people having 1-2 children instead of 6-12
| children. The amount of human labour in housework has
| plummetted since 1900.
|
| Plenty of flying cars existed through the 1900s,
| including commercial ones:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_car
|
| The International Space Station was launched in 1998.
| lbreakjai wrote:
| You still have to find the kids to rape.
| chii wrote:
| Watch, or read "altered carbon" for a taste of that future.
| coldtea wrote:
| Or the Epstein files, for that matter
| Findecanor wrote:
| That notion is based on the misconception that for there to
| be very rich people, other people would need to be poor --
| that would resent you.
|
| Economic science has pretty much proven that when the
| average income in a society is higher and fewer are poor,
| the economy moves more money and the rich benefit more as
| well.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Misconception is not really the right word here along
| with the word 'need'.
|
| It comes down to if the people in power think they are
| playing a zero sum game and are driven by greed. We see
| plenty of dictatorships that are _very_ resource wealthy
| and yet their society suffers in abject poverty. Said
| leaders have zero care about making their peoples life
| better and will gladly kill them wholesale if they become
| problematic.
| nosianu wrote:
| > _other people would need to be poor_
|
| Just like billions are not about "being rich", this is
| about CONTROL. Control of the economy, and how people
| live, and control over one's own life.
|
| Abstraction is a beast, putting everything regardless of
| what it actually is as some $$ number is terrible for
| understanding. The billionaires don't have Scrooge McDuck
| money at home where they swim in coins, they control huge
| parts of the economy.
|
| And as long as they need workers, they will want them to
| live not too well - that would raise the price of labor,
| if people wanted to do work in places like Amazon
| warehouses to begin with, if they had better alternatives
| not working for the billionaires.
|
| Being "poor" in this context means having a lot less
| control over how you live, not that you live on the
| streets. Although, as soon as you lose your value, e.g.
| by getting too sick, that is always on the table too.
| bitwize wrote:
| Relative wealth disparity is what drives lower-class
| resentment, not absolute poverty.
|
| Income inequality is very bad in its own right.
| direwolf20 wrote:
| Gaza is kept as a testing ground for domestic spying and
| domestic military technology intended to be used on other
| groups. Otherwise they'd have destroyed it by now. Stuff like
| Palantir is always tested in Gaza first.
| cr125rider wrote:
| > Otherwise they'd have destroyed it by now.
|
| About that...
| tartoran wrote:
| Isn't Gaza a mess in ruins already? I'd count that as
| destroyed aleeady
| direwolf20 wrote:
| Not completely. I mean there would be zero living people
| left. They've been downscaling it.
| squidsoup wrote:
| The bombs dropped on Gaza are equivalent to six Hiroshimas
| - I think we can safely say that Gaza has been destroyed.
|
| https://www.bradford.ac.uk/news/archive/2025/gaza-bombing-
| eq...
| direwolf20 wrote:
| There are still living people in it
| gom_jabbar wrote:
| Sort of. The thing building and being protected is capital,
| not humans. As Nick Land wrote:
|
| "Robotic security. [...] The armed mass as a model for the
| revolutionary citizenry declines into senselessness, replaced
| by drones. Asabiyyah ceases entirely to matter, however much
| it remains a focus for romantic attachment. Industrialization
| closes the loop, and protects itself." [0]
|
| The important part here is that "[i]ndustrialization [...]
| protects itself". This is not about protecting humans
| ultimately. Humans are not autonomous, but ultimately
| functions of (autonomous) capital. Mark Fisher put it like
| this (summarizing Land's philosophy):
|
| "Capital will not be ultimately unmasked as exploited labour
| power; rather, humans are the meat puppet of Capital, their
| identities and self-understandings are simulations that can
| and will be ultimately be sloughed off." [1]
|
| Land's philosophy is quite useful for providing a non-
| anthropocentric perspective on various processes.
|
| [0] Nick Land (2016). _The NRx Moment_ in Xenosystems Blog.
| Retrieved from github.com /cyborg-nomade/reignition
|
| [1] Mark Fisher (2012). _Terminator vs Avatar_ in
| _#Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader,_ Urbanomic, p. 342.
| quantummagic wrote:
| This reads like absolute gibberish to me. The capitalistic
| system does not function without the motivations of the
| people running it. Ultimately every decision and action is
| in service of some human, and his or his group's interest.
| pixl97 wrote:
| The motivations of the people running the capitalistic
| system is making more money. Remember the entire mantra
| of greed is good? Group interest can be a super-human
| entity that you can get caught in a loop of serving even
| though serving said entity is not in your best interest.
| Humans have only been 'mostly' in control of this because
| there was no other entities capable of said control
| themselves.
|
| https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-
| moloch/
| gom_jabbar wrote:
| From the Landian perspective, initially, sure, the system
| needs humans. But once you have autonomous and sovereign
| capital, things could look very different.
|
| In Land's own words:
|
| "Since capitalism did not arise from abstract
| intelligence, but instead from a concrete human social
| organization, it necessarily disguises itself as _better
| monkey business,_ until it can take off elsewhere. It has
| to be the case, therefore, that cynical evo-psych
| reduction of business activity remains highly plausible,
| so long as the escape threshold of capitalism has not
| been reached. No one gets a hormone rush from business-
| for-business while political history continues. To fixate
| upon this, however, is to miss everything important (and
| perhaps to enable the important thing to remain hidden).
| Our inherited purposes do not provide the decryption key.
| " [0]
|
| [0] Nick Land (2013). _Monkey Business_ in Xenosystems
| Blog. Retrieved from github.com /cyborg-nomade/reignition
|
| If you're open to explore Land's perspective more deeply,
| you can read the introduction here:
| https://retrochronic.com/
| direwolf20 wrote:
| They're saying capital is power. Not analogous -- the
| same thing. Until now power always had to be wielded by a
| human, but it's really the power who is wielding the
| human as an instrument to channel itself, like Majora's
| Mask. Once we have power that doesn't need a human, it
| won't need that and we'll all be subservient.
|
| I agree with it. Consider financial markets, for example.
| There are individual humans whose account balances are
| changing, but the system as a whole is not an instrument
| of any human, not the buyers, not the sellers, and not
| the exchange operators, and yet it dictates the large
| scale structure of society in ways unimaginable a century
| ago.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Companies are already like this. Boss fires his friend
| and puts him out of work with a family to feed. Why? It
| was 'good for the company.' So many inhuman decisions
| hide behind that fig leaf. It is a way to mentally remove
| responsibilities from these decisions. After all, it was
| for the good of the company. Stock buybacks while
| mailroom is on food stamps? For the good of the company.
| Dumping the waste into the river instead of safely
| disposing it? For the good of the company. Making money
| off vice and the mentally vulnerable? For the good of the
| company. Overfishing the ocean such that there won't even
| be a commercial fishing industry in our lifetimes? For
| the good of the company. Polluting the earth and ushering
| in a new age of extinction? For the good of the company.
|
| We are already enslaved to capitalism. Working against
| our own interest. In service towards the company and the
| company alone. This meta organism we value above all else
| on earth.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| Capitalism is the ultimate 'Norman lord in his castle on
| conquered land', removed from the consequences of his
| choices/rent extraction on the serfs he shares no
| culture, no understanding with just what value can he
| extract from them.
| direwolf20 wrote:
| He is forced to do that, or he'll be replaced by someone
| who will. All hail Moloch[2+[?]7i]!
|
| [2+[?]7i]
| https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-
| moloch/
| overfeed wrote:
| >To prevent the violence towards them.
|
| "This morning at 8:00 am Pacific, there were 5 simultaneously
| assassination attempts on tech executives across the Bay
| Area. The victims, who are all tech executives known to us
| have suffered serious injuries . It is reported that
| Securibot 5000s were involved. Securibot inc declined to
| comment. This is a developing story"
| XorNot wrote:
| There is no master plan, there's a hype cycle, environment
| and the market.
|
| Humanoid robots became possible and so people are racing to
| be first to market assuming that might be a giant market
| (it's cheap labor potentially so of course it might be huge -
| the microcomputer was).
| jjgreen wrote:
| Welcome to capitalism!
| smokel wrote:
| Besides being a bit of a shallow comment, what exactly do you
| imply here? That capitalism logically implies that the rich
| become richer? I don't think this is necessarily the case, it
| just needs a stronger government than what the US currently
| has in place. (e.g. progressive taxation and strong antitrust
| policy seem to work fairly well in Europe).
| beardyw wrote:
| Isn't that what Americans call socialism?
| kubb wrote:
| But with how compounding works, isn't this outcome
| inevitable in capitalism? If the strong government prevents
| it then the first step for the rich is to weaken or co-opt
| the government, and exactly this has been happening.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| We have a lot of people, capitalism values them as
| approaching zero, anything that alters that valuation
| (without reducing population) is contrary to capitalism.
| Capitalism means the rich must get richer, they own the
| resources and means of production, they take the reward.
|
| It comes to a point where they need an underclass to
| insulate them from the masses; look how cheaply Trump
| bought his paramilitary though, he only had to spend the
| money taken from those he's suppressing, didn't even have
| to reduce his own wealth one bit; the military and his new
| brown shirts will ensure the rich stay rich and that
| _eventually_ there is massive starvation (possibly water
| /fuel poverty first).
|
| Or USA recovers the constitution, recognises climate change
| and start to do something about it.
|
| It seems like the whole of humanities future hinges on a
| handful of billionaires megalomania and that riding on the
| coattails of Trump's need to not face justice for his
| crimes.
| jwarden wrote:
| Capitalism just means private citizens can own the means
| of production (e.g. start a business, buy stock) and earn
| a return on investment. It doesn't mean only the rich
| must get richer. It means anyone who saves and invests
| their money instead of spending it gets richer.
|
| However capitalism is perfectly compatible with a
| progressives taxation system such that the rich get
| richer at a lesser rate than the poor get richer.
| pixl97 wrote:
| The important thing to note here is people have been
| propagandized into thinking that capitalist = democratic.
| In fact the US would gladly punish you with 'un-American
| activities' investigation if you said anything to the
| contrary.
|
| The thing is a capitalistic country will gladly turn
| itself into an authoritarian one if both wealth becomes
| concentrated and wealth buys votes. With the massive rise
| in authoritarian activities all over the world,
| especially in the US our democratic system is at very
| high risk of collapsing.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| >anyone who saves and invests their money instead of
| spending it gets richer.
|
| You realise that a large swathe of society earn less than
| their costs?
|
| Everyone will get richer perpetually, there will never be
| any impact on climate, we'll never suffer water
| shortages, we'll all ride unicorns and eat rainbows...
| coldtea wrote:
| > _That capitalism logically implies that the rich become
| richer? I don 't think this is necessarily the case,_
|
| It doesn't need to imply anything. It's an ideology, those
| promoting it will say whatever BS attracts people to it. In
| practice, what is happening in capitalist countries since
| 1970s (when they abandoned all pretense) is that the rich
| get way richer and everybody else is fucked.
| glitchc wrote:
| Versus what exactly? Communism? Where the rich got richer
| faster and people got fucked faster?
| coldtea wrote:
| They taught you the only two altenatives are 1917 style
| communism or 2026 style capitalism?
|
| Talk about a crap educational system.
| pixl97 wrote:
| At the end of the day Capitalism and Communism have
| nothing to do with authoritarianism and
| liberalism/democracy. An authoritarian capitalist country
| is a perfectly valid type of government as there has
| never existed a 'pure' capitalistic governed country.
| Muromec wrote:
| It's regression to the mean in action. Everethyng eventually
| collapses into olygarhy and wevwill simply joing the
| unpriviliged rest in their misery. Likely with few wars civil
| or not here and there
| 9dev wrote:
| It's not oligarchy, it's feudalism.
|
| I wholeheartedly recommend you buying a new keyboard, by the
| way.
| kubb wrote:
| I wonder, will the rich start hiring elaborate casts of
| servants including butlers, footmen, lady's maids, and so on,
| since they'll be the only ones with the income?
| temp8830 wrote:
| They already do. In fact, we are all working in service of
| their power trips.
| ted_bunny wrote:
| This is what the service economy in the imperial core already
| is.
| drzaiusx11 wrote:
| As far as I can tell, the rich have never stopped employing
| elaborate casts of servants; these servants just go by
| different titles now: private chef, personal assistant,
| nanny, fashion consultant, etc.
| kbelder wrote:
| The fact that it's a voluntary arrangement instead of
| forced makes a significant difference.
| chung8123 wrote:
| Who do you think is building the machines for the rich? All
| of these tech companies are nothing without the employees
| that build the tech.
| graemep wrote:
| They already do and always have. They never stopped hiring
| butlers (who are pretty well paid BTW), chefs, chauffeurs,
| maids, gardeners, nannies.....
|
| The terminology may have changed a bit, but they still employ
| people to do stuff for them
|
| One big difference is while professional class affluent
| people will hire cleaners or gardeners or nannies for a
| certain number or hours they cannot (at least in rich
| countries) hire them as full time live in employees.
|
| There are some things that are increasing. For example
| employing full time tutors to teach their kids - as rich
| people used to often do (say a 100 years ago). So they get
| one to one attention while other people kids are in classes
| with many kids, and the poor have their kids in classes with
| a large number of kids. Interesting the government here in
| the UK is increasingly hostile to ordinary people educating
| their kids outside school which is the nearest we can get to
| what the rich do (again, hiring tutors by the hour, and self-
| supply within the household).
|
| They also hire people to manage their wealth. I do not know
| enough about the history to be sure, but this seems to be
| also to be a return to historical norms after an egalitarian
| anomaly. A lot of wealth is looked after by full time
| employees of "family offices" - and the impression I get from
| people in investment management and high end property is that
| this has increased a lot in the last few decades.
| Incidentally, one of the questions around Epstein is why so
| many rich people let him take over some of the work that you
| would expect their family offices to handle.
| ghaff wrote:
| A lot of it is probably more part-time but, yes, people who
| are some definition of rich spend more money on people to
| do more work for them (cleaning, landscaping, accounting,
| etc.) Doesn't mean they don't do any of those things--and
| outsourcing some can be more effort than it's worth--but
| they don't necessarily cut their own lawn or do car
| repairs.
| graemep wrote:
| If you are rich "outsourcing" is easy because you have
| people to handle that for you. You have senior servants
| like butlers and housekeepers who manage the rest of the
| staff, for example, so you are not directly hiring
| cleaners.
|
| This is the difference between the affluent and the truly
| rich.
| ghaff wrote:
| It's fair that's probably the difference. You don't have
| a full-time personal assistant/butler/whatever you want
| to call it. But you personally outsource a lot of
| individual tasks that you don't really want to do.
| kubb wrote:
| I pay to have my car serviced... but I don't employ a
| full-time mechanic.
| ghaff wrote:
| In this day and age, how often do you actually need to
| have your car serviced? And there is no shortage of
| places that will do it for you in a few hours.
|
| Similarly, if money were no real object within reason,
| I'm not sure what I would really need done on a day-to-
| basis that I couldn't just order or contract for pretty
| easily.
| dontwannahearit wrote:
| You clearly don't have enough cars. Once you get enough
| cars, especially if any of them are classic cars you
| actually want to drive occasionally and want to be in a
| driveable condition, you might want to have a full time
| mechanic.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >increasingly hostile to ordinary people educating their
| kids outside school
|
| There is a whole lot more nuance here than you're giving
| the topic.
|
| There is one side that wants to give their kids a good
| education, they have the resources and the motivation to
| ensure they come out ahead.
|
| They are not the problem, the problem is the other side of
| this coin.
|
| Where I grew up there were a lot of homeschooled kids that
| belonged to religious organizations. These groups had very
| little motivation to ensure they were intelligent, but
| instead nice dumb little worker bees that would stay with
| said organization and have little ability to work with the
| outside world at large. They were also at a much higher
| risk of being sexually abused/sexually trafficked as they
| were given little to no education about sex or risky
| adults.
|
| I still remember being a kid myself and having to educate
| these other kids my age because they were missing large
| chunks of important information about the world.
| graemep wrote:
| > Where I grew up there were a lot of homeschooled kids
| that belonged to religious organization. These groups had
| very little motivation to ensure they were intelligent,
| but instead nice dumb little worker bees that would stay
| with said organization
|
| Not true in the UK. Studies in many countries (the UK,
| US, Australia) and others have shown that home educated
| kids have better outcomes than school going kids after
| correcting for parental education, wealth etc.
|
| Yes, there are exceptions, but there are also bad schools
| and some terrible schools.
|
| UK law also requires children to receive a "suitable and
| efficient" full time education and there are legal
| mechanisms for sending children to school if they do not.
|
| > They were also at a much higher risk of being sexually
| abused/sexually trafficked as they were given little to
| no education about sex or risky adults.
|
| Stats in the UK show home ed kids are MUCH less likely to
| be abused, to self harm, or commit suicide.
|
| Of course there are bad home educating communities, but
| there are also some horrific schools and the latter are a
| lot more common. Does that mean we should shut down
| schools?
| latexr wrote:
| > Trouble who in power is willing to stop it?
|
| Absolutely no one.
|
| https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/719111/survival-of-t...
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwJQEAI_KE0
| pydry wrote:
| >We stand on the brink of a world where some wealthy people
| will get more wealthy, but very many will struggle without work
| or prospects.
|
| Brink? This has been the reality for decades now.
|
| >A society where a large percent have no income is
| unsustainable in the short term, and ultimately liable to turn
| to violence. I can see it ending badly. Trouble who in power is
| willing to stop it?
|
| Nobody. They will try to channel it.
|
| I think all signals are pretty inevitably pointing to three
| potential outcomes (in order of likelihood): WW3, soviet style
| collapse of the west or a soviet style collapse of the sino-
| russian bloc.
|
| If the promise of AI is real I think it makes WW3 a much more
| likely outcome - a "freed up" disaffected workforce pining for
| meaning and a revolutionized AI-drone first battlefield both
| tip the scales in favor of world war.
| KurSix wrote:
| People in power won't act out of foresight or ethics. They'll
| act when the cost of not acting exceeds the cost of doing
| something messy and imperfect
| relaxing wrote:
| Even that's giving them too much credit. They'll burn it all
| down preserve their fragile egos.
| coldtea wrote:
| They'll act when it profits them.
|
| What's stopping them from good actions is not the fear of
| "doing something messy and imperfect". It's the lack of
| financial and power-grabbing motivation.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > very many will struggle without work or prospects.
|
| People always say this with zero evidence. What are some real
| examples of real people losing their job today because of LLMs.
| Apart from copywriters (i.e. the original human slop creators)
| having to rebrand as copyeditors because the first draft of
| their work now comes from a language model.
| Throaway1982 wrote:
| book keepers, graphic artists
| nicksergeant wrote:
| I wouldn't let an LLM touch my business's books with a 10
| foot pole.
| Throaway1982 wrote:
| me neither, but that's because I used to be a bookkeeper.
| There's accountants though who have data entry people
| under them who they market as "bookkeepers," and they are
| now being replaced by AI. Most small business owners in
| particular dont care.
| generic92034 wrote:
| If your corp is large enough to use a full-sized ERP
| system it will no longer be your choice to make. The
| whole software industry is desperately trying to fit AI
| functions into every pore of their software, ERP vendors
| being no exception.
| coldtea wrote:
| Translators, graphic designers, soundtrack composers, call
| center/support workers, journalists, all have reported
| devastating losses coinciding with LLM use. And there's no
| shortage of companies press releases about cutting down
| thousands of jobs and saying it's because they leverage AI.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Call center workers are bound to a fixed script, they're
| basically humans who play robot as their job. Replacing
| this with AI is a welcome development. As for jobs like
| translator, graphic designer and journalist, it's only the
| extremely low-end work that can possibly be replaced with
| LLMs. Not an issue if they move upmarket.
|
| > And there's no shortage of companies press releases about
| cutting down thousands of jobs and saying it's because they
| leverage AI.
|
| These press releases are largely fake. "We're leveraging AI
| now" sounds a lot better than "whoops, looks like we
| overhired, we have to scale back and layoff workers because
| there's no demand for what we're doing".
| coldtea wrote:
| > _Replacing this with AI is a welcome development._
|
| Not if you fed your kid doing it, and now you can't.
|
| > As for jobs like translator, graphic designer and
| journalist, it's only the extremely low-end work that can
| possibly be replaced with LLMs. Not an issue if they move
| upmarket.
|
| Yes, fuck the 90% of those working in that space, and
| let's hope the 10% gets an "upmarket" gig there.
|
| All this grand-visioning sounds devoid of empathy and
| real understanding of millions of real people's
| situations and needs.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > Not if you fed your kid doing it, and now you can't.
|
| Which happens all the time anyway. There just aren't that
| many people for whom being a call center worker is their
| long-term career, they'll just switch to some other job.
| direwolf20 wrote:
| This works until we run out of sensible jobs, which may
| have already happened.
| coldtea wrote:
| There are millions upon millions of people where there is
| no "long-term career" period, just regular shitty and
| more shitty gig jobs and low end work like this, from
| factories and workcenters to burger flipping, to
| deliveries, loading, to cleaning, and everything in
| between. And they are getting increasingly squeezed and
| out of options.
| doctorwho42 wrote:
| What other jobs? I hate how people just throw that out as
| a viable path. In a world with ever increasing wealth
| inequality there is lower velocity of money (lower
| available cash flow) to enable the creation of jobs. And
| just pointing to the industrial revolution is not the
| panacea that you think it is. Past economic/tech
| revolutions creating new jobs, I have yet to see anyone
| point to a vast creation of jobs (or at least the
| starting trend of job creation)... Instead all the news,
| all the discussions, everything has been about (directly
| or indirectly) the decreased need for as many workers or
| the increased production of workers with the tools (which
| indirectly implies a decrease in workforce)
| SkyeCA wrote:
| > What other jobs? I hate how people just throw that out
| as a viable path.
|
| People on HN are extremely privileged and massively out
| of touch with the average normal person, what's new?
| baxtr wrote:
| I definitely recommend to watch this video with Reinhold
| Niebuhr.
|
| Sure some things deteriorate, but many things improve. Talking
| about a net decline (or net gain) is very difficult.
|
| Every age has its own set of problems that need to be solved.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=93EJJVAinRc
| ozmodiar wrote:
| Part of it is also that when we look back we think of
| people's suffering as sacrifices that needed to be made. Now
| that it's us being sacrificed it really shifts a lot of
| people's perspective. I think we need a better solution than
| letting a bunch of people get fucked so that some other set
| of people in the right place can have shinier toys in the
| future. Society needs to handle these transitions better,
| especially as technology raises the stakes with mass
| servailance and nuclear weapons.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| It only took 70 years (1880s to 1950s) and two world wars
| for the world to digest the industrial revolution and reach
| the 'capitalism lifts everyone' modern Capitalist(ish) era.
| Just think of the new kinds of jobs AI will enable our
| grandchildren to have after we inbetween sacrifice. Space
| yacht polisher. Space yacht teak refinisher. Space yacht
| eye candy.
| nosianu wrote:
| There is one thing different though: Technology allows
| surveillance on a level and scale that did not ever exist
| before. I would expect that that in turn allows far greater
| levels of oppression than ever before. And with all payments
| going more and more digital, if the powers decide to cut you
| off you can't even buy anything any more. Or get a job. Or go
| anywhere without being seen and identified by various
| cameras.
|
| Or, try organizing any kind of movement that those with power
| don't like. It does not even have to be violent! Here in
| Germany, as soon as the previous government with the Green
| Party was in power, a huge never-ending campaign started.
| Easy - after all, the vast majority of the important media is
| owned by very few, just like in the US. Funny enough, after
| inevitably that government failed, turned out the CDU failed
| many if not most of the promises made, and in other areas
| does exactly what they heavily criticized.
|
| The point is, surveillance, "soft" punishments, and media
| control and reach are on a whole new level. Trump wanted
| TikTok for a reason, and Musk wanted X not for the money that
| company could make.
|
| The more tech we have, and it's conveniently concentrated
| too, the worse it can get if you don't want to play that
| game.
|
| On top pf that, debt and a system of law heavily skewed for
| those with money, just because of its complexity and to gain
| access, and no more competition for minds from a block of
| socialist countries, so no clear alternative apart from
| obviously stupid ideas most people won't want to vote for,
| and this "democratic" system can go very far towards being
| very controlling and restricting for many.
|
| We can see for example in Iran, or few decades ago in China,
| or since it was founded in North Korea what happens when
| people protest - and how nothing changes. Now we have
| billionaires who would love to have similar powers, who don't
| want to be "held back" by laws and regulations.
| Davidzheng wrote:
| "People living in less advanced economies will do OK, but the
| rest of us not so much" how is this possible? are the less
| advanced economies protected from outside influences? are they
| also protected from immigration?
| iugtmkbdfil834 wrote:
| Not OP, but assuming I am following the argument correctly, I
| think parent is referring to something else. Advanced
| economies have participants, who function well in that
| environment and are shaped by it to a large degree. As a
| result, if one was to ask them to get food in an environment,
| where it is not as easily accessible as it is today, they
| might stumble. On the other hand, in the old country, a lot
| of people I knew had a tendency to have a little garden, hunt
| every so often, forage for mushrooms and so on. In other
| words, more individuals may be able to survive in less
| developed economies precisely, because they are less
| developed and less reliant on convenience today brings.
| Davidzheng wrote:
| ah makes a lot of sense! thanks!
| jezzamon wrote:
| It's no coincidence that populism is rising. That's the non-
| violent way out - electing leaders that are willing to change
| the dynamics a lot.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Populism _can_ be a non-violent way out, not _is_ the non-
| violent way out.
|
| As we saw 100 years ago, violent authoritarians will gladly
| use technology to make themselves look like the populists
| choice all the while planning to neglect the very thing they
| promised when they were getting elected.
| direwolf20 wrote:
| Populism is how you get elected, not what you do once
| elected. Disregarding current politics, _Adolf Hitler_ was a
| populist and that didn 't go very well, did it? As I see it
| now, populism means focusing on truthiness instead of truth,
| charisma instead of competency, and running the country into
| the ground because those things you don't have are actually
| important.
| 9rx wrote:
| _> We stand on the brink of a world where some wealthy people
| will get more wealthy_
|
| Not to the degree you might originally think. Most of the
| wealth being captured today is hypothetical wealth (i.e.
| promises) to be delivered in a hypothetical future. Except we
| know that future will never come as the masses, as you point
| out, have almost nothing, and increasing nothing, to offer to
| make good on those promises. In other words, it is just a piece
| of paper with IOU written on it, not real wealth.
|
| What that hypothetical wealth does provide and what makes it so
| appealing, however, is social standing. People are willing to
| listen to the people who have the most hypothetical wealth. You
| soon hear of what they have to say. When the hobo on the street
| corner says something... Wait, there is a hobo on the street
| corner?
|
| A small group of people having the ear of the people is human
| nature. In ancient times, communication challenges left that
| small group of people to be limited to a small community (e.g.
| a tribe, with the people listening to the tribe leader). Now
| that we can communicate across the world with ease, a few
| people rising up to capture the attention of the world is the
| natural outcome. That was, after all, the whole point -- to
| move us away from "small tribes" towards a "global tribe".
|
| Hypothetical wealth is the attention-grabbing attribute du
| jour, but if you remove it, it will just become something else
| like who is most physically attractive, who tells the funniest
| jokes, whatever. The handling of "Dunbar's number" doesn't go
| away.
|
| _> Trouble who in power is willing to stop it?_
|
| China has tried with its Great Wall (meaning the internet one,
| although perhaps you can find relevance in the physical one
| too), but is it successful? Maybe to some degree, but I expect
| many people in China still listen to what Elon Musk has to say,
| all while completely ignoring the millions of Chinese people
| immediately outside of their door. It isn't really something a
| power can do (ignoring that there even being a power
| contradicts the whole thing). The people themselves could in
| theory, but they would have to overcome their natural urges to
| do so.
| outime wrote:
| > 90% is a lot. Will you care about the last 10%? I'm terrified
| that you won't.
|
| I feel like long before LLMs, people already didn't care about
| this.
|
| If anything software quality has been decreasing significantly,
| even at the "highest level" (see Windows, macOS, etc). Are LLMs
| going to make it worse? I'm skeptical, because they might
| actually accelerate shipping bug fixes that (pre-LLMs) would have
| required more time and management buy-in, only to be met with
| "yeah don't bother, look at the usage stats, nobody cares".
| intrasight wrote:
| If it can enable very small teams to deliver big apps, I do
| think the quality will increase.
| KurSix wrote:
| I don't think LLMs are the root cause or even a dramatic
| inflection point. They just tilt an already-skewed system a
| little further toward motion over judgment
| jt2190 wrote:
| Every successful software project reaches an equilibrium
| between utility for its operators and bugs, and that point
| _very rarely_ settles at 0% bugs [1].
|
| When software operators tolerate bugs they're signaling that
| they're willing to forego the fix in exchange for other parts
| of the feature that work and that they _need_.
|
| The idea that consumers will somehow _not need_ the features
| that they rely on anymore is completely wrong.
|
| That leaves the tolerable bugs, but those were always part of
| the negotiation: Coding agents doesn't change that one bit.
| Perhaps all it does it allow more competitors to peel away
| those minority groups of users who are blocked by certain
| unaddressed bugs. Or maybe it gets those bugs fixed because
| it's cheaper to do so.
| hereme888 wrote:
| "terrified".... overused word. As a man I literally can't relate.
| I get terrified when I see a shark next to me in the ocean. I get
| impatient when code is hard to debug.
| KurSix wrote:
| We're pretty good at naming fear when it has a physical
| trigger. We're much worse at naming the unease that comes from
| watching something you care about get quietly hollowed out over
| time. That doesn't make it melodrama, just a different category
| of discomfort.
| mystraline wrote:
| Its existential dread, of being useless and of not being able
| to thrive.
|
| Its being compared to that of a slop machine, and billionaires
| claiming that its better than you are in all ways.
|
| Its having integrity in your work, but the LLM slop-machines
| can lie and go "You're actually right (tells more lies)".
|
| It all comes down to that LLMs serve to 'fix' the trillion
| dollar problem: peoples wages. Especially those engineers,
| developers, medical, and more.
| xandrius wrote:
| I wonder how people like you would have fared even just 100y
| ago, if typing on a keyboard with your own fingers is so
| foundational to your identity.
| direwolf20 wrote:
| Ask a horse buggy driver and find out.
| mystraline wrote:
| "People like (me)".. And what are me and people like me
| like?
|
| How's about you say what you're comparing me and people
| like me to.
|
| In my experience, people who use terms like "You people"
| are just using that as a placeholder for racism, sexism, or
| ableism. Which is it in your case?
|
| And 100 years ago, when industry took over something, the
| new thing still needed people. But thats not a hard
| economic law - thats just what happened before. There is no
| guarantee of that observation to still hold true.
| SkyeCA wrote:
| My job, a place I spend 1/3 of my days is a core part of my
| identity. It's also how I manage to feed myself.
| hereme888 wrote:
| I hear you, especially as a man, because we're attuned at
| looking for trouble in the horizon. AI is not some transition
| from horses to cars, which just meant selling the horse,
| buying a car, and continue your transport business. It's
| intelligence that may be able to take over all aspects of our
| current professional training, thus potentially threatening
| our livelihoods.
| mystraline wrote:
| Thats the underlying dread.
|
| The base capitalist premise is if you work, you'll have
| resources to survive and thrive. The flip-side is that if
| you cannot or refuse to work, you will starve, be
| destitute, homeless, without medical care, live under a
| bridge, and die hopeless.
|
| And societal failings in a capitalist system are always
| reflected towards the individual no matter what.
|
| Bad monetary policy? Should have saved. Businesses buy
| state laws to worsen worker laws? Get a better job. Got
| sick and medical lost your job? Too bad, go die, I guess?
|
| Its never a systemic thing we can identify and fix. But its
| always always reflected as a personal failing.
|
| Theres a top comment on this article that LLMs are a
| perfect parieto machine. 80% good, 20% utter shit and lies.
| That seems to track pretty well with what I'm seeing. If
| thats generally being accepted, I have to ask if my (and
| all others professional labor) if we're worth our wages for
| that 20%. And the question isnt being asked of us, but
| about us in HR and C levels.
|
| I'm already seeing "make do with what less labor you
| already have and hope AI helps". I support a national level
| thing (all 50 states). Used to be 3 engineers for backend.
| Now its just me. I'm already seeing the stark negative
| effects, overworking, sloperating as a necessity (no DBA),
| and hope and prayer stuff doesnt go down.
|
| And combined with the fact we're seeing worse hiring and
| layoffs since the Great Recession... Something's gotta
| change.
| relaxing wrote:
| Step 1: Start looking beyond your code, as the stuff beyond
| your code is looking at you.
| intrasight wrote:
| > I'm terrified that our craft will die, and nobody will even
| care to mourn it.
|
| "Terrified" is a strong word for the death of any craft. And as
| long as there are thousands that love the craft, then it will not
| have died.
| blaze33 wrote:
| As much as we speak about slop in the context of AI, slop as the
| cheap low-quality thing is not a new concept.
|
| As lots of people seem to always prefer the cheaper option, we
| now have single-use plastic ultra-fast fashion, plastic stuff
| that'll break in the short term, brittle plywood furniture, cheap
| ultra-processed food, etc.
|
| Classic software development always felt like a tailor-made job
| to me and of course it's slow and expensive but if it's done by
| professionals it can give excellent results. Now if you can get
| crappy but cheap and good enough results of course it'll be the
| preferred option for mass production.
| qwerpy wrote:
| > brittle plywood furniture
|
| If only it was plywood, at least it'd be solid and sturdy.
| These days it's particleboard, which is much worse than
| plywood. Similar concept, but now made out of sawdust and glue
| instead of woodchips and glue that are alternately laid down in
| different orientations layer by layer for increased strength.
|
| Particleboard chips much easier, breaks down much faster with
| moisture, and can't hold screws in. But it's very cheap, can be
| made very smooth, and is light.
|
| Agree with the general sentiment though.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Our paper on removing AI slop got accepted to ICLR 2026, and it's
| under consideration for an IgNobel prize:
|
| https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.15061
|
| Our definition of slop (repetitive characteristic language from
| LLMs) is the original one as articulated by the LLM creative
| writing community circa 2022-2023. Folks trying to redefine it
| today to mean "lazy LLM outputs I don't like" should have chosen
| a different word.
| suddenlybananas wrote:
| Words expand meanings all the time and frankly I don't think
| your narrow definition of slop was ever a common one.
| direwolf20 wrote:
| Slop is food scraps fed to pigs. Folks trying to redefine it in
| 2022-2023 as "repetitive characteristic language from LLMs"
| should have chosen a different word.
|
| A computer is a person employed to do arithmetic.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Sloppy joes is either a food item or a slur against the
| previous democratic president. Checkmate.
| zbentley wrote:
| I was disappointed that your paper devoted less than a sentence
| in the introduction to _qualifying_ "slop" before spending many
| pages _quantifying_ it.
|
| The definitions you're operating under are mentioned thus:
|
| > characteristic repetitive phraseology, termed "slop," which
| degrades output quality and makes AI-generated text immediately
| recognizable. (abstract)
|
| > ... some patterns occur over 1000x more frequently in LLM
| text than in human writing, leading to the perception of
| repetition and over-use - i.e. "slop". (introduction)
|
| And that's ... it, I think. No further effort is visible
| towards a definition of the term, nor do the background
| citations propose one that I could see (I'll admit to skimming
| them, though I did read most of your paper--if I missed
| something, let me know).
|
| That might be suitable as an _operating_ definition of "slop"
| to explain the techniques in your paper, but neither your paper
| nor any of your citations defend it as the common definition of
| an established term. Your paper's not making an incorrect claim
| _per se_ , rather, it's taking your definition of "slop" for
| granted without evidence.
|
| That doesn't bode well for the rigor of the rest of the paper.
|
| Like, look: I get that this is an extremely fraught and
| important/popular area of research, and that your approach has
| "antislop" in the name. That's all great; I hope your approach
| is beneficial--truly. But you _aren 't claiming a definition_
| of slop in your paper; you're just assuming one. Then you're
| coming here and asserting a definition citing "the LLM creative
| writing community circa 2022-2023" and asserting redefinition-
| after-the-fact, both of which are extraordinary claims that
| require evidence.
|
| Again, not only do I think that mis-definition is _untrue_ , I
| also think that you're _not actually defining_ "slop" (the
| irony of my emphasizing that in a not-just-x-but-y sentence is
| not lost on me).
|
| I don't know which of the authors you are, but Ravid, at least,
| should know better: this is not how you establish terminology
| in academic writing, nor how you defend it.
| Havoc wrote:
| The slop is sad but a mild irritation at most.
|
| It's the societal level impact of recent advances that I'd call
| "terrifying". There is a non-zero chance we end up with a
| "useless" class that can't compete against AI & machines - like
| at all, on any metric. And there doesn't seem to be much of a
| game plan for dealing with that without social fabric tearing
| danaris wrote:
| _Some_ of us have a perfectly good game plan for that. It 's
| called Universal Basic Income.
|
| It's just that many powerful people have a vested interest in
| keeping the rest of us poor, miserable, and desperate, and so
| do everything they can to fight the idea that anything can ever
| be done to improve the lot of the poor without destroying the
| economy. Despite ample empirical evidence to the contrary.
| alehlopeh wrote:
| Well that sounds less like a plan and more like a pipe dream.
| fragmede wrote:
| We can (and should) provide for those among us who aren't
| able to provide for themselves, without also firing everyone
| in the welfare department. UBI is shit. People need to do
| something in order to recieve money, even if the something is
| begging on the side of the freeway or going into the welfare
| office to claim benefits. Magic money from the sky is not the
| answer.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I agree with you about _magic money_. Frequently downvoted
| when I put it forward but by and large I think that the
| human psyche needs to have a daily sense of having
| "accomplished something".
|
| Otherwise I suspect many of us will (reluctantly) drift off
| into lives that center around drinking alcohol, playing
| video games...
| SkyeCA wrote:
| I have a decent job, get paid an acceptable amount, and
| at the end of the day I never get the feeling that I've
| "accomplished something".
|
| I'm extremely jealous of anyone who feels a sense of
| reward from their job.
| direwolf20 wrote:
| What if you have to dig holes and fill them back in to get
| the money?
|
| And some more people can do the useless work of tracking
| who filled and dug how many holes.
| danaris wrote:
| > People need to do something in order to recieve money
|
| Why?
|
| What purpose does this serve?
|
| Why should people have to prove their worthiness to be
| allowed to continue living?
| hgs3 wrote:
| > It's called Universal Basic Income.
|
| I'd rather we democratize ownership [1]. Instead of taxing
| the owning class and being paid UBI peanuts, how about
| becoming the owning class and reaping the rewards directly?
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_cooperative
| danaris wrote:
| Honestly, I'm all for something like that. It is, however,
| a much harder sell for most people.
| ninkendo wrote:
| I wouldn't call UBI a "game plan" so much as a thing people
| can point to so justify their actions to themselves. It helps
| you pretend you're not ruining people's lives, because you
| can point to UBI as the escape hatch that will let them
| continue to have an existence. It's not surprising that so
| many in the tech industry are proponents of UBI. Because it
| helps them sleep at night.
|
| Never mind that UBI has never actually existed, it probably
| never will exist, and it's _very, very_ likely that it won 't
| even _work._
|
| People need to face the possibility that we will destroy
| people's way of life the way we're headed, and to not just
| wave their hands and pretend that UBI will solve everything.
|
| (Edited to tone back the certainty in the language: I'm not
| actually sure whether AI will be a net positive or negative
| on most people's lives, but I just think it's dishonest to
| say "it's ok, UBI will save them.")
| danaris wrote:
| OK, maybe take it down a few notches?
|
| I'm only "in the tech industry" in the literal sense, not
| in the cultural sense. I work in academia, making programs
| for professors and students, and I think the stuff "the
| tech industry" is doing is as rotten as you appear to.
|
| UBI has never existed because the level of production
| required to support it has only just started to exist.
| (It's possible that we're actually not quite there, but
| that's something we can only determine by trying it out--
| and if we're not, then I'm 100% confident we can get there
| with further refinement of existing processes.) _If_ we
| have the political will to actually, genuinely do UBI--
| enough to support people 's basic needs of food, clothing,
| shelter, and a little bit of buffer, without any kind of
| means testing or similar requirements--then it's _very,
| very_ likely that it _will_ work. All the pilot programs
| give very positive data.
|
| I'm not pushing UBI because I think it's a fix to the
| problem of automation. I'm pushing UBI because I think it's
| the _fulfillment_ of the _promise_ of automation.
| KurSix wrote:
| I don't think craft dies, but I do think it retreats
| roxolotl wrote:
| LLM are an embodiment of the Pareto principle. Turns out that if
| you can get an 80% solution in 1% of the time no one gives a shit
| about the remaining 20%. I agree that's terrifying. The
| existential AI risk crowd is afraid we'll produce gods to destroy
| us. The reality is we've instead exposed a major weakness in our
| culture where we've trained ourselves to care nothing about
| quality but instead to maximize consumption.
|
| This isn't news really. Content farms already existed. Amusing
| Ourselves to Death was written in 1985. Critiques of the culture
| exist way before that. But the reality of seeing the end game of
| such a culture laid bare in the waste of the data center buildout
| is shocking and repulsive.
| KurSix wrote:
| The data center buildout feels obscene when framed this way.
| Not because computation is evil, but because we're burning
| planetary-scale resources to accelerate a culture that already
| struggles to articulate why quality matters at all
| direwolf20 wrote:
| There isn't nearly enough AI demand to make all of these
| projects turn a profit.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Unless you successfully make ai subscription an obligatory
| cost to pay for every employee in an org. Which they seem
| to be doing quite successfully considering enterprise sales
| activity.
|
| Successfull b2b salesmanship does not require a working and
| useful product. It just requires you to get these meetings
| with purchasers and show that other comparable orgs are
| buying your product. For example, at my last job I wasn't
| sure if we were a microsoft shop or a google shop because
| we bought both of their products that did the same thing.
| Because that is just what you do when you are an org with 5
| figure employee counts, you spend budget.
| slfnflctd wrote:
| Very well put, one of the more compelling insights I've seen
| about this whole situation. I feel like it gets at something
| I've been trying to say but couldn't find the right words for
| yet.
|
| Quality. Matters.
|
| It always has, and it always will. If you're telling yourself
| otherwise, you are part of a doomed way of thinking and will
| eventually be outcompeted by those who understand the
| implications of thinking further ahead. [ETA: Unfortunately,
| 'eventually' in this context could be an impossibly long time,
| or never, because people are irrational animals who too often
| prioritize our current feelings over everything else.]
| lbreakjai wrote:
| If quality matters then why is everything crap? Price has a
| quality of its own.
| slfnflctd wrote:
| As I said in my edit, "because people are irrational
| animals who too often prioritize our current feelings over
| everything else."
|
| Marginal improvements in quality which result in a marginal
| increase of cost/price often provide much better overall
| returns than just using a series of cheap substitutes that
| fail quickly. In some areas, this doesn't work, but I think
| shortsightedness is blocking truly better solutions in a
| great many cases. Particularly when true costs are being
| externalized.
| chung8123 wrote:
| AI slop is similar to the cheap tools at harbor freight. Before
| we used to have to buy really expensive tools that were designed
| to last forever and perform a ton of jobs. Now we can just go to
| harbor freight and get a tool that is good enough for most
| people.
|
| 80% of good maybe reframed as 100% ok for 80% of the people. It
| is when you are in the minority that cares about or needs that
| last 20% where it is a problem because the 80% were subsidizing
| your needs by buying more than the need.
| direwolf20 wrote:
| And then you have to buy it again next time because it broke.
| I've never killed a power tool. I don't use them that much but
| neither do you. And when you have a library of power tools in
| your shed and don't have to go out and buy one, you can do more
| things more quickly.
| snozolli wrote:
| _Before we used to have to buy really expensive tools that were
| designed to last forever and perform a ton of jobs. Now we can
| just go to harbor freight and get a tool that is good enough
| for most people._
|
| This just isn't true. First, cheap tools have always been
| around. I have a few that I've inherited from my grandfather
| and great-grandfather. They're junk and I keep them
| specifically to remind myself that consumer-oriented trash
| versions of better quality tools have always existed.
|
| Second, Harbor Freight is the only consumer-oriented tool
| retailer that seems to be consistently improving their product
| lines. Craftsman, which was the benchmark for quality,
| consumer-oriented hand tools, dropped off a cliff in terms of
| quality around the mid- to late-2000s.
|
| If you can afford professional-grade tools (Snap-On, Mac, Wera,
| Knipex, etc.) great. For the rest of us, Harbor Freight is the
| only retailer looking out for us. Their American- and
| Taiwanese-made tools are excellent. Their Chinese-made tools
| are good. Their Indian-made tools will get the job done, but it
| won't be pleasant. At least they give the consumer a range of
| options, unlike Snap-On, which gives you a payment plan.
| chung8123 wrote:
| Using tools broadly but things like torque wrenches, AC
| vacuum pumps, and other specialized tools have mostly been
| too expensive to buy. Now I can buy a cheap version and it
| works good enough for most cases. It is not cheaper even with
| buying the tools to do the work yourself.
|
| This is happening in other areas as well. The Chinese mini
| excavators and mini skid steers are changing what smaller
| landscape companies can do. They are not as good as a Kubota
| but they are 1/2 the price and 80% as good.
| tjr wrote:
| I'm glad cheap stuff exists. Sometimes I really do need
| something quickly, and borderline-disposable quality is good
| enough. But I also want the option to buy better than that.
|
| I installed some drywall a few years ago. I plan to install a
| room of drywall exactly never again. Not worth it for me to buy
| the best drywall tools.
|
| But I have installed multiple wood floors, replacing old
| carpet, and would do so again if needed. I'd rather get higher
| quality tools there so I can keep them and reuse them for
| years.
| frankie_t wrote:
| If slop doesn't get better, it would mean that at least I get to
| keep my job. In the areas where the remaining 10% don't matter,
| maybe I won't. I'm struggling to come up with an example of such
| software outside of one-off scripts and some home automation
| though.
|
| The job is going to be much less fun, yes, but I won't have to
| learn from scratch and compete with young people in a different
| area (and which I will enjoy less, most likely). So, if anything
| slop gives me hope.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| I find working with LLMs much more fun and frictionless
| comprated to the drudgery of boring glue code or tracking down
| nongeneralizable version-specific workarounds in github issues
| etc. Coding LLMs let you focus on the domain of you actual
| problem instead of the low level stumbling blocks that just
| create annoyance without real learning.
| direwolf20 wrote:
| Focusing on your problem means focusing on minimizing that
| stuff.. with LLMs it will fester.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| Not in my experience so far. But if it becomes a problem,
| I'll reconsider.
| RalfWausE wrote:
| Butlers jihad has to happen. Destroy the datacenters and give the
| oligarchs the french treatment!
| drzaiusx11 wrote:
| I have deep concerns surrounding LLM-based systems in general,
| which you can see discussed in my other threads and comments.
| However in this particular article's case, I feel the same fears
| outlined largely predate mass LLM adoption.
|
| If you substitute "artificial intelligence" with offshored labor
| ("actually indo-asians" meme moniker) you have some parallels:
| cheap spaghetti code that "mostly works", just written by farms
| of humans instead of farms of GPUs. The result is largely the
| same. The primary difference is that we've now subsidized
| (through massive, unsustainable private investment) the cost of
| "offshoring" to basically zero. Obviously that has its own set of
| problems, but the piper will need to be paid eventually...
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Cost of offshoring to ai isn't zero. Chatgpt and such are
| businesses. They charge subscriptions. In fact whatever cost
| you'd pay offshoring to india is probably where chatgpt is
| hoping to price its subscriptions eventually. Anything less is
| just leaving money on the table for chatgpt.
| elric wrote:
| Instead of money flowing to lower income countries (by virtue
| of their cheaper labour), which helped those countries grow,
| money is now flowing to the already richest economy on earth.
| That's a big difference.
| mktk1001 wrote:
| Interesting how your "structural critique of AI" requires you
| to characterize an entire workforce of engineers as producing
| "cheap spaghetti code" from "farms of humans" with a racial
| meme thrown in for flavor. Code quality tracks with investment
| and management, not ethnicity. You're not making the
| sophisticated point you think you're making
| secretsatan wrote:
| I was watching a youtube video the other day where the guy was
| complaining his website was dropping off the google search
| results. Long story short, he reworded it according to advice
| from Gemini, the more he did it, the better it performed, but he
| was reflecting on how the website no longer represented him.
|
| Soon, we'll all just be meatpuppets, guided by AI to suit AI.
| masswerk wrote:
| Actually Louis Rossmann finding himself forced to convert his
| genuine advocacy for repair into textual convenience.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=II2QF9JwtLc
| secretsatan wrote:
| That's the one
| bonoboTP wrote:
| Commercial ventures already had to care exactly to the extent
| that they are financially motivated by competition forces and by
| regulation.
|
| In my experience coding agents are actually better at doing the
| final polish and plugging in gaps that a developer under time
| pressure to ship would skip.
| ReptileMan wrote:
| Meh. Slop is not danger. Because in software lines of code
| quantity does not have quality on its own. Or if it has it is not
| a good quality. And bad software costs money. The problem with
| temu for the west is not that the things sold there are bad. The
| real problem rose in the last 2-3 years when they become good.
| fragmede wrote:
| The creme rises to the top. If someone's shit-coded program hangs
| and crashes frequently, in this day and age, we don't have to put
| up. with it any longer. That lazy half-assed feature that
| everyone knows sucks but we're forced to use it anyway? The
| competition just vibe coded up a hyper-specific version of that
| app that _doesn 't_ suck for everyone involved. We start looking
| at who's requiring what. What's an interface and what's required
| to use it. If there's an endpoint that I can hit, but someone has
| a better, more polished UI, that users prefer, let the markets
| decide.
|
| My favorite pre-LLM thing in this area is Flighty. It's a flight
| tracking app that takes available data and presents it in the
| best possible wway. Another one is that EU border visa residency
| app that came thru here a couple of months ago.
|
| Standards for interchange formats have now become paramount.
|
| API access is another place where things hinge on.
| TaupeRanger wrote:
| Right. If the "slop" is truly "90% as good" and that 10%
| actually matters to people, then they won't use the slop. If
| the 10% doesn't matter, there's probably a reason for that.
| hgs3 wrote:
| Why is slop assumed inevitable? These models are plagiarization
| and copyright laundering machines. We need a great AI model reset
| whereby all published works are assumed to opt-out of training
| and companies pay to train on your data. We've seen what AI can
| do, now fund the creators.
| amelius wrote:
| Good luck, there are too many forces working against that.
|
| Only big creative companies like Disney can play the game of
| making licensing agreements. And they are ok with it because it
| gives them an edge over smaller, less organized creators
| without a legal department.
|
| https://thewaltdisneycompany.com/news/disney-openai-sora-agr...
| direwolf20 wrote:
| Who's going to enforce that, exactly?
| slekker wrote:
| Y' know there's this thing called a government
| direwolf20 wrote:
| Y' know it's owned by big corporate interests.
| slekker wrote:
| I mourn for the US :(
| wundersam wrote:
| The terrifying part isn't obsolescence. It's mediocrity becoming
| the ceiling.
|
| AI produces code that technically runs but lacks the
| thoughtfulness that makes software maintainable or elegant. The
| "90% solution" ships because economic pressure rewards speed over
| quality.
|
| What haunts me: compilers don't make design decisions. IDEs don't
| choose architecture. AI does both, and most users accept those
| choices uncritically. We're already seeing juniors who've never
| debugged without a copilot.
|
| The author's real question: what if most people genuinely don't
| care about the last 10%? Not from laziness, but because "good
| enough" is cheaper and we're all exhausted.
|
| Dismissing this as "just another moral panic" feels too easy. The
| handcraft isn't dying because AI is too good. It's dying because
| mediocrity is profitable.
| gf263 wrote:
| Speaking of slop..
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| For real I'm starting to get a feel for the slop and the
| first sentance gave me pause. Never mind green username.
| Classic its not just that. Its this. LLM pattern.
| djoldman wrote:
| Now that generative AI products are becoming more widely used,
| it's a little depressing how folks don't seem to view the world
| with a broad historical context.
|
| The "AI effect" on the world has many similarities to previous
| events and in many ways changes very little about how the world
| works.
|
| > I'm terrified of the good enough to ship--and I'm terrified of
| nobody else caring.
|
| For almost every product/service ever offered, it was possible to
| scale the "quality" of the offering while largely keeping the
| function or outcome static. In fact, lots of capitalistic
| activity is basically a search for the cheapest and fastest way
| to accomplish a minimum set of requirements. This leads to folks
| (including me!!) to lament the quality of certain
| products/services.
|
| For example, it's possible to make hiking boots that last a lot
| longer than others. But if the requirement is to have it last for
| just 20 miles, it's better to pay less for one that won't last as
| long.
|
| Software is the same way. Most users just absolutely do not know
| about, care about, or worry about security, privacy,
| maintainability, robustness, or a host of other things. For some
| reason this is continually terrifying and shocking to many.
|
| There is nothing surprising here, it's been this way for many
| years and will continue.
|
| Obviously there are exceptions, but for the most part it's best
| to assume the above.
| kryogen1c wrote:
| It should also be noted that most companies that make high
| quality (last decades) low volume goods go out of business;
| people vote with their dollars and dont want the capex.
|
| Put another way, who here wants a car that costs more than
| their house? Or shoes that cost 2000$?
| doctorwho42 wrote:
| Or, wealth inequality has gotten so out of hand that people
| are forced to buy the cheaper products.
|
| It's the age old paradigm of buying a pair of shoes/boots,
| the poor man keeps buying $20 shoes/boots that wear out in a
| year or two. The wealthy man looks perplexed and states,
| "this is why they are poor, they don't understand investing
| in a quality pair of shoes/boots... For a measly $100 they
| could buy a pair of shoes/boots that would last them 10+
| years". But what is always overlooked, is that the poor man
| doesn't have the flexibility of spending to afford to invest
| better quality purchases, because the money needs to be
| applied to other problems in their lives.
|
| I would argue that this is one contributing factor, outside
| of companies just chasing the lowest quality/cost, that
| contributes to crappier stuff.
| gosub100 wrote:
| "It's expensive af to be poor" - unknown source
| 93po wrote:
| idk if this is useful info but at least in my case i tend
| towards cheaper items because
|
| 1. i dont want to worry about them getting damaged or lost
| or stolen
|
| 2. my preferences will likely change in a couple years
|
| 3. i may not want the item as much as i think i do
|
| i've owned a very expensive watch (many thousands of
| dollars) and i find myself almost never wearing it, both bc
| the style isnt exactly what im into these days, but i also
| worry about banging it on anything or the smallest
| scratches. it's nice to wear a cheaper watch (only a few
| hundred dollars in value) and just sort of not care about
| it.
|
| i've had my handful of "buy it for life" purchases and i'm
| struggling to think of literally any item like that i've
| purchased that i still use
| owlstuffing wrote:
| Yep, and...
|
| 4. the quality gap has closed considerably
|
| e.g., the function and durability of your $8k watch and a
| $300 watch are effectively imperceptible
|
| The gap is closing from both ends (cheap manufacturing,
| access to tech, etc.)
| shimman wrote:
| This might be true once in the past but even the "quality"
| brands are garbage today. It's all being made from the same
| factories with the same materials, with the same business
| magnates forcing worse quality at higher costs.
| acdha wrote:
| Some brands have definitely devalued themselves but it's
| definitely not "same factories with the same materials".
| If I buy a pair of jeans at Walmart and Costco, the
| latter ones will last years longer.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > wealth inequality has gotten so out of hand that people
| are forced to buy the cheaper products.
|
| Other people having more money does not result in higher
| prices for the rest, i.e. it does not cause inflation.
|
| For example, when I was a boy steak was a rare luxury.
| Today, a steak dinner costs less than a TV dinner or a bag
| of Doritos.
| auggierose wrote:
| That can't be a very good steak.
| WalterBright wrote:
| You're right, it's not a top cut. Still far better than a
| TV dinner.
| collingreen wrote:
| This is a fun "boots theory" bit from Terry Pratchets
| discworld. I don't know where it started but discworld is
| where I first read it described this way.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| > For example, it's possible to make hiking boots that last a
| lot longer than others. But if the requirement is to have it
| last for just 20 miles, it's better to pay less for one that
| won't last as long.
|
| Sure, but the OP's concern is whether this chokes off
| innovation. Is there some better kind of hiking boot, longer-
| lasting and cheaper and maybe more comfortable, that we've
| never found because the shoemakers who'd be able to invent it
| are too busy optimizing Nike production lines?
| doctorwho42 wrote:
| Exactly: is the local max or min for (hiking boots) currently
| the global max or min. And does the way LLMs work limit
| future exploration because it increases the activation cost
| of getting out of the local min/max due to the effects on
| society/workforce/corporate direction caused by LLMs?
| djoldman wrote:
| Possibly.
|
| But that question is impossible to answer and therefore can
| justify no recommended changes to the current state.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| Which is why the source article did not recommend any
| changes to the current state.
| ghaff wrote:
| I have custom hiking boots but they're very heavy. I have
| plastics for winter that are both very heavy and not very
| comfortable relatively. I rarely wear either.
| tuhgdetzhh wrote:
| Historically, every major general-purpose technology followed
| the same trajectory. Printing reduced the quality of
| manuscripts while massively increasing access.
| Industrialization replaced craftsmanship with standardization.
| Early automobiles were unreliable and dangerous compared to
| horse-drawn transport, yet they won because they were
| sufficient and scalable. The internet degraded editorial
| standards while enabling unprecedented distribution. None of
| these shifts reversed. They stabilized at a new equilibrium
| where high quality persisted only in niches where it was
| economically justified.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > Early automobiles were unreliable and dangerous compared to
| horse-drawn transport
|
| People have forgotten that a lot of people were killed by
| horses. Cities had to deal with vast quantities of manure and
| horse corpses. Horses knew they were slaves and you always
| had to be careful around them. Horses are expensive and
| required daily maintenance.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > The internet degraded editorial standards
|
| I'm not so sure about those editorial standards. The internet
| has revealed that there's a lot of propaganda in the
| newspaper editorials.
| user____name wrote:
| I feel like there's a false dichotomy here where there's an
| inverse relationship between quality and cost. I know seen
| plenty of cheap goods that do what they're supposed to and last
| forever, and I know plenty of expensive projects, both in
| purchasing price and development cost that are just steaming
| piles. So you get all this sloppy jank and say "well but at
| least it's fast and cheap". I'm not sure that's the argument
| you should be making, why can't we have high quality cheap
| things in the first place?
| djoldman wrote:
| Agreed. "Quality" is a shortcut word to mean an aspect of a
| product/service that many/most think desirable.
|
| There are examples of seemingly contradictory high/low cost,
| high/low durability, high/low reliability, high/low status
| symbol, etc. and seemingly every combination.
|
| Cars are a great example:
|
| * Reliable cars can also be cheap.
|
| * High status symbol cars can be incredibly expensive but
| also unreliable.
|
| * Expensive cars can be dangerous.
|
| * etc.
| autoexec wrote:
| The overall trend is that things are getting much more
| expensive while the quality is declining. It's inevitable
| when companies insist on endlessly increasing profits.
|
| Even the things that are "good enough" and cheap tend to come
| with massive hidden costs. For example, good looking clothing
| can be inexpensive enough for a person to wear everything
| once and throw it away, but behind the scenes there are child
| slaves, microplastics/PFAS contamination, and a textile waste
| crisis.
| the_pwner224 wrote:
| > things are getting much more expensive while the quality
| is declining
|
| This is totally untrue, material things have gotten way
| cheaper over time. TVs, cars, phones, technology,
| appliances, the list goes on and on.
|
| And quality has improved on many of these, a $500 TV today
| is way bigger and better than a $5k TV from a few decades
| ago. Same for cars & phones when you adjust for inflation.
| Home gadgets / IOT are much more accessible & affordable.
| Appliances have gotten cheaper and even the higher end
| products are quite affordable. Ikea furniture is cheap and
| many of their products are quite durable and solid quality.
|
| And old things weren't always better or more reliable than
| the modern cheaper products.
| direwolf20 wrote:
| We've gotten more pixels and bytes and flops, that's it.
| We haven't got more battery life, or faster computers,
| which is strange because they have orders of magnitude
| more flops in them.
|
| Casey Muratori showing off the speed of visual studio 6
| on a Pentium something after ranting about it: Jump to
| 36:08 in https://youtu.be/GC-0tCy4P1U
| autoexec wrote:
| Every time we get faster computers we get much much
| slower software. We get larger hard drives, so software
| bloats until it takes GBs
| the_pwner224 wrote:
| > We haven't got more battery life
|
| 15 years ago even the high end smartphones could barely
| make it half the day before dying. Now all-day battery
| life is the norm, and the Chinese phones with the latest
| battery tech can easily last 2 days (Samsung, Google,
| Apple are very behind here).
|
| Laptop battery life isn't even comparable to what it was
| 20 years ago.
|
| And software getting slower doesn't change the fact that
| our material goods (pixels, bytes, flops) have improved
| orders of magnitude while getting cheaper.
| decimalenough wrote:
| Back in the Nokia brick days you could easily go a full
| week between charges.
|
| Of course it's an apples to oranges comparison since a
| modern smartphone has infinitely more functionality, but
| in this one thing modern phones remain objectively worse.
| direwolf20 wrote:
| Does it, though? Unless you go back so far you're talking
| about fixed-layout b&w LCD screens, the next era after
| that had games and the internet -- what's actually new
| since that time? Multitasking yes, what else?
| autoexec wrote:
| Most of the things you call "way cheaper" have massive
| costs that aren't reflected in the price tag. The TVs,
| phones, and IoT appliances are spying on you 24/7 and
| pushing ads in your face. In terms of quality, much of
| that is highly debatable.
|
| If you compare a call over the newest iphone to a call
| over a rotary phone from 60 years ago guess which one
| gave users better call quality? I don't remember who made
| the joke about advertisers going from "You can hear a pin
| drop!" to "Can you hear me now?" but that sums up the
| problem very well. TVs are bigger but still can't do
| everything CRTs could (color accuracy, contrast, variable
| resolutions). We have faster hard drives with SSDs but
| with limited numbers of writes and they lose data when
| not powered. Everything is just trade offs. Some things
| have been improved, some things have gotten worse, but
| however good things are right now you can bet they will
| be made worse going forward. Enshittification is real and
| increasing all the time.
| djoldman wrote:
| For calculating price changes over time, there will
| always be the question: "is this the same product as
| earlier?"
|
| Without a reasonableness factor, prices can't be compared
| for anything. An egg from a chicken in 1940 is different
| from one in 2026. If we want to be pedantic, every egg is
| different.
|
| But I think it's pretty uncontroversial that the prices
| of TVs, cell phones, and most appliances, _with similar
| features_ , have fallen considerably over the last few
| decades.
| magicalist wrote:
| Yes, and you can get fresh tomatoes any time of year for
| cheap and they're so firm they won't get damaged in
| transit and with a blast of ethylene they're a perfect
| shade of red when you buy them.
|
| All things unquestionably better than the past. What's
| there to complain about?
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| Clothing is horrible. Shirts don't last a season.
| T-shirts (all brands) are kleenex. Like tshirts are
| basically how old scifi portrayed how UBI issued clothes
| would be. Outdoor gear companies no longer backup their
| products the failure rate is insanely high while being
| more expensive. Sony/Apple hugely expensive earbuds are
| basically disposable junk after a year or two whereas my
| old Sony headphones lasted decades. No earbuds are going
| to last decades. Olive oil mayonnaise number 2 and 3
| ingredients are other oils (split to two types so that
| olive oil is TECHNICALLY the highest percentage oil
| still). Google broke my phones voice command so I can't
| use it to set timers and I have less functionality than I
| did 10 years ago (home automations all broke, etc). Music
| services broke the algos so they no longer give me the
| 'best results for me' but for the company. New vehicle
| prices are higher than they have ever been for vehicles
| with repair costs so high they are going to be an
| insurance rate nightmare later in their lifecycle.
|
| Other than TVs (which are literally the 1984 screens,
| where you buy something to spy on you) everything is
| trash/misleading now.
| the_pwner224 wrote:
| My Bose headphones are at 8 years and in perfect
| condition with 90% of original battery life. Adjusted for
| inflation, they were way cheaper than those older
| headphones.
|
| Excellent quality olive oil is incredibly easy to find,
| if you're buying bottom barrel junk then that's on you.
|
| New vehicle prices when adjusted for inflation have not
| risen at all; when adjusted for
| features/comfort/reliability/luxury they've fallen a
| ridiculous amount.
|
| Same for clothing. My $14.88 Walmart jeans lasted for
| years before I sized out of them. My $15 t-shirts from
| Target are going strong. I recently got $15 gym shirts
| from Target which seem to be excellent quality, thick
| material and good stitching. The cheap gym shorts I
| bought literally 10 years ago are still in perfect
| condition. And again you need to adjust for inflation
| when comparing to the older clothing you're talking
| about.
|
| The OLED TV I got for $2700 a few years ago is now closer
| to $2k and has superior specs. And again, way superior to
| more expensive TVs from a decade or two ago.
|
| For car repair... what repair do you even need on a
| modern Japanese car? They just work forever if you do
| even the bare minimum maintenance. And honestly even if
| you neglect that maintenance. Yes labor costs have gone
| up but that's not relevant to this discussion.
|
| All your other complaints are about software which isn't
| really relevant to this discussion.
|
| Honestly all of this sounds like a "you problem." No
| offense.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| My Sony died very quickly. My Apple's are on their way
| out. Everyone I know is past their first earbuds
| purchase. Inflation adjustment doesn't apply when the
| product life is so incredibly different. The fact you
| even know your pairs life shows the previous effortless
| use of headphones versus modern use has been enshitified.
|
| I said Olive oil mayonnaise is an enshitified product
| abusing loopholes. That you can't read is on you (no
| offense).
|
| $15 gym shirts aren't tshirts (you know like 3 pack
| Hannes, Jockey). Again why are you trying so hard to
| reply t something I didn't write?
|
| If new vehicles are just as affordable why are average
| loan lengths going up? The average car loan in the 1970s
| was 30 months. Long-maturity auto loans carry
| substantially higher interest so it isn't gaming the
| system reasons.
|
| "Over 20% of new car purchases in Q4 2025 were 84-month
| financing deals."
| https://www.usatoday.com/story/cars/research/car-loans-
| finan...
|
| That decade ago TV didn't spy on you, and I conceded TVs
| are an outlier if you ignore the whole 1984 aspect.
|
| What car repairs does insurance cover? Where did I talk
| about maintenance? I talked about the cost to insure
| modern vehicles being higher especially later on. Context
| is important for comprehension.
|
| You can leave off the passive aggressive 'no offense'
| snark.
| djoldman wrote:
| > New vehicle prices are higher than they have ever been
| for vehicles with repair costs so high they are going to
| be an insurance rate nightmare later in their lifecycle.
|
| Just a shout out for this one. Possibly the most
| "irrational" purchases made right now by US consumers are
| _new_ cars. 5 year old cars are 60% cheaper than new!
|
| https://www.carfax.com/buying/car-depreciation
| dijksterhuis wrote:
| > Most users just absolutely do not know about, care about, or
| worry about security, privacy, maintainability, robustness, or
| a host of other things.
|
| nitpick: most users don't care about these things _until
| something goes significantly wrong and it impacts them_ , e.g.
| a massive data breach or persistent global downtime.
|
| then they get angry. very angry.
|
| just because people don't care about it _now_ doesn't mean they
| won't care about it _in the future_.
|
| edit -- these are the _hidden requirements_.
|
| > For example, it's possible to make hiking boots that last a
| lot longer than others. But if the requirement is to have it
| last for just 20 miles, it's better to pay less for one that
| won't last as long.
|
| until requirements change, or the hidden requirements come out
| to play ... most software engineers can probably recall
| multiple times when the requirements changed half way through.
| hell, i've done it on solo projects.
|
| now we're stuck with boots that can only last 20 miles, but we
| need to go 35.
| encom wrote:
| >until something goes significantly wrong
|
| Data breaches are so common they don't even register any
| more, and people share far more personal information now
| (willingly or not) than they used to. Remember when the
| common advice was "don't use your real name online"? Now
| every service demands your phone number to register, and
| those temporary email services (like 10minutemail) rarely
| work any more, in my experience. Downtime makes the news if
| it's bad enough, but Cloudflare, Microsoft and Amazon still
| control most of the internet. They fuck up badly all the
| time, and nothing ever happens. Windows 11 is literal adware,
| and Linux desktop usage is still a rounding error.
|
| Remember that Tea "dating" app that leaked pretty much
| everything last year? As far as I can tell, it's still in
| business.
|
| Many such cases.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > Now every service demands your phone number to register
|
| That appeared as a defense against people impersonating
| you, i.e. two factor authentication.
| BobbyTables2 wrote:
| Equifax arguably shouldn't still be in business...
|
| And yet not long ago its stock was nearly triple that of
| the time of the 2017 breach...
| djoldman wrote:
| > nitpick: most users don't care about these things until
| something goes significantly wrong and it impacts them, e.g.
| a massive data breach or persistent global downtime.
|
| > then they get angry. very angry.
|
| Yes, this has a lot of overlap with how humans differ from
| "Homo Economicus" [0].
|
| Humans generally can't find out, don't know, care to know,
| have the time to research, or are expert enough to understand
| the ramifications of decisions perfectly (or adequately to
| some definition of adequate).
|
| However, they do understand price!!! So you end up getting
| cheap stuff that everyone chooses because they don't
| understand how they lower their future risk or save money
| over the long run with a more immediately expensive option.
|
| This, also, has been true for a long long time. Humans are
| far more likely to choose the cheap option if they don't
| believe or understand the expensive one.
|
| Incidentally, this is somewhat rational given that marketing
| half-truths are rampant.
|
| [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_economicus
| rescripting wrote:
| I've noticed this is leading to less high quality products
| being produced in general. If the only real axis people
| understand is price then products can't compete on
| quality/durability/maintability/etc, and so they're pushed
| aside to lower the cost.
|
| A recent example: I've bought many articles of clothing
| from Eddie Bauer over the years because they have been
| generally high quality and durable, and even so are only a
| bit more expensive than other brands. However just last
| week they filed for bankruptcy. Sure, the company could
| have been mismanaged, but I'm sure competition from fast
| fashion brands with rock bottom prices didn't help.
| djoldman wrote:
| There is an interesting counter balance to this consumer
| tendency: the business.
|
| Businesses/organizations in a lot of ways act much more
| "rationally" than the individual consumer. So you'll see
| generally better car/truck maintenance in fleets than by
| consumers.
|
| Then there is a cool feedback/blowoff valve where more
| expensive + higher quality "pro" tools get discovered by
| consumers, drive up demand, the price falls, and then the
| features become common.
| direwolf20 wrote:
| I've never heard of Eddie Bauer, and if I did see that in
| a store, there's no way to know the clothing is of higher
| quality, or how much higher. In a market for lemons,
| lemons win.
| wingspar wrote:
| Haven't followed the recent history of Eddie Bauer, but
| seems they've sullied their brand for a while. Sam's Club
| has been selling Eddie Bauer stuff for years. I don't
| think a $37 pair of Eddie Bauer hiking boots are going to
| be quality.
| BobbyTables2 wrote:
| It's the externalized costs that bite society in the end.
|
| The short life boots are great for everyone (boot makers,
| suppliers) except the end user.
|
| A slightly higher quality boot could reduce their expenditure
| (monetary and time) and collectively allow society to devote
| the time and resources saved to higher goals.
|
| However the wants of the few outweigh the needs of the many.
| gyomu wrote:
| > The short life boots are great for everyone (boot makers,
| suppliers) except the end user.
|
| And the environment, which now gets polluted with discarded
| short life boots, and all the waste byproducts required for
| their production/transportation
|
| And the social fabric inevitably changes for one reflecting
| the priorities of a world of cheap disposable boots made
| far away
| WalterBright wrote:
| > lots of capitalistic activity is basically a search for the
| cheapest and fastest way to accomplish a minimum set of
| requirements
|
| This is what produced our high standard of living.
|
| For example, Ford and the Model T. Before the Model T, only the
| rich could afford to buy a car. Ford was relentless with the T
| in finding ways to cut the manufacturing cost. And the result
| was America got wheels.
| re-thc wrote:
| > For example, it's possible to make hiking boots that last a
| lot longer than others. But if the requirement is to have it
| last for just 20 miles, it's better to pay less for one that
| won't last as long.
|
| That's rewriting history especially in terms of software and
| hardware.
|
| Appliances like Microwaves, etc were revolutionary for its
| time. Only problem: they lasted forever (>20 years). No 1
| needed to buy it again = no business. It was deliberately not
| made to last as long and possibly not exactly cheaper both in
| cost and retail price.
|
| > Software is the same way. Most users just absolutely do not
| know about, care about, or worry about security, privacy,
| maintainability, robustness, or a host of other things.
|
| They don't want to know. They assume it is there. Most people
| have inherit trust with for example big companies.
|
| > In fact, lots of capitalistic activity is basically a search
| for the cheapest and fastest way to accomplish a minimum set of
| requirements.
|
| This is a rewrite of history to. In search? No. More like self
| create. Was Uber for example searching for the cheapest way?
| Well, yes, by throwing so much money to have a monopoly. We're
| currently throwing trillions at AI to find the "cheapest" way.
| Just like with the dot com era, we might not even recover 1%
| wasted. Are you sure it is the cheapest?
| djoldman wrote:
| > Appliances like Microwaves, etc were revolutionary for its
| time. Only problem: they lasted forever (>20 years). No 1
| needed to buy it again = no business. It was deliberately not
| made to last as long and possibly not exactly cheaper both in
| cost and retail price.
|
| I'm curious if the inflation-adjusted prices of those long-
| lasting early microwaves were less than the cost of 3 current
| microwaves that last 7 years. Also, this isn't an apples to
| apples comparison because they gradually lost performance
| over time and it took longer to heat up food as they aged.
| enraged_camel wrote:
| >> Appliances like Microwaves, etc were revolutionary for its
| time. Only problem: they lasted forever (>20 years). No 1
| needed to buy it again = no business. It was deliberately not
| made to last as long and possibly not exactly cheaper both in
| cost and retail price.
|
| This is a common myth that was debunked a while back.
| Essentially people get fooled by survivorship bias: they only
| see the few old appliances that somehow survived, and that
| leads them to conclude that things were higher quality back
| in the day.
| dspillett wrote:
| _> Most users just absolutely do not know about, care about, or
| worry about security, privacy, maintainability, robustness, or
| a host of other things._
|
| That is a problem that needs to be fixed in those users, not
| something we should take advantage of as an excuse for
| releasing shoddy work.
|
| _> For some reason this is continually terrifying and shocking
| to many._
|
| For _many_ reasons.
|
| It means that a good product can be outcompeted by a
| substandard one because it releases faster, despite the fact it
| will cause problems later, so good products are going to become
| much more rare at the same time as slop becoming much more
| abundant.
|
| It means that those of us trying to produce good output will be
| squeezed more and more to the point where we _can 't_ do that
| without burning out.
|
| It means that we can trust any given product or service even
| less than we were able to in the past.
|
| It means that because we are all on the same network, any flaw
| could potentially affect us all not just the people who don't
| care.
|
| The people who don't care when caring means things release with
| lower cadence, are often the same people who will cry loudest
| and longest about how much everyone else should have cared when
| a serious bug bites their face off.
|
| and so on... ... ...
|
| Are you suggesting we should just sit back and let then entire
| software industry go the way of AAA games or worse?
| c0_0p_ wrote:
| All true, except I think you've conflated software and software
| product a bit. The author is mourning the craft, the same way
| the boot makers or furniture makers probably mourned the
| decline of their craft. We'll still have boots, furniture, and
| software, but those craftspeople who take pride in it can
| justifiably feel melancholy about it all.
| onion2k wrote:
| One of the biggest problems with AI slop ( _the_ biggest problem)
| is that we aren 't discerning or critical enough to ignore the
| bad stuff. It should be _fine_ for people to use AI to generate
| tons of crap so long as people curate the good stuff to the top.
| wavemode wrote:
| Slop existed before AI came along.
|
| It's often lamented that the World Wide Web used to be controlled
| by indie makers, but now belongs to a handful of megacorp
| websites and ad networks pushing addictive content. But, the
| indie maker era was just a temporary market inefficiency, from
| before businesses fully knew how to harness the technology.
|
| I think software development has gone through a similar change.
| At one point software companies cared about software quality, but
| this too was just an idealist, engineer-driven market
| inefficiency. Eventually business leaders realized they can make
| just as much money (but make it faster) by shoveling out rushed,
| bloated, garbage software, since even though poor-quality
| software aggravates people, it doesn't aggravate enough for the
| average person to switch vendors over it. (Case in point - I'm
| regularly astounded at how buggy the YouTube app is on Android of
| all platforms. I have to force-kill it semi-regularly to get it
| working right. But am I gonna stop watching YouTube because of
| this? Admittedly, no, probably not.)
| direwolf20 wrote:
| You might install PipePipe or YouTube ReVanced, but they'd
| sooner ban you as a customer than improve their app quality.
| hdaz0017 wrote:
| We should have also been talking about "devops slop" since 2007!
| it's good enough we have heard this for how many decades?
| tim333 wrote:
| >What if AI stops getting better and what if people stop caring?
|
| Seems an unlikely problem. It'll get better, which may cause it's
| own problems.
| atomic128 wrote:
| Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the
| Slop
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46926439
| shmerl wrote:
| As it should.
| bitbasher wrote:
| > 90% is a lot. Will you care about the last 10%? I'm terrified
| that you won't.
|
| I would argue most never did.
|
| If you spend time in the startup world you quickly realize how
| little the average developer cares about craftsmanship or
| quality.
|
| The startup world is full of mantras like move fast and break
| things, or if you are not embarrassed by your mvp it's not an
| mvp.
| kaicianflone wrote:
| I'm a systems person too, and I don't see mediocrity as
| inevitable.
|
| The slop problem isn't just model quality. It's incentives and
| decision making at inference time. That's why I'm working on an
| open source tool for governance and validation during inference,
| rather than trying to solve everything in pre training.
|
| Better systems can produce better outcomes, even with the same
| models.
| jbonatakis wrote:
| I agree completely, and I'm doing the same thing. Good tools
| that help produce better outcomes will have a multiplicative
| impact as models improve.
|
| What are you building?
| b00ty4breakfast wrote:
| Generative AI is completely in line with the rest of the
| industrial milieu; pumping out product as quickly and as cheaply
| as possible. "Good enough" is often the standard, even before the
| industrial mode, but the industrial mode allows "good enough" to
| compound exponentially until you've got an edifice of trash that
| continues tumbling downhill on sheer momentum and we all scramble
| to fix the thing in situ.
|
| This is how our world works and until it hits the proverbial
| wall, this is how it will continue to work because it's too big
| to be detoured or course-adjusted
| myth_drannon wrote:
| From The Free Press article:
|
| In a 1995 interview with Inc. magazine, author Kurt Vonnegut was
| asked what he thought about living in an increasingly digitized
| world. His response is so perfect that it's worth reprinting in
| full:
|
| I work at home, and if I wanted to, I could have a computer right
| by my bed, and I'd never have to leave it. But I use a
| typewriter, and afterwards I mark up the pages with a pencil.
| Then I call up this woman named Carol out in Woodstock and say,
| "Are you still doing typing?" Sure she is, and her husband is
| trying to track bluebirds out there and not having much luck, and
| so we chitchat back and forth, and I say, "OK, I'll send you the
| pages."
|
| Then I'm going down the steps, and my wife calls up, "Where are
| you going?" I say, "Well, I'm going to go buy an envelope." And
| she says, "You're not a poor man. Why don't you buy a thousand
| envelopes? They'll deliver them, and you can put them in a
| closet." And I say, "Hush." So I go down the steps here, and I go
| out to this newsstand across the street where they sell magazines
| and lottery tickets and stationery. I have to get in line because
| there are people buying candy and all that sort of thing, and I
| talk to them. The woman behind the counter has a jewel between
| her eyes, and when it's my turn, I ask her if there have been any
| big winners lately. I get my envelope and seal it up and go to
| the postal convenience center down the block at the corner of
| 47th Street and 2nd Avenue, where I'm secretly in love with the
| woman behind the counter. I keep absolutely poker-faced; I never
| let her know how I feel about her. One time I had my pocket
| picked in there and got to meet a cop and tell him about it.
| Anyway, I address the envelope to Carol in Woodstock. I stamp the
| envelope and mail it in a mailbox in front of the post office,
| and I go home. And I've had a hell of a good time. And I tell
| you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody
| tell you any different.
|
| We're dancing animals. How beautiful it is to get up and go do
| something
| samiv wrote:
| What terrifies me is the total and utter potential disruption to
| our economies in a very rapid order.
|
| Software is just a proxy for the thing that we want which is
| data. The same way an electric drill is a proxy to a hole. Since
| it's impossible to sell holes there's a market for selling
| electric drills to make holes.
|
| A lot of economic activity is based on these proxies. Same in the
| software digital world. Even though it's data that were after
| many successful software businesses have been started to sell the
| tools, i.e. software products for people to make their digital
| "holes".
|
| Now imagine if you could just suddenly 3D print your electric
| drill. Or your frying pan. Or your garden shears. What would
| happen to the economiies based on selling these tools?
|
| Once you can prompt your way to any digital creation what happens
| to the economies based on making the digital tools?
|
| It's not there yet, but if/when it does it's going to be a
| complete economic restructuring that will affect many. Careers
| will be wiped out, livelihoods will be lost.
| whaleidk wrote:
| Hopefully this does not count as being uncivil, I just want to
| cut through what feels like insanity to put my (and at least a
| few others') feelings plainly:
|
| If you are one of those devs who heavily uses LLMs at work and
| you are in a position of relative authority, either as senior+ or
| something else, and you hand off your LLM code to others to
| review or "build off of"... we hate you. We don't want to be your
| voluntold slop jannies. LLM over use and vibe coding is taking a
| fairly enjoyable job and making it insufferable. Now I have to
| sift through 3-10x more lines of code that are written in a non-
| human thought process using terrible naming schemes and try to
| find the bug... just to realize that the code isn't even solving
| for the correct or underlying problem. _Every_ time I have to
| interact with a co-workers LLM code, my tasks take _weeks_ longer
| than they would have. This is including the ones who claim to be
| exerts in prompting and harnessing and whatever skibidi buzzword
| is out this week.
|
| You are not saving time, you only think you are because you don't
| look closely at the output and send it off to your lowley
| janitors to deal with. And the people who claim to be running 20
| or 30 AI tasks at once what are you even building? If you aren't
| literally shipping the next Amazon that's just embarrassing.
|
| I can not wait for people to wake from this bizarre mass
| psychosis. I already see co-workers context window getting
| smaller than free version ChatGPT in an incognito window.
| iuufuri wrote:
| That this person has a .jp address may be relevant. In my
| experience Americans are much more tolerant of "good enough"
| than, say, Japanese people. An American might even ship a high
| end final product with four figure price tag that literally was
| made with hot glue. ( _cough_ Grado)
|
| Whereas a Japanese business would rather just not ship in such a
| case. Look at the Nintendo, such as the 3d Mario games. Those
| things are polished to an insane degree that no American studio
| would bother with.
|
| Apple is exceptional in many ways and this is one of them.
| Microsoft, with "no taste", is the standard American fare.
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