I'm actually credited on the Wikipedia page for "slop" for helping spread the term - I wrote about it right as it was emerging https://simonwillison.net/2024/May/8/slop/ and did some press interviews to push it around then too. I'm up to 40 posts on my blog tagged "slop" now: https://simonwillison.net/tags/slop/ I consider covering AI misuse as part of my "beat" that I write about - there are so many bad ways to appl…
We should also be cautious to not characterize an article we don't like as slop
I didn't dislike the article for its content. I disliked it for its insincerity - see the piece I quoted for an example.
It's not just waiting on them, you're going to be reviewing an endless flood of their agentic slop, cajoling or bullying them into sticking with a problem or looking harder for information, all in between glancing at AI summaries of your colleagues' AI generated Slack messages and approving the AI generated auto-replies.
It's like having a whole team of developers to help me!! Except they're all brain damaged and completely incapable of learning from experience and never improve on their brain damaged ways. On the plus side, I can let my frustration out by calling them fucking morons without getting HR mad at me
True thought leaders are asking "what could I build, if I had access to infinite incompetent junior engineers?"
Quotes from the article: 'Work as Identity: The Foundation' Knowledge workers hold a different relationship to their labor than manufacturing workers did. For a cognitive professional, expertise is not only an activity. It is a large part of the self. A data scientist who has spent a decade building statistical judgment does not experience that judgment as a detachable tool. It is closer to a personality trait. When…
> Knowledge workers hold a different relationship to their labor than manufacturing workers did. For a cognitive professional, expertise is not only an activity. It is a large part of the self. A data scientist who has spent a decade building statistical judgment does not experience that judgment as a detachable tool. It is closer to a personality trait. When automation threatens the work, it reaches past the income and touches the identity.'
I think the idea that coal miners or factory laborers or whoever else in blue-collar work did not identify with their work is just wrong, and there's evidence going back as far as the Tomb of Eurysaces the Baker of people deeply identifying with work we might otherwise be tempted to view as lowly.
Truck driver to nurse is special kind of issue, because nursing is feminine coded occupation and trucking attracts men who want to prove own masculinity. But they will take jobs that are not that much feminine. And nursing also require a lot more study then people assume, 40 years old trucker will have hard time spending that much time in school even if it was his lifelong dream.
> nursing is feminine coded occupation and trucking attracts men who want to prove own masculinity In your head maybe?
The profession is in reality overwhelmingly female, and it is associated with women in basically the entire world. Even from a linguistic perspective, the origins of the English word is gendered (the association with wet nurses is unmistakably feminine), and similar phenomenon happen in other languages. It's no longer considered the polite word to use, but if you read moderately old Japanese texts you'll find nurses referred to as "kangohu," no longer preferred because the "hu" part specifically means "woman." I'm sure if we did a survey of more world languages we'd find other hints. Even high-minded economic writing will describe it as "pink-collar" work. You could quite sensibly argue that it should be otherwise but the world is not as we might wish it were.
The idea that skilled people who work with their hands don't identify with their work is laughable.
The article says nothing about “skilled people who work with their hands” specifically, so it’s unclear what is being refuted here. However there are people in the workforce who don’t identify with their work. Those are likely not in professions that Marx thought of when he wrote about alienation, but instead are Uber Eats delivery drivers, call centre workers, flight attendants on low-cost airlines, nurses in medioc…
I'm sure there are but I am just as sure some of these people also identify with their work.
It is absolutely possible economically. It may not be possible politically (right now) but that's a very different reason.
Explain how it is possible economically, debunk all arguments experts have claimed of it being mathematically unfeasable, you can use GPT latest deep research extended thinking consortium. Thanks
It's not just waiting on them, you're going to be reviewing an endless flood of their agentic slop, cajoling or bullying them into sticking with a problem or looking harder for information, all in between glancing at AI summaries of your colleagues' AI generated Slack messages and approving the AI generated auto-replies.
It's like having a whole team of developers to help me!! Except they're all brain damaged and completely incapable of learning from experience and never improve on their brain damaged ways. On the plus side, I can let my frustration out by calling them fucking morons without getting HR mad at me
> It's like having a whole team of developers to help me!! Except they're all brain damaged and completely incapable of learning from experience and never improve on their brain damaged ways
Funny that things are discussed in HN only when "Tech Workers" are affected. Artists feel the same about AI, it is probably much worse for them. Computer was a job before becoming a machine. And IT has been automating jobs out of existence ever since. This has been going for centuries.
I mean, yeah? People were getting sad about death thousands of years ago yet that doesn't stop people today from getting sad about it either.
You must truly have no love for your craft if you see "manually" writing code as _just_ typing. That's like calling writing a novel just dragging ink over paper.
Yeah, sure. We both know it’s not black and white. Like all of you write rocket ship software. You’re all funny. Heads too far up your asses. What fucking craft are you talking about “implement this html and css exactly like described in the ticket”, or “write this deployment pipeline for that client for the 50th time”, or “implement authentication for the 15th time this year”. Really fucking novel stuff. Craft my as…
Not going to bother responding to most of that as it does not warrant a response, but I would point out that the word craft does not imply novelty or uniqueness.
Yeah, sure. We both know it’s not black and white. Like all of you write rocket ship software. You’re all funny. Heads too far up your asses. What fucking craft are you talking about “implement this html and css exactly like described in the ticket”, or “write this deployment pipeline for that client for the 50th time”, or “implement authentication for the 15th time this year”. Really fucking novel stuff. Craft my as…
Not going to bother responding to most of that as it does not warrant a response, but I would point out that the word craft does not imply novelty or uniqueness.