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Slop Terrifies Me

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Re: Slop Terrifies Me

#211

Post by encom »

dijksterhuis wrote: post #204
djoldman wrote: post #108

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 offe…

> 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’…

>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.

Re: Slop Terrifies Me

#212

Post by qwerpy »

blaze33 wrote: post #25

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 sl…

> 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.

Re: Slop Terrifies Me

#213

Post by nosianu »

Findecanor wrote: post #130
satisfice wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

> 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.

Re: Slop Terrifies Me

#214

Post by ghaff »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #153
djoldman wrote: post #108

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 offe…

> 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 b…

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.

Re: Slop Terrifies Me

#215

Post by acdha »

shimman wrote: post #184
doctorwho42 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 shoe…

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.

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.

Re: Slop Terrifies Me

#216

Post by kjkjadksj »

coldtea wrote: post #172
pixl97 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 br…

So easy to control that most rich people throughout history were murdered by their guards and close helper circle.

Epstein had a staff of 70 on that island kept mum

Re: Slop Terrifies Me

#217

Post by djoldman »

dijksterhuis wrote: post #204
djoldman wrote: post #108

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 offe…

> 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’…

> 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

Re: Slop Terrifies Me

#218

Post by jodrellblank »

danaris wrote: post #52
Der_Einzige wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

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?

Re: Slop Terrifies Me

#219

Post by kjkjadksj »

direwolf20 wrote: post #147
quantummagic wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

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.

Re: Slop Terrifies Me

#220

Post by gf263 »

wundersam wrote: post #102

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.…

Speaking of slop..
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