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Slop Terrifies Me

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Re: Slop Terrifies Me

#251

Post by the_pwner224 »

direwolf20 wrote: post #246
the_pwner224 wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 m…

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

> 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.

Re: Slop Terrifies Me

#252

Post by collingreen »

doctorwho42 wrote: post #171
kryogen1c wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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$?

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 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

Re: Slop Terrifies Me

#253

Post by mktk1001 »

drzaiusx11 wrote: post #54

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…

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

Re: Slop Terrifies Me

#254

Post by squidsoup »

direwolf20 wrote: post #57
lm2s wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, that’s why they are on the race to building the very advanced robots. To prevent the violence towards them.

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.

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...

Re: Slop Terrifies Me

#255

Post by djoldman »

autoexec wrote: post #248
the_pwner224 wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 m…

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…

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.

Re: Slop Terrifies Me

#256

Post by ryan_n »

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…

[dead]

Re: Slop Terrifies Me

#257

Post by _DeadFred_ »

the_pwner224 wrote: post #240
autoexec wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

> 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 m…

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.

Re: Slop Terrifies Me

#258

Post by decimalenough »

the_pwner224 wrote: post #251
direwolf20 wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> 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 ma…

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.

Re: Slop Terrifies Me

#259

Post by the_pwner224 »

_DeadFred_ wrote: post #257
the_pwner224 wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 m…

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. N…

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.

Re: Slop Terrifies Me

#260

Post by _DeadFred_ »

ozmodiar wrote: post #115
baxtr wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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 a…

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.
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