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Slop Terrifies Me

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Re: Slop Terrifies Me

#281

Post by tjr »

chung8123 wrote: post #47

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 b…

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.

Re: Slop Terrifies Me

#282

Post by BobbyTables2 »

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’…

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.

Re: Slop Terrifies Me

#283

Post by _DeadFred_ »

the_pwner224 wrote: post #259
_DeadFred_ wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Re: Slop Terrifies Me

#284

Post by BobbyTables2 »

encom wrote: post #211
dijksterhuis wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Dow…

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…

Re: Slop Terrifies Me

#285

Post by whaleidk »

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.

Re: Slop Terrifies Me

#286

Post by gyomu »

BobbyTables2 wrote: post #282
dijksterhuis wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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’…

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.

> 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

Re: Slop Terrifies Me

#287

Post by danaris »

ninkendo wrote: post #175
danaris wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 actuall…

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.

Re: Slop Terrifies Me

#288

Post by danaris »

jodrellblank wrote: post #218
danaris wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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,…

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.)

Re: Slop Terrifies Me

#289

Post by iuufuri »

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.

Re: Slop Terrifies Me

#290

Post by [deleted] »

SkyeCA wrote: post #210
JKCalhoun wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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