Objects in Mirror Appear Smaller Than They Are (*)

(*) Astronomical telescope joke.

The market will kill it naturally

Yes there's a mechanism for that. It's called destroying a part of your life. Maybe you lose your job "naturally". Maybe you lose 10-20 years of your wealth growth "naturally". Maybe crime goes up in your neighborhood "naturally".

No. There's nothing "natural" about market repricing mechanisms, they are destructive, and many people get hurt. In the case of the AI bubble, those getting hurt are not the billionaires early investors, unless we actively resist it.

You're either with us or against us, like one of your compatriots used to say.

AI slop is a completely different kind of slop from bad human programming. You can't mix up AI slop and bad human programming into one single category. That's an oversimplification which hinders intelligent discussion.

And it doesn't use MongoDB.

MongoDB is webscale.

Also an additional question: If AI writes most of your code today and god forbid if both Anthropic + OpenAI close shop tomorrow, who will write most of your code then?

That's right, my point is exactly that. Humans live in the human world where herd mentality is the law and your job as a child is to master enough social patterns so that you can thrive during your lifetime. That game is a lot more complex than trying to pass off an LLM text as a human text.

On your second paragraph, I would merely indicate to you that the high water mark is not the same as the low watermark, or the median or the mean. Pointing to a few instances of "excellent writing" is statistical noise if the bulk of normal LLM written instances does not also qualify as "excellent writing". But if most or all instances of LLM writing objectively constituted "excellent writing" then it would be very easy to spot, as it would stand out against human "average writing". Either way, the in-crowd can recognize the out-crowd.

Excellent! Luckily I have a life outside of slashdot :)

Nope. The Open Source ethos is that you get to use the software (you need explicit permission), and also to see the source code and modify it if you want, provided you contribute back. You can contribute with money, or with resources, or with bug reports, or even with explicit attribution, etc.

What you are seeing here is several generations of startups and small or large businesses using software they found on the internet for free, setting up a website once and never maintaining it. The fact that the software they use is open source is irrelevant. They're not looking at the source, the contractor who built the site is nowhere to be found, and the vulnerabilities are here to stay.

Truly no-one has to worry about this scenario. Anyone who interprets a rejection of AI slop writing as an AI classification problem misses the point.

The point is: humans have many ways to separate the in-crowd from the out-crowd, and it's not well defined what criteria are used.That's what nerds in High School always misunderstand. They think it's about breaking that one specific unfair rule. It's not and never will be.

People who fake their own writing using AI slop can be found out, either after the first incident, or the second, or the third, through a combination of many unrelated things. It doesn't matter what precisely.

Once you're labeled out-crowd, you probably stay there. Maybe you're incensed about it. Maybe you feel it's unfair that you're labeled this way for a single infraction. Doesn't matter. It's not about classification errors and well defined detection problems. It's about being socially accepted or not. There are no fixed rules.

If you fuck up you're out. So don't fuck up in trivial ways that are easy to spot.

That is probably a good thing. The open internet has been a cesspool of advertising and commercial garbage for a long, long time. The sad part is merely that kids who grew up with that never knew what it was originally.

Yes. What you're missing is that AI researchers are, by and large, dumb. There's a handful of scientist types who are subject matter experts and think this makes them smart enough to make decisions in another subject they know nothing about. Then there's a much larger handful of groupies who worship the scientist types and will just go along whatever is proposed, no matter how sketchy. Finally, there's the handful of lowly IT guys who are treated as morons by the researchers, and are not allowed to interfere with the important work of testing the Stupid Intelligence models.

I think that's mostly what you're missing.

It's not just bits going in and out. It's also noise pollution, water usage, and higher electricity prices. Building on nature reserves. And when the AI bubble crashes next year, all those half finished buildings will be abandoned.

Yes, you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs. Lots of early pioneers also died in the 1900s when humanity learned to fly. None of it matters if you lose the race.

Now, the real question is why do you need to race to the moon? Maybe let the Chinese get there first and reap the second mover benefits instead.

Sorry. Disagree. Google Evil.

Why? Safety means nothing if you lose the race!