Well, it kind of sucks to have an idea to contribute and no way to contribute because you have to be invited by someone before you can offer...

The problem is volume.

Just like AI slop content isn't generally that much worse than human slop that flooded the services, at *least* the human slop required more effort to generate than it takes a person to watch, and that balance meant the slop was obnoxious, but the amount was a bit more limited and easier to ignore.

Now the LLM enables those same people that make insufferable slop to generate orders of magnitude more slop than they could before. Complete with companies really egging them on to make as much slop as they possibly can.

LLM can be useful for generating content, but it is proportionally *way* better at generating content for content creators that don't care about their content.

Which for self-directed people is an easy-ish solution, don't let the LLM far off a leash if you use it at all. Problem is micromanaging executives that are all in and demanding to see some volume of LLM usage the way they think is correct (little prompt, large amounts of code).

As far as I've seen, the AI fanatic's answer is "don't care about the code".

They ask for something and whatever they get, they get. The bugs, the glitchiness, the "not what they were expecting" are just accepted as attempts to amend purely through prompting tend to just trade one set of drawbacks for another rather than unambiguously fix stuff. Trying again is expensive and chances are not high that it'll be that much better, unless you have an incredibly specific and verifiable set of criteria that can drive automatic retry on failure. However making that harness is sometimes harder than making the code itself, and without a working reference implementation even that may be a lost cause.

I've always hated trying to salvage outsource slop, and LLM has a very similar smell with similar reactions where people resign themselves to the crappiness.

Well, in one respect it is 'very useful'. Executive direction that the legacy codebase must be 'documented' fully. Poof, it is 'documented'. Is it correct? Who knows, no one will ever read it, but it fluffs the executives "thought leadership". The compromise between 'port the code' which is a risk no one will take and 'document the code to prepare for a porting effort that will never come'.

Just be careful to keep the LLM vomit clearly distinguished from actually curated documentation, lest some naive person one day believe the documentation is actually based on anything.

So we have LLM vomit directed in ways to make the leadership feel like we are 'properly' leveraging the hype while we wait for the hype train to run out of steam.

Problem being that this is requests from people trying to contribute.

Even when they avoided github, they got hit.

I wager at one point, a project that stayed strictly email based will have threads with this sort of slop in it.

Unless you make your repository and all means of contact with you invite-only, it's going to be hard to avoid.

Though they managed to ultimately extend this github brand to github copilot, that will gladly push stuff to forgejo, gitlab, etc...

Even worse, they've extended it to tooling that they pitch to developers who use git for anything under the brand affinity of 'github' (which *way* too many people already assumed git == github).

May not ever 'figure it out'.

A lot of 'leadership' saw "everyone is hiring tech" in the aftermath of the pandemic and so they did, with or without any vision.

This represents a narrative consistent with shedding those people they didn't have business value for. So they end up no more broken than they were in 2019, and it provides a narrative consistent with doing things "right".

Based on some codebases I've seen...

AI slop can be bad, but has *nothing* on the closed source codebases I've seen for low quality slop.

... to never buy Apple products. I don't need a nanny, and my children have parents that pay attention. Why should I have my privacy invaded and surveilled just because some parents don't know how to parent.

And anyone who doesn't think this will be easily circumvented is naive or has never had an intelligent child.

So, during this story, someone pointed out a command to contextualize the info:
# userdbctl user --output=json $(whoami)

Ok, so run that and I see "hashedPassword". A field that my entire career has been about "not even the user themselves should have access, even partial access to it needs to be protected by utilities that refuse to divulge that to the user even as they may need that field to validate user input. And now, there it is, systemd as a matter of course saying "let arbitrary unprivileged process running as the user be able to access the hashed password at any point".

Now this "age verification" thing? I think systemd facet is blown out of proportion. All it is is a field that the user or administrator injects, no "verification". Ultimately if wired up, the only people that are impacted are people who do not have admin permissions to their system and have an admin that's forcing your real date of birth somehow.

The biggest problem comes with "verification" for real, when an ecosystem demands government ID or credit card. However, most of the laws consider it sufficient for an OS to take the owner at their word as to the age of the user, without external validation. So a parent might have a chance at restricting a young kid (until kid knows how to download a browser fork that always sends the "I'm over 18" flag when it exists), but broadly the data is just whatever the people feel like.

While it is an enormous problem, possibly the most significant, we know how to shield against radiation, but it's going to take mass in the form of hydrogen-rich molecules like water or polyethylene (as examples). To solve that problem we are either going to have to make launches a lot cheaper, or figure out how to do it all in orbit.

It's at the edge of our technological capacity to produce such a spacecraft now, so the barrier is economic. That's a massive barrier, but in theory we definitely could, if we put a significant percentage of GDP of the wealthiest nations towards the project, produce a spacecraft that keep astronauts alive and relatively protected from ionizing radiation both on the journey and while on Mars.

As to your general assholery, I guess everyone has to have an outlet, though why Slashdot is a bit mysterious.

One, how much is owed to dubious hardware vendors that don't even play in the Mac ecosystem.

The "lasts longer" is not necessarily a statement of durability, it's mostly about being a prolific business product and business accounting declaring three year depreciation.

I'm no fan of Windows and don't like using it, but these criteria are kind of off.

Delete your account if you want to, but please don't delete posts and comments. I sympathize wanting to stick it to Reddit and not giving them free content to whore out to AI companies for training, but for the millions of normal people who might get value from comments it's really frustrating.

There are tools to mass-edit all your reddit comments and it's incredibly frustrating to see when people do it. I've thought I finally found the answer to some question or technical problem or whatever in a reddit thread, only to then see the original post replaced with something like "This comment was removed because Reddit made me angry. Lorem ipsum dolar sit amet shit." Perhaps unfair but it makes me hate that person's selfishness much more than make me dislike Reddit.

I live in Utah and get to witness this first-hand. Just yesterday it was windy enough that unpleasant dust clouds were coming off the dried parts of the lake bed. Utah snowpack is at a record low this year and peaked for the 2026 water year earlier in March. We broke several high temperature records this month (along with a bunch of other states in the west / mountain west). It's looking pretty bad.

Right now it's a lot like watching a slow-moving train derailment. Everyone knows what's coming, but 80% of the population, the majority being Mormon religious nuts, rationalizes it away or refuses to acknowledge it, but those that do see the problem won't take action to address it, preferring instead to "hopes and prayers". Brian Cox, the damned governor, has declared multiple "days of prayer for rain".

There's a sick fatalism amongst many religious groups, assuming that God won't let terrible things happen to them, but it's especially bad with Mormons. They think they're a chosen people, living in a chosen land, and that the "end times" are coming soon. All this adds up to "I don't need to do or sacrifice anything to deal with Problem because God won't let me suffer and it doesn't matter because the world is going to end soon anyway."

For any rational thinking person this is disgusting, but when 90% of the legislature, the governor, and all US congressmen are owned (mentally and financially) by the Mormon church, there's not much we can do. At best voting them out just gets a different lizard in the seat.