Just two weeks til’ Halloween now.
Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
Cory casually adopts the latest slopaganda
Again he gets one-shotted by using an LLM helper to do the most trivial stuff, so it must be just as good at everything else, right?
It it’s anything like any android device I’ve ever put custom stuff into, the gnarly and highly technical work alluded is just following a checklist.
groan.
It kind of devolved to LLMs are so cool guys type stuff where he brags about his chatbot helping him with his linux power management by unearthing an undocumented environment variable, so when other people say it wrote a custom os for their device from scratch that must have been just as frictionless, right?
I don’t know what I’m supposed to get from this piece, it feels like he’s saying LLMs are about to solve enshittification as long as you’re willing to take the responsibility of e.g. using a hella unsafe os, so basically what’s left if repealing the laws that make tampering with your device this way broadly illegal.
There’s also a part in the denouement where he says a possible solution to improving slop code quality and safety standards is uploading the code to public repositories so similarly inclined people can engage with it, which, I don’t know, seems kind of familiar if you’ve been a programming adjacent for two seconds. But then you’d also be aware what the slopnami is already doing to the open source ecosystem.
It’s Doctrow. If you had a magic wand powered by orphan tears that jail broke IOT devices he would already have written a blog post about it before you finished the incantation.
“Look the thing is, I am still planning to walk away from Omelas but it turns out they believe DRM is ethically and morally wrong here - I need to spend some time here to focus on my next book ‘Making Children Miserable Might Be Ok in some Circumstances’”
Which assumes people actually want to deal with slop code. An assumption that can be proven wrong by simply looking at the slopnami’s effect on the open source ecosystem. Speaking of which:
Honestly, I’d be willing to bet good money on the ecosystem’s collapse at this point - the slopnami has tanked software quality across the board, the plague of scraping has made sharing source code deeply unattractive, the flood of LLM bug reports has crippled FOSS’s ability to find and fix bugs/vulnerabilities (which combos nicely with LLMs increasing bugcounts), and, as Baldur’s noted, the labour surplus FOSS relied upon has gone down the shitter.
On top of that, senior devs are burning out and deciding to GTFO en masse, and junior devs are getting deskilled, burnt out and/or laid off, crippling FOSS’s ability to replace any maintainers they lose.
Not just code sharing is unattractive, but writing guides etc as well. Saw that some people who have been offering courses that teach you how to code certain things are now closing down due to less and less (or none at all) people buying.
People burn out, and no new teaching material is created.
Quick follow-up, for the sake of furthering my argument:
Baldur, whilst talking about the aforementioned loss of FOSS surplus, laid out a worst-case scenario, where a vicious cycle collapses the FOSS ecosystem:
As a consequence of the slop-nami, I’d argue the perfect conditions for this vicious cycle have already emerged:
The slopnami has done plenty to exacerbate existing burnout in current maintainers - slop bug reports, scrapers and AI bros DDoSing services, AI bros in general and the myriad other negative externalities of this bubble have been utterly draining to deal with.
As (indirectly) mentioned before, the slopnami has given a variety of serious bugs and security issues - rsync’s broken backups, the rise of slopsquatting and prompt injection attacks, Linux’s recent race condition mishap, the list goes on.
The only move for FOSS projects to survive is to reject AI users and their contributions out of hand. Zig and Godot wrote good articles about this.
What does Doctrow care? as far as he is concerned it’s done it’s job. It was never about the people or their labor for him.