Comment by RyanHamilton
3 months ago
Less incentive to write small libraries. Less incentive to write small tutorials on your own website. Unless you are a hacker or a spammer where your incentives have probably increased. We are entering the era of cheap spam of everything with little incentive for quality. All this for the best case outcome of most people being made unemployed and rolling the dice on society reorganising to that reality.
> or a spammer where your incentives have probably increased.
Slight pushback on this. The web has been spammed with subpar tutorials for ages now. The kind of medium "articles" that are nothing more than "getting started" steps + slop that got popular circa 2017-2019 is imo worse than the listy-boldy-emojy-filled articles that the LLMs come up with. So nothing gained, nothing lost imo. You still have to learn how to skim and get signals quickly.
I'd actually argue that now it's easier to winnow the slop. I can point my cc running in a devcontainer to a "tutorial" or lib / git repo and say something like "implement this as an example covering x and y, success condition is this and that, I want it to work like this, etc.", and come back and see if it works. It's like a litmus test of a tutorial/approach/repo. Can my cc understand it? Then it'll be worth my time looking into it. If it can't, well, find a different one.
I think we're seeing the "low hanging fruit" of slop right now, and there's an overcorrection of attitude against "AI". But I also see that I get more and more workflows working for me, more or less tailored, more or less adapted for me and my uses. That's cool. And it's powered by the same underlying tech.
The thing is, what is the actual point of this approach? Is it for leaning? I strongly believe there’s no learning without inmersion and practice. Is it for automation? The whole idea of automation is to not think about the thing again unless there’s a catastrophic error, it’s not about babysitting a machine. Is it about judgment? Judgment is something you hone by experiencing stuff then deciding whether it’s bad or not. It’s not something you delegate lightly.
The problem isn't that AI slop is doing something new. Phishing, blogspam, time wasting PRs, website scraping, etc have all existed before.
The problem is that AI makes all of that far, far easier.
Even using tooling to filter articles doesn't scale as slop grows to be a larger and larger percentage of content, and it means I'm going to have to consider prompt injections and running arbitrary code. All of this is a race to the bottom of suck.
> The problem isn't that AI slop is doing something new. Phishing, blogspam, time wasting PRs, website scraping, etc have all existed before. The problem is that AI makes all of that far, far easier.
The term I like is that AI has _industrialised_ those behaviours. While native hunted buffalo, it wasn't destructive until it was industrialised [1] it that it became truly destructive.
[1] https://allthatsinteresting.com/buffalo-slaughter
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The difference is that the cost of slop has decreased by orders of magnitude. What happens when only 1 in 10,000 of those tutorials you can find is any good, from someone actually qualified to write it?
One instance of definite benefit of AI is AI summary web search. Searching for answers to simple questions and not having to cut though SEO slop is such an improvement
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What happens when the monkeys stop getting bananas to work on the typewriters? More stories?
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> We are entering the era of cheap spam of everything with little incentive for quality
Correction -- sadly, we're already well within this era
I was searching a specific niche on Youtube today, and scrolled endlessly trying to find something that wasn't AI generated. Youtube is being completely spammed.
That was true even before llms
On that - naive proposition; shouldn't we establish say "humanTube" - service which would strictly prohibit AI content? With all this AI slop engulfing our web 2.0 - maybe this is the time and place to establish the new web for "nerds" i.e. people who care for the real thing? Just as our current web once was a place for scientists and engineers mostly, maybe we now need something as this? I feel the flaws in my own point, but maybe it's not all hopeless?
I think by this point that premium services dedicated to quality is going to be the way to avoid the flood of AI slop that's come to us. Premium services mean QA and accountability should anything try to slip through.
Closest thing in the YT space would be Nebula, but Nebula's scope is very narrow (by design).
We'll get content that is indistinguishable from human curated content before long, we might even already have that and it's just toupee fallacy making us only see the slop. I'm making no value statement here, just that any sort of curation attempts are probably futile.
But some webdev said they are 10x faster now so it cant be bad for humanity /s
They must be slackers, I heard from multiple sources that AI makes you a 100x developer.
So this is why all the leading AI companies normalize 72 hour weeks.
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Upvoting because it's a salient point and downvoters are mad. HN has a complex lately.
It's not even a point, it barely counts as sarcasm. I'm not sure why a chunk of hello world in ARM assembler is supposed to be relevant to anything, let alone if there's a trap hidden in there.
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It's not a "salient point", it's a ridiculous strawman that has almost nothing to do with the topic being discussed.
The context is literally this:
>Less incentive to write small libraries. Less incentive to write small tutorials on your own website.
What weitendorf posted is definitively not a library, nor is there a small tutorial for the code.
>Unless you are a hacker or a spammer where your incentives have probably increased. We are entering the era of cheap spam of everything with little incentive for quality.
Considering the low effort to post and high effort to understand what weitendorf wrote, he might be considered a spammer given the context. The code quality is also low since his application can easily be replicated by a bunch of echo calls in a bash script, making me lean towards thinking he is a low quality spammer, given the context.
>All this for the best case outcome of most people being made unemployed and rolling the dice on society reorganising to that reality.
I'm not sure you can argue that weitendorf sufficiently addressed this. He put too much emphasis on an obvious strawman (real programmer) which is completely out of context. Nobody is questioning here whether someone is a programmer or not. There is no gatekeeping whatsoever. You're free to use LLMs.
I'll also complain about your use of "salient" here, which generally has two meanings. The first is that something is "eye catching" (making me think more of spam), the second meaning is "relevancy/importance" to a specific thing and that's where weitendorf falls completely flat.
Now you might counter and argue that he packaged all of his salient points inside the statement "want to lay off bread-and-butter red-blooded american programmers", then your position is incredibly weak, because you're deflecting from one strawman to another strawman or alternatively, your counterargument will rely heavily on reinterpretation, which again just means the point wasn't salient.