Comment by bsza
5 months ago
The best analogy I can think of (quite similar to this one) is that the internet is low Earth orbit and AI is the Kessler syndrome. We abandon the place not to hide ourselves, but because it is saturated with garbage, and anything you try to put up there will only result in even more garbage being generated, without any positive effect.
The ideal solution would be to remove the garbage, but right now we can't even detect it, let alone figure out a way to get rid of it. Besides, it's a zero sum game, why bother cleaning up when you can just effortlessly pump out more garbage in hopes that some of it will remain in orbit for long enough to benefit you.
I don't buy the analogy. The problem with Kessler syndrome is that low earth orbit is physically crowded, you run into collisions. I don't care about the garbage. I don't care about the AI era. I've been writing code in Emacs for 20 years, I'll be writing code in Emacs in 20 years, every open source project I contribute to still looks the same because all these AI people, like the blockchain people do is just make new stuff up in their own incestuous tupperware salesmen ecosystems.
I do pity the bug bounty people who rely on goodwill in their programs given that everything with a financial incentive is vulnerable. But otherwise the great thing about digital spaces is that there is, for practical purposes, unlimited space.
Every day there's another "how do you deal with the AI-apocalypse" article, I don't just ignore it
I think by "internet" they mean search engine results pages. If you restrict yourself to short, common queries and only look at the top 10 results on the page, then the space really is very limited. If all those top 10s for common queries start to get crowded out with AI slop, then people are going to start abandoning search.
Well, if you open-source anything these days and it does make it big, you can be prepared for a flood of low-effort slop PRs that you must either review for free or stop accepting external contributions altogether, making it effectively closed-source. You can't choose to ignore the garbage, it will collide with your stuff, unless your stuff is small enough to avoid collisions (in which case no one will see it).
Zero-contribution open source doesn't at all make it closed source.
It delivers on the value of open source, that anyone using your software is permitted to make and distribute their own changes.
SQLite is an example of a project that is open source but closed contribution.
5 replies →
> I've been writing code in Emacs for 20 years, I'll be writing code in Emacs in 20 years
Bold assumption. On what will you run Emacs if average PC costs $12000? Yes. Even Raspberry Pi. It's not called war on general computing for nothing.
If you say the cloud, that will be cut up and reused by the next AI crawler.
AI will not be able to eat up all chip manufacturing capabilities forever. At some point the market will be saturated and PCs will get affordable again.
10 replies →
You can use old hardware.
1 reply →
> It's not called war on general computing for nothing.
Companies paying too much for hardware to chase a bubble is not "war on general computing".
> Even Raspberry Pi.
What's preventing supply from catching up with demand in this situation?
If high prices stick around long term, there will be so many chip fabs ready to pump out $100 pi-equivalents that still let them have a 200% markup.
Also I can go buy a quite good mini PC with 16GB of RAM for $300. In what world does that price go up another 40x?
I would suffocate it. Know the greedy snake idiom? A snake is so hungry and greedy that it suffocates on its prey?
Best you can do is to spread all of the goods it provides, as it is too greedy to not devour them itself. It will consume them and suffocate slowly.
I assume you indicate LLM poisoning with bad web data ? (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47561819)
> It will consume them and suffocate slowly.
Can we accelerate it perhaps? You know, spending ALL our resources on making the snake more fat is not a good idea. Its only good idea when you have so much resources that you can easily suffocate the snake with negligible (for us) amount. If you try to suffocate several million snakes, that might backfire a little.
This is why I now check when I'm researching for a solution (that an LLM cannot figure out.) I go to github but often check if the project was created before 2022 due to AI slop concerns.
This is interesting.
When I read if for the second time, trying to understand it - maybe even better match for the low orbit flying garbage would be "enshitification"? As the time goes on, more and more garbage is produced, and we have no clear way or specific motivated entity to start removing it so it just grows.
Enshittification specifically is when a product/service/platform gets worse from the user’s perspective because the platform vendor can directly profit from user-hostile design; for example, Google intentionally serves up bad results on the first search results page so the user clicks-through to the second page of results, resulting in more advert revenue to Google[1].
…whereas I feel what you’re describing is another Tragedy-of-the-Commons.
[1]: https://jackyan.com/blog/2023/09/google-search-is-worse-by-d...
enshittification is a hip, tech-bro term to mean "rent seeking" and is nothing new
1 reply →