Saw it linked elsewhere!

I find his posts as of late extremely disappointing.

I truly think the Rust Programming Language is an outstanding piece of technical writing (due credit to Carol Nichols as well) and commend a lot of the outreach and projects he’s been a part of, but recently his takes are all purely beige prose bemoaning “the discourse” around LLMs and ATproto while making every excuse to hype up the tech.

The comment thread that inspired his dramatic exit was so mild that I don’t understand how anyone can take his claims at face value.

“alpha slop”

I am reminded of Val Packett’s lobsters comment I read the other day:

The “AI” companies are DDoSing reality itself.

They have massive demand for new electricity, land, water and hardware to expand datacenters more massively and suddenly than ever before, DDoSing all these supplies. Their products make it easy to flood what used to be “the information superhighway” with slop, so their customers DDoS everyone’s attention. Also bosses get to “automate away” any jobs where the person’s output can be acceptably replaced by slop. These companies are the most loyal and fervent sponsors of the new wave of global fascism, with literal front seats at the Trump administration in the US. They are very happy about having their tools used for mass surveillance in service of state terrorism (ICE) and war crimes. That’s the DDoS against everyone’s human rights and against life itself.

Inshallah

My power bill went from ~$100 to >$300 / month average in the past year, and my state is one of the more proactive ones about building out solar and wind. Between this, the removal of ACA subsidies causing a healthcare death spiral and doubling rates, the brain drain, the economic isolation, the tariffs, it feels like a coordinated effort on all sides to wipe out what’s left of the American middle class and turn everyone into serfs. Things are going to reach a breaking point.

I’ve been made aware of a new manifesto. Domain registered September 2024.

Anyone know anything about the ludlow institute folks? I see some cryptocurrency-adjacent figures, and I’m aware of Phil Zimmerman of course, but I’m wondering what the new grift angles are going to be, or whether this is just more cypherpunk true believer stuff.

“Plug-N-Plague” is great. “ClodCode” too but I fear that tying a title to a product name will inevitably become outdated when they drop the Claude brand

I like “The Human Software Project” for being a rare non-pejorative submission.

I do think that it makes more sense for the inverse mission (promoting slop-free software rather than shaming slopware), though.

Slop Gun

Mary Sloppins

Beverly Hills Slop

RoboSlop

Little Slop of Horrors

Cowboy BeSlop

Unsloppable

• tAInted
• Promptware
• Vibeless
• SlopHub / SlopLab
• SlopForged
• LibreSlopware /s

How would you rank Book of Dust relative to His Dark Materials (assuming you’ve also read them)?

Stalker makes 2001: a Space Odyssey feel like an action movie

JavaScript isn’t even the worst Brendan Eich misdeed!

“Top of the Slops”

I didn’t make the comment because I struggled bypassing it, but because calling out this UI dark pattern bullshit feels topical here and I wasn’t sure if OP was aware it was in place.

Judging from votes, other people found the skyview link novel/useful, so it was constructive!

Thanks.

I love the fact that this “decentralized billionaire-proof open network” needs a nitter clone.

That link can’t be viewed without a bluesky account, btw.

Tesla stock goes up

This is a good insight into the corporate culture angle, but I’m a bit disappointed the author didn’t go into the more obvious technical problems, mainly: power. This article from IEEE goes into much more depth in that regard, in case anyone missed it in the stubsack a while ago.

I didn’t know about the Tesla humanoid robot demo (Hilarious) though, so at least that’s another tack for the pegboard.

The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power by Daniel Yergin.

The history of oil is so much more interesting than it might appear at first glance. It’s part technological history, corporate intrigue, political thriller, and more.

Honorary second place to The Long Shadow: the Legacies of the Great War in the Twentieth Century. WWII tends to get a lot more attention in popular histories, but WWI really set the stage for the trajectory of Europe in the 20th century and the end of colonialism.