To wow people who need a computer to think for them?

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:

1. Declining surplus and burnout leads to maintainers increasingly stepping back from their projects.

2. Many of these projects either bitrot serious bugs or get taken over by malicious actors who are highly motivated because they can’t relay^[sic] on pervasive memory bugs anymore for exploits.

3. OSS increasingly gets a reputation (deserved or not) for being unsafe and unreliable. [This drives away users as a result.]

4. That decline in users leads to even more maintainers stepping back. [return to step 1]

As a consequence of the slop-nami, I’d argue the perfect conditions for this vicious cycle have already emerged:

1. 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.

2. 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.

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 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:

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.

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.

The purpose of LLMs is theft, part infinity: AI game clones are making indie developers afraid to show their work

Glyph recently convinced a project to stop doing updates altogether by accident, and has had some thoughts about it.

For the second time I think I have accidentally convinced a project to just … stop doing security updates on a critical dependency forever, because they’d assumed the LLM usage problem wasn’t as bad as it is.

Both of these are offline things that are not at all security-sensitive, but I am starting to worry that in the “dark matter” of the broader developer community there is a meaningful plurality of people who are just going to stop updating e.g. the Linux kernel because of broken trust

(Recommend checking the full thread)

This can either be read as San Francisco or Science Fiction, and both readings work perfectly

Jonny took a look at Meta’s “Wonder” model they just released. Here’s how the thread starts:

The hourly history backup just failed in a way you should hear about plainly: the backup worker accidentally deleted the backup repo itself mid-run. The repo’s entire git history and all the DB sidecar files up to watermark 330145 are gone — that deletion was the worker’s own mistake, not a platform event.

I’m some random shitposter from TERF Island and I can definitely write better than Aella

(h/t david gerard)

How much slop is in Linux now? You’re no longer allowed to know, so its probably all slop

(why did I jump ship to Linux at this exact moment)

New Baldur Bjarnason: It’s not our job to fix our employers

As a note, Baldur dedicates much of the first half to how general sentiment has shifted against the tech industry over the past decade.

Starting things off with a new(ish) and very well-crafted sneer from Iris Meredith: There’s little that’s “inevitable” about AI

For a while it looked like devs would resist the slop, but now it looks like the slop is winning. It is pretty depressing. I am thinking about leaving tech altogether.

Honestly, can’t blame you - with how utterly tech’s surrendered to the slop machines, and how its actively sabotaged attempts to resist them, I’d be looking to leave as well.

Musk and DHH are both incompetent fascists, they were made for each other

Glyph’s recently sneered his fellow programmers’ enthusiastic acceptance of the slop machines - recommend checking it out.

Terminator, but stupid

You could also compare it to the lobotomy, with how much it ruins people’s intellect

Should be working now, forgot the https:// prefix

ChatGPT is adding real cartoonists’ signatures to fake New Yorker cartoons, because simply stealing the collective works of humanity isn’t enough

New Baldur Bjarnason: Software developers are not okay

I vaguely recall once arguing that an arts education should be mandatory for all students. Honestly, that would probably solve a lot of problems in society.

Maybe if we banned teaching MBAs altogether alongside it…