Slop Terrifies Me(ezhik.jp) |
Slop Terrifies Me(ezhik.jp) |
The job is going to be much less fun, yes, but I won't have to learn from scratch and compete with young people in a different area (and which I will enjoy less, most likely). So, if anything slop gives me hope.
The slop problem isn’t just model quality. It’s incentives and decision making at inference time. That’s why I’m working on an open source tool for governance and validation during inference, rather than trying to solve everything in pre training.
Better systems can produce better outcomes, even with the same models.
What are you building?
It runs at inference time rather than training time and is model agnostic. The goal is to make disagreement explicit and costly instead of implicit and ignored, especially in high stakes or autonomous workflows.
A couple of years ago, I worked for an agency as a dev. I had a chat with one of the sales people, and he said clients asked him why custom apps were so expensive, when the hardware had gotten relatively cheap. He had a much harder time selling mobile apps.
Possibly, this will bring a new era of decent macOS desktop and mobile apps, not another web app that I have to run in my browser and have no control over.
There has been no shortage of mobile apps, Apple frequently boasts that there are over 2 million of them in the App Store.
I have little doubt there will be more, whether any of the extra will be decent remains to be seen.
It's the societal level impact of recent advances that I'd call "terrifying". There is a non-zero chance we end up with a "useless" class that can't compete against AI & machines - like at all, on any metric. And there doesn't seem to be much of a game plan for dealing with that without social fabric tearing
It's just that many powerful people have a vested interest in keeping the rest of us poor, miserable, and desperate, and so do everything they can to fight the idea that anything can ever be done to improve the lot of the poor without destroying the economy. Despite ample empirical evidence to the contrary.
Never mind that UBI has never actually existed, it probably never will exist, and it's very, very likely that it won't even work.
People need to face the possibility that we will destroy people's way of life the way we're headed, and to not just wave their hands and pretend that UBI will solve everything.
(Edited to tone back the certainty in the language: I'm not actually sure whether AI will be a net positive or negative on most people's lives, but I just think it's dishonest to say "it's ok, UBI will save them.")
Whereas a Japanese business would rather just not ship in such a case. Look at the Nintendo, such as the 3d Mario games. Those things are polished to an insane degree that no American studio would bother with.
Apple is exceptional in many ways and this is one of them. Microsoft, with “no taste”, is the standard American fare.
They allow me to do work I could never have done before.
But there’s no chance at all of an LLM one shotting anything that I aim to build.
Every single step in the process is an intensely human grind trying to understand the LLM and coax it to make the thing I have in mind.
The people who are panicking aren’t using this stuff in depth. If they were, then they would have no anxiety at all.
If only the LLM was smart enough to write the software. I wish it could. It can’t, nor even close.
As for web browsers built in a few hours. No. No LLM is coming anywhere new at building a web browser in a few hours. Unless your talking about some super simple super minimal toy with some of the surface appearance of a web browser.
I just enjoy writing my own software. If I have a tool that will help me to lubricate the tight bits, I’ll use it.
Occasionally of course it's way off, in which case I have to tell it to stfu ("snooze").
Also it's great at presenting someone else's knowledge, as it doesn't actually know facts - just what token should come after a sequence of others. The other day I just pasted an error message from a system that I wasn't familiar with and it explained in detail what the problem was and how to solve it - brilliant, just what I wanted.
This is the browser engine I was alluding to in the post: https://github.com/wilsonzlin/fastrender
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.15061
Our definition of slop (repetitive characteristic language from LLMs) is the original one as articulated by the LLM creative writing community circa 2022-2023. Folks trying to redefine it today to mean "lazy LLM outputs I don't like" should have chosen a different word.
It's often lamented that the World Wide Web used to be controlled by indie makers, but now belongs to a handful of megacorp websites and ad networks pushing addictive content. But, the indie maker era was just a temporary market inefficiency, from before businesses fully knew how to harness the technology.
I think software development has gone through a similar change. At one point software companies cared about software quality, but this too was just an idealist, engineer-driven market inefficiency. Eventually business leaders realized they can make just as much money (but make it faster) by shoveling out rushed, bloated, garbage software, since even though poor-quality software aggravates people, it doesn't aggravate enough for the average person to switch vendors over it. (Case in point - I'm regularly astounded at how buggy the YouTube app is on Android of all platforms. I have to force-kill it semi-regularly to get it working right. But am I gonna stop watching YouTube because of this? Admittedly, no, probably not.)
Seems an unlikely problem. It'll get better, which may cause it's own problems.
I'd rather we democratize ownership [1]. Instead of taxing the owning class and being paid UBI peanuts, how about becoming the owning class and reaping the rewards directly?
The definitions you're operating under are mentioned thus:
> characteristic repetitive phraseology, termed “slop,” which degrades output quality and makes AI-generated text immediately recognizable. (abstract)
> ... some patterns occur over 1000× more frequently in LLM text than in human writing, leading to the perception of repetition and over-use – i.e. "slop". (introduction)
And that's ... it, I think. No further effort is visible towards a definition of the term, nor do the background citations propose one that I could see (I'll admit to skimming them, though I did read most of your paper--if I missed something, let me know).
That might be suitable as an operating definition of "slop" to explain the techniques in your paper, but neither your paper nor any of your citations defend it as the common definition of an established term. Your paper's not making an incorrect claim per se, rather, it's taking your definition of "slop" for granted without evidence.
That doesn't bode well for the rigor of the rest of the paper.
Like, look: I get that this is an extremely fraught and important/popular area of research, and that your approach has "antislop" in the name. That's all great; I hope your approach is beneficial--truly. But you aren't claiming a definition of slop in your paper; you're just assuming one. Then you're coming here and asserting a definition citing "the LLM creative writing community circa 2022-2023" and asserting redefinition-after-the-fact, both of which are extraordinary claims that require evidence.
Again, not only do I think that mis-definition is untrue, I also think that you're not actually defining "slop" (the irony of my emphasizing that in a not-just-x-but-y sentence is not lost on me).
I don't know which of the authors you are, but Ravid, at least, should know better: this is not how you establish terminology in academic writing, nor how you defend it.
A computer is a person employed to do arithmetic.
That’s probably the single most valuable aspect, for me.
I'm only "in the tech industry" in the literal sense, not in the cultural sense. I work in academia, making programs for professors and students, and I think the stuff "the tech industry" is doing is as rotten as you appear to.
UBI has never existed because the level of production required to support it has only just started to exist. (It's possible that we're actually not quite there, but that's something we can only determine by trying it out—and if we're not, then I'm 100% confident we can get there with further refinement of existing processes.) If we have the political will to actually, genuinely do UBI—enough to support people's basic needs of food, clothing, shelter, and a little bit of buffer, without any kind of means testing or similar requirements—then it's very, very likely that it will work. All the pilot programs give very positive data.
I'm not pushing UBI because I think it's a fix to the problem of automation. I'm pushing UBI because I think it's the fulfillment of the promise of automation.
The reason why it doesn't exist is because, for all that those in positions of power love to talk about it, they very consistently shoot down any actual attempt to implement them. I mean, for starters, it'd mean much higher taxes, and especially higher taxes on those very people (who currently pay lower rates on capital gains than people who actually produce value pay on their wages). When was the last time you've seen one of the Big Tech luminaries advocate for higher capital gains taxes?
Why?
What purpose does this serve?
Why should people have to prove their worthiness to be allowed to continue living?
And some more people can do the useless work of tracking who filled and dug how many holes.
Why is it useless to track who dug which hole?
Otherwise I suspect many of us will (reluctantly) drift off into lives that center around drinking alcohol, playing video games…
I'm extremely jealous of anyone who feels a sense of reward from their job.
The "AI effect" on the world has many similarities to previous events and in many ways changes very little about how the world works.
> I'm terrified of the good enough to ship—and I'm terrified of nobody else caring.
For almost every product/service ever offered, it was possible to scale the "quality" of the offering while largely keeping the function or outcome static. In fact, lots of capitalistic activity is basically a search for the cheapest and fastest way to accomplish a minimum set of requirements. This leads to folks (including me!!) to lament the quality of certain products/services.
For example, it's possible to make hiking boots that last a lot longer than others. But if the requirement is to have it last for just 20 miles, it's better to pay less for one that won't last as long.
Software is the same way. Most users just absolutely do not know about, care about, or worry about security, privacy, maintainability, robustness, or a host of other things. For some reason this is continually terrifying and shocking to many.
There is nothing surprising here, it's been this way for many years and will continue.
Obviously there are exceptions, but for the most part it's best to assume the above.
nitpick: most users don’t care about these things until something goes significantly wrong and it impacts them, e.g. a massive data breach or persistent global downtime.
then they get angry. very angry.
just because people don’t care about it now doesn’t mean they won’t care about it in the future.
edit — these are the hidden requirements.
> For example, it's possible to make hiking boots that last a lot longer than others. But if the requirement is to have it last for just 20 miles, it's better to pay less for one that won't last as long.
until requirements change, or the hidden requirements come out to play … most software engineers can probably recall multiple times when the requirements changed half way through. hell, i’ve done it on solo projects.
now we’re stuck with boots that can only last 20 miles, but we need to go 35.
> then they get angry. very angry.
Yes, this has a lot of overlap with how humans differ from "Homo Economicus" [0].
Humans generally can't find out, don't know, care to know, have the time to research, or are expert enough to understand the ramifications of decisions perfectly (or adequately to some definition of adequate).
However, they do understand price!!! So you end up getting cheap stuff that everyone chooses because they don't understand how they lower their future risk or save money over the long run with a more immediately expensive option.
This, also, has been true for a long long time. Humans are far more likely to choose the cheap option if they don't believe or understand the expensive one.
Incidentally, this is somewhat rational given that marketing half-truths are rampant.
The short life boots are great for everyone (boot makers, suppliers) except the end user.
A slightly higher quality boot could reduce their expenditure (monetary and time) and collectively allow society to devote the time and resources saved to higher goals.
However the wants of the few outweigh the needs of the many.
Data breaches are so common they don't even register any more, and people share far more personal information now (willingly or not) than they used to. Remember when the common advice was "don't use your real name online"? Now every service demands your phone number to register, and those temporary email services (like 10minutemail) rarely work any more, in my experience. Downtime makes the news if it's bad enough, but Cloudflare, Microsoft and Amazon still control most of the internet. They fuck up badly all the time, and nothing ever happens. Windows 11 is literal adware, and Linux desktop usage is still a rounding error.
Remember that Tea "dating" app that leaked pretty much everything last year? As far as I can tell, it's still in business.
Many such cases.
Which that's probably why we're in a lemon economy. To figure out the answers to these things is incredibly time consuming, even if one does have expertise in a specific domain. Fatigue leads to the same result, oversimplification of assumptions
There are examples of seemingly contradictory high/low cost, high/low durability, high/low reliability, high/low status symbol, etc. and seemingly every combination.
Cars are a great example:
* Reliable cars can also be cheap.
* High status symbol cars can be incredibly expensive but also unreliable.
* Expensive cars can be dangerous.
* etc.
Even the things that are "good enough" and cheap tend to come with massive hidden costs. For example, good looking clothing can be inexpensive enough for a person to wear everything once and throw it away, but behind the scenes there are child slaves, microplastics/PFAS contamination, and a textile waste crisis.
When you watch a video or use a service that requires significant effort and value to create, you inherently trust that the creators have invested diligence and care to protect their investment. Creators risk losing customers through bad reviews or, worse, being sued for damages.
In an age where it's reasonably straightforward to create something that appears to match the quality and effort of what was previously difficult to accomplish, it becomes harder for users to distinguish high quality anymore.
I think we'll go through a period where many users will get burned by poor services (lost data, security breaches, etc.) and will need to find new ways of verifying product and service credibility.
I suspect the market for simple consumer apps charging $5+ monthly for basic functions (like todo lists) will disappear, and possibly the same for low-to-moderate complexity enterprise apps (like Jira). This is probably better for consumers. Many of these apps and tech businesses can charge so much for fairly basic functionality because the barrier to building alternatives is too great. There was simply no option if you wanted a particular set of features. It's 'value-based pricing' that extracts benefits from consumers unable to negotiate the price.
People have forgotten that a lot of people were killed by horses. Cities had to deal with vast quantities of manure and horse corpses. Horses knew they were slaves and you always had to be careful around them. Horses are expensive and required daily maintenance.
I'm not so sure about those editorial standards. The internet has revealed that there's a lot of propaganda in the newspaper editorials.
Put another way, who here wants a car that costs more than their house? Or shoes that cost 2000$?
It's the age old paradigm of buying a pair of shoes/boots, the poor man keeps buying $20 shoes/boots that wear out in a year or two. The wealthy man looks perplexed and states, "this is why they are poor, they don't understand investing in a quality pair of shoes/boots... For a measly $100 they could buy a pair of shoes/boots that would last them 10+ years". But what is always overlooked, is that the poor man doesn't have the flexibility of spending to afford to invest better quality purchases, because the money needs to be applied to other problems in their lives.
I would argue that this is one contributing factor, outside of companies just chasing the lowest quality/cost, that contributes to crappier stuff.
This is what produced our high standard of living.
For example, Ford and the Model T. Before the Model T, only the rich could afford to buy a car. Ford was relentless with the T in finding ways to cut the manufacturing cost. And the result was America got wheels.
Sure, but the OP's concern is whether this chokes off innovation. Is there some better kind of hiking boot, longer-lasting and cheaper and maybe more comfortable, that we've never found because the shoemakers who'd be able to invent it are too busy optimizing Nike production lines?
But that question is impossible to answer and therefore can justify no recommended changes to the current state.
Yes. Which means the overall quality of things is dropping. Its nothing new or AI-specific indeed, but that doesn't make it a good thing.
Excellent point which leads to one related but less commonly mentioned:
If you build a product that lasts 25 years and that's what people want, you need to price it in such a way that if the entire market buys your product, you will run out of customers (for roughly 25 years or until new customers are born). Otherwise, you have a big rush of revenue early and then it drops off a cliff.
(I'm oversimplifying here but this is partly why there is a trend to make things more disposable or have a limited lifespan).
That's rewriting history especially in terms of software and hardware.
Appliances like Microwaves, etc were revolutionary for its time. Only problem: they lasted forever (>20 years). No 1 needed to buy it again = no business. It was deliberately not made to last as long and possibly not exactly cheaper both in cost and retail price.
> Software is the same way. Most users just absolutely do not know about, care about, or worry about security, privacy, maintainability, robustness, or a host of other things.
They don't want to know. They assume it is there. Most people have inherit trust with for example big companies.
> In fact, lots of capitalistic activity is basically a search for the cheapest and fastest way to accomplish a minimum set of requirements.
This is a rewrite of history to. In search? No. More like self create. Was Uber for example searching for the cheapest way? Well, yes, by throwing so much money to have a monopoly. We're currently throwing trillions at AI to find the "cheapest" way. Just like with the dot com era, we might not even recover 1% wasted. Are you sure it is the cheapest?
I'm curious if the inflation-adjusted prices of those long-lasting early microwaves were less than the cost of 3 current microwaves that last 7 years. Also, this isn't an apples to apples comparison because they gradually lost performance over time and it took longer to heat up food as they aged.
This is a common myth that was debunked a while back. Essentially people get fooled by survivorship bias: they only see the few old appliances that somehow survived, and that leads them to conclude that things were higher quality back in the day.
That is a problem that needs to be fixed in those users, not something we should take advantage of as an excuse for releasing shoddy work.
> For some reason this is continually terrifying and shocking to many.
For many reasons.
It means that a good product can be outcompeted by a substandard one because it releases faster, despite the fact it will cause problems later, so good products are going to become much more rare at the same time as slop becoming much more abundant.
It means that those of us trying to produce good output will be squeezed more and more to the point where we can't do that without burning out.
It means that we can trust any given product or service even less than we were able to in the past.
It means that because we are all on the same network, any flaw could potentially affect us all not just the people who don't care.
The people who don't care when caring means things release with lower cadence, are often the same people who will cry loudest and longest about how much everyone else should have cared when a serious bug bites their face off.
and so on… … …
Are you suggesting we should just sit back and let then entire software industry go the way of AAA games or worse?
> That is a problem that needs to be fixed in those users, not something we should take advantage of as an excuse for releasing shoddy work.
Ok. Tech folks have been trying to educate users and get them to make better decisions (in the viewpoint of those tech folks) for a long time. And the current state points to how successful that's been: not very. This isn't exclusive to software... many industries have consumers who make unsound long-term choices (in the viewpoint of experts).
Taking advantage? Besides cases where folks are actually breaking the law and committing fraud, this isn't some kind of illicit activity, it's just building what the users choose to buy/use.
> It means ... It means ... It means ... It means ...
Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps, and perhaps.
> Are you suggesting we should just sit back and let then entire software industry go the way of AAA games or worse?
I'm not sure what "the way of AAA games" means. I'm just laying out how I view the last 30 years of the software industry.
I don't see any reason to expect significant change.
A society where a large percent have no income is unsustainable in the short term, and ultimately liable to turn to violence. I can see it ending badly. Trouble who in power is willing to stop it?
If you substitute "artificial intelligence" with offshored labor ("actually indo-asians" meme moniker) you have some parallels: cheap spaghetti code that "mostly works", just written by farms of humans instead of farms of GPUs. The result is largely the same. The primary difference is that we've now subsidized (through massive, unsustainable private investment) the cost of "offshoring" to basically zero. Obviously that has its own set of problems, but the piper will need to be paid eventually...
Soon, we'll all just be meatpuppets, guided by AI to suit AI.
This isn’t news really. Content farms already existed. Amusing Ourselves to Death was written in 1985. Critiques of the culture exist way before that. But the reality of seeing the end game of such a culture laid bare in the waste of the data center buildout is shocking and repulsive.
Quality. Matters.
It always has, and it always will. If you're telling yourself otherwise, you are part of a doomed way of thinking and will eventually be outcompeted by those who understand the implications of thinking further ahead. [ETA: Unfortunately, 'eventually' in this context could be an impossibly long time, or never, because people are irrational animals who too often prioritize our current feelings over everything else.]
I would argue most never did.
If you spend time in the startup world you quickly realize how little the average developer cares about craftsmanship or quality.
The startup world is full of mantras like move fast and break things, or if you are not embarrassed by your mvp it’s not an mvp.
This is how our world works and until it hits the proverbial wall, this is how it will continue to work because it's too big to be detoured or course-adjusted
In a 1995 interview with Inc. magazine, author Kurt Vonnegut was asked what he thought about living in an increasingly digitized world. His response is so perfect that it’s worth reprinting in full:
I work at home, and if I wanted to, I could have a computer right by my bed, and I’d never have to leave it. But I use a typewriter, and afterwards I mark up the pages with a pencil. Then I call up this woman named Carol out in Woodstock and say, “Are you still doing typing?” Sure she is, and her husband is trying to track bluebirds out there and not having much luck, and so we chitchat back and forth, and I say, “OK, I’ll send you the pages.”
Then I’m going down the steps, and my wife calls up, “Where are you going?” I say, “Well, I’m going to go buy an envelope.” And she says, “You’re not a poor man. Why don’t you buy a thousand envelopes? They’ll deliver them, and you can put them in a closet.” And I say, “Hush.” So I go down the steps here, and I go out to this newsstand across the street where they sell magazines and lottery tickets and stationery. I have to get in line because there are people buying candy and all that sort of thing, and I talk to them. The woman behind the counter has a jewel between her eyes, and when it’s my turn, I ask her if there have been any big winners lately. I get my envelope and seal it up and go to the postal convenience center down the block at the corner of 47th Street and 2nd Avenue, where I’m secretly in love with the woman behind the counter. I keep absolutely poker-faced; I never let her know how I feel about her. One time I had my pocket picked in there and got to meet a cop and tell him about it. Anyway, I address the envelope to Carol in Woodstock. I stamp the envelope and mail it in a mailbox in front of the post office, and I go home. And I’ve had a hell of a good time. And I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you any different.
We’re dancing animals. How beautiful it is to get up and go do something
If you are one of those devs who heavily uses LLMs at work and you are in a position of relative authority, either as senior+ or something else, and you hand off your LLM code to others to review or “build off of”… we hate you. We don’t want to be your voluntold slop jannies. LLM over use and vibe coding is taking a fairly enjoyable job and making it insufferable. Now I have to sift through 3-10x more lines of code that are written in a non-human thought process using terrible naming schemes and try to find the bug… just to realize that the code isn’t even solving for the correct or underlying problem. Every time I have to interact with a co-workers LLM code, my tasks take weeks longer than they would have. This is including the ones who claim to be exerts in prompting and harnessing and whatever skibidi buzzword is out this week.
You are not saving time, you only think you are because you don’t look closely at the output and send it off to your lowley janitors to deal with. And the people who claim to be running 20 or 30 AI tasks at once what are you even building? If you aren’t literally shipping the next Amazon that’s just embarrassing.
I can not wait for people to wake from this bizarre mass psychosis. I already see co-workers context window getting smaller than free version ChatGPT in an incognito window.
As much as we can fault the technology and the hype around it, this as much a people problem as anything else. Before AI, this same problem happened with architecture/PoC to implementation hand-offs.
AI is a new tool that a lot of us are still figuring out, but that doesn't excuse poor communication.
Till this day even there exists IDEs with proper auto-complete suggestions (or editors with LSP support), there are still a lot of people prefer doing it in the old way (vim/emac/nano) and none of them get fired for that.
Z3 exists but we still like to solve algorithms by hand. High level languages exists but C/C++ codes are still written every day, even asm is still used.
On the brighter side of the issue, we now have ton of legacy projects written in obscure languages (COBOL, FORTRAN) that only some dozen people can maintain effectively, and those people are mostly at retirement age now. GenAI can solve that.
Sounds like the cost of everything goes down. Instead of subscription apps, we have free Fdroid apps. Instead of only the 0.1% commissioning art, all of humanity gets to commission art.
And when we do pay for things, instead of an app doing 1 feature well, we have apps do 10 features well with integration. (I am living this, instead of shipping software with 1 core feature, I can do 1 core feature and 6 different options for free, no change order needed)
I feel like long before LLMs, people already didn't care about this.
If anything software quality has been decreasing significantly, even at the "highest level" (see Windows, macOS, etc). Are LLMs going to make it worse? I'm skeptical, because they might actually accelerate shipping bug fixes that (pre-LLMs) would have required more time and management buy-in, only to be met with "yeah don’t bother, look at the usage stats, nobody cares".
When software operators tolerate bugs they’re signaling that they’re willing to forego the fix in exchange for other parts of the feature that work and that they need.
The idea that consumers will somehow not need the features that they rely on anymore is completely wrong.
That leaves the tolerable bugs, but those were always part of the negotiation: Coding agents doesn’t change that one bit. Perhaps all it does it allow more competitors to peel away those minority groups of users who are blocked by certain unaddressed bugs. Or maybe it gets those bugs fixed because it’s cheaper to do so.
"Terrified" is a strong word for the death of any craft. And as long as there are thousands that love the craft, then it will not have died.
Mourn it? Overall, people seem to hate tech workers in general (of all kinds). The death of the craft will not be mourned as a tragedy, it's already being celebrated as a triumph (whether it's true or not, doesn't matter).
I must admit there's a part of me that wants it to die. I want people to remember what was good about it in retrospect, then realize there is no chance of ever getting it back. Permanent losses are important lessons.
As lots of people seem to always prefer the cheaper option, we now have single-use plastic ultra-fast fashion, plastic stuff that'll break in the short term, brittle plywood furniture, cheap ultra-processed food, etc.
Classic software development always felt like a tailor-made job to me and of course it's slow and expensive but if it's done by professionals it can give excellent results. Now if you can get crappy but cheap and good enough results of course it'll be the preferred option for mass production.
If only it was plywood, at least it'd be solid and sturdy. These days it's particleboard, which is much worse than plywood. Similar concept, but now made out of sawdust and glue instead of woodchips and glue that are alternately laid down in different orientations layer by layer for increased strength.
Particleboard chips much easier, breaks down much faster with moisture, and can't hold screws in. But it's very cheap, can be made very smooth, and is light.
Agree with the general sentiment though.
In my experience coding agents are actually better at doing the final polish and plugging in gaps that a developer under time pressure to ship would skip.
My favorite pre-LLM thing in this area is Flighty. It's a flight tracking app that takes available data and presents it in the best possible wway. Another one is that EU border visa residency app that came thru here a couple of months ago.
Standards for interchange formats have now become paramount.
API access is another place where things hinge on.
Its being compared to that of a slop machine, and billionaires claiming that its better than you are in all ways.
Its having integrity in your work, but the LLM slop-machines can lie and go "You're actually right (tells more lies)".
It all comes down to that LLMs serve to 'fix' the trillion dollar problem: peoples wages. Especially those engineers, developers, medical, and more.
AI produces code that technically runs but lacks the thoughtfulness that makes software maintainable or elegant. The "90% solution" ships because economic pressure rewards speed over quality.
What haunts me: compilers don't make design decisions. IDEs don't choose architecture. AI does both, and most users accept those choices uncritically. We're already seeing juniors who've never debugged without a copilot.
The author's real question: what if most people genuinely don't care about the last 10%? Not from laziness, but because "good enough" is cheaper and we're all exhausted.
Dismissing this as "just another moral panic" feels too easy. The handcraft isn't dying because AI is too good. It's dying because mediocrity is profitable.
80% of good maybe reframed as 100% ok for 80% of the people. It is when you are in the minority that cares about or needs that last 20% where it is a problem because the 80% were subsidizing your needs by buying more than the need.
Based on the Adobe stock price the market thinks AI slop software will be good enough for about 20% of Adobe users (or Adobe will need to make its software 20% cheaper, or most likely somewhere between).
Interestingly workday, which is possibly slightly simpler software more easily replicable using coding agents is about the same (down 26%).
Agents don’t care about any of Workday’s value-adds: Customizable workflows, “intuitive” experiences, a decent mobile app. Agents are happy to write SQL against a few boring databases.
Software is just a proxy for the thing that we want which is data. The same way an electric drill is a proxy to a hole. Since it's impossible to sell holes there's a market for selling electric drills to make holes.
A lot of economic activity is based on these proxies. Same in the software digital world. Even though it's data that were after many successful software businesses have been started to sell the tools, i.e. software products for people to make their digital "holes".
Now imagine if you could just suddenly 3D print your electric drill. Or your frying pan. Or your garden shears. What would happen to the economiies based on selling these tools?
Once you can prompt your way to any digital creation what happens to the economies based on making the digital tools?
It's not there yet, but if/when it does it's going to be a complete economic restructuring that will affect many. Careers will be wiped out, livelihoods will be lost.
Only big creative companies like Disney can play the game of making licensing agreements. And they are ok with it because it gives them an edge over smaller, less organized creators without a legal department.
https://thewaltdisneycompany.com/news/disney-openai-sora-agr...
Absolutely no one.
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/719111/survival-of-t...
Sure some things deteriorate, but many things improve. Talking about a net decline (or net gain) is very difficult.
Every age has its own set of problems that need to be solved.
Or, try organizing any kind of movement that those with power don't like. It does not even have to be violent! Here in Germany, as soon as the previous government with the Green Party was in power, a huge never-ending campaign started. Easy - after all, the vast majority of the important media is owned by very few, just like in the US. Funny enough, after inevitably that government failed, turned out the CDU failed many if not most of the promises made, and in other areas does exactly what they heavily criticized.
The point is, surveillance, "soft" punishments, and media control and reach are on a whole new level. Trump wanted TikTok for a reason, and Musk wanted X not for the money that company could make.
The more tech we have, and it's conveniently concentrated too, the worse it can get if you don't want to play that game.
On top pf that, debt and a system of law heavily skewed for those with money, just because of its complexity and to gain access, and no more competition for minds from a block of socialist countries, so no clear alternative apart from obviously stupid ideas most people won't want to vote for, and this "democratic" system can go very far towards being very controlling and restricting for many.
We can see for example in Iran, or few decades ago in China, or since it was founded in North Korea what happens when people protest - and how nothing changes. Now we have billionaires who would love to have similar powers, who don't want to be "held back" by laws and regulations.
"This morning at 8:00 am Pacific, there were 5 simultaneously assassination attempts on tech executives across the Bay Area. The victims, who are all tech executives known to us have suffered serious injuries . It is reported that Securibot 5000s were involved. Securibot inc declined to comment. This is a developing story"
Humanoid robots became possible and so people are racing to be first to market assuming that might be a giant market (it's cheap labor potentially so of course it might be huge - the microcomputer was).
"Robotic security. [...] The armed mass as a model for the revolutionary citizenry declines into senselessness, replaced by drones. Asabiyyah ceases entirely to matter, however much it remains a focus for romantic attachment. Industrialization closes the loop, and protects itself." [0]
The important part here is that "[i]ndustrialization [...] protects itself". This is not about protecting humans ultimately. Humans are not autonomous, but ultimately functions of (autonomous) capital. Mark Fisher put it like this (summarizing Land's philosophy):
"Capital will not be ultimately unmasked as exploited labour power; rather, humans are the meat puppet of Capital, their identities and self-understandings are simulations that can and will be ultimately be sloughed off." [1]
Land's philosophy is quite useful for providing a non-anthropocentric perspective on various processes.
[0] Nick Land (2016). The NRx Moment in Xenosystems Blog. Retrieved from github.com/cyborg-nomade/reignition
[1] Mark Fisher (2012). Terminator vs Avatar in #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader, Urbanomic, p. 342.
As we saw 100 years ago, violent authoritarians will gladly use technology to make themselves look like the populists choice all the while planning to neglect the very thing they promised when they were getting elected.
What's stopping them from good actions is not the fear of "doing something messy and imperfect". It's the lack of financial and power-grabbing motivation.
The terminology may have changed a bit, but they still employ people to do stuff for them
One big difference is while professional class affluent people will hire cleaners or gardeners or nannies for a certain number or hours they cannot (at least in rich countries) hire them as full time live in employees.
There are some things that are increasing. For example employing full time tutors to teach their kids - as rich people used to often do (say a 100 years ago). So they get one to one attention while other people kids are in classes with many kids, and the poor have their kids in classes with a large number of kids. Interesting the government here in the UK is increasingly hostile to ordinary people educating their kids outside school which is the nearest we can get to what the rich do (again, hiring tutors by the hour, and self-supply within the household).
They also hire people to manage their wealth. I do not know enough about the history to be sure, but this seems to be also to be a return to historical norms after an egalitarian anomaly. A lot of wealth is looked after by full time employees of "family offices" - and the impression I get from people in investment management and high end property is that this has increased a lot in the last few decades. Incidentally, one of the questions around Epstein is why so many rich people let him take over some of the work that you would expect their family offices to handle.
Brink? This has been the reality for decades now.
>A society where a large percent have no income is unsustainable in the short term, and ultimately liable to turn to violence. I can see it ending badly. Trouble who in power is willing to stop it?
Nobody. They will try to channel it.
I think all signals are pretty inevitably pointing to three potential outcomes (in order of likelihood): WW3, soviet style collapse of the west or a soviet style collapse of the sino-russian bloc.
If the promise of AI is real I think it makes WW3 a much more likely outcome - a "freed up" disaffected workforce pining for meaning and a revolutionized AI-drone first battlefield both tip the scales in favor of world war.
Not to the degree you might originally think. Most of the wealth being captured today is hypothetical wealth (i.e. promises) to be delivered in a hypothetical future. Except we know that future will never come as the masses, as you point out, have almost nothing, and increasing nothing, to offer to make good on those promises. In other words, it is just a piece of paper with IOU written on it, not real wealth.
What that hypothetical wealth does provide and what makes it so appealing, however, is social standing. People are willing to listen to the people who have the most hypothetical wealth. You soon hear of what they have to say. When the hobo on the street corner says something... Wait, there is a hobo on the street corner?
A small group of people having the ear of the people is human nature. In ancient times, communication challenges left that small group of people to be limited to a small community (e.g. a tribe, with the people listening to the tribe leader). Now that we can communicate across the world with ease, a few people rising up to capture the attention of the world is the natural outcome. That was, after all, the whole point — to move us away from "small tribes" towards a "global tribe".
Hypothetical wealth is the attention-grabbing attribute du jour, but if you remove it, it will just become something else like who is most physically attractive, who tells the funniest jokes, whatever. The handling of "Dunbar's number" doesn't go away.
> Trouble who in power is willing to stop it?
China has tried with its Great Wall (meaning the internet one, although perhaps you can find relevance in the physical one too), but is it successful? Maybe to some degree, but I expect many people in China still listen to what Elon Musk has to say, all while completely ignoring the millions of Chinese people immediately outside of their door. It isn't really something a power can do (ignoring that there even being a power contradicts the whole thing). The people themselves could in theory, but they would have to overcome their natural urges to do so.
People always say this with zero evidence. What are some real examples of real people losing their job today because of LLMs. Apart from copywriters (i.e. the original human slop creators) having to rebrand as copyeditors because the first draft of their work now comes from a language model.
I wholeheartedly recommend you buying a new keyboard, by the way.
I've worked with, trained and lived alongside workers overseas for months at a time and can say that there's no meaningful difference across racial divides, save for some variation on cultural norms. I would have assumed a more charitable interpretation of my words, but we live in uncharitable times. I'll do better going forward.
Cheers
I didn't mean to imply that anyone of asian descent is inherently generating "spaghetti code". If that's how it read, I apologize, that was not my intention.
To further clarity, I've dealt with a number of these offshoring agencies (the really inexpensive ones specifically), and their output is very similar to what AI produces today. They have extreme turnover rates, and team assignments change at random so lost context and variable output is common. They do operate cube farms just like US workers, though I'm not sure why that's pertinent to call out though.
I agree, however, that I'm not saying anything sophisticated or complex, merely stating an observation.
I get the feeling that we're not even close to paying for the _actual_ costs of our frontier GenAI models at current usage levels, with or without subscriptions in the picture. AFAICT we're all using a highly subsidized product, made possible by private capital on the promise of future returns that may or may not materialize.
Outside of a few vertically integrated companies (Google with their custom TPUs, possibly AWS with theirs) LLM companies like OpenAI have to rely on massive data centers via MSFT, Oracle and Nvidia deals to train their frontier models to stay competitive. Theres a lot to pay for when wielding 20 Gigawatts of compute on other folks' machines. For OpenAI we're talking 4+ trillion USD so far with no signs of slowing. That's a hell of a lot of subscriptions to make up for that spend and they have a long climb ahead of them to get there. Maybe their "killer app" will be their new "erotica" models, who knows (porn has lead several tech initiatives in the past.) But I wouldnt bet money on it working out for them.
It's estimated that OpenAI spends 3 USD for every 1 it makes. Obviously that will have to change to make them an actually viable company in the long term. In the end, I see the most likely scenario is we're left with the few large players like Google. They're the ones that have any hope on "winning" the GenAI race, as they're in the best position to not rely on someone else's shovels.
All that said offshoring started out with similar promises to GenAI and some things panned out with offshoring and others didn't. Only time will tell what shakes out of all this mess. I just hope we get a sane readjustment of expectations for GenAI before our next economic collapse (the massive GenAI investment has helped prop up our economy to an extent, at least in the US)
In short, a business exists to turn a profit and OpenAI has yet to do so. Perhaps they eventually will and be the new "offshore" solution going forward as you imply, but just like actually moving your technical talent overseas it comes with a significant amount of tradeoffs to consider (tradeoffs already outlined in parent and other posts on this thread.)
This just isn't true. First, cheap tools have always been around. I have a few that I've inherited from my grandfather and great-grandfather. They're junk and I keep them specifically to remind myself that consumer-oriented trash versions of better quality tools have always existed.
Second, Harbor Freight is the only consumer-oriented tool retailer that seems to be consistently improving their product lines. Craftsman, which was the benchmark for quality, consumer-oriented hand tools, dropped off a cliff in terms of quality around the mid- to late-2000s.
If you can afford professional-grade tools (Snap-On, Mac, Wera, Knipex, etc.) great. For the rest of us, Harbor Freight is the only retailer looking out for us. Their American- and Taiwanese-made tools are excellent. Their Chinese-made tools are good. Their Indian-made tools will get the job done, but it won't be pleasant. At least they give the consumer a range of options, unlike Snap-On, which gives you a payment plan.
This is happening in other areas as well. The Chinese mini excavators and mini skid steers are changing what smaller landscape companies can do. They are not as good as a Kubota but they are 1/2 the price and 80% as good.
I installed some drywall a few years ago. I plan to install a room of drywall exactly never again. Not worth it for me to buy the best drywall tools.
But I have installed multiple wood floors, replacing old carpet, and would do so again if needed. I’d rather get higher quality tools there so I can keep them and reuse them for years.
Marginal improvements in quality which result in a marginal increase of cost/price often provide much better overall returns than just using a series of cheap substitutes that fail quickly. In some areas, this doesn't work, but I think shortsightedness is blocking truly better solutions in a great many cases. Particularly when true costs are being externalized.
The rush to get things out NowNowNowNowNOWNOWNOW has resulted in massive crunches at the end (or even from the very start) or many big projects, and an apparent “sod it, it'll do, we can patch it later” attitude. Over the last decade or more this problem has become worse, with only a few exceptions to the rule.
With “vibe coding” and “vibe designing” taking more load, I expect that “sod it, it'll do, we can patch it later” will become more common everywhere¹, and that is among those that do have an understanding of the potential security and stability issues that things going out without sufficient review can cause.
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[1] Once management are convinced LLM tools will increase throughput by, say, 50% in ideal cases, they'll expect output to increase by 50+% in all cases, and like the gaming industry “if you can't put the hours in, someone else will” when problems in LLM output cause delays or production issues, is likely to become a key driver, more so than it might be already.
The base capitalist premise is if you work, you'll have resources to survive and thrive. The flip-side is that if you cannot or refuse to work, you will starve, be destitute, homeless, without medical care, live under a bridge, and die hopeless.
And societal failings in a capitalist system are always reflected towards the individual no matter what.
Bad monetary policy? Should have saved. Businesses buy state laws to worsen worker laws? Get a better job. Got sick and medical lost your job? Too bad, go die, I guess?
Its never a systemic thing we can identify and fix. But its always always reflected as a personal failing.
Theres a top comment on this article that LLMs are a perfect parieto machine. 80% good, 20% utter shit and lies. That seems to track pretty well with what I'm seeing. If thats generally being accepted, I have to ask if my (and all others professional labor) if we're worth our wages for that 20%. And the question isnt being asked of us, but about us in HR and C levels.
I'm already seeing "make do with what less labor you already have and hope AI helps". I support a national level thing (all 50 states). Used to be 3 engineers for backend. Now its just me. I'm already seeing the stark negative effects, overworking, sloperating as a necessity (no DBA), and hope and prayer stuff doesnt go down.
And combined with the fact we're seeing worse hiring and layoffs since the Great Recession... Something's gotta change.
Successfull b2b salesmanship does not require a working and useful product. It just requires you to get these meetings with purchasers and show that other comparable orgs are buying your product. For example, at my last job I wasn’t sure if we were a microsoft shop or a google shop because we bought both of their products that did the same thing. Because that is just what you do when you are an org with 5 figure employee counts, you spend budget.
It's still a thing today though? It's not survivorship bias. Take the Microwave example. In a lot of countries it is very hard to buy just a traditional (convection) Microwave now. They force these 4-in-1 or an inverter Microwave.
> leads them to conclude that things were higher quality back in the day
It says nothing about "quality". So continuing, yes the inverter Microwaves are "quality", offer more control and costs more but due to all the complexity dies way faster. A lot of them die in <3 years when the traditional 1s last way longer. Back in the day we only had convection Microwaves. The end.
> This is a common myth that was debunked a while back.
By who? By you? Another example - SSDs have been made to not last as long. We went from SLC -> MLC -> TLC -> QLC etc. The writes were reduced. Did the consumers want this? No. There just wasn't much "choice". Top of line Samsung consumer SSDs just changed. During COVID some vendors sneakily adjusted it too. So, yes quality went worse. Deliberately.
And you don't even have to go back 100 years for an example. About a year will do it.
How's about you say what you're comparing me and people like me to.
In my experience, people who use terms like "You people" are just using that as a placeholder for racism, sexism, or ableism. Which is it in your case?
And 100 years ago, when industry took over something, the new thing still needed people. But thats not a hard economic law - thats just what happened before. There is no guarantee of that observation to still hold true.
The problem is that you can randomly end up in a group of people destined to be fucked, and there's no compensation.
And the environment, which now gets polluted with discarded short life boots, and all the waste byproducts required for their production/transportation
And the social fabric inevitably changes for one reflecting the priorities of a world of cheap disposable boots made far away
That said many of those employered in service industries and to some extent the gig economy have limited options and their participation is barely "voluntary" in modern capitalism.
That appeared as a defense against people impersonating you, i.e. two factor authentication.
And yet not long ago its stock was nearly triple that of the time of the 2017 breach…
> And there's no shortage of companies press releases about cutting down thousands of jobs and saying it's because they leverage AI.
These press releases are largely fake. "We're leveraging AI now" sounds a lot better than "whoops, looks like we overhired, we have to scale back and layoff workers because there's no demand for what we're doing".
Not if you fed your kid doing it, and now you can't.
> As for jobs like translator, graphic designer and journalist, it's only the extremely low-end work that can possibly be replaced with LLMs. Not an issue if they move upmarket.
Yes, fuck the 90% of those working in that space, and let's hope the 10% gets an "upmarket" gig there.
All this grand-visioning sounds devoid of empathy and real understanding of millions of real people's situations and needs.
Which happens all the time anyway. There just aren't that many people for whom being a call center worker is their long-term career, they'll just switch to some other job.
https://www.bradford.ac.uk/news/archive/2025/gaza-bombing-eq...
About that…
A recent example: I've bought many articles of clothing from Eddie Bauer over the years because they have been generally high quality and durable, and even so are only a bit more expensive than other brands. However just last week they filed for bankruptcy. Sure, the company could have been mismanaged, but I'm sure competition from fast fashion brands with rock bottom prices didn't help.
Businesses/organizations in a lot of ways act much more "rationally" than the individual consumer. So you'll see generally better car/truck maintenance in fleets than by consumers.
Then there is a cool feedback/blowoff valve where more expensive + higher quality "pro" tools get discovered by consumers, drive up demand, the price falls, and then the features become common.
I think people generally do understand that. What they can't do is tell which of the more expensive options is actually of higher quality and which just has higher margins. That requires expert knowledge and we can't each be an expert in everything.
In other cases it can also actually be better to get the cheaper crap option. E.g. if you are not sure if something will actually work for you the best option is no longer just the one with the lowest cost/lifetime.
1. i dont want to worry about them getting damaged or lost or stolen
2. my preferences will likely change in a couple years
3. i may not want the item as much as i think i do
i've owned a very expensive watch (many thousands of dollars) and i find myself almost never wearing it, both bc the style isnt exactly what im into these days, but i also worry about banging it on anything or the smallest scratches. it's nice to wear a cheaper watch (only a few hundred dollars in value) and just sort of not care about it.
i've had my handful of "buy it for life" purchases and i'm struggling to think of literally any item like that i've purchased that i still use
4. the quality gap has closed considerably
e.g., the function and durability of your $8k watch and a $300 watch are effectively imperceptible
The gap is closing from both ends (cheap manufacturing, access to tech, etc.)
Other people having more money does not result in higher prices for the rest, i.e. it does not cause inflation.
For example, when I was a boy steak was a rare luxury. Today, a steak dinner costs less than a TV dinner or a bag of Doritos.
You are overlooking debt / credit.
For the first few years, there aren't enough product issues for most of the hardcore enthusiasts to notice - maybe your tent ripping was just bad luck, or it may take two years for even a mediocre tent to weaken and fail for all but the people taking their tent to Denali or something.
Eventually the people who know move on and stop paying for the poorly made crap, but it's still seen as an exclusive brand by people who care about showing off they can afford something expensive vs. those for whom the quality was worth paying more for.
I have a pair of Belleville "hot weather mountain hybrid boots" (TR550) that I got back in 2014, heavily used, still in one piece.
So then it becomes a cycle. It's risky to make a high quality initial product that's expensive because it requires the buyer to understand and trust why they should pay more.
Eventually the market demands the higher quality and the pro series gains adoption, only for the the cheap stuff to come in again.
People on HN are extremely privileged and massively out of touch with the average normal person, what's new?
This is the difference between the affluent and the truly rich.
Similarly, if money were no real object within reason, I'm not sure what I would really need done on a day-to-basis that I couldn't just order or contract for pretty easily.
There is a whole lot more nuance here than you're giving the topic.
There is one side that wants to give their kids a good education, they have the resources and the motivation to ensure they come out ahead.
They are not the problem, the problem is the other side of this coin.
Where I grew up there were a lot of homeschooled kids that belonged to religious organizations. These groups had very little motivation to ensure they were intelligent, but instead nice dumb little worker bees that would stay with said organization and have little ability to work with the outside world at large. They were also at a much higher risk of being sexually abused/sexually trafficked as they were given little to no education about sex or risky adults.
I still remember being a kid myself and having to educate these other kids my age because they were missing large chunks of important information about the world.
Not true in the UK. Studies in many countries (the UK, US, Australia) and others have shown that home educated kids have better outcomes than school going kids after correcting for parental education, wealth etc.
Yes, there are exceptions, but there are also bad schools and some terrible schools.
UK law also requires children to receive a "suitable and efficient" full time education and there are legal mechanisms for sending children to school if they do not.
> They were also at a much higher risk of being sexually abused/sexually trafficked as they were given little to no education about sex or risky adults.
Stats in the UK show home ed kids are MUCH less likely to be abused, to self harm, or commit suicide.
Of course there are bad home educating communities, but there are also some horrific schools and the latter are a lot more common. Does that mean we should shut down schools?
I agree with it. Consider financial markets, for example. There are individual humans whose account balances are changing, but the system as a whole is not an instrument of any human, not the buyers, not the sellers, and not the exchange operators, and yet it dictates the large scale structure of society in ways unimaginable a century ago.
We are already enslaved to capitalism. Working against our own interest. In service towards the company and the company alone. This meta organism we value above all else on earth.
In Land's own words:
"Since capitalism did not arise from abstract intelligence, but instead from a concrete human social organization, it necessarily disguises itself as better monkey business, until it can take off elsewhere. It has to be the case, therefore, that cynical evo-psych reduction of business activity remains highly plausible, so long as the escape threshold of capitalism has not been reached. No one gets a hormone rush from business-for-business while political history continues. To fixate upon this, however, is to miss everything important (and perhaps to enable the important thing to remain hidden). Our inherited purposes do not provide the decryption key." [0]
[0] Nick Land (2013). Monkey Business in Xenosystems Blog. Retrieved from github.com/cyborg-nomade/reignition
If you're open to explore Land's perspective more deeply, you can read the introduction here: https://retrochronic.com/
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
This is totally untrue, material things have gotten way cheaper over time. TVs, cars, phones, technology, appliances, the list goes on and on.
And quality has improved on many of these, a $500 TV today is way bigger and better than a $5k TV from a few decades ago. Same for cars & phones when you adjust for inflation. Home gadgets / IOT are much more accessible & affordable. Appliances have gotten cheaper and even the higher end products are quite affordable. Ikea furniture is cheap and many of their products are quite durable and solid quality.
And old things weren't always better or more reliable than the modern cheaper products.
Other than TVs (which are literally the 1984 screens, where you buy something to spy on you) everything is trash/misleading now.
Just a shout out for this one. Possibly the most "irrational" purchases made right now by US consumers are new cars. 5 year old cars are 60% cheaper than new!
My over ear 3.5mm headphones are still going doing well after 7 years.
After watching some up and coming band live, I can find their music on spotify available for listening without ads included in my existing subscription.
Excellent quality olive oil is incredibly easy to find, if you're buying bottom barrel junk then that's on you.
New vehicle prices when adjusted for inflation have not risen at all; when adjusted for features/comfort/reliability/luxury they've fallen a ridiculous amount.
Same for clothing. My $14.88 Walmart jeans lasted for years before I sized out of them. My $15 t-shirts from Target are going strong. I recently got $15 gym shirts from Target which seem to be excellent quality, thick material and good stitching. The cheap gym shorts I bought literally 10 years ago are still in perfect condition. And again you need to adjust for inflation when comparing to the older clothing you're talking about.
The OLED TV I got for $2700 a few years ago is now closer to $2k and has superior specs. And again, way superior to more expensive TVs from a decade or two ago.
For car repair... what repair do you even need on a modern Japanese car? They just work forever if you do even the bare minimum maintenance. And honestly even if you neglect that maintenance. Yes labor costs have gone up but that's not relevant to this discussion.
All your other complaints are about software which isn't really relevant to this discussion.
Honestly all of this sounds like a "you problem." No offense.
Casey Muratori showing off the speed of visual studio 6 on a Pentium something after ranting about it: Jump to 36:08 in https://youtu.be/GC-0tCy4P1U
15 years ago even the high end smartphones could barely make it half the day before dying. Now all-day battery life is the norm, and the Chinese phones with the latest battery tech can easily last 2 days (Samsung, Google, Apple are very behind here).
Laptop battery life isn't even comparable to what it was 20 years ago.
And software getting slower doesn't change the fact that our material goods (pixels, bytes, flops) have improved orders of magnitude while getting cheaper.
If you compare a call over the newest iphone to a call over a rotary phone from 60 years ago guess which one gave users better call quality? I don't remember who made the joke about advertisers going from "You can hear a pin drop!" to "Can you hear me now?" but that sums up the problem very well. TVs are bigger but still can't do everything CRTs could (color accuracy, contrast, variable resolutions). We have faster hard drives with SSDs but with limited numbers of writes and they lose data when not powered. Everything is just trade offs. Some things have been improved, some things have gotten worse, but however good things are right now you can bet they will be made worse going forward. Enshittification is real and increasing all the time.
Without a reasonableness factor, prices can't be compared for anything. An egg from a chicken in 1940 is different from one in 2026. If we want to be pedantic, every egg is different.
But I think it's pretty uncontroversial that the prices of TVs, cell phones, and most appliances, with similar features, have fallen considerably over the last few decades.
SSD is not only faster but also quieter and more efficient. See how much power a modern laptop consumes vs 20 years ago?
> Some things have been improved, some things have gotten worse, but however good things are right now you can bet they will be made worse going forward. Enshittification is real and increasing all the time.
You said everything is trade off but choose to believe the future will get worse. Seems contradictory? I believe life will go on, and in 2046 people will complain about modern life and talk about how good things were 20 years earlier.
All things unquestionably better than the past. What's there to complain about?
Taste and nutritional value a worse then in the past. Arguably the two most important things when it comes to food.
My family calls those "water balloons".
Economic science has pretty much proven that when the average income in a society is higher and fewer are poor, the economy moves more money and the rich benefit more as well.
It comes down to if the people in power think they are playing a zero sum game and are driven by greed. We see plenty of dictatorships that are very resource wealthy and yet their society suffers in abject poverty. Said leaders have zero care about making their peoples life better and will gladly kill them wholesale if they become problematic.
Income inequality is very bad in its own right.
Just like billions are not about "being rich", this is about CONTROL. Control of the economy, and how people live, and control over one's own life.
Abstraction is a beast, putting everything regardless of what it actually is as some $$ number is terrible for understanding. The billionaires don't have Scrooge McDuck money at home where they swim in coins, they control huge parts of the economy.
And as long as they need workers, they will want them to live not too well - that would raise the price of labor, if people wanted to do work in places like Amazon warehouses to begin with, if they had better alternatives not working for the billionaires.
Being "poor" in this context means having a lot less control over how you live, not that you live on the streets. Although, as soon as you lose your value, e.g. by getting too sick, that is always on the table too.
[Citation needed]
No LLM is yet being used effectively to improve LLM output in exponential ways. Personally, I'm skeptical that such a thing is possible.
LLMs aren't AGI, and aren't a path to AGI.
The Singularity is the Rapture for techbros.
Plenty of flying cars existed through the 1900s, including commercial ones: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_car
The International Space Station was launched in 1998.
It doesn't need to imply anything. It's an ideology, those promoting it will say whatever BS attracts people to it. In practice, what is happening in capitalist countries since 1970s (when they abandoned all pretense) is that the rich get way richer and everybody else is fucked.
Talk about a crap educational system.
It comes to a point where they need an underclass to insulate them from the masses; look how cheaply Trump bought his paramilitary though, he only had to spend the money taken from those he's suppressing, didn't even have to reduce his own wealth one bit; the military and his new brown shirts will ensure the rich stay rich and that eventually there is massive starvation (possibly water/fuel poverty first).
Or USA recovers the constitution, recognises climate change and start to do something about it.
It seems like the whole of humanities future hinges on a handful of billionaires megalomania and that riding on the coattails of Trump's need to not face justice for his crimes.
However capitalism is perfectly compatible with a progressives taxation system such that the rich get richer at a lesser rate than the poor get richer.
You realise that a large swathe of society earn less than their costs?
Everyone will get richer perpetually, there will never be any impact on climate, we'll never suffer water shortages, we'll all ride unicorns and eat rainbows...
The thing is a capitalistic country will gladly turn itself into an authoritarian one if both wealth becomes concentrated and wealth buys votes. With the massive rise in authoritarian activities all over the world, especially in the US our democratic system is at very high risk of collapsing.
It is necessarily the case. Capitalism is characterized by private ownership of capital, which among other things means that it's possible to accrue it without limit. So the loop whereby the rich accumulate capital, which then allows them to extract even more value produced by workers (i.e. people who actually do useful things with said capital), is an inherent part of capitalism.
You can make it more mellow by heavily taxing the capitalists and using that money to raise the standard of living for everyone else, which is basically what Western social democracy is. But it doesn't eliminate the loop, and thus rich continue getting richer. And more powerful, too, which they use to dial said taxation back eventually.
A hundred million years ago, every day on Earth was much like every other day and you could count on that. As you sweep forwards in time you cross things like language, cooperation, villages, control of fire, and the before/after effects are distinctly different. The nearer you get to the present, the more of those changes happen and the closer they happen, like ripples on a pond getting closer to the splash point, or like the whispers of gravity turning into a pull and then a crunch. "Singularity" as an area closer to the splash point where models from outside can't make good predictions keeps happening - a million years ago, who would have predicted nations and empires and currency stamped with a human face? Fifty thousand years ago, who could have predicted skyscrapers with human-made train tunnels underground beneath them, or even washing bleached white bedsheets made from cotton grown overseas? Ten thousand years ago, who could have predicted container shipping through the human-made Panama canal? A thousand years ago who could have predicted Bitcoin? Five hundred years ago, who could have predicted electric motors? Three hundred years ago who could have predicted satellite weather mapping of the entire planet or trans-Atlantic undersea dark fibre bundles? Two hundred years ago, who could have predicted genetic engineering? A hundred and fifty years ago, who could have predicted MRI scanners? A hundred years ago, who could have predicted a DoorDash rider following GPS from a satellite using a map downloaded over a cellular data link to a wirelessly charging smartphone the size of a large matchbox bringing a pizza to your house coordinated by an internet-wide app?
In 2000 with Blackberry and Palm Treo and HP Journada and PalmPilot and Windows Phone and TomTom navigation, who was expecting YouTube, Google Maps with satellite photos, Google StreetView, Twitch, Discord, Vine, TikTok, Electron, Amazon Kindle with worldwide free internet book delivery, or the dominance of Python or the ubiquity of bluetooth headphones?
Fifty years ago is 1975, batteries were heavy and weak, cameras were film based, bulbs were incandescent, betamax and VHS and semiconductors were barely a thing - who was predicting micro-electromechanical timing devices, computer controlled LED Christmas lights playing tunes in greetings cards, DJI camera drones affordable to the population, Network Time Protocol synchronising the planet, the normality of video calling from every laptop or smartphone, or online shopping with encrypted credit card transactions hollowing out the highstreets and town centers?
The strange attractor at the end of history might be a long way away, but it's pulling us towards it nonetheless and its ripples go back millions of years in time. It's not like there's (all of history) and then at one point (the singularity where things get weird). Things have been getting weird for thousands and thousands of years in ways that the people before that wouldn't or couldn't have predicted.
Your species would have watched humans go from hairless mammals that basically did the same set of actions and need that your species had to an alien that might as well have landed from another planet (other than you don't even know other planets even exist). Now forests disappear in an instant. Lakes appear and disappear. Weird objects cover the ground and fill the sky. The paradigms that worked for eons are suddenly broken.
But you, you're a human, you're smart. The same thing couldn't possibly happen to you, right?
[2+√7i] https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
I said Olive oil mayonnaise is an enshitified product abusing loopholes. That you can't read is on you (no offense).
$15 gym shirts aren't tshirts (you know like 3 pack Hannes, Jockey). Again why are you trying so hard to reply t something I didn't write?
If new vehicles are just as affordable why are average loan lengths going up? The average car loan in the 1970s was 30 months. Long-maturity auto loans carry substantially higher interest so it isn't gaming the system reasons.
"Over 20% of new car purchases in Q4 2025 were 84-month financing deals." https://www.usatoday.com/story/cars/research/car-loans-finan...
That decade ago TV didn't spy on you, and I conceded TVs are an outlier if you ignore the whole 1984 aspect.
What car repairs does insurance cover? Where did I talk about maintenance? I talked about the cost to insure modern vehicles being higher especially later on. Context is important for comprehension.
You can leave off the passive aggressive 'no offense' snark.
> My Sony died very quickly. My Apple's are on their way out.
i'll never buy those apple earbuds ever again; hundreds of dollars down the drain and more e-waste cause those batteries cant be replaced... and sony: charging 70 bucks for wired earbuds and the cover falls off after a couple months usage what the f... (ok rant finished)
Of course it's an apples to oranges comparison since a modern smartphone has infinitely more functionality, but in this one thing modern phones remain objectively worse.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_2720_Flip
The new dump phone likely has more functionality and uses a much more robust wireless network.
First is you get a particular group of people to work for you. You tell them they are better than all the other poor people out there, that is get them to be nationalistic/racist, etc. You also give them a little bit more than the abjectly poor so they have something they fear to lose. You also let them know if they upset the situation they are in retribution will be swift and brutal and affect anyone they know and love.
So then what has been happening in non-capitalist countries since the 1970s, so we can compare?
The reason being that everyone else who tried something more e.g. democratic generally got crushed. So the commies that ended up running countries in the real world were the most ruthless, hyper-violent ones.
Those that do, yes, usually get murdered by those in position to do that (i.e. those that have physical access to them). That's neither interesting nor relevant though.
LLMs have been trained on synthetic outputs for quite a while since then and they do get better.
Turns out there's more to it than that.
In 2000, webcams were barely a thing, audio was often recorded to dictaphone tapes, and now you can find a recorded photo or video of roughly anyone and anything on Earth. Maybe a tenth of all humans, almost any place, animal, insect, or natural event, almost any machine, mechanism, invention, painting, and a large sampling of "indoors" both public and private, almost any festival or event or tradition, and a very large sampling of "people doing things" and people teaching things for all kinds of skills. And tons of measurements of locations, temperatures, movements, weather, experiment results, and so on.
The ability of computers to process information jumped with punched card readers, with electronic computers in the 1950s, again with transistors in the 1970s, semiconductors in the 1980s, commodity computer clusters (Google) in the 1990s, maybe again with multi-core desktops for everyone in the 2000s, with general purpose GPUs in the 2010s, and with faster commodity networking from 10Mbit to 100Gbit and more, and with SATA, then SAS, then RAID, then SSDs.
It's now completely normal to check Google Maps to look at road traffic and how busy stores are (picked up in near realtime from the movement of smartphones around the planet), to do face and object recognition and search in photos, to do realtime face editing/enhancement while recording on a smartphone, to track increasing amounts of exercise and health data from increasing numbers of people, to call and speak to people across the planet and have your voice transcribed automatically to text, to realtime face-swap or face-enhance on a mobile chip, to download gigabytes of compressed Wikipedia onto a laptop and play with it in a weekend in Python just for fun.
"AI" stuff (LLMs, neural networks and other techniques, PyTorch, TensorFlow, cloud GPUs and TPUs), the increase in research money, in companies competing to hire the best researchers, the increase in tutorials and numbers of people around the world wanting to play with it and being able to do that ... do you predict that by 2030, 2035, 2040, 2045, 2050 ... 2100, we'll have manufactured more compute power and storage than has ever been made, several times over, and made it more and more accessible to more people, and nothing will change, nothing interesting or new will have been found deliberately or stumbled upon accidentally, nothing new will have been understood about human brains, biology, or cognition, no new insights or products or modelling or AI techniques developed or become normal, no once-in-a-lifetime geniuses having any flashes of insight?
It's not the singularity.
The singularity is a specific belief that we will achieve AGI, and the AGI will then self-improve at an exponential rate allowing it to become infinitely more advanced and powerful (much moreso than we could ever have made it), and it will then also invent loads of new technologies and usher in a golden age. (Either for itself or us. That part's a bit under contention, from my understanding.)
That is one version of it, but not the only one. "John von Neumann is the first person known to have discussed a "singularity" in technological progress.[14][15] Stanislaw Ulam reported in 1958 that an earlier discussion with von Neumann "centered on the accelerating progress of technology and changes in human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue""[1]. A time when people before it, would be unable to predict what came after it because it was so different. (And which I argue in another comment[2] is not a specific cutoff time, but a trend over history of the future being increasingly hard to predict over shorter and shorter timeframes).
Apart from AGI, or Von Neuman accelerationism, I also understand it as augmenting human intelligence: "once we become cyborgs and enhance our abilities, nobody can predict what comes next"; or artificial 'life' - "if we make self-replicating nano-machines (that can have Darwinian natural selection?), all bets about the future are off"; or "once we can simulate human brains in a machine, even if we can't understand how they work, we can run tons of them at high speeds".
> and usher in a golden age. (Either for itself or us. That part's a bit under contention, from my understanding.)
Arguably, we have built weakly-superhuman entities, in the form of companies. Collectively they can solve problems that individual humans can't, live longer than humans, deploy and exploit more resources over larger areas and longer timelines than humans, and have shown a tendency to burn through workers and ruin the environment that keeps us alive even while supposedly guided by human intelligence. I don't have very much hope that a non-human AGI would be more aligned with our interests than companies made up of us are.
Also yes LLMs are indeed AGI: https://www.noemamag.com/artificial-general-intelligence-is-...
This was Peter Norvig's take. AGI is a low bar because most humans are really stupid.
Instead, a subconscious process assembles the words to support my stream of consciousness. I think that LLMs are very similar, if not identical.
Stream of thought is accomplishing something superficially similar to consciousness, but without the ability to be innovative.
At any rate, until there’s an artificial human level stream of consciousness in the mix for each AI, I doubt we’ll see a group of AIs collaborating to produce a significantly improved new generation of AI hardware and software minus human involvement.
Once that does happen, the Singularity is at hand.
I’ll emphasize my main point further, LLMs have no ability to innovate much beyond the vast data they’ve scraped. They’re almost entirely derivative.
They are a definite improvement over traditional search engines though!
There really isn't much to engage with.
I don’t understand this perspective. There are numerous examples of technical progress that then stalls out. Just look at batteries for example. Or ones where advancements are too expensive for widespread use (e.g. why no one flies Concorde any more)
Why is previous progress a guaranteed indicator of future progress?
If AGI doesn't happen, then good. You get to keep working and playing and generally screwing off in the way that humans have for generations.
On the other hand if AGI happens, especially any time soon, you are exceptionally fucked along with me. The world changes very rapidly and there is no getting off Mr Bones wild ride.
>Why is previous progress a guaranteed indicator of future progress?
In this case, because nature already did it. We're not just inventing and testing something whole cloth. And we know there are still massive efficiencies to be gained.
For me the Concorde is an example of how people look at stuff incorrectly. In the past we had to send people places very quickly to do things. This was very expensive and inefficient. I don't need to get on a plane to have an effect just about anywhere else in the world now. The internet and digital mediums give me a presence at other locations that is very close to being there. We didn't need planes that fly at the speed of sound, we needed strings that communicate at the speed of light.
I look at the trajectory of LLMs, and the shape I see is one of diminishing returns.
The improvements in the first few generations came fast, and they were impressive. Then subsequent generations took longer, improved less over the previous generation, and required more and more (and more and more) resources to achieve.
I'm not interested in one guy's take that LLMs are AGI, regardless of his computer science bonafides. I can look at what they do myself, and see that they aren't, by most very reasonable definitions of AGI.
If you really believe that the singularity is happening now...well, then, shouldn't it take a very short time for the effects of that to be painfully obvious? Like, massive improvements in all kinds of technology coming in a matter of months? Come back in a few months and tell me what amazing new technologies this supposed AGI has created...or maybe the one in denial isn't me.
[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.04125
" We consistently find that, far from exhibiting "zero-shot" generalization, multimodal models require exponentially more data to achieve linear improvements in downstream "zero-shot" performance, following a sample inefficient log-linear scaling trend. This trend persists even when controlling for sample-level similarity between pretraining and downstream datasets, and testing on purely synthetic data distributions. Furthermore, upon benchmarking models on long-tailed data sampled based on our analysis, we demonstrate that multimodal models across the board perform poorly."
It seems even more true if you look at OpenAI funding thru 2022 initial public release to how spending has exponentially increased to deliver improvements since. We’re now talking upwards of $600B/yr of spending on LLM based AI infrastructure across the industry in 2026.
There's no "rapid acceleration of progress". If anything there's a decline, and even an economic decline.
Take away the financial bubbles based on deregulation and huge explosion of debt, and the last 40 years of "economic progress" are just a mirage filling a huge bubble with air in actual advancement terms - unlike the previous millenia.
The world can produce more things cheaper and faster than ever and this is an economic decline? I think you may have missed the other 6 billion people on the planet getting massive improvements in their quality of life.
Who was it who stated that every exponential was just a sigmoid in disguise?
> most humans are really stupid.
Statistically, don't we all sort of fit somewhere along a bell curve?
Think of stupidity as the consequences of interacting with ones environment with negative outcomes. If you have a simple environment with few negative outcomes, then even someone with a 80 IQ may not be considered stupid. But if your environment rapidly grows more complex and the amount of thinking you have to do for positive outcomes increases then even someone with a 110 IQ may find themselves quickly in trouble.
I think you have missed that it's easy to get "massive improvements in your quality of life" if you start from merely-post-revolution-era China or 1950s Africa or colonial India.
Much less so if you plateaud as US and Europe, and live off of increased debt ever since the 1970s.
Increased debt is mostly on the good that technology cannot at least yet reproduce. For example they aren't making new land. Taste, NIMBYism and currently laws stop us from increased housing density in a lot of places too. Healthcare is still quite limited by laws in the US and made expensive because of it.
The industrial revolution increased the pace, but it was already there, not flat or randomly flunctuating (think ancient hominids versus early agriculture vs bronge age, vs ancient Babylon and Assyrian empires, vs later Greece, and Persia, later Rome, later Renaissance and so on).
Post 1970s most of the further increase has been based on mirages due to financialization, and doesn't reflect actual improvement.
In 2026, unless you are really lucky your chances of being treated into remission are much better. That is a meaningful improvement.
Medical science made a HUGE progress in the last 50 years alone. The oldest IVF baby is not even fifty yet.
Of course it does. It would be good if you would try to actually support such controversial claims with data.
Just because you can find someone referring to something else as a "technological singularity" doesn't mean it's reasonable to say that must, or even could, have been the definition the person I was replying to was using.
...And I think you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone to agree with you that "we founded companies" somehow satisfies the conditions of the Singularity, unless they're deeply invested in the idea that The Singularity Is Happening Now, and have entirely forgotten just what that's actually supposed to mean, or why they wanted it to be happening.
> The version I described is the only one I've ever heard anyone else referring to.
In 2008 the IEEE magazine Spectrum did a series on the Singularity and one article [0] says "Like paradise, technological singularity comes in many versions, but most involve bionic brain boosting." Another article had this "Who's Who"[1] cheat-sheet of famous Singularity discussers for and against; one of the columns is "Kind of Singularity", and there's more than one kind. Kevin Kelly has "singularities are pervasive changes in the state of the world that are often recognizable only in retrospect. As a result, the singularity is always near". Bill Joy was a more general "computer science, biotech and nanotechnology event horizon". Marvin Minsky had mind uploading as well as machine intelligence.
Vernor Vinge named 'The Singularity' in 1983 and popularised the ida, and here are talk slides from him in 2005 after he had twenty years of thinking about it[2]:
Why call this transition the "Technological Singularity"?
By analogy with the use of "singularity" in Math
A place where some regularity property is lost
Not necessarily a place where anything becomes infinite
By analogy with the use of "singularity" in Physics
A place where the rules profoundly change
What comes beyond is intrinsically less knowable/predictable than before
The apocalyptic endpoint of radical optimism :-)
Singularity futures
Possible paths to the Singularity
What if: AI (Artificial intelligence) research succeeds?
I.J. Good, "Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine"
Hannes Alfv�n, The End of Man?
What if: The internet itself attains unquestioned life and intelligence?
Gregory Stock, Metaman
Bruce Sterling, "Maneki Neko"
What if: Fine-grained distributed systems are aggressively successful?
Karl Schroeder, Ventus
Vernor Vinge, "Fast Times at Fairmont High"
What if: IA (Intelligence Amplification) occurs
As the radical endpoint of Human/computer interface research?
Poul Anderson, "Kings Who Die"
Vernor Vinge, "Bookworm, Run!"
As the outcome of bioscience research?
Vernor Vinge, "Fast Times at Fairmont High"
Vernor Vinge, "Win a Nobel Prize!"
The 'attractor at the end of history' is from Terence McKenna: "[he] saw the universe, in relation to novelty theory, as having a teleological attractor at the end of time, which increases interconnectedness and would eventually reach a singularity of infinite complexity. ... The universe is not being pushed from behind. The universe is being pulled from the future toward a goal ... our ever-accelerating speed through the phenomenal world of connectivity and novelty is based on the fact that we are now very, very close to the attractor."[3]
> "doesn't mean it's reasonable to say that must, or even could, have been the definition the person I was replying to was using."
Okay, but your "LLMs are not a path to AGI and tech bros are dumb" doesn't lead to anything interesting, it's just a mic-drop end of discussion.
[0] https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-consciousness-conundrum
[1] https://spectrum.ieee.org/who-is-who-in-the-singularity
[2] https://edoras.sdsu.edu/~vinge/misc/ac2005/
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terence_McKenna#Novelty_theory...
"The earth is flat" is one of those things.
"The singularity is happening" is one of those things.
"LLMs are AGI" is yet another.
They've already been discussed to death. The only reason to discuss them now is if you are one of the people who is absolutely rejecting reality because you are bound and determined to believe something that is not true.