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The best analogy I can think of (quite similar to this one) is that the internet is low Earth orbit and AI is the Kessler syndrome. We abandon the place not to
by bsza 6mo ago
The best analogy I can think of (quite similar to this one) is that the internet is low Earth orbit and AI is the Kessler syndrome. We abandon the place not to hide ourselves, but because it is saturated with garbage, and anything you try to put up there will only result in even more garbage being generated, without any positive effect.
The ideal solution would be to remove the garbage, but right now we can't even detect it, let alone figure out a way to get rid of it. Besides, it's a zero sum game, why bother cleaning up when you can just effortlessly pump out more garbage in hopes that some of it will remain in orbit for long enough to benefit you.
- middayc 6mo agoThis is interesting. When I read if for the second time, trying to understand it - maybe even better match for the low orbit flying garbage would be "enshitification"? As the time goes on, more and more garbage is produced, and we have no clear way or specific motivated entity to start removing it so it just grows.
- DaiPlusPlus 6mo agoEnshittification specifically is when a product/service/platform gets worse from the user’s perspective because the platform vendor can directly profit from user-hostile design; for example, Google intentionally serves up bad results on the first search results page so the user clicks-through to the second page of results, resulting in more advert revenue to Google[1]. …whereas I feel what you’re describing is another Tragedy-of-the-Commons. [1]: https://jackyan.com/blog/2023/09/google-search-is-worse-by-design-internal-memo/ https://jackyan.com/blog/2023/09/google-search-is-worse-by-d...
- red-iron-pine 6mo agoenshittification is a hip, tech-bro term to mean "rent seeking" and is nothing new
- chongli 6mo agoRent-seeking is too general of a term. You can rent-seek just by raising prices. Enshittification specifically means deliberately making the product worse as a rent-seeking strategy.
- Barrin92 6mo agoI don't buy the analogy. The problem with Kessler syndrome is that low earth orbit is physically crowded, you run into collisions. I don't care about the garbage. I don't care about the AI era. I've been writing code in Emacs for 20 years, I'll be writing code in Emacs in 20 years, every open source project I contribute to still looks the same because all these AI people, like the blockchain people do is just make new stuff up in their own incestuous tupperware salesmen ecosystems. I do pity the bug bounty people who rely on goodwill in their programs given that everything with a financial incentive is vulnerable. But otherwise the great thing about digital spaces is that there is, for practical purposes, unlimited space. Every day there's another "how do you deal with the AI-apocalypse" article, I don't just ignore it
- chongli 6mo agoI think by "internet" they mean search engine results pages. If you restrict yourself to short, common queries and only look at the top 10 results on the page, then the space really is very limited. If all those top 10s for common queries start to get crowded out with AI slop, then people are going to start abandoning search.
- bsza 6mo agoWell, if you open-source anything these days and it does make it big, you can be prepared for a flood of low-effort slop PRs that you must either review for free or stop accepting external contributions altogether, making it effectively closed-source. You can't choose to ignore the garbage, it will collide with your stuff, unless your stuff is small enough to avoid collisions (in which case no one will see it).
- xnorswap 6mo agoZero-contribution open source doesn't at all make it closed source. It delivers on the value of open source, that anyone using your software is permitted to make and distribute their own changes. SQLite is an example of a project that is open source but closed contribution.
- 6mo ago
- bodegajed 6mo agoThis is why I now check when I'm researching for a solution (that an LLM cannot figure out.) I go to github but often check if the project was created before 2022 due to AI slop concerns.
- ohelm 6mo agoI would suffocate it. Know the greedy snake idiom? A snake is so hungry and greedy that it suffocates on its prey? Best you can do is to spread all of the goods it provides, as it is too greedy to not devour them itself. It will consume them and suffocate slowly.
- yetihehe 6mo ago> It will consume them and suffocate slowly. Can we accelerate it perhaps? You know, spending ALL our resources on making the snake more fat is not a good idea. Its only good idea when you have so much resources that you can easily suffocate the snake with negligible (for us) amount. If you try to suffocate several million snakes, that might backfire a little.
- mentalgear 6mo agoI assume you indicate LLM poisoning with bad web data ? (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47561819 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47561819)