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Cake day: July 18th, 2023

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  • WhatAmLemmy@lemmy.worldtoOpen Source@lemmy.ml•Ban AI Slop?
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    8 days ago

    I’m conflicted. I’m anti-AI due to distrust in capitalism and our pseudo-democratic plutocracies, the profit motive to replace the human workforce, the reckless criminal-incompetence of its implementation, and apparent stupidity of the average hairless primate in understanding that you can never trust a correlation engine… but it’s just a tool, and I’ve also found it incredibly useful in my limited and controlled usage; getting it to write small functions or blocks of code, then amending and composing them myself.

    How do we determine what is “heavily written by ai”, and all the obvious slop factory bullshit, without banning strong projects who are just leveraging it for legitimate dev work; as a glorified autocomplete, test autofill, etc but still read and validate every line of code?

    Like most people, I’m finding it increasingly difficult to find trustworthy projects amongst the see of amateur slop, but I think banning it out-right would likely result in many false positives, and ultimately be counter-productive.

    As much as I don’t want to depend on metrics, I think a better approach would be to define a bunch of heuristics based on historically-competent projects. Things like defining an upper limit based on LoC vs commit time and number of devs, project age, etc. Ultimately I feel the industry should do what cybersecurity should be doing; moving to some sort of cryptograhically-verified social trust model where engineers/professionals have to build trust in the real world, and take turns in “vouching” for projects and code releases.






  • I once came across a large adult wombat just chilling in the middle of a single lane road in a national park. Wikipedia says they grow up to 35kg, but I swear this one was pushing 50kg; like a large bulldog crossed with a pig. One absolutely rotund stocky fur-ball. He continued to waddle down the middle of the road as I swerved from side to side, trying to get him to move over so I could go around. I had places to be, and drugs to consume. He did not give a fuck. He couldn’t give one single iota of a fuck. I eventually got outta the car and chased him. I started with a slow jog but he just continued trotting down the middle of the road, keeping his distance. Within about 10 seconds I was sprinting as fast as I could but the majestic chonk wasn’t even trying hard; just leisurely galloping. The chase continued for a solid 100 meters before he opened up and just took off like a rocket, accelerating into the shadows before darting sideways into the bushes. I was blown away. I thought the fat little cunt would be slow but he was as fast as a dog. Don’t fuck with wombats. They are the honey badgers of Oz.



  • That’s why Firefox should be relinquished to a non-profit which is not associated with a for-profit company in any way.

    Think about it logically. A non-trivial proportion of Firefox users are power users. We’re talking about millions of well paid IT professionals, programmers, academics, etc who trend older and wealthier. I don’t know about you, but if Firefox was truly non-profit and focused development on user-voted features, instead of for-profit SaaS services, I’d be willing to donate $100+ a year for the rest of my life out of principle. We’re not talking about some hidden open source library here. We’re talking about the only viable browser alternative to big tech. We’re talking about a product equivalent to Wikipedia or the internet archive in importance (both of which I donate to annually, and will likely continue to forever).

    I do not donate to Firefox because of the Mozilla corporation and their for-profit influence over Firefox, and I never will as long as they are involved.