Glyph
After a couple of epic crash-outs the last few days, today I am feeling a bit more hopeful, which I assume is going to get more people to yell at me:
Your favorite open source project that is "embracing slop" is not lost forever. Some will be, but I think overall the ecosystem will be eminently recoverable.
If I may, here's another metaphor. 🧵
Glyph
It's not like the consequences aren't serious; some people will, in fact, contract lung cancer. Some of them will die from it, often in hideous agony. So I don't want to downplay that "it's fine to smoke" or anything.
But neither is a smoker who occasionally condemns others to secondhand smoke a morally irredeemable person, nor are they a doomed lost cause. They could always stop. It's easier to not-start than it is to stop, but lots of people stop.
Glyph
This doesn't mean that there are no boundaries. I will strenuously object if you smoke around me; if you're jonesing, and we're outside, I might begrudgingly bear it for the benefit of conversation. I will absolutely forbid you to smoke around my kid, though, and if you try to, we might not be friends for much longer. This distinction highlights that while all smoking is bad, not all smoking is *the same*.
Glyph
A lot of "slop" is just trivial fixes that cannot possibly be copyright-infringing or holding hidden security holes. Vigilance in human review does tend to decrement over time, but that's not the same as it being totally worthless. Projects will still have standards, even if they're a little degraded. Some projects will simply observe these things through direct experience and eventually stop.
Glyph
Many projects that stop will not need to do a giant dramatic remediation; they will have been paying attention all along, they will have been *trying* to get good utility out of the LLMs, they will not have their critical faculties _instantly_ obliterated (it is indeed the creeping and subtle nature of the problems which makes them so problematic).
Glyph
I have a very nasty reaction to tobacco smoke. I might be allergic to it, but in any case, inhaling even a tiny bit is a DEEPLY unpleasant experience for me. Being around it nauseates me. And obviously it's not healthy for the person smoking it. Indeed, it's usually, eventually, lethal.
And yet, I have many friends who are, or have been, smokers. Most of them smoked socially. A few were chain smokers. Some did in fact blow smoke in my face on occasion. I survived. So did they.
Glyph
For those of you that are fucking off to Codeberg forever and making forks of the Linux kernel and everything else, godspeed, I hope that you are successful and I hope your efforts send a useful signal. I hope that I have the energy to help out a little. But for those of you who are watching everyone in your community go a *little* bit nuts, I don't think you need to despair that we are descending into a permanently unfixable mess. The smaller fights are also worthwhile.
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