Notices by Glyph (glyph@mastodon.social)

@mcc I have to guess "no" if not even zkat has done so, even after *multiple* comments from the offender in the above post.

This strikes me as a situation where different approaches make sense in different contexts. Some projects should probably take that approach, and maybe even collaborate on blocklists to kick out transgressors. Other projects with higher emotional bandwidth might want to have an explicit goal of rehabilitation.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@grimalkina/116410267466134747

I am, personally, really worried that AI might in fact cause something like "brain damage". Informally, I have seen manic behavior, risk-taking, and troubling personality changes from some heavy users, and I've seen similar things reported in the press. I think it's something we should worry about. But I co-sign this take enthusiastically because so many "studies" are framing "we made a task easier, and then people rationally invested less in learning that task" as some scary injury

To me, what this calls out for is a new type of contributor role, a person who can run interference to help the core technical maintainers actually maintain some enthusiasm and momentum for their own projects. FLOSS has long been starved for issue and PR triagers already, but the spampocalypse is escalating the deficiency into a catastrophe.

The way that this is written strikes me as wildly over-optimistic and dangerously credulous towards slopmongers' claims about capabilities.

But.

I think in the mold of "try to be kind, not to be 'nice'", we do need to engage with the realpolitik of a slop-haunted world. We cannot accept extruded text in our projects for a whole host of reasons, BUT, we do need to have patience and grace for the extruders themselves, to help them understand how to participate.

https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2026/apr/15/eternal-november-generative-ai-llm/

If you are an enthusiast yourself who is interested in a sustainable open source culture, you should consider maybe dedicating some time to help a no-AI project you like fend off such people. Allowing this kind of direct abuse to take place with no pushback from your faction kinda tars you all with the same brush.

Thankfully my maintenance portfolio exists in a backwater of obscurity and irrelevance, so I am able to think about this from at least a *partial* remove from the immediacy of the catastrophe. But even I can see a plethora of evidence—like the above—where it really looks like the extruders turn people into aggressive, unrepentant assholes. At least, they create a constituency of unrepentant assholes who are also LLM users.

One of the very difficult tensions around this problem is that the extrusion enthusiast culture itself is deeply obnoxious, bordering on predatory. So enforcement of boundaries may sometimes need to be pretty confrontational. And it really shouldn't be incumbent upon maintainers themselves to need to constantly re-litigate basic project policy in every single PR, because that is a recipe for burnout. As a recent and striking example, consider *this* disaster:

https://toot.cat/@zkat/116410545300488665

On the resistance side, we need to figure out ways to talk to people who think that this is an acceptable way to conduct themselves in public understand that:

1. they should believe in their own abilities more
2. if they want a feather in their resumé cap, there's no credit or glory in getting an LLM to do the work, even if it gets the code into the project; it just marks you as a plagiarist
3. almost no project with *any* degree of popularity needs "more PRs", it needs more *maintainers*

after all the Hasan Discourse last week I took a quick peek over at this YouTube channel and, holy shit

these view counts. this subscriber count

I understand the ways in which social media metrics are gameable and don't always represent the most accurate gauge of public sentiment, especially once you get over a million or so

but holy shit, these aren't cracking *a hundred* views.

these people Do Not Have The Juice at a truly staggering level

https://www.youtube.com/@ThirdWayVideo/videos

the apple watch activity rings are like “what if sisyphus’s rock had a cool app, with like, animations and stuff”

@thomasfuchs do you remember the time Long Island Brand Beverages became a blockchain

augghhh why won't they just take my money https://keeb.io/products/sinc-lm-kit

I found gas for less than $6 today and felt a little thrill, which tells me that maybe it's time to get an EV. I am—obviously—not getting a Tesla, and I'd just like a reliable, regular EV that can fit a kid and a few friends. But the offerings in the US seem confusing and gimmicky. I don't want a big truck or an experimental mess full of panel gaps and slow charging. I don't want my feet nailed to the floor of some proprietary subscription HUD; I want to use CarPlay like a normal person

it is so mind-meltingly frustrating to see people think that we are close to a "singularity" with current AI technology. here's a hint about when you could worry about a disruption so big that it might, even momentarily, *appear* to be a singularity:

a single corporation turning a profit even once

if, in order to achieve your out-of-control doomsday robot scenario, a trillion dollars worth of human effort must be expended annually, and if any of it stops for even a moment than the whole thing implodes and grinds to a halt, _you can stop worrying_ that it is "the machines" which dominate us

we are not even remotely close to a single LLM meaningfully constructing even a portion of the pipeline to train another LLM. you can sort of argue around the edges that maybe under certain synthetic conditions this is borderline possible now, but on the "singularity" progress bar, that is 0.5%

in order to be a singularity candidate, an AI would need to achieve vertical integration from silicon fabrication through logistics and integration, into operating systems and applications, with tight whole-system feedback from the robotics to the shipping to the power generation and back

RE: https://mastodon.social/@glyph/115076275195904439

I've written about this before and I will probably do it again. but I don't know what else to do but repeat myself when allegedly serious, internationally-renowned academic experts and influential public intellectuals are just going out there and saying stuff that would get you laughed out of a late night freshman dorm room conversation about philosophy

doomers might look at my rant here and think, "but wait, once it's self-sustaining, even a little, it's TOO LATE, it's already out of control!!!" and to that I say: no. not even close. look the evolution of *any* business. managing resource flows is really hard. there is an off-ramp every single day

seriously just imagine the plot of one of the movies that doomers seem to think are documentaries, like Terminator 2. imagine the scene where the T-1000 is getting pelted with bullets. instead of seamlessly autonomously healing, imagine it has to lie down and wait for a human to place an order for $1,000,000 of NVIDIA GPUs to be delivered in a shipping container and then a construction crew to set up a methane generator to run for two weeks straight before it got up again. is that still scary?