RE: https://fedi.copyleft.org/@bkuhn/117453005618069047

slopware freedom conservancy 🥱

The term "single use software" currently lives rent free in my head.

People use LLMs to create software specific for their needs. But neither can other people use it (hardcoded variables, no rights management, too specific), nor do they use it again (too specific, easier to produce a new one).

Single use software is not maintained. Nobody understands it or has an interest in keeping it working.

The creation of single use software feels cheap, but isn't. It takes time to create the software, it needs infrastructure and power. The time is experienced as short compared to how long it takes to create maintainable and reusable software. But once you take into account how many people benefit from reusable software, the single use software takes way more time to create than what it saves. The infrastructure and power costs are hidden because the data center isn't visible. The costs are subsidized by venture capital.

Like other single use items, single use software brings risks of unforeseen consequences. From data loss or leaks to issues for maintainers of reusable software (eg. verbal abuse, less motivation and lost income).

As an example of single use software is a German LinkedIn post of a person who slopcoded a HEMS (home energy management system). It took them more than a week. While open source projects like https://evcc.io/ already provide the same functionality. They could have used it for free or paid 100€ and got support for some additional devices. But they decided that they know better how it should work and now have a single use software. If it breaks there is nobody they can ask. There won't be updates and no community to discuss and develop new features. No organization will ever be interested in officially supporting it. And even if it works, it only benefits that one person.

(This doesn't mean people shouldn't build things that only they use. But they should enjoy doing so.)

From "the journey is the reward", to "I want it now". I sometimes wonder if people understand the point of living.

https://www.404media.co/video-game-reverse-engineering-community-shuts-down-because-ai-has-made-it-too-easy/

@glyph I've been saying this for years ever since "it just speeds up the boilerplate" first ruffled my feathers and I had to sit and examine why.

If boilerplate is somehow prohibitively uncomfortable to write, that's a pain signal here to tell you something. You're missing an abstraction! Just like touching a hot stove should signal you to not do the thing. Choosing to just do the boilerplate faster with stolen training data, even if it's a task the bot can easily do correctly, is like shooting up morphine instead of moving your hand off the stove. And nearly all LLM apologia is like this!

If nothing else, I have a far more fundamental respect for friction* and pain signals than I did five years ago.

It's also very frustrating to constantly have my opposition to AI be taken as an opposition to abstraction, or to automation, and a desire to do every little thing by hand. But it's the opposite. For a whole bunch of reasons, AI anti-abstracts. It adversarially creates oceans of duplication to process. It creates a situation where the AI user gets to set the terms of some ecosystem with synthetic productivity but then everyone else needs an AI to figure out what's going on in that new ecosystem.

Regardless of the actual merits or downsides of the use of AI, it is increasingly obvious that AI boosters are not the kind of people you want to let anywhere near your project. Or indeed your drink.

It turns out that @freecad is the latest project to fall victim to slop. To their partial credit, they are acknowledging it's controversial and are retooting a sample of pro and anti responses they've had.

The difference in the responses is stark.

The anti-slop responses relate disappointment, betrayal, and concern for the future of the project. These are mostly people who have at least some investment in the project even if "just" users and not contributors.

The pro-slop responses are purely pushback and not constructive: Fork the project. Write your own replacement. Use something else. Ad hominem attacks. These people are not invested in the project at all, they're just interested in pushing their agenda. Come back in a week and they'll be vociferously defending slop on another project, having forgotten that FreeCAD ever existed.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@lobsters/117449825505376513

Refusing accessibility contributions and telling experts to no longer help your product is low even for Mullenweg.

And you can call this oversensitive, feel-good "woke" nonsense if you want, but I've got the data and I'm right: a code of conduct, community standards and moderation enforcing them, the psychological safety of your community, these are near term competitive advantages and long term survival necessities. Treating the process of getting involved and the experience of staying involved in your community _as a product_, worthy of usability testing and ergonomic refinement, that moves the needle.

"Nerds would rather be slavers than admit that their stochastic token predictor is not intelligent" reveals way more about nerds and their views on other human beings than it says about Chatbots.

"this downright black-and-white refusal of generative AI is childish"

Okay, now replace"AI" with child labor and say that again. Because a lot of the moral arguments against genAI are similarly structured than those against child labor.

RE: https://tldr.nettime.org/@tante/117444990857312231

What I find most interesting is a phrase like «This is NOT some kind of “social warrior” project, never has been, and never will be.». If you lurk on /r/linux, you can see the general right-wing sentiment growing, complaining about "political" or social issues getting raised. There is a clear, slow direction that the leadership of the project is taking, and, in his words, "the genie is out of the bottle".

There's a form of grief about the state of the climate, the species we killed with our actions, the damage we've done to the ecosystem. Grief about not what we "lost" but what we destroyed (often through negligence).

I do feel a very similar kind of grief when I think about "AI" and what its usage does to our cultural expression and our collaborative infrastructures.

Seeing the damage that "AI" is doing to the Kernel (not just in Slop code being integrated that will bite us later but in making becoming a new kernel developer even harder than it is at a time where we should really be thinking about how to fill that pipeline) is super painful.

I think that - like Wikipedia - Linux as an alternative platform for computing was one of the new wonders of the world, something that showed that a better world is possible. And we're just pissing it away because Linus doesn't want to talk to people who he needs to mentor.

"I suggest the social action: shame. Shame these people. Their actions are shameful. AI bros hate being shamed and they try to make rules against shaming — because shame works.

None of these people doing shameful things deserve a place in polite company. They should be shamed for their shameful choices.

The AI industry is also running a PR push to redefine common word usage. The word “slop” is also super effective — so the bros really hate “slop” and try to define it to mean slop they don’t like.

But all AI output is slop. It’s social spam. That’s what it’s for. It’s slop! Say “slop” every time."

https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/10/14/linux-kernel-goes-full-ai-slop-code-hides-chatbot-commits/

RE: https://social.kit.edu/@KIT_Karlsruhe/117444063768135059

Wichtiger Schritt. Noch wichtiger ist natürlich eine Umgebung, in der die Lernenden keine "KI" Systeme nutzen und damit dann die Chance haben, Kompetenzen auszubilden.

Das House of Competence (HoC), die zentrale wissenschaftliche Einrichtung für Schlüsselkompetenzen am #KITKarlsruhe, macht künftig den Einsatz generativer #KI in der #Lehre transparent: Als erstes SQ-Zentrum Deutschlands stellt es sicher, dass Studierende immer genau wissen, ob und wie #KünstlicheIntelligenz in der Lehre eingesetzt wird. Im Wintersemester 2026/27 bietet das #HoC erstmals komplett KI-freie Kurse unter einem eigenen Label an. https://www.hoc.kit.edu/2070.php

Fast tech has a slow death. Cheap gadgets pile up as e-waste, says new study

A WEEE study has found that nearly 90 per cent of European consumers from 12 countries own at least one such “fast tech” device and 78 per cent of them bought one recently.

https://theprint.in/science/fast-tech-has-a-slow-death-cheap-gadgets-pile-up-as-e-waste-says-new-study/3071624/

Danes ob 19h na #RadioStudent 89,3MHz 📻️ v #TehnoKlistir Intervju s @tante o tehno fašizmu, ki ga je osvetlila #linux distribucija #Omarchy.

https://radiostudent.si/druzba/tehno-klistir/ljuti-luditi

#TuneIn #Podcast

This is so so nuts: the @earthshotprize.bsky.social@bsky.brid.gy is partnering up with NVIDIA.

By my calcs: just 1 yr of NVIDIA's AI climate emissions undo Earthshot's total avoided emissions todate, several times over.

No other company getting away with it quite like this one

ketanjoshi.co/2026/09/16/n...