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. 🧵
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.
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.
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*.
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.
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).
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.
@glyph ... in this metaphor, is the slop lung cancer?
@miss_rodent the slop is the smoke itself, that we are all breathing. the lung cancer is the full-on family-annihilating AI psychosis
@glyph One difference between smoking tobacco and our current LLM moment is the climate crisis. There is no particular timeline by which we need to defeat the tobacco industry to survive; people will die of cancer unnecessarily and young, but it's not existential.
We have tight deadlines to address the climate crisis. For some people and ecosystems, it's already too late. Emissions from data centers alone should have sunk LLMs.
We don't have time for LLMs to sort themselves out.
@skyfaller @glyph In this, we may get lucky in the least lucky way.
We're facing multiple crisises at once. While LLMs will do a lot of damage... they have terrible economics and are mostly tied to a country that is in active collapse. It's also heavily depenent on crude oil, which... well... we have also sabotaged the market for with our attacks in Iran.
The worst case likely scenarios include a collapse of the very infrastructure this technology relies on.
This will, of course, be very very bad for the people living in the USA. (including me.) But at least it will cause a hard stop for a lot of the harms to the climate crisis?
@Epic_Null @glyph This is accelerationism, not a good framing. Hoping that the harms become so extreme that even the richest people on earth can no longer ignore them implies mass death before the data centers are disabled.
It's often said "the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent", and that's best understood collectively: the market can keep destroying our planetary life support systems well past the point of no return.
Let's stop the LLMs before that point.
Aug 13, 2026, 2:35 AM@glyph Sir, I'm digging the optimism and I hope I can one day share it.
Meanwhile I'm archiving what I can.
Aug 13, 2026, 1:00 AM@glyph thats a good analogy
@glyph well you’ve managed to highlight another thing about the mandated AI hype wave that ticks me off.
I used to smoke cigarettes, a pack or more per day. I still vape. I prefer outside, away from people. I see someone, I cross the street. Never within visual range of kids.
These folks are smoking, they want me to smoke, they want kids to smoke, and they get mad anyone wants a non-smoking section.
@randomgeek the cultural perspective that I have to offer is: I remember the 80s, when that was “the government”
@glyph and funnily enough I am indeed prepared for one of these folks to tell me ketchup is a vegetable.
Aug 13, 2026, 2:22 AM@glyph I know this thread is about other things, but HEY ME TOO. I am physically wrecked for about a day after under 10min of exposure to cigarette smoke. My throat feels like it has been ripped open by hyenas. I only just found out this is not normal and may be an allergy.
@glyph Thanks for sharing this, I want to have hope and I still believe in open source software.