Technology

You did show that it's valuable to you, and that you care about the outcome.

Is that what's ultimately important?

it might have more to do with an opportunity cost that is evaluated and intentionally selected

I think that's getting closer. I definitely interpret 'sacrifice' as suggesting one or both parties is facing an uncertain, likely or guaranteed negative opportunity cost but chooses to engage anyways. One of the ways I show care is trying to ensure that is never knowingly the case and as many unknowns are disclosed beforehand. Informed consent and all that.

I hear what you're saying, but it feels to me like a very competitive zero-sum game perspective that can be true sometimes but is an exception rather than a universal. I'm trying to figure out if there is a root universal there that I'm just not seeing. Any ideas?

AI has no opportunity cost, at the individual level

I do not see how that is remotely true in either of our frameworks/perspectives. Reduced opportunity cost absolutely, but certainly not zero and different uses will have different costs associated.

They aren't putting anything of themselves in it.

Anything someone touches puts some amount of themselves in it. It's a big issue in science, law, testing, validation and politics is that people are unable to not put themselves into their work.

I would agree that AI dilutes and transforms that personal touch and often replaced it with something that has a bit more mass market appeal, but I can't think of any medium that isn't true for. I would agree the magnitude of that transformation is fairly unprecedented though. However, I would argue that it would be a lot more valuable if it was capable of living up to that claim.

That does however start to get into the very philosophical and largely unknowable weeds of 'is there such a thing as perfect information or does everything contain bias and when can that bias be considered negligible'?

It has no value because it isn't them.

It is a homomorphism of them. Unrecognizable due to it's transformation into mass-market/slop-space but I don't think that guarantees any specific direction of transformation on the value.

One of the most problematic issues with AI slop I see is that it allows for the transformation of things that should objectively be disposed of due to being intrinsically harmful into something with marginal value that is then mass-marketed.

Value is largely subjective. Slop is generally valued as a feedstock. There is a wide range of qualities of slop. I do not understand where your insistance that slop universally has no value is coming from other than your own personal value judgements.

This has been a pleasure. In a lot of ways I figure out what I think by writing it down, so this has been a very useful challenge.

Agreed ^⁠_⁠^

the fact that we're both choosing to be here, honing our arguments, is meaningful.

Yes, and I'm doing so with the belief this is the most valuable use of my time at the moment for myself and those involved. For me the meaningfullness isn't derived from what else is/isn't on that list and the 'sacrifices' made but from a largely subconscious cost/benefit analysis.

You're meaningful because you exist, not because I'm neglecting my job to talk with you :P

With slop, you don't have to make a choice. You can send an agent on all of the flights at once!

But why? The point of a flight is to get your physical body from X to Y.

If you're spamming flights for the sake of A/B testing I would agree that is slop, but that's not unique to AI and this exact hypothetical is often done with human agents for the sake of identifying the best options for ~~V~~IPs

Do the agents clog up seats that impede with the ability of the airline to achieve it's purpose of transportation from X to Y? Yes! Is that an inherently negative thing? I don't think so, but I'm hoping you can convince me otherwise.

because of my upbringing, I don't see it as a necessarily negative word

Fair. And I would believe mine does give it a more negative connotation than it justly deserves.

"Intent" is another good word that we could probably use here for what I'm calling "effort," though it's also inexact. Slop has no intent.

I feel like effort was closer. Slop absolutely has 'intent', however those intentions often get transformed in a non-deterministic way, or simply don't translate to the medium. That's true of any artistic process though, IE Bob Ross sort of 'mistakes become happy little trees'.

Someone who is a master of their craft with good/reliable tools is better able to translate their intent to medium. Often with less effort and shorter time spent. I think the issue comes from conflating the master and his tools, and in the case of AI assuming the tool has no master.

I understand and partially agree with the perspective that AI, and 'the algorithms' in general, are largely independent stochastic processes but I don't think that changes that they are tools with owners who are controlling/manufacturing them.

I also do see the man in the middle vulnerability within that transformation that you might be pointing at but I don't think that is encapsulated by either 'effort' nor 'intent' either.

I do recognize how ridiculous it is

It doesn't sound ridiculous to me. Being succinct is a valuable skill that often takes time and sometimes the best way to communicate is via short-form. I don't think I can say for certain that text was any more valuable for having deliberated for hours but it does shape my perception to believe it to be a more thoughtful succinctness instead of a lazy one. Is that part of the misalignment between us? A focus on the 'packaging' vs. 'product'?

the midpoint between all four terms.

Phrasing it as effort/intent/choice/sacrifice doesn't feel any closer to me. Invested maybe? Has some negative connotations for me but feels like that's maybe a direction worth exploring?

That doesn't make them good, but it does mean that some stuff they did caused goodness as a second-order effect.

I do agree that it's kind of the modern version of patronage but I don't follow the value judgement/framework to understand how/why you label anything there as 'good'. It objectively is but I think there is just as much value in the 'bad' as the 'good', for that example especially.

'Chiobani funding a team that knowingly and deliberately engaged in blatant green-washing which became a cultural meme that lead to their own downfall along with an era of plenty, community restoration and deliberate ecological restoration' certainly has strong historical echoes and does seem like an objectively good outcome but I don't think Chiobani nor most of the designers get the credit for that outcome as that wasn't their intent/goal/focus.

Vista was the low point between the high points of XP and 7.

Lol, it's been so long I've forgotten the order of things!

Lemmy carcinization

Another beautiful phrase!

all conversations eventually evolve into either Linux conversations or socialism conversations

We've definitely danced around them... I use Arch by the way :P (Not usually actually, I'm too lazy. But it is great for old, weird, or custom hardware if you've got time and energy to spare.)

There are probably as many definitions of "slop" as there are people on the internet

Everything I've seen on mutational semantics applied to any sort of living human language does suggest that all words anybody uses are almost guaranteed to have variations in definition. Usually slight unless two populations that had been previously isolated start communicating again. Thankfully that never happens, and certainly not on the modern Internet!

(Part 1)