You don’t need to have read Kafka to know about Kafka.

Someone must have been telling lies about Some slop machine must have misidentified Josef K., he knew he had done nothing wrong but, one morning, he was arrested.

Only works for publishers or developers who have a page.

The scammers producing slop clones don’t (or would just have a different one for each game), so they can’t be filtered.

everyone wanted a way to speak to their computer

No one who has the slightest idea of how to use a computer has ever wanted that.

That’s an awfully stupid, obnoxious, inefficient, and unreliable way to control an interface.

Want your computer to do things, read the fucking screen (seriously, 99% of IT is just that, 99% of the remaining 1% is reading the fucking manual, and 99% of what remains is trauma from having encountered some related undocumented issue in the past and having had to solve it by yourself), and click on whatever option does what you want.

Or use the command line if that’s your thing.

Want to automate something, use whatever task scheduler your OS comes with. It’s not rocket surgery.

Want it to do something it doesn’t already do, that’s what programming is for. And 99% of the time someone else has already done it, for free more often than not, so just save yourself time and use their work.

If you need a slop machine to operate your computer, you are not qualified to operate it (or any other form of machinery; computers are easy, as I said, just read the fucking screen, and the manual for good measure), and shouldn’t be allowed near one lest you become a risk to yourself and others.

It also gatekeeps non-Americans, I assume; I had to puzzle out the meaning and while the name Gateway does ring a bell (I probably saw it on some ad or CRT monitor at some point) I’d have never associated it with the cow and box emojis. 🤷‍♂️

They have two options: fix it fast or die.

A store overrun by slop will quickly lose its customers, and with them any developers offering actual games.

Once the ball starts rolling it’ll become a vicious cycle, and once enough developers and customers have left there’ll be no coming back. And it certainly looks like the ball is picking up speed.

At least two of them, apparently, one with even the same exact name 🤮 (how is that allowed?).

Game’s not my cup of tea, but I tagged both clones as slop (can’t report them because none of the reasons would apply, as this kind of cloning is still legal), not that it’ll do any good.

Least Vave could do is add “blatant slop clone” to the reasons to report a game.

They aren’t letting slop roll over them

And yet it rolls.

A lot of developers have already pulled their demos from Steam for fear of them being cloned.

Either Valve takes a stance against slop clones, or they’re going to alienate indie devs (and probably the big ones too), and with them a lot of their customers.

Valve have to decide if they want Steam to be a thriving games store or an abandoned slop repository.

And “making no decision” is choosing the latter.

Not possible.

Think photocopy of a photocopy, or JPEG of a JPEG.

You start getting artifacts, and the model collapses.

Of course, though, they’ve already poisoned the well, and at this point it’s impossible for them to sieve out any remaining non-LLM-generated content. They started watermarking too late, and couldn’t recognise other slop machines’ watermarks anyway.

Model collapse is inevitable and already ongoing (search “thousand whys" on Amazon, for instance, or read up on Elias Thorne, lighthouse keeper), and will only get worse.

In a few years it will be impossible to train a working up-to-date model. Maybe it already is, hence this article, as a preemptive justification for why newer models won’t be able to generate code using language features introduced after 2026.

I’m sorry, what?

Peter Parker being seen as a nerd when out of his suit is one of the defining characteristics of Spider-Man.

Their intelligence the defining characteristic of Richards and Stark (also his money in the latter case, but he’s lost that on occasion without that making him not be Iron Man, in fact the one time he did stop being Iron Man was because his alcoholism was making him too irrational).

Banner’s intelligence is almost always a necessary counterpoint to Hulk’s brutishness.

Going to DC, Batman’s main asset is arguably his intelligence. Sure, he’s a ninja, sure, he’s a billionaire, sure, he’s dark and scary. But take all that away and his intelligence will still allow him to keep fighting crime.

Speaking of Batman, I forgot about Daredevil; sure, again, he’s a ninja with super-senses (except for sight), but we see a lot of him being a lawyer, and he sometimes wins in the court what he couldn’t win by beating people up. Also dude won against fucking Mephisto, obviously not by beating him with his little sticks, but through sheer conviction. It took Doctor Victor Von fucking Doom decades to beat that devil. Matt fucking Murdock beat him in four issues by essentially turning the other cheek.

Side notes? Far from it. (In Richards’ case, and arguably in Stark’s most of the time, heroing is the side note; the Fantastic Four almost never go looking for it, rather stumbling upon it from time to time, and Stark spends most of his time looking after his company, not seeking crime to fight.)

comics

I don’t know about DC (I know Batman and Mr. Terrific exist, but that’s about it; also Blue Beetle might be somewhat of an Iron Man expy, I think?), but when it comes to Marvel…

Peter Parker is a world class chemist and engineer. He created his web fluid and designed his web shooters, which definitely counts as using his brain to solve crime.

Tony Stark, world class engineer, designed and built the armours he uses to fight crime.

Reed Richards is one of the topmost scientists and engineers in the world in practically any field. Using his brain to solve / create problems is what the Fantastic Four do (fighting crime is incidental, really).

Hank Pym, aka Ant Man, aka Giant Man, aka Yellowjacket (on a bad day), is up there with Richards at the top, when he isn’t suffering from mental illness or depression. He discovered the particles that bear his name and give him (and others) his powers, which he uses to fight crime.

Bruce Banner is almost up there, above them when it comes to nuclear physics. He uses his mind to… OK, fine, I’ll give you this one, most of the time.

Hank McCoy, aka Beast, also top level engineer and general scientist. He designs and makes most of the tools (except the ones made by Forge, or by Kitty Pryde) the X-Men use to, uh… well, mostly try to defend themselves and other mutants from human racists trying to kill them, or humans from mutant racists trying to kill them, and sometimes to try and take over the world, I think…? I don’t know, I haven’t read the X-Men in a long time but it seems they’ve been drifting from light to dark grey this last decade; but, still, he uses his brain, is what matters. Fists and feet too, but also brain.

And those are the top ones that come to mind, but with the exception of Captain America that’s basically core Marvel right there.

Dada as in Idi Amin Dada, I assume?

I mean, it fits, what with the human rights abuses and whatnot…

🎈📌

it shouldn’t be that impactful negatively that AI is being used

Doesn’t it invalidate the GPL? Open source licenses depend on copyright, and LLM-generated code isn’t copyrightable.

(Also, it can’t be proven not to contain plagiarised proprietary code, in fact it’s quite likely that it does; between this, the testing / review burden, and the mental decay of developers that use LLMs instead of coding, this pretty much kills open source projects, in several different ways to make sure they stay dead…)

As much as I hate the ongoing “AI” scam, and as many hours as I’ve wasted on Bethesda’s games (or on modding them), in Bethesda’s case (especially modern Bethesda) I actually believe the slop machine might actually be an improvement.

At least the code for the unofficial patches will be in its training set, which is a start…

Not really… “AI journalist” might refer to a plain old astroturfing spambot, or to one piloting a reverse centaur, but it’s still the same old spambot when it comes to it, and it’ll still be spewing the same worthless slop, so the distinction is mostly moot, merely making the latter option a bit more tragic.

I hate that I never had a good math teacher and that the ones I had made me hate maths.

I would love to like maths, but there’s too much trauma there.

I’ve taught myself what I’ve needed for work, but it has never been a pleasant experience.

Bad math teachers are a plague on humanity.

Replace the AI tool with a calculator. You’d get the same results.

Correct. I used to be able to calculate square roots in my head, then they let us use calculators the next school year, and soon I was no longer able to do so.

The problem is that what calculators due to math LLMs do to thinking in general, causing much deeper and extensive damage to the brain.

Also, calculators are good at maths. They produce correct results.

LLMs aren’t good at thinking (or even capable of doing it at all), they’re very good at putting the most statistically likely (given the texts they were trained on) word in front of a sequence of words. They don’t necessarily produce correct results, they produce results that wouldn’t look out of place in their training set (unless you’re an expert in whatever the text is about, in which case it’s often absolute bullshit that sounds correct to a layman).

We’re replacing working brains with autocomplete engines that (if they were capable of caring about anything, which they’re not) couldn’t care less about the correctness of their output, just that it looks correct.

And it remains to be seen if the people injured by this will ever be able to recover anything close to normal brain function. Personally, I doubt it. Once it’s gone, it’s gone.