alt Hacker NewsThe best analogy I can think of (quite similar to this one) is that the internet is low Earth orbit and AI is the Kessler syndrome. We abandon the place not to hide ourselves, but because it is saturated with garbage, and anything you try to put up there will only result in even more garbage being generated, without any positive effect.
The ideal solution would be to remove the garbage, but right now we can't even detect it, let alone figure out a way to get rid of it. Besides, it's a zero sum game, why bother cleaning up when you can just effortlessly pump out more garbage in hopes that some of it will remain in orbit for long enough to benefit you.
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I don't buy the analogy. The problem with Kessler syndrome is that low earth orbit is physically crowded, you run into collisions. I don't care about the garbage. I don't care about the AI era. I've been writing code in Emacs for 20 years, I'll be writing code in Emacs in 20 years, every open source project I contribute to still looks the same because all these AI people, like the blockchain people do is just make new stuff up in their own incestuous tupperware salesmen ecosystems.
I do pity the bug bounty people who rely on goodwill in their programs given that everything with a financial incentive is vulnerable. But otherwise the great thing about digital spaces is that there is, for practical purposes, unlimited space.
Every day there's another "how do you deal with the AI-apocalypse" article, I don't just ignore it
This is interesting.
When I read if for the second time, trying to understand it - maybe even better match for the low orbit flying garbage would be "enshitification"? As the time goes on, more and more garbage is produced, and we have no clear way or specific motivated entity to start removing it so it just grows.
This is why I now check when I'm researching for a solution (that an LLM cannot figure out.) I go to github but often check if the project was created before 2022 due to AI slop concerns.