All of those intents cause the cook to make particular decisions regarding ingredients, preparation, presentation, and so on

Strongly agree!

the decisions’ outcomes don’t matter to this conversation, just the fact that they were made.

Strongly disagree!

The farmer has no intent. He just shovels it into the trough so that the pigs will shut up until they’re fat enough to slaughter.

The farmer absolutely has an intent! Which I ‘highlighted’. The problem isn’t lack of intent, it’s that the intent exists and it’s dark. However, I think this might help with explaining why I call Kurzkesagt slop though.

Their self described intent is to “spark curiosity in people about science, humanity and our future” using “vibrant and striking vector illustrations”. Which seems like a good intent on the surface. “Farmer wants to make sure his pigs are (intellectually???) fat and happy!”

The problem comes from what they call “lies for children”. A principle that is important because children can not ‘digest’ complex ideas, or foods, in the same way as adults. Which is the point of baby food!

The problem arises because Kurzkesagt doesn’t proport to have an “intended audience” and it’s probably not suited for young children due to the sheer number of bird corpses despite the lies they tell catering specifically to that demographic. Their actual demographic data¹ shows it skews 18-34 and male which could be primarily dads playing it for their kids but I would suspect that’s their true demographic with the true <18 audience being pretty evenly distributed up to the ~54 range.

The intent is to “spark curious” but the reality looks to be a bunch of young-middle age adults slurping on intellectual baby food and lacking the curiousity to move beyond that. If that isn’t slop I don’t know what is.

Maybe this is just a framing thing

Yeah probably. Chili with a good queso mixed in is delicious! Calling it ‘bean slop with leftover nacho toppings’ does make it significantly less appetizing.

In your defense, you were watching Love Island. That probably slows down the brain.

Yep! …and now I need your help designing a test.

Love Island is clearly functional brainrot. Fruit Love Island is more stereotypical brainrot. But is it more, less, or equal functional brainrot? Designing the test ensures you can’t be selected to participate.

^1 it does need to be said that demographic data is suspect as hell, but it’s the only thing I could find and does seem to line up vaguely with other sources, if you find something better please share!^

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 VIPs

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)

I’m definitely not a grindset guy.

Sorry, definitely didn’t mean to imply you were just meant it in a ‘ah yes that makes sense in a broader cultural context’ way.

I can’t think of a way to show that something matters to you aside from making some kind of sacrifice

That is exactly what I’m pointing at with a ‘protestant ethic’ but it really comes down to specific definitions of ‘sacrifice’. A night out with friends could be described as a ‘sacrifice’ of time and money to show care/affection for those people, but if it’s something you enjoy is it really a sacrifice? As an example, I enjoy making things, and making things for others is a good source of both inspiration and ‘disposal’ for lack of better word. Making sure the things I make find good homes and not just making junk is a form of care in my opinion.

If it is something you don’t enjoy does that sacrifice actually show that care for others? Personally, I can think of few things worse than a night out with someone who doesn’t want to be there and isn’t having fun.

Watching Love Island with my friend wasn’t a sacrifice because I got the fun of watching a psychological horror film, they got their ‘sims’ playtime and we had an interesting/fun/silly discussion afterwards. In the same way that the time I’m spending talking to you isn’t a sacrifice because it’s providing interesting thoughts and perspectives that I might not run into otherwise is a useful challenge to my own beliefs/perspectives. Hopefully it’s the same for you?

It’s hard to understate the damage the ‘self-sacrifice’ mentality can cause. A lot of relationships are ruined by two people trying to show they care for eachother by deliberately and intentionally sabotaging themselves at every opportunity. A lot of ‘activism’ is people sacrificing their time and energy doing things that are well meaning but nobody asked for, help nobody, and often cause harm.

I do think it shows a desire or intent to care, but I don’t think it automatically or necessarily translates.

I don’t mean “toiling for weeks on a tweet,” I mean “at least thinking about it for a few minutes.”

But if they spent a whole week thinking on that tweet then surely it’s more important to them than someone who only spent a few minutes! /s

tries to flood the zone

I think this is a big piece actually! I would agree that spam is incapable of communication a message. Not that it doesn’t have one, but by ‘flooding the zone’ at best it gets filtered and ignored, at worst it triggers a severe reactionary response.

That’s more or less what I mean by “effort”

I do feel like there is still something we keep circling around here but I’m unsure what it is or how to suss it out.

‘Dear Alice’ as a perfect example

The original commercial promotion a company that in reality is the antithesis of everything ‘solarpunk’ and which deliberately and intentionally does everything in its power to prevent the sort of future imagined in the commercial.

now we’ve gotta fight?

BRING IT! :P I think we can both agree 7 was actually pretty good. The extreme drop in quality from 7 to vista was shocking plus it now being old and dated makes comparisons hard. However, I would argue that 11 has more bugs, more adware/spyware, worse performance, less customization and less ‘salvagability’ than Vista. It just doesn’t feel as bad thanks to the slow enshittification that was 8, 8.1, 10.

Maybe you figured that out a while ago.

My original comment was coming from that assumption but you, and others, did not think so and honestly it does still feel like I’m missing something big and important but we’ve spent how many words trying to find it? And I still don’t know what it could be. I do very much appreciate you being willing to explore it with me though! Thank you!

The algorithm. It just has to pass muster long enough that the algorithm serves it up to a real human.

I was definitely coming from the perspective of the humans are the swine and the algorithm was the gatekeeper, logistics, feeding machine, etc. The prison analogy was partially to communicate that humans do often treat other humans like swine.

However I am realizing that’s a bit of a dated perspective and with the modern Internet the ‘algorithm’ is still the gatekeeper, etc. but the goal is primarily to feed bots to better sheepdog the humans. So the root miscommunication comes from conflating ‘slop’, aka “dogfood” with ‘slop’, aka “prison food”. So when I call ‘tablescraps’ slop it’s confusing because that’s neither food for dogs nor low quality dogfood, it’s premium dogfood! Describing the ingredients doesn’t clarify anything because it’s not really any different other than process and packaging. I think that’s the exact sort of insight I was looking for! Thank you! Does that all track for you as well?

I think the problem there would be the tomato

Oh yeah. It’s definitely not a haphazardly mix together kind of thing. But a creamy bolognese sauce on biscuits? It’d be weird. But I’d try it!

So it’s a dating sim that you’re just not playing.

…That’s such a better description of what we took 2 episodes to figure out how to communicate!

Unfortunately, that is what was advertised in a lot of official channels but not remotely what was delivered.

A ‘perfect’ vaccine does work like that, where the specific entry-point the pathogen uses gets patched and completely prevents infection. Very few vaccines work like that unfortunately.

The vaccine that was delivered was instead a ‘communication blitz and drill’ to train the body ‘if you see this guy kill him real good!’ where it used mrna to directly put COVID onto the immune system’s priority kill list and supplies some target practice.

The problem with the second type is the immune system can’t be everywhere all at once and so some amount of infection does occur which does result in those ‘side effect of the infection’ occuring. In addition that ‘target practice’ can and does cause similar side effects.

All that said, imagine how much worse those side effects would be if the virus was allowed to infect more in addition to hangig around longer!

the idea is important enough, that they cared enough, to put in the time and energy

That unfortunately tracks with overall American culture and it having deeply ingrained protestant work ethic. I was really hoping there was something more to it though

and in the case of AI, they literally can’t care about the message.

Why? Even my ‘all ads are slop’ position doesn’t preclude ads from having a message the creators and/or artists do care about. I unfortunately do think that most slop peddlers do genuinely, and often passionately, have a specific message/idea/belief they are trying to communicate/perpetuate.

The problem comes from not having rigorously interrogated that message or engaged with it in any fundamental way. I would agree that an issue with AI is that it shortens the time from idea->creation such that the creator has even less time to engage with what they’re creating and is even less likely to interrogate the message being spread. I would point to ‘Dear Alice’ as a perfect example of how that’s not an exclusively AI thing though.

Oh man, remember Windows Vista?

You mean back when windows was good :P

an uncanny valley version of a polished, final product.

Ooh, that’s a real good phrase! I’m stealing that!

I really do think that the people there actually are putting in a ton of effort.

I would agree! And I do understand they do seem to be trying to do their best given the environment they exist within.

Would comparing them to a prison chef be a good metaphor? It’s a hard job that takes a lot of work and they’re doing the best with what they’ve got, but the final outcome is still slop. They’re prisoners like the rest of us and I understand why they don’t defy the guards(funders and platforms) and raid the commissary, serve us the same meals that they provide for the guards, show up in solidarity during a strike, etc. but I do respect them significantly less for it.

I don’t think they put out a large enough quantity to reasonably call it slop.

I can see the distinction you’re pointing at but I don’t see the difference, it ‘feeds’ millions of people.

slop isn’t made for humans

I don’t follow. Then who is it made for?

sloppy joes and biscuits and gravy. Not all together, though.

… On self reflection I might have a problem with high slop tolerance because I immediately went ‘if done right that could actually be pretty good!’

That is one impressive bit of self-awareness, honestly. lol

To be fair, I guess half the ‘fun’ of Love Island is the lack of personality? The explanation I got was that it was like watching someone stream playing ‘Sims’. The streamer then fucks with the ‘sims’ to see what happens giving the audience the ‘whats going to happen next!?’ high. As the audience you can project whatever personality you want onto the characters and the soullessness gives a blank canvas that allows the viewer to fill in the blanks which allows for a better reality tv show with broader mass appeal than could otherwise be created?

… Yeah I don’t really get it, but to each their yum.

The effort is an important part of it.

Why? If someone is baking cookies it doesn’t improve the cookies if they have to run a mile for each ingredient. What am I missing? Is it just that someone being willing to run and get each ingredient demonstrates a level of care?

I think we may have hit upon another definitional difference here.

Good catch! I do think that’s a big part of the difference! In my old age I’ve definitely seen it go from sloppy->slop and in that process reclaim the old connotation of “low quality, high quantity animal feed”. Specifically, back in my day, it wasn’t uncommon to be using/hearing Microslop to refer to the company and it’s shitty half-ass product implementations since at least 2018 (with Edge and Bing specifically), but it was more about being ‘sloppy’ than ‘slop for the masses’ y’know?

It makes 100% sense that the more popular definition would’ve lost the ‘sloppy’ association and gone back to the ‘low quality, high quantity animal feed’.

However, bringing it back to the original topic, I do think that definition/perspective is more damning of Kurzkesagt. Their videos are rushed but they do take great care to not be sloppy in that way.

I think it was artists doing a job they could get paid for, but making good art within those constraints.

I think this is where we flip sides on the ‘sloppy’ vs. ‘slop’ distinction. I do think that objectively good art (if we pretend that’s a thing) can be slop if it’s purpose is ‘high volume animal feed’. That might be coming from the culinary association of things like sloppy joes, casseroles, mashed veggies, biscuits and gravy, MREs, etc. as ‘slop’ and sometimes even ‘tasty slop’.

I move to have that stricken from the record.

I second that motion! The core concept was valid and beneficial a single extra word shouldn’t detract from that :P

Huh. Well, today I learned about something against my will.

…Sorry to curse you with that… I have a friend who is really into both reality TV and tiktok+Instagram who was absolutely raging about it when it was popular and assumed it was more common knowledge…

I’ve tried watching a couple episodes of Love Island with said friend and, for me, it felt like some of the most soulless TV I’ve ever seen. To avoid cursing you with that experience as well, my experience of it was that everyone on set looks dead inside, they’re all kissing eachother all the time but it doesn’t look like any of them are having any fun. Then the producers intentionally do a “game” that breaks the norms of monogamy and then all the contestants robotically do a big show of performative jealousy, hurt and anger before going back to some of the most depressing and uncomfortable kissing I’ve ever seen.

I was using that and Fruit Love Island as a foil because I half joked that the FLI characters at least had more soul and personality, albeit cartoonish, than the contestants in the original show and my friend agreed.

Sorry I apparently needed to vent about that, lol -⁠_⁠-⁠;

“if they don’t care enough to make it, why would I care enough to read/look at/watch/listen to it?”

Isn’t that already covered without the additional metric of “effort”?

If it’s anything churned out cynically, with only the desire to make money off of broad appeal

It’s not just that, but I do think that is a large part. The corporate and soulless part you called out.

I think the “just wanted to give the fans what they wanted” and Doyle’s ability to actually do just that saves it from the “little to no value” bit, which makes it pandering but not slop. The same can be said for a lot of movies, music, etc. Meanwhile a lot of street art is sloppy as hell from needing to rush due to illegality but that doesn’t necessarily make it bad either.

“art-nouveau” style and movement began as advertising for theater performances in the 1890s.

I think both that and the “Dear Alice” video are examples of reclaimed slop. Someone saw the “little” value in the ad and opted to amplify it. I would classify those and similar examples as memes distilled from slop.

“slop” also doesn’t mean soulless, anodyne, corporate, or misguided. Again, all slop is those things

“Misguided” doesn’t feel like it’s a necessary part of “slop” but I otherwise agree.

Going the other way with examples, I think we can both agree that Fruit Love Island is absolutely slop, despite many viewers caring a lot about it’s existence. But why exactly? And is it more or less “slop” than the original Love Island? Honestly I’m having a hard time justifying why Fruit Love Island isn’t an example of a ‘meme distilled from slop’ when I really want to call it ‘slop distilled from slop’.

An “agent” meaning an “instance of some specific LLM model with a fancy wrapper, tool use, and instruction set that recursively calls itself and/or other agents in order to accomplish a given task”. Absolutely don’t trust anything hosted on X!

offline + firewall

Mostly just trying to convey a sense of caution/paranoia with extra layers of daemon bindings. Probably should’ve added “sandboxed” in there too.

Honestly it seems like our definitions don’t differ that much. Rephrasing my definition to your format: “little to no-value content, about which the creator cares little about, with the goal for mass appeal”.

I don’t think the amount of effort someone put into something changes it’s value or quality. It feels like some kind of “blood sweat and tears are what’s most important, that’s why blood diamonds are the most valuable” shit y’know?

People can find value in anything, so I’m likely a bit more pervasive on what’s “slop” quality.

I do emotionally agree that most human-made memes and jokes aren’t slop but according to both of our definitions that doesn’t really hold up. If it was just because the creator cared about their creation or the laugh was valuable that “unslops” a lot of, pretty terrible and objectively slop, slop. I think we’re both missing something here, any ideas on what?

I disagree strongly about ads and see those of all shapes and provenance as the quintessential and original slop. The creators don’t care about the ad, they’re doing it for a paycheck with the benefactor only giving a shit about the “engagement” that comes from force feeding the ad to the masses.

Ironically that’s a perfect use case for a local, open-sourced, non-corporate, offline, firewalled and possibly air-gapped agent; to more easily explore, document and understand what’s in those 500 million files.

However, I would agree unless you’ve really got to know what’s in there the setup alone makes it almost certainly not worth it.

Possibly. Probably just an old definition though, hence why I tried to explain it.

Re-reading though I feel like I should clarify that the “nonstandard definition” is definitely a negative adjective, just not ‘damning’ in the same way it seems to be being interpreted here.

While I can’t speak for @itsjustachairmary it seems there’s at least 2 of us with that, or a similar, definition!

How would you explain the “standard” definition?

By their own admission? “Lies to children” is just a variation of “slop for babies”.

Or if you prefer pulling from Wikipedia’s sources.

It’s been years and I don’t care to re-watch for the specific arguments but going through the list ones that I vaguely recall being not just “lies for children” but contained blatant, lack of better term, capitalist propaganda: Loneliness, Is meat bad for you, Overpopulation, marijuana, Geo engineering, whos to blame for climate change, UBI, banking explained.

I also recall a few especially bad ones on syria, the immigrant crisis, addiction and homelessness but those don’t seem to be up anymore. You may be right that I am being overly harsh based on old history. Hopefully one they are trying to fix and not just whitewash.

“Effort” is not an antonym of slop.

1. Anything new you try takes a ton of effort and the results will generally be pretty sloppy. It takes time and practice to make not-slop.

2. Rushing something to completion results in slop. It’s hard to move fast! That doesn’t make the final quality any better.

3. Using garbage tools and/or materials results in a garbage/slop output.

4. Doing something exclusively for the sake of profit leaves the result soulless. This one is a bit more controversial, but I 100% classify this as slop.

AI generated stuff is usually slop, and the sloppiest of slop, because it’s often an amateur using garbage tools to rush something to completion for a quick buck.

Kurkesagt is, arguably, slop because they have slowly transitioned into trying to put out content as quickly as possible so that everyone working on it gets paid. Their whole thing is covering topics they themselves have not dedicate the time and effort to fully understand and master.

Also, slop is not a synonym for “unrecyclable trash”. In my opinion, Kurkesagt is sloppy as hell! But the animations are fun, the voiceover is pleasant and the pop-sci is generally accurate enough to provide an interesting glimpse into whatever topic they’re covering. They’re still shoveling slop for profit though, sold out years ago and have a heavy bias towards explaining how capitalism, and their participation within it, is the most moral of choices one could make.

And that “somewhere” is optogenetics mice, bacteria that produce egg whites, and glowing fish. Not a complete rewrite of the entire human digestive, immune and microbiotic systems!

Also rabies immunity is because they’re birds not mammals, if you want that; add nervous system and metabolic overhauls as well.

We can’t both maintain a consumer mindset and abdicate individual responsibility while also demanding sweeping societal changes.

And you think it’s the “demanding sweeping societal changes” that has to go?

Maybe we need to start with the individualism and “consumer mindset”?

Sure, and the Irish were still exporting massive amounts of food during the great hunger.

Both exporting oil and nearly depleted reserves can be true at the same time because of the absolute global refusal to learn from history.

The whole point is to change the risk calculations people make in order to make “civil” and “polite” actions such as protests, legislation, etc. more risky and therefore most people are less likely to engage in.

What these dumb asses don’t realize is that if the level of risk for the “peaceful” options rises to the same level as alternatives, which are arguably much more effective, then those are going to be the only recourse people have and the actions people will take.

I do believe your analysis is correct about there being zero chance of it being legislated away. So now what?

Pay attention to how often you see “cellulose” as a listed ingredient. That’s also usually processed wood pulp.

That cheap powdery parmesan often found in pizza places? Also sawdust.

It gets extra funny when you see cellulose listed on something with artificial cinnamon flavoring.