Gustavo Costa

YouTube video by GDC Festival of Gaming 1,500 Slot Machines Walk into a Bar: Adventures in Quantity Over Quality

Apparently yes. Im always reminded of this GDC talk. Slop precursor youtu.be/E8Lhqri8tZk?...

If you like scifi that's exploratory of an idea, you will LOVE Sam's other books, Ra and Fine Structure. I cannot recommend them enough.

We should emphasise, therefore, that we do not deny that science is a highly creative activity. It is just that the precise nature of this creativity is widely misunderstood. (2/4)

BCherny’s updated Claude Code tips:

xcancel.com/bcherny/stat...

… our thinking about mathematics is poised on a knife-edge. By adopting a formal, either/or attitude, it can be made to look as if there are no significant sources of variation within mathematics which require explanation. (1/5)

— David Bloor, Knowledge and Social Imagery, p. 120

A List of Complaints from 1926

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I think they were very mindful of that when developing this one. It has the same vibes as the others but i havent yet needed a guide. Very impressive actually -- they compromised on inaccessibility without compromising on an artistic vision that is 20 years old.

2025: The year in LLMs This is the third in my annual series reviewing everything that happened in the LLM space over the past 12 months. For previous years see Stuff we figured out about …

Very good roundup! simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/31/...

The vibes are noticeably different this year

just got Claude Code and was editing my philosophy citations.
it found this issue unprompted.

Maybe CC is the real deal huh

Perhaps one of the defining features of slop: features that indicate effort in human work actually indicate low-effort in ai-generated work.

The Empiricism Gap in Computer Science So far, I have argued that there is a dissonance between, on the one hand, CS’s founding myths, curricula, and self-image, and, on the other hand, the modern production of knowledge in computer scienc...

"A helpful way to contrast these different flavors of empiricism more sharply is to separate the engine of each style from its maintenance layer. In other words, once a community has a means of generating results, how does it ensure honesty?"

doomscrollingbabel.manoel.xyz/p/the-empiri...

I think a key problem is that to most critics, it must be everything. It has to destroy the environment, eliminate every job, enable a fascist takeover, melt our brains, all while being a uninspired, unremarkable piece of boring technology that also doesn't work.

an official policy among LLM research nerds

Edited garfield meme, showing the cat's face with the caption "You are not immune to sycophancy"; for context, the original meme says "you are not immune to propaganda"

probably gonna get a lot of use out of this over the next few years

My ChatGPT Teacher Do believe the hype.

This is some world-class Eliza-effect-experiencing.

www.persuasion.community/p/my-chatgpt...

This might be the actual story here. How he repeatedly arrived at suboptimal solutions and how the model didnt help in fixing that. and did so while making him believe that chatgpt is his new (female) friend.

Merriam-Webster’s human editors have chosen ‘slop’ as the 2025 Word of the Year.

I always avoid the word refactor though, since it seems to activate the Uncle Bob part of the network and it turns the code into a web of unnecessary Java-like OOP abstractions.

But progress still happens. It just requires a different narrative: sometimes being "truly faithful" is going back and reinterpreting the original holy text (because current interpretations are distorted etc). And so the holy text was always right all along, we just hadnt understood it yet...

"if you asked me [...] what's new in psychoanalysis, I would answer: Freud" (Andre Green, 1990).

Only explanation I ever found for this absolute refusal of innovation is Latour on religious discourse - where "fidelity" is the main goal.

anyhow we all know that ai can produce slop. but people can also create slop. and sometimes people use ai to create exactly the slop they want it to create.

Unfortunately I can't go, but I want to learn about evaluation. Are there any books (or other materials) on the topic that you would recommend?

The highlight for me was copenhill, the waste processing plant + ski slope building. Such a weird thing to exist.

Also christiania and kastellet.

In light of record submission rates and a large volume of AI-generated slop, SocArXiv recently implemented a policy requiring ORCIDs linked in the OSF profile of submitting authors, and narrowing our focus to social science subjects. Today we are taking two more steps:
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AI terminology for poets Nobody really knows what artificial intelligence (AI) means, but it sure sounds impressive - and, more importantly, easy to sell

Hi I wrote about this here simulacro.co.uk/ai-terminolo...

Fearing He Would Flee, Police in Brazil Arrest Jair Bolsonaro

What landed him in pokey was tampering with his ankle bracelet. The authorities concluded that a planned demonstration at his home was likely to be cover for an escape attempt to the American embassy, so the slammer it is for Jair.

SVMs are the only moral type of machine learning, which is why they’re still taught in ML classes. Unlike next token prediction, they are inherently good

Finally, we are overcoming the distinction between description and prescription by using ML.

on a purely selfish level, i got into the Go To School Forever game so i could think weird interesting and complex theory thoughts about technology, and just whacking the DONT BUILD THE FUCKING TORMENT NEXUS WE TALKED ABOUT THIS drum over and over again is not interesting!