RunSet

Quake released the day before Super Mario 64.

Those 48 hours were likely the peak of video gaming. Certainly they have yet to be equaled.

It is doubtful whether anyone can claim copyright over LLM-generated code since it was not created by any human and the "training" does not preserve provenance.

Possibilities range from "public domain" to "the cancer Microsoft accused GPL-licensed code of being". In no plausible scenario does the person who pressed the "generate slop" button become the copyright holder.

> the only thing I took from Discord at all (it's UI is generally awful yes, I agree!) is the support for multiple servers.

To be sure, Discord "servers" are not servers in the sense the word is used in virtually every other context. They are more like group chats that share a hosting location. If anything the hard part for Discord is making them seem disparate enough that someone might rent their "own server".

> Discord is by far my favorite communication platform across anything I used in my entire life, nothing else comes even close in terms of feature set.

It's just yahoo groups that requires your phone number.

And data can be.

Which is why I suspect most nominal "data centers" are fronts for crypto mining, an activity that seeks out the cheapest energy.

> In papers filed with the court on November 20, the DOJ told the court that Windows 95 would function without Internet Explorer 3.0, and that Microsoft should be required to offer computer manufacturers (OEMs) the option of installing Windows, free of Internet Explorer 3.0 in “all” respects. In response, Microsoft explained that the latest versions of Windows 95 would not work under such a scenario

https://news.microsoft.com/source/1997/12/23/dojs-request-fo...

Last I heard they had only data mined their own (human) users, submitted a pile of slop for (human) mathematicians to verify, and then withdrew much of it when it proved not to be a solution.

"You have no expectation of privacy in public, citizen."

"Officer, do you have any expectation of privacy in public?"

"That's different."

It strikes me that the author bemoans the state / lack of software literacy immediately after they take responsibility for obfuscating the descriptive parameters "callback" and "errback" in favor of "deferred" which became "promise" in the name of aesthetics. "callback" might be ugly but at least it says what it does and does what it says.

> Beyond that, if we assume that such knowledge does exist in humans, its marginal value is clearly nearly zero now

"If those grapes exist they are probably sour."

> There is no such thing as knowledge that has never even been written down a single time by anyone or anything.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_knowledge#Definition

OpenAI: "Here are the answers to every math problem. Now mathematicians are obsolete. Just send the prize money and prestige to Sam Altman. BTW gonna need some mathematicians to check these answers."

The emphasis on quantity while neglecting quality calls to mind a passage from EWD1175[0]:

> My second warning remark is that I shall refuse to discuss the academic enterprise in financial terms. The first reason is that the habit of trying to understand, explain, or justify in financial terms is unhealthy: it creates the ethics of the best-seller society in which saleability is confused with quality. The other day we had to discuss the professional quality of one of our colleagues, in whose favour it was then mentioned that one of his Ph.D.s had earned lots and lots of money in the computer business, and few people seemed to notice how ridiculous a recommendation this was. We also know that the financial success of a product can be totally independent of its quality (as everyone who remembers for instance the commercially successful IBM360 should know). The second reason for my refusal is that the value of money is a very fuzzy notion, so fuzzy in fact, that efforts to understand in financial terms always lead to greater confusion. [Remember this, for it is quite likely that this afternoon will give you the opportunity to observe the phenomenon. Note that money need not be mentioned explicitly for the nonsense to emerge, a reference to "the taxpayer" can do the job. The role of "the taxpayer" then invariably leads to the conclusion that of State Universities at least the undergraduate curriculum has to be second- or third-rate.] The final reason for my refusal is that the habit appeals to the quantitative mind and I come from a culture in which the primarily quantitative mind does not evoke admiration. [A major reason that we considered Roman Catholics to belong to a lower class was precisely their quantitative bent: they always counted, number of faithful, number of days in purgatory, you name it.....]

[0] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD11xx/EWD117...

> It's been doing all of the actual coding part of my job for the better part of a year,

Makes me think of the Upton Sinclair quote:

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

A good starting definition for slop might be "It requires more effort for its reader / audience to understand than it took its notional author to create."

https://karansag.org/2026/08/01/no-one-wants-to-read-your-sl...

Reading Jetbrains' EULA makes me think it would be an easier read if they just listed the entities they would NOT share your data with.

vscodium[0] might require some aftermarket bells and whistles to reach feature parity with jetbrains' "swiss army kitchen sink" approach but at least vscodium is not data-mining me.

[0] https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium

It's not just plagiarism as a service.

It's also forgery as a service.

> OpenAI is the one who made the rebar, but not necessarily the one driving the vehicle.

More like the company that sells defective ratchet straps.

"Drive faster! You don't want to be left behind!"

Drag events in Firefox have failed to set the event coords for (at least) seventeen years.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=505521

That bug lends a sense of constancy to an ever-changing world.

The ubiquitous "LLM slop is the car and thoughtful development is the horse" analogy makes me think of Steve Jobs's "Bicycle for the Mind".

https://www.themarginalian.org/2011/12/21/steve-jobs-bicycle...

> how to do high performance GUIs on multiple operating systems.

By being a poorly-behaved process until you are caught red-handed.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/07/why-google-took-year...

".avif" format rears its ugly head.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/webp-image-co...

Possible solution: An app that dumps / restores the phone to a remote site, all e2ee.

Wipe your phone and factory reset before you cross the border, then restore afterward.

Slop born of plagiarism. People would rather read a pastiche of documentation than the actual documentation.

> I heard complaints that it's just a Tolkien clone

What a flattering complaint. Reminds me of this:

"Terry Brooks has often been disparaged for imitating Tolkien, particularly by those reviewers who find his books inferior to Tolkien's own. I can say only that I wish there were more imitators -- we need them -- and that all imitations of so great an original must necessarily be inferior. "

https://web.archive.org/web/20110823100353/https://www.theni...

> Another high-profile case is Ms. Rachel, one of the most influential YouTubers in the United States, who has a channel with 21 million followers, a Netflix series, books and a commercial brand. [..] She has spoken out for LGBTQ+ rights, against the war in Gaza and against ICE mass detentions, especially of children — positions uncommon in the U.S. With a son aged eight, at 43 she became a mother again in 2025 via surrogacy, citing medical problems that prevented her from carrying a pregnancy. She drew no criticism.

Given her "I care about ALL children" stance, it would have been more on-brand for her to adopt an unwanted child than to lease a human body her own genetic lineage.

I notice that software-related professions tend be named after traditionally male-dominated fields, such as "software engineer" or "software architect" or even the "rock star programmer".

Which is strange since the original "computers" were predominately women[0] and I find writing software has much in common with activities that were historically at least coed, such as creating recipes or sewing patterns.

Yet we never hear of "software chefs" or "software tailors". Given how little many titular heads of software companies understand their product, "software nanny" would also be applicable.

[0] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/history-human-...

Killing the survivors of a shipwreck[0] is a textbook example of a war crime[1] and would explain why the liar-in-chief is so sweaty about the ICC.

[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/11/28/...

[1] https://www.mediaite.com/media/tv/cnns-elie-honig-points-out...