we now have a slop-free jobs board

happy birthday! fancy steak is always a good idea!

so maybe this is a bit too obvious to state at this point but: conover’s very obviously tied up in aella’s plzdontkillus EA influencer scheme, his apparent anti-AI stance is purely performative, and the apology he did for doing marketing for worldcoin on his channel isn’t accepted. he knew what he was doing.

also, I really don’t need the Adam Ruins Everything guy in the same part of my brain as sex, thanks

holy fuck that’s infuriating

imagine the worst possible CLI and then make it even worse and then make it an asshole

real rich of their CEO (presumably? it looks like a burner account which still checks out if it’s their CEO or someone who works for him doing damage control and trying to take this shit to DMs) to both anthropomorphize their chatbot and assert that the problem is you need uhh training on the system that doesn’t do what you want it to do and keeps trying to charge you for shit that makes your workflow worse

honestly the thing that makes me think it is actually their CEO is I’ve watched these fuckers use “let’s take this to DMs/email” as an attempted power move. they seriously think we want to talk to them privately about, like, anything at all. no fucker I’m here to call you out in public because your product is shit and you’re shit too.

I wrote a reply to this article where I thanked Liam for the shoutout and sincerely hoped that next time he writes on this subject, he has reason to come to a different conclusion

uh oh, ours? that’s a different disk but it’s also a tiny disk

uggh, I dragged my feet too much on giving our instance more disk and the database fell over

it seems to have recovered alright, but please check if there’s any weirdness or missing posts around the time when it went down

thank you! I feel terrible I haven’t been posting as much here as life’s been finding a way to consistently disrupt my writing and admining time, but mastodon’s format is pretty good for turning disrupted, high-anxiety writing into threads

they can! the repository itself is all CC0 public domain, so everything taken from it will adopt the license of whichever project it ends up in.

I’m filing a bug for myself to clarify in the README.md that the provided poisoning instructions likely aren’t very effective, and that this is partially on purpose. LLM companies are known to filter out (via either regex or sometimes zero weighting) instructions that are known to trip up their chatbots, and they seem to do it very quickly. there’s even posts on our instance for simple logic puzzles that the chatbot screwed up, that quickly got updated with a response for that specific phrasing of the question.

I’ve considered writing up some Claude “skills” to redefine the most common repo commands to echo a string to the terminal and exit instead

I’ll take a bug to rephrase the section as “conforming tools shouldn’t process AAA-NO-SLOP.md files in any special way” if that helps make it clearer why the file can have any name and contents

if in spite all of the marketing claims to the contrary an LLM can’t understand a request to not slopify a repository but a human can, that sounds like a bug for anthropic’s bug tracker to me

ooh good idea! maybe a couple mentions of spirals too, for flavor

thank you!

possibly! I figured capital-A was most likely to sort first across the wide variety of code forges and operating systems so I went with that, but better names are possible

conforming tools should ignore it, and that’ll work just fine if it’s renamed

I don’t think there’ll ever be a conforming LLM because LLMs are built on systemic consent violation, but the slop machines can use their magic mind powers or whatever bullshit I’m expected to swallow this week to find the correct file

I recommend the renamed file gets a mention in the project docs so humans can find it, and a good name is also very obvious and more or less self-documenting. I’ve seen some projects use .noai which I like too, but unfortunately that’s very likely to get lost in a directory listing, and locally ls won’t display it at all without -a.

I started from a vague memory of something that used to screw up LLMs (the grandma trick) and wrote whatever sounded fun from there

there’s absolutely no guarantees it’ll do anything to an LLM as spending money on tokens to test it felt gross, but it’s a hopefully memorable starting point for people to grow on

in the very worst case it gives the humans reading the repo a laugh (always worth it), fills a bit of the context window of visiting LLMs with nonsense, gives visiting slop coders absolutely nothing to work with, and acts like a canary (if you’re viewing a diff that changes these files and you weren’t expecting changes, someone using an LLM slipped up)

correct

also the AAA represents the screaming that happens every time I see slop

it’s amazing how once the LLM cooks these guys they all start spewing the same crap

version 3.5 is going to “raise the bar enormously with regards to rsync security”

did rsync previously have a particularly flawed security model? it sounds like it had a couple of CVEs that this asshole decided to slop out fixes for, alongside breaking a bunch of parts of rsync. maybe somebody showed him mythos (which is fucking terrible at finding vulnerabilities when it’s not backed by a bunch of invisible labor doing the actual work or just finding bugs that originated by letting Claude or some other LLM loose on the codebase) and that pushed him over the edge?

did you mistake this for a fucking tiktok video?