The problem with slop is, nobody understands it. Nobody ever designed it, nobody really knows how it works. You’re just putting blind faith in the slop you’ve shipped.
It lets you be very quick, but if you’ve accidentally compromised all your data or bank accounts through the slop then you won’t know until you’re destroyed.
Did you even check the link? It's a podcast from Cal Newport, a quite known figure (at least in software engineering / compsci circles). So it's not exactly a random shitty podcast. And, it's also (obviously) not my content.
It also sounds extremely counterproductive to try and sabotage your competition by.. driving your customers away? I have no love for these companies but it's a silly conclusion to jump to.
People on OpenClaw discord were bragging about having this stuff running 24/7 and using billions of tokens. I think one guy was using billions per day. (I might have misplaced some zeros but I remember one guy's bill would have been $1000 with API pricing. Per day.)
At the time, enforcement was pretty random, and I think based on how heavy your traffic was.
They weren't all on Claude (though it was the preferred setup) and some people had dozens of accounts hooked up with proxies to avoid hitting limits.
But the have an ass-backwards billing method to appeal to the masses in the first place. It's like price dumping as long as they can do it with the investors' money that they somehow swindled. Their competitors do the same thing, so it is either go along with it, or be left behind in the dust. A contest of endurance in financial swindling.
I for one hope it all comes crashing down, when reality hits these companies. I like being able to ask some LLM a question, when I don't know something. I also like asking it for examples. But I don't let it write my code and burn tokens to no end until it passes some tests or something. My usage is at human speed, and I feel like that is sufficient for the technology to be helpful. For the rest I will use my biological wet ware, thank you.
They're subsidizing the plans. A lot of subscriptions in general do this: the users that barely do anything subsidize the users that do a whole lot. If every user starts doing a whole lot more than usual, you have a problem. Which means OpenClaw poses a problem, because not only do existing users start doing a whole lot more than usual, but a huge influx of new users start doing the whole lot too.
Not if a chatbot did it, maybe. No legal precedence here. Also they are a defense and offense contractor they could kill people and nothing would happen
Chatbot doesn't really make a difference. Swap out Claude with the aws or azure cli increasing your usage to 100% for mentioning some forbidden keyword and it's the same problem.
Have you seen documentation that the thoughts in Claude Code are slipped out separately, authoritative or otherwise? I've heard this claimed a few times and wondering what they're doing differently from traditional thinking models.
What people typically mean by the GP statement is that the “thinking” mode of these models is loosely analogous to what humans do: a bit of a retrograde reconstruction of how we arrived at a gestalt conclusion that sounds good, but may not accurately reflect the real logic at play.
IME you can see this more easily with less-polished models like Deepseek 3.X, where the reasoning in the thinking traces occasionally contradicts or has zero bearing on the non-thinking output.
But they are actual tokens produced, that are then read by the answer generation as part of the prompt, nonetheless. And the hidden state of course has a ton of logic that may not be apparent by the tokens produced as well!
Unlike humans, this thinking cannot possibly be retrograde, since causal masking means it is strictly generated before the answer and cannot be affected by it (though the model may have some concept of an answer by the time it starts generating the thinking tokens, and there is no guarantee the thoughts generated by thinking are actually attended to by the text generation).
I'll never forget watching a product manager struggle to keep their saliva in their mouth after seeing a Claude demo. Some peoples greatest thrill is slop. "Oh yea baby tell me more about how you automated that new feature I ran past no one while you reformatted my hard drive oooo sooo good".
We don't need to give up streetlights to make huge progress. 20 to 50 percent of outdoor lighting is wasted. Just shielding streetlights would go a long way.
So what? Astronomy doesn’t actually produce anything meaningful.
Hell, astronomers were telling us the sun orbited the earth for 99% of human history. Shoot forward to the present day and they can tell us… the universe started at some point somehow. Great job guys. Really earning those billions in grants.
Basically hallucinations are false external things, and delusions false internal things. You hallucinate a pink elephant, you delude yourself into thinking trump won 2020.
The problem with slop is, nobody understands it. Nobody ever designed it, nobody really knows how it works. You’re just putting blind faith in the slop you’ve shipped.
It lets you be very quick, but if you’ve accidentally compromised all your data or bank accounts through the slop then you won’t know until you’re destroyed.
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