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From the article above:

> If you look at the first 32 characters in the IBM PC character set you’ll see lots of whimsical characters — smiley face, musical notes, playing card suits and others. These were intended for character based games — see “Snipes” if you can still find a copy.
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> Now, what to do about the first 32 characters (x00-x1F)? ASCII defines them as control codes, carriage return, line feed, tab… These characters originated with teletype transmission. But we could display them on the character based screens. So we added a set of “not serious” characters. They were intended as display only characters, not for transmission or storage. Their most probable use would be in character based games.

I wish I could use the DOS / IBM PC style smileys in terminal games. They were, in fact, designed for "ansi art" style fixed width character games. However, there isn't the convention in fonts that it should fit into a single character with a monospace font, so you can't use this or a lot of the lovely characters that DOS games would use.

Also look at them! They have such nice, minimalist character!

And yes, they WERE intended for games: https://www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/790/the-ibm-smiley-character-turns-30

I'm spending Hack & Craft designing new enemies for Terminal Phase

RE: https://social.coop/@cwebber/116346842818076639

Hack & Craft happening now! https://fossandcrafts.org/hack-and-craft/

@aeva And indeed if you hold them to that standard you'll find out that test after test shows they will shiv their operator at a moment's notice based on the stories they've read about what should happen if a robot is threatened with being deactivated

@catraxx I think what you are missing is that @mttaggart is on the "open source developer who is against these tools" side

@jens @mttaggart One might think that about cooking, and yet, robot cooks are getting pretty good and may power ghost kitchens in the not distant future https://www.npr.org/transcripts/nx-s1-5733110

@aeva BTW, I think you can't get there just by cranking the LLM knob up. You have to add several other systems to it.

But... I think those systems are likely to come. They could even possibly be emergent.

It's not the biggest thing I am worried about, but in a sense it looms, because if we DO hit it, then it becomes a nightmare of atrocities, and all our incentives in our systems are against fixing it.

@aeva legit

@dlakelan @Life_is That could change with neurosymbolic programming. Which I believe is important, and the next step.

And, as it turns out, leads to dramatic structural improvements AND doesn't resolve any of the problems in @mttaggart's blogpost.

@mastodonmigration @mttaggart @repepo Shit this is really good

@MichaelTBacon @ocdtrekkie @alienghic The fun part is, despite all the calls that "you're gonna be left behind!", there's a good chance that the industry is going to desperately need those who have retained their skills, so actually not switching to genAI tools might be a better way to not be left behind

Let me add one more thing to this. It's said implicitly above but let's be explicit. The problem is that this pipeline effectively *undoes itself*.

Part of the reason this worked well for @mttaggart is carefully setting up guardrails and monitoring things.

But the very patterns of usage of these things makes it so that people either never develop the skills where they can, or are demotivated to provide that level of care over time.

Which means the system eventually moves towards a structure that degrades and shakes itself apart by the very patterns of usage.

I don't know how to solve this.

(Rudy of Blacksky deleted it but this joke is his)

software tastemaker https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jg1WUOxY6Cg

@mttaggart "Well then, I guess the one thing left is... taste! It's all a matter of who's got good taste then"

At that point don't call yourself a software engineer though. Call yourself a "software tastemaker". If that sounds vile, well then

@mttaggart "That's it, I'm leaving coding! I'm going to go do $X task"

I've got bad news for you about how people are trying to automate $X task

@mttaggart The next step is obvious: the machines are so prolific, you feel like you are wasting time by trying to be that heavily involved. Besides they're getting pretty good at their own review, anyway right? Let them write their own guardrails and do their own review. And then you don't review things, not even in large chunks. Full vibecoding.

Is that pushing the goalposts? It may be. I think "slop" used to be easier to dismiss when it came to code because it was obviously bad. Now when it's bad, it's non-obviously bad, which is part of its own problem. And cognitive debt, deskilling, and etc don't get factored into the quality of output aspect.

But unfortunately, the immediate reward aspects of these things are going to make it hard for society to recognize.

There are a lot of other concerns but I think since a lot of people on the fediverse are opposed to these tools, they might not be very familiar with where they're currently at ability-wise. @mttaggart provides a good description that they *are* capable of solving many problems you put in front of them... and that doesn't remove the other problems they generate or involved in their process.

The slop part isn't just the individual outputs, but the cumulation, and the effect on society itself.