Eunice is like Wintermute's grandma. Five years per generation at the current rate, so 2035 sounds about right. All that's missing is rastafarians on a derelict space station.
The author says in the introduction that a certain amount of the book is verified. Presence of LLM-use doesn’t inherently make something of less value.
If an author doesn’t have time to write. Why should I give up my time to read?
Because -- if the author is to be believed -- essentially no one bothered to look at this work at all before AI became available to help with it. I had certainly never heard of it before. Had you?
That's the choice being offered. Not between "LLM slop" or "painstaking human authorship", but between something being done or nothing at all being done.
The problem with AI generated content is, it tells me you didn't care enough about the work to do it yourself. To understand it fully, to the point where you don't need or even want to hand the work off to an LLM.
Interacting with AI content makes me feel like I'm consuming something that was created purely for engagement farming. Not that human created content wasn't for engagement farming, but noticing an AI tell breaks the suspension of disbelief in a way. It devalues the relationship between creator and consumer, so that genuine care is not being shared. It's like I'm a cow being milked on an industrial engagement farm.
I don't think is about caring or not caring, you can care about an idea but not have time or resources to work, or lack the technical knowledge. I have plenty of experience (10+ years) but my coding time is very limited, does that mean that I care less? No, just that I don't have time enough to code.
I'm not pro AI by any means and I don't like the way this tech is turning the world into, but I see this as a people's problem, AI is a tool, the problem is how is being shoved into everything. Is nothing else than abstraction on top of another level of abstraction.
Being an engineer is about finding the best way to solve the issue at hand. Your client won't care if you use to code AI, or if you use Javascript, or C#, Java,... your client will care that the issue at hand is fixed on the best possible way. Fix the issue fast and you'll have a happy client.
1 point by scrollop 0 minutes ago | parent | next | edit | delete [–]
"The problem with AI generated content is, it tells me you didn't care enough about the work to do it yourself."
It may be the translation, however, this project is a passion for him. I would guess the passion is the book itself, and though he wants to share his passion, I imagine creating the actual page for others is tedious compared to the work of discovering the book. I have had the same issue.
If an AI can save you time so you can continue with your passion, I say go for it. No one has paid you to create the page, he's not vying for an award. If people are interested they can read it.
There are likely many people out there doing remarkable work but they can't be bothered creating a website to share with others.
If AI can do that, fantastic - even though some people will moan. There are always people who complain.
Wow. This is the exact opposite of what that the site is. It is very clear that the author of the web site cares deeply about the material and has put a lot of effort into the work. You are letting your personal biases color your view. That is your right, but check to see if it is making you happy.
Note that (1) this is just your opinion and (2) that he has put a lot less effort into it than others have put into similar endeavors which as a result have a different level of authenticity.
> You are letting your personal biases color your view. That is your right, but check to see if it is making you happy.
Why the free psycho analysis? GP just made a statement.
This work lacks merit. The descriptions of things from the book are not adequately descriptive, because the LLM that wrote the descriptions doesn't understand the drawings. It's mostly prose and little substance.
Oh, look, another drive-by throwaway profile that doesn't add anything meaningful to the conversation and just pisses on those who call out sloppy AI writing.
I suppose the implication is that you cannot presume human care with evidence of LLM use, it's considerably more likely that it's an indicator of lack of care, unfortunately.
It's like saying "but a lot of human care goes into factory made X" when comparing it to handmade X. It starts on a lesser footing unless evidence suggests otherwise
If you are deciding to delegate parts to AI, that’s probably a signal that it should just be edited out. If it isn’t worth your time to create, it probably isn’t worth my time to read.
AI is being used for the most part to shit out as much “content” as possible in order to show ads, sell courses and other products (bonus points if what is sold is itself also pure AI slop), or to finish tasks at work with as little effort as can be done, so that boss man is impressed by the velocity. “Who cares about quality? This is 2026, bro.”
The actual thoughtful use of AI is the minority case. Not the default. We humans are lazy, and when we can get away with less effort we put as little effort as we can into things.
Oh cool. I’m going to try this with my Conure at home. I hadn’t thought about “BAO” as a test before, we’ve done all sorts of little things in front of the mirror to see if he responds.
We’re using it to build our web app (https://uncook.xyz) and while it’s a slight departure from my team’s NodeJS background it’s been pretty cool to work with
This was refreshing to read. I’m a big believer in getting things done especially when some process or people get in your way. In my experience people usually understand “oh this person is trying to make things better so this arbitrary process should take a backseat here”. Even people only working the clock will work with you if you frame it well.
Correlation isn't causation; in the last few years we've experienced some significant economic headwinds like COVID and the current oil crisis. AI rollout is not happening in a vacuum.
Sure but you can't say “the numbers are flat hence nothing is happening” when the numbers aren't in fact flat.
Maybe it's trending up for completely unrelated reasons, as it's very hard in economics to derive the actual causal relationship, but a blanket refusal is unwarranted and should be counted as the unsubstantiated opinion it is.
Yeah, I would be impressed by an economist talented enough to discern a defensible signal on the impact of AI on real job growth. I think the next best thing we have is to observe the tendencies of supply/demand; if people were actively being replaced by AI, that large demand would be being enabled by some pretty wealthy companies providing AI laborers, white collar desk job perhaps; however the companies providing such a service still involve a lot of human-in-the-loop type stuff, like those startups offering "AI coworkers" through a Slack or Teams interface.
Those companies though are not nearly as successful as OpenAI/Anthropic last I checked, which are supplying a lot of consumer AI/ AI being used by humans rather than AI doing what humans do, independently. And I'm pretty sure the majority of AI token burn is not replacing humans; it's building software under the direction of humans.
It is very strange to me when people refer generically to "MUD" and cannot even seem to qualify what type of MUD they refer to.
Since the advent of MUD gaming, there has been a wide variety of codebases, servers, and clients, with distinct genealogical lineages, that appeal to quite distinct sectors of nerd-dom, and sometimes with very little overlap in the player base.
The original big-3 "non-Tiny" MUDs were: AberMUD, DikuMUD, and LPMud. These were largely unknown to me as I never played any of them, but they were mostly known as combat-based, player-programmable, and even quite distinctly European, for the most part. I could be wrong.
TinyMUD Classic began at CMU with Jim Aspnes, but quicky a lot of forks developed that resulted in MUCK, MUSH, MOO, FuzzBall and other interesting derivatives. The Tiny* class shared a lot of playerbase, because the appeal was mostly the same; all were user-extensible but only some were programmable; none were combat-based or adversarial. They mostly tended to evolve into social and chat functions, once they were established and built-up.
There are plenty of other MUD types and in the 90s, every budding programmer had ideas and forked a codebase for their own purposes. But it still baffles me, when commenters here and there wax nostalgic about those MUD days, I really have no idea what sort of game they're referring to, if they cannot be more specific.
I expect that people who mention MUDs largely do not expect anyone to know what they are talking about, since these games have nearly always been tiny and nowhere near even nerd pop culture. At least this has been my experience -- so I will prefer to say "I am playing this game called Hesperia/Achaea/Discworld/whatever, which is like a text-based RPG" and avoid even the "MUD" terminology.
Further, I expect an even smaller subset of people who have played MUDs are aware of the 'distinct genealogical lineages' you describe. As someone who spent my teens browsing mudconnector and dabbling in lots of random MUDs listed there, I started hazily noticing patterns in structure, design, mechanics, and even networking to some extent, and suspecting that certain games existed within specific 'traditions' of MUD development or even used similar libraries or frameworks, but I didn't have the context or curiosity to dig deeper.
Like everything, this can be modeled as a funnel: of the relatively small number of people on planet Earth who know that MUDs exist, only a tiny fraction has even connected to one, an even tinier fraction of those spent meaningful time on one, and an even smaller number of these who have thought to contextualize and taxonomize what they were played
Anyway, I am curious what level of specificity would you find normal?
As a zillenial who grew up playing DikuMUD derivatives, LPMUDs, and MUs, I feel uniquely qualified to bridge the gap here.
What GP is referring to and complaining is that when people say MUD, they're probably referring to either:
- A MUD based on some derivative of the TinyMUD codebase, colloquially called "MUs"
- Literally any other "MUD"
These two categories of "games" are both legitimately called "MUDs" but also have almost nothing in common with each other. The union of "MU" players and "MUD" players is not that large, in my experience. MU servers tend to function somewhere between glorified Discord servers and sandbox programming environments.
Even more specifically, within the MU* space, the different forks of TinyMUD ended up adopting different subcultures, programming languages, and general vibes. Despite all being superficially similar, telling someone you play a:
- MUSH
- MUCK
- MOO
says a great deal about both you and server. MUCKs are furry subculture for the most part and use Forth for programming, while MUSHes are ... more Star Trek/Lord of the Rings coded. With other weird differences: MUSHes tend to have elaborate mail and Discord-like comm systems built in, MUCKs tend to eschew those in favor of "hanging out in the same virtual room".
IME there isn't this same feeling in "other MUDs". You don't "identify" DikuMUD or LPMUD players in the same way, so I don't think the question makes sense to anyone who isn't a MU* player.
The difference here is almost entirely cultural, since technologically, LPMUDs and MUSH/MOO/MUCKs aren't that dissimilar. But LPMUDs are almost never used the same way, at least I've never seen it.
I have a love/hate relationship with my memories of the MUD era. I loved exploring different worlds and interacting with some of the brilliant people who took the time to help teach and encourage others. I was a casual who would disappear for months at a time when doing real world things, but it was comforting to be able to come back a little community of people building fun things.
The couple MUD communities I participated in eventually collapsed under drama explosions from terminally online people. Some really manipulative and cruel stuff from people who would present themselves as noble community leaders, work themselves into positions of power, then grind down everyone in the out group until the rest of the community stopped playing.
I would log in to a couple of them once a year. It was the same small ingroup of people idling away. All the recent posts on the in-game message board were from the new people complaining, admonishing, or introducing more rules to tighten their grip on anyone who remained. Really sad to see the same pattern collapse multiple different communities in the same way.
It seems you only had exposure to a limited set of MUDs that died quickly.
I played some MUDs that were quite solid; PaderMUD/Xyllomer in the late
1990s (peak count connection at about 60 different people in late 1998).
GEAS (similar code base) was also quite ok-ish up to 2013, though admin
made too many mistakes (Asralites, aka the warclergy, were pimp-nerfed
via divine codex to disallow them from starting wars, the old 'who' was
stolen by PO Allalltar and PO Okkita and many more mistakes). But community
wise both had many great roleplayers and your description appears to be
hugely one-sided in that you never found competent roleplayers that would
narrate a storyline (or usually several, if you had enough players) at the
same time. Often "drama" is just roleplay and reaction by characters to
in-game situations. I am aware that some players sabotage(d) MUDs and
cliques rose past 1998 or so; and many older players gave up due to lack of
time and what not. So the genre struggled already past 1998 and maintaining
MUDs was much harder. But things such as "grind down everyone" can only happen
if the rules are broken and the code is broken really. I also highly doubt
that players were the primary "until the rest of the community stopped playing"
as a problem - perhaps it applies to the MUDs you frequented, but very clearly
this was not the case for all MUDs, so I suspect you had a very limited set
of exposure to MUDs. I mentioned two; you did not mention any MUD specifically.
Can you mention which MUDs you played extensively for a while?
As for pattern collapsing MUDs, I actually agree; in particular those who held
the monopoly over the game code, can really quickly ruin a game. This does not
even happen deliberately all of the time; old admin stopped playing their own
MUDs and after +30 years they no longer understand why some code changes ruined
the MUD. It's a tragedy without a good fix, because they are old and lack time
to play, so they slowly stop understanding the game they still make code changes
to.
> It seems you only had exposure to a limited set of MUDs that died quickly
Limited set, yes. I was never a hardcore player. I would drop in for some months, then disappear again for months as I had other things going on in my life.
Quickly, no. Some of the MUDs are still running today (as I mentioned) but my in and out nature made the dramatic changes more obvious. I would spend the summer away doing something, and come back to discover someone new had worked their way into the admin staff and was stirring the pot at every opportunity. One time I came back and the MUD was taken offline because the staff was infighting so much about it.
> But things such as "grind down everyone" can only happen if the rules are broken and the code is broken really. I also highly doubt that players were the primary "until the rest of the community stopped playing" as a problem
I'm not pretending my experience was common to all MUDs because I didn't play a large number. However the ones I did play eventually succumbed to admin and staff drama.
Your assumption is backwards: It wasn't the people breaking rules who were causing problems. It was the people who were making rules. Some of them came up with increasingly specific things that were decided to be against an ever longer list of rules, which became the weapon which they could wield against anyone they didn't like. Temporary bans and restrictions were handed out selectively to their political adversaries.
Yeah what you’ve described a basically how I saw many forums collapse over the years as well. While they all have the basic problems of bringing in and retaining users, many stacked on top of those issues an unremovable set of hostile admins/mods driving away people from the kingdom they usurped.
The people who have the most time and energy to give for moderation, are the same ones most in love with the control for it’s own sake.
It's a pattern I see in a lot of communities now. Some of the open source projects I follow have had their communities collapse the same way: Some group comes in with all smiles and energy to help out, then they brings their friends into the upper ranks because they say they need more help, then they start pushing agendas and adding rules to give themselves more power, then finally they just exhaust everyone else who isn't interested in fighting the battles every time they log on to do something.
The few remaining forums I frequent have survived because they have no tolerance for admins who push their own agendas. They've all erred on the side of minimal rules and bans only in extreme cases. Every forum I've been on that went all-in on rules and heavy moderation has collapsed, or at least driven away the core users and left roaming packs of ingroup people who care more about picking apart everyone else than being part of the community. It's weird how many different places I've watched this happen online.
I had a blast in the late 2000s joining dead MUDs and just wandering around. It was utterly bizarre, in a good way. It also felt somewhat shocking when someone else actually signed in.
About Wolf Tivy's idea of "xenohumanism": strip "humanity" of all ape-ish historical contingency and identify the convergent "true man" as sum of "human" capabilities like language, philosophy, sociality, intelligence, consciousness
Agree, start with some books on the veracity of doom predictions of which there have been many. Learn how to read the IPCC reports so that you don't have to rely on the media summary which has been shown to be not much more than click bait given that they have been using the now-dropped RCP8.5 (and SSP5-8.5, and SSP3-7.0) scenarios. Read some works by the likes of Bjørn Lomborg, Michael Schellenberger, Steven Koonin et al as a counter to what the media have been pushing for years. Then and only then it is time to make up your mind where you stand on the subject of anthropogenic climate change and what it means for the future of society.
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