There was some promising research showing that you could recapture co2 and catalyze it into methane pretty efficiently. I wonder whatever happened to that.

It'd be nice if we could continue burning "fossil" fuels by recapturing and reusing. With enough solar power, the efficiencies don't matter a lot. And with reuse we wouldn't have to change any of our chemical processes or equipment that we've already built in the modern plastic era.

condensing the co2 to the necessary concentrations to drive these reactions is basically never economical - we will need widespread energy abundance before non-organic based removal becomes viable.

If you're really hampered by not having a wok behavior for your induction stove, good news! There are plugin induction woks! From what I hear they work great. Technology Connections on YouTube did a great video about them

I appreciate your empathy for the fellow human. Even if it's "undeserved" it still makes things better for everyone involved.

>If you are hung up on commit build quality

I'm sorry but what? Are you really trying to argue that it doesn't matter that nothing works, that all it produced is garbage and that what is really important is that it made that garbage really quickly without human oversight?

That's.....that's not success.

Quality absolutely matters, but it's hyper context dependent.

Not everything needs to, or should have the same quality standards applied to them. For the purposes of the Cursor post, it doesn't bother me that most of the commits produced failed builds. I assume, from their post, that at some points, it was capable of building, and rendering the pages shown in the video on the post. That alone, is the thing that I think is interesting.

Would I use this browser? Absolutely not. Do I trust the code? Not a chance in hell. Is that the point? No.

"Quality" here isn't if A is better than B. It's "Does this thing actually work at all?"

Sure, I don't care too much if the restaurant serves me food with silverware that is 18/10 vs 18/0 stainless steel, but I absolutely do care if I order a pizza and they just dump a load of gravel onto my plate and tell me it's good enough, and after all, quality isn't the point.

Software that won’t compile and doesn’t do anything is not software, it’s just a collection of text files. A computer that won’t boot isn’t a computer anymore, it’s a paperweight. A car that won’t start isn’t a car anymore, it’s scrap metal.

I can bang on a keyboard for a week and produce tons of text files - but if they don’t do anything useful, would you consider me a programmer?

> Quality absolutely matters, but it's hyper context dependent.

There are very few software development contexts where the quality metric of “does the project build and run at all” doesn’t matter quite a lot.

How do you iteratively improve a broken codebase that doesn't compile with more than 3 million lines of code?

I don't want to defend the AI slop, but it's common for me to go on for a few weeks without being able to compile everything when doing something realy big. I can still compile individual modules and run their tests, but not the full application (which puts all modules together)... but it may take a lot of time until all modules can come together and actually run the app.

You must have really tiny hands considering the pixels are smaller that .2mm by .2mm

In particular I think if the writing is excessively vapid and generic it's either AI written, or written badly enough I'm okay lumping it in with AI writing.

Good. Slop should not be profitable.

Edit: There's a whole lot of replies trying to sell the idea that AI Slop and pop music is the same. It isn't. You can dislike pop music all you want, you can think it's low effort all you want, but it's not AI Slop. This is a false equivalency.

That submarine sailed with the beatles.

It's not really happening - there's still the classic stuff if nothing else but even modern output is pretty diverse between sloppier and less sloppy.

"Slop" doesn't mean "bad" or "designed for mass appeal". It means "low effort and inhuman" (to oversimplify).

How is Spice girls & Coldplay slop? The entire production is so detailed with 1000s of people working on each song.

> AI slop, Human slop - who cares if people are enjoying it.

Many people do care in fact.

But why should you make the distinction between slop that is created by a human or AI? Why should you care if something terrible was created by an AI or a human?

For the same reason some people like buying local, or buying hand-made, or buying "Made in <insert country>". People aren't robots, and we know the consequences of our actions are not limited to the current moment and on the current side of the black box we happen to be on as consumers. Further, even in cases of pure observation, where there is no monetary, verbal, implicit, or indirect support - e.g. just looking at a piece of art we didn't pay to see - we care about things that are not represented solely by the observable qualities of an object, especially when it comes to art and craft and the effort of people we admire.

This is obvious, though. This part of human nature will never change, and there is no argument that can confront it, and no reason to want to formulate one unless:

A. It makes you money.

B. It appears to have dividing lines that match a larger culture war in which you have emotional stock.

Yellow by Coldplay was original, heartfelt and got years best single at the NME awards. If you are going to call that slop, what isn't slop?

Would you watch a sports league that was entirely AI generated? It's purely entertainment, why care if the athletes are real?

>Are you saying that e.g. Spice Girls or Coldplay or whatever is not slop?

Your definition of "slop" seems to be "is popular with the mainstream." That isn't the definition used when applied to AI generated music. Spice Girls and Coldplay are leagues beyond anything an AI can currently produce in terms of artistic quality. Yes, there is artistic quality to popular culture.

And to most people it matters that human beings produce it. It may not matter to you - you may only consider music or any other form of art to be nothing more than a means of producing stimuli intended to create a pleasing endorphine response, but most people don't want to process art the way a machine processes data.

Yes, it's cheaply made en-masse, like actual slop.

There are a couple issues with that definition: - quality is not always correlated with "cheaply made en-masse" - actual slop, assuming you are talking about the food, is more about preventing food waste although it happens to also be cheap.

I'm being pedantic AF because most people refer to AI slop as "low-quality or careless work". And AI is just a tool so it's possible to spend a lot of time making something of high quality with it. I get the outrage with respect to copyright and artist rights, but it certainly doesn't look like slop to me.

Eeeeh your definition is as good as mine. To me, slop is used to convey the fact that whatever it is applied to was made with quantity/efficiency in mind rather than quality/purpose, like what is fed to pigs. Indeed, ultimately slop could be good by that definition. Lots of people like McDonald's, but I think most people also realize it is slop.

My partner and I kinda do this. We have a blanket that is thin enough for him to be comfortable under and then between the sheet and the blanket on my side I have a nice thick Sherpa ugg throw. That way we can still touch and stay our respective comfortable temps

Nvidia might not want to sell you a GPU but I'm sure they'll rent you one