The effort is an important part of it.

Why? If someone is baking cookies it doesn’t improve the cookies if they have to run a mile for each ingredient. What am I missing? Is it just that someone being willing to run and get each ingredient demonstrates a level of care?

I think we may have hit upon another definitional difference here.

Good catch! I do think that’s a big part of the difference! In my old age I’ve definitely seen it go from sloppy->slop and in that process reclaim the old connotation of “low quality, high quantity animal feed”. Specifically, back in my day, it wasn’t uncommon to be using/hearing Microslop to refer to the company and it’s shitty half-ass product implementations since at least 2018 (with Edge and Bing specifically), but it was more about being ‘sloppy’ than ‘slop for the masses’ y’know?

It makes 100% sense that the more popular definition would’ve lost the ‘sloppy’ association and gone back to the ‘low quality, high quantity animal feed’.

However, bringing it back to the original topic, I do think that definition/perspective is more damning of Kurzkesagt. Their videos are rushed but they do take great care to not be sloppy in that way.

I think it was artists doing a job they could get paid for, but making good art within those constraints.

I think this is where we flip sides on the ‘sloppy’ vs. ‘slop’ distinction. I do think that objectively good art (if we pretend that’s a thing) can be slop if it’s purpose is ‘high volume animal feed’. That might be coming from the culinary association of things like sloppy joes, casseroles, mashed veggies, biscuits and gravy, MREs, etc. as ‘slop’ and sometimes even ‘tasty slop’.

I move to have that stricken from the record.

I second that motion! The core concept was valid and beneficial a single extra word shouldn’t detract from that :P

Huh. Well, today I learned about something against my will.

…Sorry to curse you with that… I have a friend who is really into both reality TV and tiktok+Instagram who was absolutely raging about it when it was popular and assumed it was more common knowledge…

I’ve tried watching a couple episodes of Love Island with said friend and, for me, it felt like some of the most soulless TV I’ve ever seen. To avoid cursing you with that experience as well, my experience of it was that everyone on set looks dead inside, they’re all kissing eachother all the time but it doesn’t look like any of them are having any fun. Then the producers intentionally do a “game” that breaks the norms of monogamy and then all the contestants robotically do a big show of performative jealousy, hurt and anger before going back to some of the most depressing and uncomfortable kissing I’ve ever seen.

I was using that and Fruit Love Island as a foil because I half joked that the FLI characters at least had more soul and personality, albeit cartoonish, than the contestants in the original show and my friend agreed.

Sorry I apparently needed to vent about that, lol -⁠_⁠-⁠;

“if they don’t care enough to make it, why would I care enough to read/look at/watch/listen to it?”

Isn’t that already covered without the additional metric of “effort”?

If it’s anything churned out cynically, with only the desire to make money off of broad appeal

It’s not just that, but I do think that is a large part. The corporate and soulless part you called out.

I think the “just wanted to give the fans what they wanted” and Doyle’s ability to actually do just that saves it from the “little to no value” bit, which makes it pandering but not slop. The same can be said for a lot of movies, music, etc. Meanwhile a lot of street art is sloppy as hell from needing to rush due to illegality but that doesn’t necessarily make it bad either.

“art-nouveau” style and movement began as advertising for theater performances in the 1890s.

I think both that and the “Dear Alice” video are examples of reclaimed slop. Someone saw the “little” value in the ad and opted to amplify it. I would classify those and similar examples as memes distilled from slop.

“slop” also doesn’t mean soulless, anodyne, corporate, or misguided. Again, all slop is those things

“Misguided” doesn’t feel like it’s a necessary part of “slop” but I otherwise agree.

Going the other way with examples, I think we can both agree that Fruit Love Island is absolutely slop, despite many viewers caring a lot about it’s existence. But why exactly? And is it more or less “slop” than the original Love Island? Honestly I’m having a hard time justifying why Fruit Love Island isn’t an example of a ‘meme distilled from slop’ when I really want to call it ‘slop distilled from slop’.

An “agent” meaning an “instance of some specific LLM model with a fancy wrapper, tool use, and instruction set that recursively calls itself and/or other agents in order to accomplish a given task”. Absolutely don’t trust anything hosted on X!

offline + firewall

Mostly just trying to convey a sense of caution/paranoia with extra layers of daemon bindings. Probably should’ve added “sandboxed” in there too.

Honestly it seems like our definitions don’t differ that much. Rephrasing my definition to your format: “little to no-value content, about which the creator cares little about, with the goal for mass appeal”.

I don’t think the amount of effort someone put into something changes it’s value or quality. It feels like some kind of “blood sweat and tears are what’s most important, that’s why blood diamonds are the most valuable” shit y’know?

People can find value in anything, so I’m likely a bit more pervasive on what’s “slop” quality.

I do emotionally agree that most human-made memes and jokes aren’t slop but according to both of our definitions that doesn’t really hold up. If it was just because the creator cared about their creation or the laugh was valuable that “unslops” a lot of, pretty terrible and objectively slop, slop. I think we’re both missing something here, any ideas on what?

I disagree strongly about ads and see those of all shapes and provenance as the quintessential and original slop. The creators don’t care about the ad, they’re doing it for a paycheck with the benefactor only giving a shit about the “engagement” that comes from force feeding the ad to the masses.

Ironically that’s a perfect use case for a local, open-sourced, non-corporate, offline, firewalled and possibly air-gapped agent; to more easily explore, document and understand what’s in those 500 million files.

However, I would agree unless you’ve really got to know what’s in there the setup alone makes it almost certainly not worth it.

Possibly. Probably just an old definition though, hence why I tried to explain it.

Re-reading though I feel like I should clarify that the “nonstandard definition” is definitely a negative adjective, just not ‘damning’ in the same way it seems to be being interpreted here.

While I can’t speak for @itsjustachairmary it seems there’s at least 2 of us with that, or a similar, definition!

How would you explain the “standard” definition?

By their own admission? “Lies to children” is just a variation of “slop for babies”.

Or if you prefer pulling from Wikipedia’s sources.

It’s been years and I don’t care to re-watch for the specific arguments but going through the list ones that I vaguely recall being not just “lies for children” but contained blatant, lack of better term, capitalist propaganda: Loneliness, Is meat bad for you, Overpopulation, marijuana, Geo engineering, whos to blame for climate change, UBI, banking explained.

I also recall a few especially bad ones on syria, the immigrant crisis, addiction and homelessness but those don’t seem to be up anymore. You may be right that I am being overly harsh based on old history. Hopefully one they are trying to fix and not just whitewash.

“Effort” is not an antonym of slop.

1. Anything new you try takes a ton of effort and the results will generally be pretty sloppy. It takes time and practice to make not-slop.

2. Rushing something to completion results in slop. It’s hard to move fast! That doesn’t make the final quality any better.

3. Using garbage tools and/or materials results in a garbage/slop output.

4. Doing something exclusively for the sake of profit leaves the result soulless. This one is a bit more controversial, but I 100% classify this as slop.

AI generated stuff is usually slop, and the sloppiest of slop, because it’s often an amateur using garbage tools to rush something to completion for a quick buck.

Kurkesagt is, arguably, slop because they have slowly transitioned into trying to put out content as quickly as possible so that everyone working on it gets paid. Their whole thing is covering topics they themselves have not dedicate the time and effort to fully understand and master.

Also, slop is not a synonym for “unrecyclable trash”. In my opinion, Kurkesagt is sloppy as hell! But the animations are fun, the voiceover is pleasant and the pop-sci is generally accurate enough to provide an interesting glimpse into whatever topic they’re covering. They’re still shoveling slop for profit though, sold out years ago and have a heavy bias towards explaining how capitalism, and their participation within it, is the most moral of choices one could make.

You do understand that many of the claims made about what AI can do ate extremely overstated at best?

Yes, and that is arguably the bigger problem. They’re very careful to not mention any hard numbers on the actual reliability, but if we give it a very generous 80% accuracy in detecting “customer shrinkage” and assume that the error is split evenly into false positives and false negatives that’s a 10% of every time you go into a store to buy things getting put into the shoplifter database(assuming the facial recognition is 100% accurate, which again: fucking lol). At which point the retailer’s internal reports show an increase in the amount of customer shrinkage.

This creates a vicious feedback loop of increased shoplifting reports, increased demand for shoplifting solutions, increased false data, increased shoplifting reports, etc… This resulted in a lot of store closures back in 21-22 and is a crucial part of that “circular investment scheme” you mention.

Of course the error rate isn’t evenly distributed. It’s heavily concentrated on people that “look like criminals” ie, poor, black, young, hispanic, disabled, etc.

The entire “western” economy is ~90% ponzi scheme. The “AI bubble” is a bit lazier of one than usual but it’s not to play out any different than the “dot com” bubble.

The grocery stores are capitAls too.

Grocery stores are also a parasite who’s entire existence is in order to ration food/supplies/materials at the barrel of a gun to see how much extraction people will put up with.

However, I agree. Killing the canary doesn’t close down the coal mine. Ideally the canary wouldn’t be harmed but you’re going to need to dramatically change your relationship with the canary first, starting with setting it free.

Focus: Abolish capitalism

Communication: Done

Leadership: Fuck that, leaders are assassinated and co-opted. You need to develop your own agency and spread the protagonist virus.

Action: Everything you listed is performative, not action. Define clear goals and steps that directly achieve them. You won’t remove a single flock camera by waving a “SHAME!” sign in front of it, you can with an angle grinder though.

You’re spot on with identifying “bread” as the general problem. The issue with your perspective though is that people are burning things down in order to get bread. They know where the bread is in their neighborhoods, and “their” businesses. At the point they’re burning and looting why not grab a circus(new TV) on your way out?

Do you know where the bread is on a megayacht? I don’t! It’s not where the rioting is going to start. It will start at where there is know bread. If you have the understanding that that the fires need to reach the billionaire enclaves you can’t be shaming people for getting their bread however they can and then burning the evidence after. That will always be the initial spark.

You vastly underestimate how cheap and prevalent that sort of AI stuff already is. The upfront costs are high, and there’s usually some sort of ongoing support cost, but it’s been much cheaper than people since ~2020 and it’s only been getting more prevalent and miniaturized.

I’d encourage you to peruse https://everseen.com/solutions for some dystopian horrorshow. That is one of the companies that Kroger and Walmart ‘leverage their capabilities from’.

There’s also the b2b quid pro quo investment schemes already mentioned.

And also that retail insurers are one of the major ones helping to ‘drive adoption of these innovative ermergent technologies’ as both the retailers and insurance are constantly trying to scam each other for profit ‘maximize the potential earnings from their synergistic, mutually beneficial, relationship’. For further reading

The “right” isn’t a monolith anymore than the “left”.

While it manifests in different ways the American “left” has been just as willing and happy to sacrifice brown, trans, woman, etc. persons because they are equally dumb and brainwashed.

Nah, this is why it’s important to make sure “vegans” are at your parties.