The Slop Ponzi Scheme is a Problem and Threat to All of Us (Even Those Who Don't Invest in or Use Slop at All)
A slop apologist or pusher recently stirred up a hornets' nest at libreplanet-discuss. Akira Urushibata has just put him in his place by explaining why the jingoism for plagiarism engines is a problem for everybody (Cringely explains a precedent this week*). To quote Urushibata:
Jean Louis wrote:
> Not at all. Those are proprietary companies. Their money, not ours, > not mine, not yours. > > Who cares for Anthropic and OpenAI? Let them get bankrupt.
I believe banks are pouring money into these companies by buying stock and lending money. Now where do the banks get money from?
In October 1929 the US stock market crashed. According to Wikipedia:
By 1933, the U.S. unemployment rate had risen to 25%, about one-third of farmers had lost their land, and 9,000 of its 25,000 banks had gone out of business.
Did workers lose their jobs and farmers lose their land because they had purchased stocks at high prices before the crash? I don't think so.
It is hard to accurately predict the future. Mistakes are inevitable and some companies go bankrupt. However capitalism has learned how to reduce the damage. Listening to diverse opinions leads to better decisions. When too many people accept falsified figures the outcome is disaster.
I'd like to ask list members: are the opinions of those who have contributed to free software being sought by those considering investing in "AI" technology and data centers?
Those who are interested in the origin of the term "millionaire" should read the Wikipedia article on the subject. It appears the word was first used in France in 1719.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millionaire#Terminology
Akira Urushibata
This problem is systemic, not contained. Two years ago my wife and I got sued by people who work for slop companies (basically profiting from a scam). We cannot ignore the financial damage those people caused. █
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* Remember when companies operated at a loss under false assumptions? For younger people who don't know or cannot remember:
I promised to show you why the whole industry’s answer to its own problem — buy a bigger brain — is the most expensive mistake in the history of computing. To do that I have to take you back to 1999, because I was there, and if you’re old enough to be reading me, maybe you were too. And I wasn’t only watching. In 1999 I put $10,000 into a young company called E-Loan, run by a founder named Chris Larsen. After the IPO I cashed out for $400,000 and bought a house.[...]
Then it ended, and everyone drew exactly the wrong lesson.
The lesson people took from 1999 was that the [Internet] was a bubble. It wasn’t. The [Internet] was the most real thing to happen to commerce in a century — it ate retail, media, advertising, and the telephone, precisely as the prospectuses promised. The technology was never the lie. The lie was the price — capital sprinting into a true story while refusing to look at the unit economics underneath it. Pets.com wasn’t wrong that you’d someday buy dog food online. You’re probably buying it online right now. Pets.com was wrong about what it cost to ship a forty-pound bag for a flat five bucks. The revolution was real. The arithmetic was fatal.
It's happening again.