Ironically I had a very smart and otherwise reasonable math professor who, shortly after Kasparov lost to Deep Blue, said in class that chess was no longer interesting.
In Athens, an "idiotes" was a citizen who focused only on private matters rather than participating in the polis (city-state). Because civic participation was considered a duty, this term carried a negative connotation of being socially irresponsible or uninvolved.
This term evolved into the modern "idiot" which we are familiar with.
The problem IMO is the transition period. A mostly safe system will make the driver feel at ease, but when an emergency occurs and the driver must take over, it's likely that they won't be paying full attention.
I think Arxiv and similar could contribute positively by listing replications/falsifications, with credit to the validating authors. That would be enough of an incentive for aspiring researchers to start making a dent.
Yes, it's the same as with nuclear vs coal. A nuclear disaster is so spectacular that it attracts a lot of attention. Meanwhile, millions of kids suffering from asthma, dying of cancer, etc. don't make the 9pm news because it's harder to connect the dots.
Yes, that's a good point. I don't think the public is ready to accept a vibe-coded medical diagnostic system (hopefully), but software in the app stores specifically is rarely used for mission-critical tasks, and I think that's why it's the next frontier for slop.
Yes, but that's mostly hand-made slop. What I'm referring to is 100% automatically generated apps from start to end. Potentially orders of magnitude larger volume, once you realize you can churn an app an hour and have it published, with the reviewers effectively unable to do meaningful testing.
What I really miss was the moderation system. There was a simple 1-5 score and a main trait (insightful, funny, flamebait, underrated, overrated...). To moderate you had to earn points which would you then spend, so careful consideration mattered. The result was that you could filter for 5+Insightful and get the core of the discussion, or 5+Funny and have a good time, etc.
Thank you for putting this in such clear terms. It really is a Catch-22 problem for startups. Most of the time, you can't reach scale unless you cut some corners along the way, and when you reach scale, you benefit from NOT cutting those corners.
I'm curious if you could share something about custom agents. I love Claude Code and I'm trying to get it into more places in my workflow, so ideas like that would probably be useful.
The core sentence has an OR clause, which means if any of the 2 conditions happens (DEI promotion; violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws), then they're in violation. Their stated mission is directly in contradiction with the first part. Even if it wasn't, I'd probably vote in the same direction, given the (let's call it) volatility we are seeing with capricious interpretation of executive privilege.