Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Sunday, 19th May 2024

Spam, junk … slop? The latest wave of AI behind the ‘zombie internet’. I'm quoted in this piece in the Guardian about slop:

I think having a name for this is really important, because it gives people a concise way to talk about the problem.

Before the term ‘spam’ entered general use it wasn’t necessarily clear to everyone that unwanted marketing messages were a bad way to behave. I’m hoping ‘slop’ has the same impact – it can make it clear to people that generating and publishing unreviewed AI-generated content is bad behaviour.

# 7:54 pm

NumFOCUS DISCOVER Cookbook: Minimal Measures. NumFOCUS publish a guide "for organizers of conferences and events to support and encourage diversity and inclusion at those events."

It includes this useful collection of the easiest and most impactful measures that events can put in place, covering topics such as accessibility, speaker selection, catering and provision of gender-neutral restrooms. # 6:24 pm

Fast groq-hosted LLMs vs browser jank (via) Groq is now serving LLMs such as Llama 3 so quickly that JavaScript which attempts to render Markdown strings on every new token can cause performance issues in browsers.

Taras Glek's solution was to move the rendering to a requestAnimationFrame() callback, effectively buffering the rendering to the fastest rate the browser can support. # 1:35 pm

A Plea for Sober AI. Great piece by Drew Breunig: “Imagine having products THIS GOOD and still over-selling them.” # 12:47 am