> I worry that everything in society will become uniform

That’s why “slop” is so appropriate. It’s the runoff from the taps poured into a glass. Tastes like everything, nothing, definitely not pleasing, probably cheap, still effective at getting you inebriated.

> Junior and mid-level engineers can no longer push AI-assisted code without a senior signing off

So what incentive is there for juniors to look at the code at all? Seniors are now just another CI stage for their slop to pass.

They don’t even send you the changes. They just say “we’re updating our terms” in an email and you’re now bound by contract to offer the company your first born as an indentured servant upon demand. Fortunately, the “bury them with paperwork” strategy is waning in effectiveness now that an LLM can read a 50 page ToS and quickly tell me if there’s anything that works against my interests.

> What makes you think that text is inherently a worse reflection of the world than light is?

What does the color green look like?

A color without form can't look like anything.

It doesn't look like anything to me.

I just wish there was some human element to them so they were easier to talk about. Something like:

BASKETBALL-9a176cbe-7655-4850-9e7f-b98c4b3b4704-FISH

CAKE-3a01d58f-59d3-4b0c-87dc-4152c816f442-POTATO

“Which row was it, ‘basketball fish’ or ‘cake potato’?

Of course, the words would need to be a checksum. As soon as you introduce them, nobody is looking at the hex again. Which is an improvement, since nobody is looking at all the hex now “it’s the one ending in ‘4ab’”.

There's nothing stopping you from doing so. You don't have to use strict UUIDs. Their form rarely serves a real purpose anyway.

But for exposed values (document ids, customer ids, that kind of thing), it can be awkward if a patient's id is suddenly "CRANKY-...-FART".

If I discovered that were my patient ID, I would laugh myself into unconsciousness and buy the staff a pizza.

There's been a lot of historical work done in the past and I used NIST FIPS181 to implement this.

Note: FIPS181 was intended for passwords and I was using them as handy short human-readable record IDs as per your post. You probably shouldn't use FIPS181 for passwords in 2026 LOL.

Describing FIPS181 as pronounceable is optimistic. However its better than random text wrt human conversations. They start looking like mysterious assembly language mnemonics after awhile.

At $dayJob we use (user facing) IDs like this. Select a prefix then add a sufficient number of random alphanumeric characters for your use case.

> Kids are smart and easily learn how to work around restrictions.

Absolutely. I feel like adults frequently mistake kids’ lack of education for stupidity. Lack of education about something is a temporary condition, and kids have ridiculous amounts of time, energy, and motivation to quickly become expert about something they care about. Particularly in reaction to “you can’t do that.”

One possibility: These laws forget that 18 year olds have kid siblings. The 18 year olds need money and like everyone else, enjoy the prospects of easy money. The 18-year-old has a phone bill to pay. These are the makings of a black market. Kid sibling acts as a broker for the older sibling’s services among the kid’s classmates and collect a commission.

Justice delayed is justice denied. There should be an express lane for litigation similar actions like this.

There is an express lane, it's reserved for the government appealing cases, in which any and all injunctions are halted because the court has unilaterally decided to interpret "not being able to do illegal shit" as "great harm" while there is no harm in sending people to torture prisons abroad on the flimsiest of evidence.

They sure took their time with this one.

we can’t even do that with violent criminal let alone white color criminals. lol

This is a silly point. Courts aren't sitting around umming and ahhing about whether they should issue an arrest warrant to get x violent criminal off the streets, the system wastes minimal time in apprehending them and putting them in jail. At THAT point things slow to a crawl - because there's no longer the urgent incentive to act to prevent further harm.

Whereas in these cases the government is potentially harming the entire public every single day that the courts don't act.

Can you imagine the chaos if suddenly all the slop code wasn’t owned by the company? Even though that result would be consistent with this ruling, it undermines the narrative the economy is now riding on, so there will likely be special exemption.

3D Movie Maker too! There’s so much nostalgia around Clippy, but the real ones know McZee.

I must tell you, it is an incredible relief to learn that McZee was not a figment of my imagination.

> Why as an adult you would play Pokemon over SMT is something I can't get.

Nostalgia is a hell of a drug.