I've thought a lot about yesterday's post over the last 24 hours and realized a few things. One is that focusing on this problem, the slopocalypse if you will, is making it impossible for me to make any progress on the things that I want to be working on, the things I need to do to find a way out of the coercive way of life that forces me to use AI in the first place.
There's a lot of things that I want to work on that people seem to want and that can contribute to a brighter future. A subset of these things are, by their nature, projects I can pursue that are not squarely in the cross-hairs of the AI industry. They don't need to integrate into "ecosystems" where the AI Industry is unavoidable. These are what I should be focusing on.
It means biting the bullet and depending on tools I can't trust, tools that are likely already infected by AI slop and maintained by people who don't yet understand (or care) about what this means to the world or even their own work. I will try to help them when I can, but if I keep using all of my free time for this I'll never make any of the tools that can be used to break the dependence on the willfully ignorant or just plain evil people that so many of us are currently under the boot of.
It's hard for me to let this go, and it's going to take daily discipline to do so. It feels wrong even writing it, but right now it's consuming me and while some progress is being made, I don't think how I've been doing this so far will be sustainable for much longer.
I've also realized that I hold myself to standards that are probably not healthy. I'm not trying to rationalize giving-up on things that matter, I'm recognizing my limits as a single human. I'm writing this post as much as a reminder to me as anything else: make things first and let the things change minds.
Jason J. Gullickson, 2026