Doing Free Software for a Living in an Era or a Time of Abundance of Code (and Fast Internet to Pass It Around Freely) or Writing When the Web is Attacked by LLM Slop
Tailoring code to needs is the key
The world is, generally speaking, overpopulated. It's not a controversial statement to make. Or should not be. It contributes to all sorts of issues, including climate change, conflict, and poverty. Many people already live in "shoeboxes" in spite of working very hard for very long time durations (long hours without proper breaks or even movement). Now some companies try to convince us that what we need is "slop" (they call this "AI") and moreover "social control media" "apps" with "slop" in them - to keep us slobs drooling and slobbering. It looks like a very poor social experiment that's doomed to fail.
Likewise, they try to sell this idea that coders can be replaced by "AI"; they often mean plagiarism.
In some ways, what they mean by "AI" is LLMs and LLMs are just state-of-the-art plagiarism or "Drunken Plagiarists". They saturate and dilute real work with sloppy slop. It's a form of text/code farming.
So yesterday I was minding my own business, using "Google News" to find "Linux" news I may have missed. This came up:
Of course it was a fake article, generated by a machine. That's all that Web site ever does [1, 2].
Sadly, a lot of the Web is the same, but not all the "slopfarms" make it into Google News, where mass layoffs made quality control/curation even worse.
Access to reliable information is becoming a challenge, as Sami Tikkanen has just demonstrated in relation to UEFI. His thought/rant was truly justified, as Wikipedia was basically edited and curated by liars. Some of them are corporate actors which many years ago had Jimmy Wales fuming at Microsoft. Of course he later took bribes from Bill Gates and from Microsoft, so don't expect these errors to be corrected, only covered up.
This is the death of science, facts, education, and truth.
A lot of years or a long time ago I also came to realise that 1) many can code; 2) too much [sic] code existed already; 3) a lot of code was not good but widely used. And hence, overabundance of code did not necessitate improvement. In some cases, writing more and more of it would miss the point as it could not guarantee that bad code would get replaced by better code. I moreover think that in other domains/disciplines there is the same issue; what sells well and is widely used is very seldom what's best. It's not meritocracy but mediocrity. Many people still use Windows. On the Web, lies or paid-for Wikipedia ads ("articles") get a lot of exposure/views. They're presumed credible.
In my late 20s I slowed down with high-quality (time-consuming due to quality demands) coding and did ugly hacks instead, knowing my old code was not used by many people anyhow or would not be used for long. Things generally changed a lot over time*.
There are nowadays people who operate sites and fail to see that turning them into slopfarms is basically suicide.
This leads me to the title of this post. It's not hard to envision code getting worse, just like the Web is getting worse. Computer Science education is misaligned and people are encouraged to either buy some proprietary software or use bloated "frameworks" they do not and/or cannot understand.
Code 'slop' would cheapen or devalue the work of real programmers, as the NY Times did a puff piece for such code the other day (link omitted). Perhaps, seeing what Google does to its engineers this month (also NY Times, but less ridiculous), there's not much future for good coding. The cofounder of Google wants staff to overwork to make him richer while making one's own job obsolete and more sloppy.
Adding insult to injury: (this month)
The world is striding towards lesser quality as the "new standard" and marching towards a status quo of aviation disasters every other week. █
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* An associate explains that with Free software "the business model is about customization. Selling code though is an outdated 1980s mindset which is an anachronism with no place in 2025. [...] It fits into the topic of 'selling' software versus making money from modding. There were stats years ago about how nearly all software is in-house anyway and thus modding is the main activity."