Slopwatch: LinuxSecurity, Planet Ubuntu, and LinuxTechLab
Today I saw linuxconfig.org trying to perhaps recover after some experiments with slop. Maybe it's a bit premature to assume this. The site used to have many decent articles, then it got all silent. Then, quite suddenly, in one day it published half a dozen pieces of LLM slop with slop images. Within hours we criticised this and days later it issued some real articles, perhaps regretting what it experimented with (it otherwise publishes pretty much nothing at all). We'd like to think of it as a failed experiment and remorse. That happened to BetaNews.
On the other hand, some slopfarms show no remorse and they don't value their reputation at all. Here's the LinuxSecurity slopfarm having a go at "RATs" and Linux:
We also saw LLM slop in Planet Ubuntu again:
Yes, it's LLM slop. It's obvious even based on the structure alone. Does Canonical even care?
Then there's some more slop from LinuxTechLab, which turned from a Linux blog into a spam site and then plain old (or new) LLM slopfarm.
This is a slop image with LLM slop:
My wife and I are aghast, seeing that many Linux writers (as in, people who routinely write articles about GNU/Linux) don't speak out about this problem. They don't want to "rock the boat", instead they write me E-mails. They're very unhappy about those slopfarms, but they don't write about this in public. We'd like to think that Slopwatch can help in this regards. █