Slop Will Not Change the World
Last night we explained and showed that Google and Microsoft borrowed over 20 billion dollars in the past 3 months alone [1, 2]. They borrow money that they do not have and the excuse might be buzzwords. At the same time they lay off many people. Similarly, if one looks past the smokescreen of "Zuckerberg says" one can find articles about him being frustrated with the slop staff that Facebook ("Meta") hired. They have no strategy and accommodating bots in social control media is assured to repel human users. X.com (Twitter) already reached this point; a lot of "users" and interactions there are bots; they fake "engagement" to make a dying/dead site look like it's doing OK. There are some reports about this.
At the moment there's a whole lot of grifting, with companies that pretend to have a future (but they don't) and latch onto whatever buzzwords seem fashionable. It used to be blockchains, now it's "hey hi", some already leap ahead to "quantum" (the executives who mention it have no actual idea what it means and how it works).
There are also dumb Web sites that try to 'ride the wave'; some of them are foolish enough to believe that pasting some slop into a WordPress blog will lead to real audience and even income. See this latest nonsense from the Serial Slopper (SS):
Why would anyone follow such a site, where all the images and text are fake?
When it comes to slop, it is one of those "keep calm and carry on" situations. A lot of the media tries to tell people they "miss out" (FOMO) by not talking about or not adopting slop.
BS!
At the end we'll likely see companies outspending whatever loans they can secure, burning through "investment" money etc. It's a dead-end expedition and they try to buy time by buying the media for jingoism and chaff. They try to tell us all this stuff is a revolution, an era, an arms race and "inevitable". The main inevitability is failure because it's expensive, it does not scale, and people are generally getting fed up with it anyway. The one use case we saw for it is DDoS attacks under the guise of "intelligence". Similarly for plagiarism ("it's not a licence violation, it is hey hi!") and assorted scams.
The passing fad which is slop (misframed as "intelligence") would not be the first such fad. Some of us grow up sooner and leave that nonsense behind (or altogether avoid/skip it). The "sloptimists" take longer. Some are in denial about it; some are investing their life/efforts/money in it, so they don't wish to let it go... just yet. █