Outline of Slop, LLMs, IBM, and Things to Come
This weekend is a slow weekend, at least news-wise (technology, not insane political developments/events); that's just more or less as one might expect (being days after a new year's beginning), so fine, so be it.
We've been catching up and tidying up (Xmas decorations taken down), the nocturnal bird ("hi-dee", she likes to hide) is back again, and we've found only one new example of LLM slop about "Linux" today:
Google News yielded nothing and the Serial Slopper pushes slop about slop, not "Linux". So far in 2026 we've hardly found any slop about "Linux" and we hope it's not a matter of luck but part of an ongoing trend. Alex Oliva (FSF Board, Linux-libre etc.) has a new article about LLMs lacking knowledge on anything. It's composed a little like a poem:
They can't tell right from wrong, they can't tell true from false.
The reason they can't lie is that it requires intent to deceive, and they're not capable of having any intent whatsoever.
So they can't be sincere either. They can't feel anything.
They can't tell whether what they generate is true.
Their training and their algorithms aim for likelihood, for plausibility.
Truth is not even a consideration.
And they don't care. They can't care. They're not capable of caring.
They're just Autocompleters, Iterated.
They compute what word seems likely to appear next, one after another.
They don't understand, they have no common sense, no intelligence.
If they seem intelligent, that's because they're trained to imitate.
When they apologize, they're not gaslighting you.
They've just been trained with apologies.
Oliva left IBM, explaining his decision at the time that he left (saying it had something to do with them imposing unethical tools on staff at Red Hat).
Today's discussions about IBM layoffs (which IBM tries to pretend aren't happening or are "old news") involve firsthand experiences from people who focus on how not to get sacked (preserved below* in case they censor comments later). Apart from that we've found nothing relevant.
We definitely don't lack things to cover, but we're taking our time to do things properly. This coming week and weekend will be very productive irrespective of how much "news" gets published by other sites. █
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* Nothing spectacular below, the key point is that IBM does not value the exercise, it just merely leverages that as an excuse to sack people but what really matters is being indispensable to IBM, financially/technically.
