Slop is a Passing Fad, It's About Faking Productivity (Plagiarism, Misinformation, and False Positives)
Today is a special day not because of excess heat but because finally, for the first time since moving in, we have a new code in the alarm (after well more than a decade!). We're planning to go out and enjoy the sun.
Next week (Monday) it's already June and 10 days into the month we are celebrating.
We are gratified to see that Linus Torvalds is belatedly realising that slop is a curse. It interferes with development of Linux (it's assured to make it less stable) and also interferes/slows down the triaging of security bugs. Yes, security defects exist, but they're lost in a sea of false positives*. Many aren't critical; they're real, but they distract from more urgent things.
Slop is a bubble. Some people accept it later than others. █
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* One reader told us about the latest myths from Mythoslop (Anthropic). "They say 1,000 "open source" packages were checked and over 10,000 problems were identified," he said.
Can we believe them? I asked this sincerely.
"At this point," he noted, "no outside party can conduct experiments or inspections. If one desires to place faith in blind trust he or she is free to do so. Some analysis on this latest report from FlyingPenguin: Mythos Grading Mythos: Got Patches Yet?"
One article said those are POTENTIAL bugs. They don't even check! They pass the burden to cURL and others. This isn't a revolution, it's white noise.