Let's Put Slop In the Casket Once and for All (Call Out the Sites and People Who Produce and Spread Slop)
Slop is overruning some sites
THIS morning I was browsing the Web for news and/or updates. I have a list of about 20 sites or pertinent pages that I manually check every day, just in case something important happens and appears (or gets formally reported). There are no RSS feeds for these.
One frustrating thing is that many videos in YouTube (which I browse via Invidious gateways) are utterly useless GC (no, do not call them "AI"! There's no intelligence in these, none whatsoever!), "shorts" (symptom of social control media, notably TikTok), or people uploading meaningless junk from a spyphohe. To a certain extent the same applies to new images detected online and even to text. They're polluting the Web.
Only a day ago there was this:
It's not even about "Linux" and it is a fake article, or LLM slop:
We need to combat slop, both online and offline. We don't want people or companies sending us E-mail which is slop; it's time-wasting. More companies realise chatbots saved them no money and only cost them business (clients got upset and left). The layoffs were due to financial issues, not the potential of over-hyped and falsely marketed LLMs. Disregard the ludicrous excuses. Layoffs should not be conflated with false "innovation".
As we said many times before, calling out the worst offenders/culprits can help. After a while they feel guilty if not humiliated*; then they stop doing it, if it's not too late already. Even doing it only once may lead to future suspicion that everything else they publish is fake. It is a reasonably fair presumption. They do not flag or label their output as slop, so common sense and gut feeling (or "pedigree" based on track record) chime in.
Together, through a movement of integrity and solidarity, we can marginalise the spread of slop in all its forms, including code. █
______
* There is no "acceptable" level of slop. Some people think playing with slop makes them SEEM clever or even INNOVATIVE. That's like shoplifters thinking they seem "brave". Later they realise most people view them as undesirable parasites.