Bonum Certa Men Certa

Slopwatch: Brian Fagioli, Brittany Day, and Other Plagiarists Who Rip Off Real Writers and Target Themes Around "Linux"

posted by Roy Schestowitz on May 23, 2025

Is SEO and fake productivity/traffic the new "bro"?

We're now at the end of another fine week. Let's examine the LLM slop situation, with less focus (at least today) on image slop...

Today we demoted some sites in our lists (OPML), seeing they had gravitated towards spam, slop, or both. We gave a new example a few hours ago.

Linking to slopfarms or sites that only SOMETIMES use LLM slop is risky. Why? Several reasons: 1) It might accidentally reward actual slop. 2) It might contains serious errors (that's what slop does). 3) Even if the cited article is original, traffic is given to sites which elsewhere within them promote a) slop b) falsehoods. The broth is spoilt. Spill it out. Get rid of the whole lot.

Serial Sloppers like Brian Fagioli will never get off the wagon. They're drunk on slop. It's an addiction of sorts. Companies such as Microsoft are providing plagiarism tools, but it isn't a sound business model, nor is this going to work in the long run, either for the provider or for the user. An associate cited this new post ("There are not good big tech companies left") wanting to "note the mistake in the penultimate paragraph -- simply using the software continues the problems because doing so block the use of better software, cf the reasoning behind the "we'll get them sort of addicted" quote from 1998..."

Microsoft wants to get people 'addicted' to low-quality junk and falsehoods. For that, nobody should forgive Microsoft. It also engages in mass-plagiarism - something of unprecedented proportions. It only calls this "AI" to mislead people and distract them from what it's really all about, as Liam Proven has proven. To quote him: "AI" is not "AI". The liars and the shills redefined what people used to mean by "AI" as "AGI", artificial _general_ intelligence, so they could market their stupid plagiarism bots as AI."

"AGI is not real. It doesn't exist. It will probably never exist. Hell, at the rate humanity is going, we won't be able to build new computers any more by 2050 and the survivors at the poles will be nostalgic for electricity."

"AI is a scam. It's a hoax. It's fake news. There is no AI, and what is being sold as AI is such an incredibly poor fake that it is profoundly disheartening that so many people are so stupid to be deceived into thinking it is AI."

Here's what Fagioli had to offer some hours ago:

Arch Linux-based SteamOS 3.7.8 update brings Plasma 6, better battery controls, and Legion Go S support

Of course it was fake garbage, likely sponging off various people who did write about this:

Valve has officially pushed SteamOS 3.7.8 to the Stable channel

And with many real pages about significant Mozilla news, Fagioli also prompted chatbots for some words diarrhoea.

Mozilla is shutting down Pocket

Yes, diarrhoea.

Mozilla, which acquired Pocket in 2017, says it’s closing the platform due to changes in how people browse and consume content. The company wants to focus its resources on tools that better align with modern online habits. Despite shutting Pocket down, Mozilla will continue offering curated content through other channels like Firefox’s New Tab experience and a newly branded email newsletter.

Brittany Day, another Serial Slopper, also did her share of diarrhoea:

Tails 6.15.1 Fixes Critical Tor Browser Flaws

Notice how bland a headline (just spam for SEO):

Understanding Security Threats In Open-Source Software Supply Chains

As usual, diarrhoea of words. These people have no knowledge, no skills, no integrity. They just flood the Web with machine-generated garbage, based on much better work of actual people who understand what they write about and actually fact-check.

Then, joining the slopfarms which inspired and got cited by real news sites (because Google News promotes slopfarms at the expense of original work by actual humans), Brittany Day had this:

Understanding Malicious .desktop Files: A Persistent Threat to Linux Systems

If only she wrote it.

We saw a couple of slopfarms citing or basing themselves on this blog post, obviously distorting the original message and not even linking to it.

The Web will become a rotten mess until and unless we all call out and discourage the prime culprits.

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