Slopwatch: LinuxTechLab, linuxsecurity.com, LinuxIac, and More
Also: The Register's Microsoft agenda (new editor)
Today's "Slopwatch" will be short and sweet.
Well, maybe not sweet. We are still sort of mourning what LinuxIac chose to become.
We never thought that LinuxIac would make it into "Slopwatch", but the closer we look, the more it seems like it is becoming a slopfarm, even if it's not fully there yet.
Let's start with LinuxTechLab, which has new LLM slop... about slop!
Once upon a time it was a real site with real articles about... well, Linux. Just like the name ("LinuxTechLab") suggests. At one point it became a spamfarm, then slopfarm.
Regarding Linux Journal, we've been keeping an eye on it and it has this new article, maybe real for a change. Because otherwise, based on our experience, the site turned into a one-man slopfarm. Can it still recover?
For a long time LinuxIac produced some real articles, but clearly more and more the whole is either fully LLM slop or partly slop.
"That's too bad about Linuxiac," an associate said. "I had hoped they knew better than to try that and drive away their audience..."
I said it is "not too late to reverse course" and was told, "not yet but getting near the point of no return" (once you slop you cannot stop).
The latest two articles are almost definitely fake, 3 articles ago (about the Debian wiki) is almost certainly not:
We are rather confident that some portion of the articles in Linuxiac are still real, however linking to these would still reward or "feed" the fakes.
Unless Linuxiac quits (completely stops) with the slop, we'll deem it "almost slopfarm".
Speaking of slopfarms, here's linuxsecurity.com slopping away based on an extensive pool of "training set" (as in, real articles):
There's also this network of slopfarms still boosted by Google News: (at least 3 sites working in tandem to produce fakes with some permutation)
Of course all the above are fake.
Lastly, and less related to slop, there are problems at The Register.
The new US editor of The Register is a Microsoft pusher (80% of his articles so far are Windows promotion). I considered writing to them to inquire, but they would just deny the issue. They made their own bed. █