Slop Still Waning, Its Momentum is Driven by Companies That Stand to Lose a Lot (or Everything) When the Bubble Pops
Amazon borrowed money at a pace of about 20 billion dollars per month, based on its own filings, so it's hardly surprising that it compels its technical workers to adopt slop and pretend to like it (many found ways to fake affinity for it and use up slop tokens).
I spoke to some of these people. They loathe their employer, especially the upper management (including the CEO).
Many of them openly (publicly) protest this policy regarding slop, set aside off-putting RTO. It's not because they'll be replaced by slop. It's because it doesn't help them do their job, but the bubble has allowed Amazon to borrow some more money. It's built on a lie of financial potential (where none exists, it's just make-believe fiction).
We've similarly seen dogmatic, overzealous adoption of fake security practices and LLM slop, no matter what technical people and veteran journalists say (they know it's not a matter of code volume or number of words). Their opinions and judgement don't matter as their superiors are not technical; they practise parroting fashionable buzzwords to merely sound like they know what they are talking about. It's a "circle-jerk" of MBAs more often than not.
When it comes to LLM slop disguised as news, it's just not working out. Many such sites go offline, the remaining "linux" sites that do this are reducible to about six (by our count, the major culprits are still linuxteck, linuxsecurity, linuxiac, ubuntupit, linuxjournal, and fosslinux) and in Google News there was a giant cull of slopfarms a few months ago. Today, for a change, we see one pair of slopfarms showing up for "linux" in Google News:
The above two are in essence the same site (same operator). We hope that by the end of this year the above-mentioned slopfarms will either stop (flop) or go offline. All they do is contaminate the Web with junk disguised as "news" about Linux.
Google has a conflicting obligation; on the one hand, it wants to give users what they want, i.e. useful and authentic search results. On the other hand, Google benefits from the bubble, so it participates in promoting this agenda and advancing slop. If Google isn't careful, it'll collapse when this bubble bursts. Look what happened to Microsoft. █