LITERALLY 1984

(I am morally obligated to make this joke)

Tech’s learned nothing from the racist taps.

Another slop article from a slop farm has hit my fucking eyeballs. This time, its “Must-Have .410 Revolver Shotguns You Didn’t Know You Needed”, written by “Nagarantha, who holds a master’s degree in Biotechnology”, and published by “Game Devolution”, a “Gaming Website proving gaming news, leaks, guides, game play and the reviews.”

Here’s a bunch of guns this fucking article claims to be “.410 Revolver Shotguns”:

• Thompson/Center G2 Contender (a break-action single-shot pistol)

• Bond Arms Snake Slayer (a derringer, from a company known near-exclusively for making derringers)

• Standard Manufacturing DP-12 (a double-barrel pump-action shotgun)

• Remington 870 (the world’s most famous pump-action shotgun)

• Milsport 410 (an AR-pattern rifle)

No human could have fucked up this badly. No human could have created this kind of fucking slop farm.

(As a minor bonus, I discovered a full-length video dissecting the shittiness of YouTube Playables recently - should help wash out the shittiness of the godawful listicle shit)

The second one’s a pic of King Dedede from the Kirby series. I’m not 100% sure where o7’s going with this either, but its probably related to the one two punch of fascism and slop hitting Linux as a whole.

EDIT: Giving it a bit more thought, the choice of Dedede works as a nod to Debian deciding to destroy its codebase with slop, so I’m gonna go with that and assume the subtle pun was intentional

It seems to me that most software devs are arrogant assholes who think they are the shit because they know some javascript.

Tying back to the original point of this thread, that’s probably a side-effect of the “acculturation of software developers generally towards the ownership class” istewart mentioned. Beyond promising them an easy ticket to Bourgeois Street, making them feel more Important And Special™ than the average prole helps keep class consciousness to a minimum.

As it stands now, I would have to think for a long time about whether I consider the collective work of my profession in the last few years a net positive for the world.

From what I can see, things are tipping towards “no”. The fact Anubis, Nepenthes, Iocaine Glaze/Nightshade and other such shit exists at all speaks volumes about the negative impact of LLMs.

Anyone got “open software dev slander” on their 2026 bingo cards?

Inside the Agent-4 collective, a year passes every week.

Good luck proving this prediction true or false given that computer algorithms do not have a concept of time separate from the real one lol.

This is just the hyperbolic time chamber but dumber

New Iris Meredith: “There’s no such thing as Just a Tool”, featuring the writings of notorious Nazi and notable 20th century philosopher Martin Heidegger on the nature of tools, and Meredith’s own writing on how philosophically bankrupt the current tech industry is.

As a bonus, here’s an old Bluesky thread I found about game design affecting a game’s community.

So this shit video got served up in my YouTube recommended feed today:

Honestly, the AI bros must be getting really fucking desperate if they’re trying to use Minecraft to criti-hype people.

New Baldur Bjarnason, looking back on the blog’s history, and lamenting the death of web development.

This isn’t giving me a reason to stop using edgy anti-AI words, this is giving me a reason to believe programmers are dogshit at resisting brainworms.

future model that has you in its training data, knows you posted that word online with joy, and denies your insurance claim as a result

Given dataset construction hasn’t developed much since the days of Tay AI, I strongly doubt this is gonna happen.

On today’s episode of AI Slop’s Endless Fuckups: “Mastering Tf2 Custom War Paint: A Step-By-Step Creative Guide”, an ostensible guide to creating custom War Paints (think something like weapon skins in Counter Strike: Global Offensive/Counter Strike 2, or character skins in Minecraft) for Team Fortress 2.

The opening has no obvious faults I can see, but the bulk of this slop article is about painting a real-life weapon, not creating a texture to be applied to an in-game weapon. Its the kind of mistake a human would never make.

EDIT: That slop guide’s existence is getting on my nerves, so here’s a basic War Paint guide I found on Steam

OT: I just turned 26. I’m taking a trip to a local steakhouse to celebrate.

AI slop is very good at falling into the uncanny valley, whether that paragraphs of pure nothingness from a text extruder, or strange almost-human looking imagery that looks and feels inexplicably wrong. Its a great way to produce some accidental nightmare fuel, especially considering the AI bros glazing such shit are incapable of recognising its accidentally disturbing nature.

As a “fun” sidenote, there was an SCP article on the site which acted like a slop generator (SCP-1004, Factory Porn). Its writer, DrBright, was permabanned in 2022 after a lengthy history of sexual harassment was uncovered (and the article was deleted altogether in February of this year). Feels oddly fitting, in the worst way possible.

Witnessed an “AI-Powered political sandbox” called President Simulator crop up after seeing someone stream it on Discord.

I felt tempted to try and fuck with it, but its asking me to sign up for some fucking reason

Found the guy’s webshite - its zero effort mInImAlIsT garbage at its core, and it proudly advertises his role in making scamchain, scamchain and more scamchain.

So, nothing really shocking

My thesis is that, with such short prompts, the user is doomed to receive a milquetoast average response; the bot correctly identifies the specific domain but elaborates a global non-specific approach that isn’t sufficiently nuanced.

Seems you’re on to something - I submitted the phrase “Demoknight TF2” (an old(ish) meme started by/referencing TF2ber SolarLight, and referencing the Demoknight subclass, which explicitly forgoes a Stickybomb Launcher for a shield), and it gave me a godawful slop guide to the aforementioned subclass:

Going over a few things obviously wrong with this:

Demoknight is a popular TF2 “Demoman” build/theme

w h a t ?

mobile melee/ranged threat

Hybrid Demoknight (which takes a grenade launcher in the primary slot), I can see describing as a ranged threat. Full Demoknight (which takes Ali Baba’s Wee Booties instead), not so much.

usually with a shield for mobility/survivability and a sword or axe for damage

Demoknight explicitly forgoes the Stickybomb Launcher for a shield of some description

Scotsman (sword/knight vibe)

There’s no weapon called the Scotsman, but there is an axe called the Scotsman’s Skullcutter

or other sword/axe-style options depending on the playstyle

There’s only one axe for the Demo in the vanilla game - the aforementioned Skullcutter.

Shield: Tide Turner (more aggressive with better survivability/tempo) or Splendid Screen (more defensive, survivability-oriented).

There is a survivability-oriented shield, but its neither of these - its the Chargin’ Targe, which offers 50% fire resist and 30% explosive resist (the Screen offers 30% resist on both, and the Turner offers only 15% on both, for comparison.

Calling the Splendid Screen “defensive” is also pretty far off the mark - beyond the aforementioned reduced resistances, its main advantage is a faster recharge on the shield charge, and a 70% increase to shield bash damage

As for the Tide Turner, it trades in offensive capabilities (it prevents its user from landing charge crits with their melee) for mobility-related ones (it completely disables turn control restrictions).

Grenade / support: often a grenade launcher for area control when you can’t reach melee cleanly, or a weapon that complements your survivability/engagements.

Yeah, seems the chatbot can’t tell the difference between full and hybrid knight. Also, the grenade launchers are generally better for landing direct hits - area control is more the domain of a stickybomb launcher, or the Soldier’s Rocket Launcher(s).

Use explosives smartly: not constant spam—more like zoning, forcing movement, or punishing groups.

Seems the chatbot got Demoknight and stock Demo mixed up.

Demoknight in general should stump chatbots pretty easily - beyond being effectively a different class from stock Demo, the subclass has a lot of nuance that can and will trip up the chatbots. To quote SolarLight’s hour-long video on the charge mechanic:

“Well, at least you know that all of Demoknight’s weapons have their uses when it comes to charging, and that Demoknight’s charge can be essentially be boiled down into three different types (listed on-screen as “Full Control”, “Some Control”, and “Low Control”). There’s also a distinction between Full Demoknight (melee-only) and Hybrid Demoknight (melee + grenade launcher), which is often a massive shift in playstyle. Demoknight has so much​ ​weapon variety, that talking about specific strategies can be a bit of a nightmare. Any given strategy might be godlike in one loadout, suboptimal in another, and impossible in another.”

OT: What the fuck happened whilst I was asleep

alt: A screenshot showing nineteen fucking notifs

On one hand, this is awful. On the other hand, if I worked at a garbage tech company and my boss would not only pay me to sabotage the code base and spend their money but also reward me for doing so… I mean that’s an attractive proposition.

Before, sabotaging your competition was difficult and legally risky. AI fixes this - now, your competition shall sabotage themselves, leaving you free to focus on other things.

The Carlson Lab has agreed on blanket-banning chatbots for writing. Why? Simple:

Using generative AI inherently exposes you to the risk of career-ending accusations of plagiarism.

In a reasonable world, this would have probably sent everyone running for the hills. Moral issues of AI aside, a fancy way of committing career suicide is never worth whatever upsides it offers. We do not leave in a reasonable world.