It’ll happen. Wait and watch.

oday I had a long conversation with a friend about sites we catch cheating and plagiarising with slop. I pointed out many of them cease to release new material, with some going offline.

That serves to affirm my expectation and observation that sites which become slopfarms commit suicide.

When the bubble pops, which is inevitable and already “in progress”, all those sites will vanish faster.

So long

oday we blacklisted two sites [1, 2], not only one, for using slop.

I blacklist sites when they become too risky to even consider for redemption.

My wife blacklisted these, I did the same, and even an associate has blacklisted what what not worthy of his time. As he put it, “if the slop blog feeds are commented out, then they are not fetched and that is a good thing, not just regarding RRRRRR’s speed, however the XML parser skips comments because it *cannot* process them by design which makes it harder to spot accidental re-inclusion” (we have tools to manage sites to curate).

Susan of Tux Machines

still remember how, about a month before Tux Machines turned 15, we invited Susan (from the US) to join us. She politely declined only because of the distance but tactfully expressed gratitude.

Today I saw Susan’s name mentioned [1, 2], so despite her retiring from writing she is still remembered, appreciated, and loved.

It’s better for more than just moral reasons like solidarity

‘ve only just realised that days ago marked 3 years since we moved everything to Simply in the UK. This webhost was recommended to us by Catalyst2, whose services I had happily used since 2003 or 2004.

One lesson I’ve learned is, if your team is mostly based in Europe, then it makes sense for hosting to be in Europe (or EU in this case).

Think local.

Application already in progress

t’s only 7:20AM and all the birds have already come and have been fed. Same for the fish. We’re leaving the house for today and we want to relax as best we can.

I’ve had a hyper-productive week, both online and offline. I think my health has improved since I began sleeping extra hours (January 2025), I certainly can focus a lot better that way.

Next month will definitely be uneventful, so further and improved focus on articles will be assured (as it seems at the moment anyway).

I now publish close to 1,000 articles/pages per month, or 1,300 if meta pages (like Daily Links) are counted and over 1,500 if news clippings get counted. Together with Rianne, it’s a total of over 2,000 per month. About 24,000 per year.

I’m just glad we managed to lower our budget requirements while keeping happy, productive, and still in love (in the fifteenth year of our marriage).

We are still hoping the Court of Appeal will agree to hear our pleadings next year. There are technical – not only legal – matters at stake.

Bots are chewing up way too much ‘traffic’, hoping to ‘monetise’ it at someone else’s expense

t has gotten gloomy again, so the hopes of going to the park are deflated again and this likely means lots of original articles, instead. Tomorrow we’ll exchange cards and celebrate with Jim Beam 14 years of happiness and teamwork. I said more about that in another site [1, 2], envisioning we’ll be too busy to write about the anniversary tomorrow.

Today I checked the progress in the blog in terms of visitorship, as it was not regularly updated in the past two decades because in 2006 I focused on non-personal sites.

It’s sad to see how much junk traffic comes from totally useless bots (not even search engines’ spiders). So much has changed, not just because of LLM slop. It seems like many people choose walled gardens such as social control media and many young people never heard of RSS feeds.

This predates the slop frenzy and it’ll make the population poorly informed, exposed to state-connected propaganda, and unfit to handle social life.

Self-advertising site anyone can edit and anybody can vandalise

Two months ago: To Wikipedia, “Notability” is Just an Excuse to Hail People Who Serve Billionaires While Marginalising or Defaming the Rest

am not in Wikipedia. This means I need not worry about what people who dislike me write about me there. I prefer it that way. I’ve said this for ~15 years already, maybe longer.

Wikipedia takes a lot of money from billionaires to call them ‘philanthropists’ and censor/block/sideline their critics. This is the real ‘business model’ of Wikipedia.

Unlike a lot of the “Linux” stories in Techrights, the EPO coverage is historically significant and impactful, but this coverage is cited nowhere in Wikipedia. Why? Because the ‘litigation industry’ took over the narrative (or articles) in Wikipedia.

So does Wikipedia say the truth? Depends on the topic.

I remember pointing out that in Wikipedia people write prose about themselves. Then they say “I’m in Wikipedia” as if it is indicative of high status.

Thanks to their foolish self-promotion, however, I spotted very obvious conflicts of interest.

For almost a whole decade, for instance, the Linux Foundation (LF) was run by Microsoft GitHub shills salaries by Microsoft, and LF was pushing slop, plagiarism and exploitative prisons with Jono Bacon’s wife in the Board while LF paid him to write pro-Microsoft crap; as for his wife, she ‘bossed’ Linus Torvalds.

“Having a Wikipedia page these days is becoming a contraindicator of reliability and trustworhiness,” a friend has told me.

Being in Wikipedia, unlike being in a high-profile court for instance, is something anyone can accomplish by schmoozing the editors or tricking them (into not paying attention).

Wikipedia is, after all, merely a brand.

“I’m not in Wikipedia, I’m in my own site…” (yes, I have a site, sir)