Low effort LLM-written content gets upvoted here anyway, despite the writer having little respect for peoples’ time.
Now that I have made this catalogue of swindles and perversions, let me give another example of the kind of writing that they lead to. This time it must of its nature be an imaginary one. I am going to translate a passage of good English into modern English of the worst sort. Here is a well-known verse from Ecclesiastes:
> I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.
Here it is in modern [1946] English:
> Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.
A 2026 version of this phenomenon would instead be:
> Here's the thing: success isn't just about talent — it's about timing. The fastest runner doesn't always win. The strongest army doesn't always prevail. Ultimately, life is a complex interplay of skill and chance, and recognizing that can be both humbling and empowering.
That's actually Claude and you can see precisely why the resulting vague language is bad; the LLM has changed the actual meaning of the passage from a sober reflection on the futility of expecting natural justice from the universe to one that emphasises skill and timing, exactly what the author is telling us is futile.
Admittedly the slop text LLMs produce in the 21st century isn't the same as the 20th century slop humans produced, but there's definitely a family resemblance in my view! Orwell was concerned with the idea language can be used to curtail thought, and he disliked what we'd now call slop because it merely gestures at a thought without actually instantiating it directly.
The whole essay is worth a read in my view, it remains highly relevant.
https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
These posts are not only a waste of time, but it also makes me feel deceived and betrayed. Why this is important? Because it's the honest take and bears the load of the reality of the post.
Please, don't make me read something you didn't write.
Disclosure: This post, incl. llm-sounding paragraph is typed by a human. All of the keystrokes are 100% human and made possibe by burning ATPs and firing tiny lightning bolts across some brain cells. No humans are harmed or GPU hours are burned in this comment.
Total water consumption: 50ml of cold spring water, because I'm thirsty.
There are certain styles for a post like this that some people may not like but things like subheads and what would be, by historical standards somewhat clipped writing are just how writing in this content is mostly encouraged theese days. I'd just add that when people do post long-form New Yorker pieces there's plenty of whining about getting to the point.
I'm not making a value judgement, but modern writing on technical topics has generally been steered toward digestible formats whether or not LLMs are involved.
Until I left, I was on social media and style committees at my former employer and there was a lot of data-based evidence around keeping things (in various multimedia formats) shorter and easier to consume. In fact, we mostly got away from writing white papers at all in favor of shorter pieces.
> Scientific Linux gave the scientific community its own implementation of a RHEL-compatible computing environment. More importantly, it kept alive the people, processes, infrastructure, and institutional knowledge needed to maintain one.
> That capability had option value. You might not need to exercise the option this year, or even this decade. It becomes valuable when the assumptions underneath your primary platform change. Those assumptions changed surprisingly quickly.
Can't imagine this lengthy style with paraphrases coming from Hashimoto or Fowler. Yes, it can appear not only in llm writing, but also in some heavily edited o'reilly book, sure, but I miss the times when tech blogs and o'reilly books were different.
Personally, I make at least some things I write more personal but, yes, that tends to be somewhat frowned upon in corporate blogs.
Theoretically a mistake a person could make, but it feels a bit unlikely in this context to me.
Also, the repeating pattern of Prompt:List through multiple paragraphs.
Headline that goes "A was this" and next headline "Then b was that".
We used to run it on our Grid nodes, and while it was not bad, it was not that smooth, either. It was a little kludgy but worked if you didn't diverge from the happy paths much.
Now Debian has Extended Long Time Support via Freexian, I believe CERN has enough confidence to use Debian instead of RH family, and that will make lives of some people way easier. Debian is still easier to manage than RH based systems, and .deb is a really good package manager, and is arguably more sophisticated than RPM.
I realize I'm veering a bit off-topic :), but I've used Debian for a long while, but I do wonder how is that deb is more sophisticated than rpm?
The one feature I remember (a long time ago) rpm being able to install the different versions of the same package, although I suppose this in practice would only work for packages made for this, and libraries would usually be such packages. With debs this means the version number needs to be embedded to the package name with some developer-chosen precision.
On the other hand, RPM still doesn't know about reverse dependencies, automatically/manually installed packages, version holds, etc.
Either one is advanced enough to handle a big distribution and have their advantages w.r.t. each other, but I still prefer .deb as a person who works with both. Also, .deb can encode much more information about the software package it contains.
Perhaps. I wouldn't argue either way, but dpkg still maintains its "data base" of installed and available packages/files as plain text files rather than using a DB format like sqlite (which one might chose for such today) or Berkeley DB (back when). The performance difference is negligible today on fast hosts with NVMe backed storage, but fairly annoying when using lesser machines with slower storage, e.g. RPi with root fs on a SD card.
On the other hand, I have been using Kingston Canvas Go SD cards on my Raspberry Pi boards for a fairly long time now, and these cards' random access speed is above and beyond of other, older cards while not being expensive.
Now apt works like it's running on an SSD.
I'm in this for a couple of decades now.
Now a colleague of mine is handling these. I'm more on the OpenStack & HPC side for other stuff.
> Debian is still easier to manage than RH based systems, and .deb is a really good package manager, and is arguably more sophisticated than RPM.
It's so bad. Coming back to RHEL (new client requirement) after sitting mostly on Debian for years is such a bizzare experience.
You want to install a PostgreSQL database, it doesn't even initialize it, you need to manually do DB init and the rest of the dance.
You want to run DRBD, sorry, we didn't bother to pick that kernel compile option, you can add extra repository for that. But hey, it's the kernel module, which means now you have to enroll cert in Secureboot, and that requires actual KVM access to the VM for someone to confirm it so now I'm on meeting with customer's IT just so they click some buttons in VM's boot process.
Even some common utilities are not in main repos but need EPEL
I once installed a Sun workstation with AMD processor (Athlon64?) and nForce (4?) chipset. The ethernet card was there but it didn't initialize, why? Because RedHat EOLd the kernel module. Why? Because.
Reinstalled the thing with Debian after fighting it for 30 minutes or so, and the thing worked happily ever since.
Yes, but this sentence didn't convince who was making these decisions back at CERN, approximately 20 years ago! I'm not even convinced that it was that possible and painless 20 years ago.
We agree about the rest of us, but I still ask why about EPEL stuff while writing salt recipes.
Update system, install EPEL, update system, install creature comforts is a such a bizarre dance to make while I can just write a one long apt command and get a better system in 30 seconds.
...and aptitude. Yes, that TUI thing. It's magnificent.
I was really glad when the vendor started unofficially supporting OpenSuse so I could finally use git on these distros.
in general a lot of people wants a lot of things from the free time of the others but not doing anything about it.
if you are using your tokens to write lengthy blog posts maybe spend them instead on trying to improve distros for LTS if that's what you want from SL.... Supporting old stuff, packages, kernel and hardware is really really a shitty and non rewarding job tho (been there done that), people only complains -- for example with length blog post -- and you don't get much rewards....
Stop upvoting AI-slop people!
It’s quite literally the modern day CentOS
Alma and Rocky provide almost the same thing.
The architecture problem that keeps on giving.
It's amazing how much damage this one brain dead decision, to make it basically impossible to use different glibc versions on one instance, made to Linux. Containers in a way are another solution to this problem, even if they were created to solve a different one (optimal resource usage).