Here are some slop “signs” that I find triggering:

  • Quietly
  • Load-bearing
  • Not one. Not two. Just three phrases destroying the flow of all online writing.

They’re all over the internet now! You see this most when there’s pressure for volume. Instagram and LinkedIn posts, high-volume, low-quality sites like The Verge. Outside of the headlines, I think people barely read these things anyway. But it has also violently infected programming blogs - largely because I think we’ve gotten so comfortable using LLMs for so many other parts of our work.

And it happened so quickly; I think it too less than a year. For some people, surely less time than that. Don’t get me started on the comments! The sad thing is that it has made so many websites unreadable. The sites that used to sustain some online technical learning are painful for me now. Most of the information I find there doesn’t ever show up in books, and the other sources here are insufferable programmers on YouTube. I really don’t know what to do here other than suffer.