I found this soothing like it met some part of me in harmony.
I hadn't encountered On Bullshit.
There is a word for this kind of communication, one the philosopher Harry Frankfurt famously employed back in 1986, when he wrote a short essay called On Bullshit. Frankfurt’s central observation, which has aged terrifyingly well, is that the bullshitter is not the same as the liar, because the liar at least respects the truth enough to try to hide it, but the bullshitter does not care whether what they are saying is true or false. The truth-value of the statement is simply not part of their concern. The bullshitter is optimising for a different objective, usually appearing competent, appearing confident, or appearing to be the right kind of person to be in the room. And precisely because the bullshitter is indifferent to truth, Frankfurt argued, they are a greater threat to honest discourse than any liar. Twenty years on, that essay reads like a pre-mortem on the modern internet and, in parts, modern society.
Frankfurt’s deepest argument is that the bullshitter is not embarrassable, because they have no relationship to the truth they could betray, while the honest person can be embarrassed, because they have made a claim they meant. As a creator, hold on to that, because being embarrassable is not a weakness. In a market that has stopped penalising shamelessness, it is one of the few remaining markers that the person you are talking to is operating in good faith. So be embarrassable!
Below, I think, explains most of the slop use that I see. It's one part desperate and another part careless. Sure I cared once, but what do I have to show for it? The outcome is the same whether I prompt between bong rips and Netflix episodes or pour my heart into this thing.
I think a lot of the cynicism, exhaustion, and quiet bitterness that has crept into professional life over the last years is downstream of this problem. I don’t believe that people no longer want to do good work, but I think that doing good work has stopped paying the way it used to, while doing bad work loudly has started paying significantly better, so people notice and they adjust.
It could also be, however, that what I’m describing are just people trying to keep up. The slop-posting middle manager who cannot tell you what their team actually built last quarter is not necessarily a malicious fraud, but they may be a person whose job no longer rewards them for knowing, in a system that has trained them to perform and act instead. While this, if true, does not make the output less hollow, it certainly does change who the actual villain is.
I'll end with this soothe maxxing gem.
The part that bothers me the most is what it does to the people who refuse to participate in this whole charade. If you are a software engineer who insists on shipping things that work, a writer who insists on knowing the subject before publishing, a designer who insists on testing the thing on actual humans, a craftsperson of any kind who treats the work as the whole point of it, you are competing in a market that has been quietly tilted against you. The person next to you, who is willing to fake the demo and declare victory on LinkedIn even before the launch, is going to look more successful than you. They will get the speaking slots, they will get the promotions or, worse, the funding rounds. Heck, they might even end up on Forbes’ 30 under 30. All that you will get is the satisfaction of doing the job properly, which, don’t get me wrong, is a beautiful thing, but sadly it does not pay rent.
I believe great work, positioned at the right place and right time, makes noise of its own. But absent that skill or coincidence, noisy work wins. We have to learn to do both good work and be noisy. So find yourself a noise maker (hopefully not an outright bullshitter) to work with if you can't do it on your own.
I've actually wondered for a while if the term "proof of work" has actually conflated work and value in bitcoiners minds. At some point in the past year, I saw a viral nostr post of someone describing a skateboard flipkick. He said that the only way to explain someone doing that is by, "proof of work," which is true. I'm sure that takes a massive amount of focused dedication. It's not slop. But also, no one asked him to do that. So no one owes him anything for that work. It's not helping anyone. I encountered this for years with kids that came out of music school. They would talk all the time about how they should be payed well because of how much dedication they put in to their craft. But no one came out to hear them because they hadn't come up with anything unique yet (although the reason doesn't matter). They were literally asking club owners to pay them more than the whole establishment would make on the night of their shows just because they had worked so hard to develop those skills. The flipkick thing is an innocuous example, but I've heard bitcoiners recently talk about "proof of work" in some more serious contexts as if working hard or intentionally was more important than the actual help a service provides for people.
If I'm right, it expands what you're describing here beyond accomplishment to including purpose. I'm a beginner coder, and have started really using AI a lot in 2026. But I try to share things that are maybe half-baked only when the idea itself hasn't been tried yet.
I guess what I'm saying is, maybe we shouldn't get so wrapped up in craftsmanship (which I love as much as anyone!) that we develop entitlement, even if on the behalf of others. The world is full of gobs of sloppy, yet significant and urgent problems. If a sloppy tool gets the job done, is that so bad? Well...yes, if its supposed to be art or medicine or engineering. But maybe not so much if the tool is a raft and the flood waters are rising...
The problem isn't that someone slopped a tool. The problem is that they then market it as if it is an accomplishment and they need to be lauded for 3 prompts and a $20 Claude bill. It's not an accomplishment. So build the tool, use it, and done. No need to productize slop.
I kind of get that, but what do you do about something that isn't quite fully baked, yet has utility which others might need right here and now? I think of that emoji steganography thing I posted about the other day. I was exposed to that through someone posting it in a message thread for bitcoiners who might have an imminent use for it. A handful of folks seemed to dismiss it as too basic. Ironically, the thing I found most impressive about the tool was how simple it was while still working. I wasn't actually familiar with unicode (which you mentioned) as the protocol for typed letters and kind of think I understand how it's done now. But my point is, even if there are more sophisticated ways to stick it to a border guard, isn't it helpful to share a little something to have in one's back pocket, even if not the maximally ideal tool?
The idea on a napkin trope only exists because there is a space in which the napkin schematic is the most useful. I can tell you that I'm going to make a ten foot ladder up to the top of that tree. That's abstract, and you can't imagine how it could be done given that third branch sticking out on the left. Conversely, I could just build the whole friggin' ladder, but then you can't help me build it or fund it or give any helpful criticism about the awkward first rung, because the whole thing is done. But on a napkin, I can show you what I can't through words alone without the investment of the whole construction. It seems that one of the helpful things about the agentic age is that our space for writing on napkins is now four dimensional and high fidelity.
Maybe this isn't that emoji app is type of thing you're referring to though? The developer wasn't selling a product in that environment, but there certainly are a number of us spreading the word about it. When you say productize, do you mean commercially, or would you put sharing/proselytizing in that category. I could potentially be hearing some of these arguments in a different light than they're intended. Bullshittery certainly sucks (and sucked for a good number of years before AI hit the scene), but I wonder if undeveloped babies with some merit, are getting thrown out with "3 prompts and a $20 Claude bill" bathwater.
PS - On the last update of https://www.bitcoinisforcriminals.com, I changed the "get involved" link because of your legit (albeit snarky) critique on my napkin. 😀󠅅󠅞󠅔󠅕󠅢󠅣󠅤󠅑󠅞󠅔󠅙󠅞󠅗󠄐󠅅󠅞󠅙󠅓󠅟󠅔󠅕󠄐󠄝󠄐󠄳󠅘󠅕󠅓󠅛󠄐󠅔󠅟󠅞󠅕󠄑 🙏
I'm an a-hole, so unless you mute me it won't be the last time.
We all have imminent use for fun, this is why slop-games and fun things like that are out of scope. But if anyone is using this and thinking that they are protected from anything but maybe their spouse, for a while, they're going to be in a world of pain when the FO phase shakes its tail. There is absolutely no use for it except maybe a fun secret way of messaging with your mistress while you're cheating on your wife and pray you never get found out.
Did you inspect the deployed code for
fetchandXMLHttpRequestinjection on the site you linked? Trackers? What if it just logs every IP address and every message (and if they're lucky, Advertising ID that no one even in 2026 understands they need to disable, and location, and whatever else can be sold)... this is not production software, especially not security software.Bottom line it's just a fun gimmick, so it gets a pass. But the moment anyone actively encourages anyone to use it as a security tool, it's the most harmful bullshit that can be done; the person doing the encouragement will be either a spook or a retard.
Undeveloped babies aren't products. Developed, maintained, well spec'd and properly executed babies could be products. And if you want to offer something to someone you don't know, you need a product, not some crap you don't even understand yourself. This is because (a) the human with the idea and a coding LLM has no added value: anyone can copy your idea and I bet that there are people out there that can productize the idea better than you or I, and (b) if you don't have any experience in what to ask for, how do you know that you actually have a good product in the first place? Or will the "clients" that use our faked-until-made (where made is likely to be never, because all of it is vapor) "products" have to find out about what we got wrong and suffer the consequences of our incompetence? What an awful waste of time, for everyone.
Of course, if you just need validation of an idea - feedback on a proof of concept - you can do it, but I think that you'd need to be really clear that that is what you're doing. To this end, I love your fedi group idea. Great move! Don't market anything that isn't a product, though. And if you don't know how to make a product but you wanna, learn it. Intern with the best, and learn from them.
It's maybe also worth noting that the opposite of undeveloped ideas being dismissed is happening instead: former at least reasonably productized apps are being slopped to death, because the author found out that they "don't have to code anymore" and pass 3 prompts and woop new feature. Except you introduced 50 vulns with your new feature and while no one that reviews your code is going to use it, and everyone that doesn't read your code (nearly everyone) is now vulnerable: the net contribution is now negative. And it's only because of some dumbass feature that probably no one uses, but it was cool to see Claude code it up.
This happens in the wild all the time, especially the past couple of months, and the only reason that I know is because I review the code of the apps I use, and I stop using apps (or fork, revert & patch) when they seriously mess up. This is not a hypothetical.
I think SN is a good example of what could be. Rewarding good human content.
Unfortunately, niche, and maybe it'll never reach a tipping point, but I do believe that I am not alone in feeling tired, just tired, of the amount of AI slop I am forced to read every day.
I am starting to speak out, more and more. Students that give me a canned AI response to a question I send them. Not even doing the effort anymore. Not even taking responsibility for the word salad they force into my brain.
I will make them embarrassed. I called one out in front of his advisor.
And I will pay the embarrassment when something I generated with AI is wrong, reminding me that I bear final responsibility.
Honest work will make a return. It has to.
It's unclear to me how many people care about consuming slop. Stacker News just needs to find those that do.
Not enough. I've started to see it crop up in my town, for advertising graphic design. To me it is abominable.
There should be more efforts to ridicule it.
We might still be early enough that most people just aren't sensitive to it yet.
hence the ridicule. It should be put to shame, preferably pubicly.
Yeah, that's a good question.
An American guy who speaks about his life in Korea, whose posts the algorithm occasionally pushes to me, used to write decent content. I then suddenly saw one of his latest posts being pure #AIslop. I called him out on it. Just a passive-aggressive #AIslop tag~~ He responded, attacking me, asking me for what I could have done better. Yet, the majority of his readers seemed to be completely fine with his switch to using AI to generate his thoughts.
So, there's that. Maybe more and more people are ok with slop? Maybe we're the last generation who still remembers the before times?
Shit, I've become the new boomer.
My current prediction is that we're going to end up with something like initial content being mostly AI generated and final thoughts being genuine.
That's because there's so much demand to know what respected thinkers would say about any number of topics and they clearly don't have time to weigh in on everything deeply. So, they train an AI on their past writings and their intellectual influences and let it do the first passes. Then, for the topics that really grab their interest, they take the time to write down their thoughts.
I have had 5 occasions since this morning where I was thinking to comment
for more information see <this post>I've been feeling this, within my own little niche of the world.
I think the solution may be to proactively try to find your own audience who responds well to how you want to work.
For example, if you need to speak to a specific audience, like VC investors or academic editors, you are entering into a game with other people who are going to highly optimize along those specific dimensions, and use whatever means necessary to achieve that optimization. If that's not how you want to work, or what you consider high quality, then it's going to corrode you. You either give in and also highly optimize along dimensions you don't want to, or you just lose to those who do.
So what can you do? The attractive thing to do is to opt out of the game and try to build your own game. The hard part is that building that audience isn't easy, and it may not even happen to the scale that you want.
As for me, I feel that I at least have to try. Part of why I decided to do this "research in public" thing is because I think that that is the right way to do research; even if the built-in audience isn't there yet. So I will accept a somewhat lower positioning within the traditional hierarchies and measures of success, but at least I'm gonna try to do it "the right way". That being said, I am feeling that I need to reach for broader distribution channels than just Stacker News. Maybe Substack. If I want to do things my way I need to try and make it visible to more people, so they can join me if that way of doing things also resonates with them.
As a side note, I do love the linked website's campaign against JavaScript. If you didn't notice, open the linked page from @k00b's post, open another tab, and see how the title of OP's linked page changes to something embarrassing...
I got
FTX Cryptocurrency exchange,Pick up lines suggestionswith the ChatGPT logo, andAdult entertainment clubswith the Google Maps logo.Interesting. This part sticks out particularly:
I can see the point being made, but I wonder how true this really is.
My main critique though is that the author's concerns seem to be somewhat a product of this hamster-wheel they are describing. Success online requires this performativeness. However, does it not also make sense to question the measuring stick being used?
Overall, I agree with you on a cosmic level, that great work tends to find its just rewards. I think cyberspace complicates this only somewhat.
That blog/journal is one of the few RSS feeds I'm still subbed to. Love the nostalgic and minimalist aesthetic and something about the site and the writing just brings me back to feeling I'm in the Old Web, slow, with intent behind posts and un-clickbaity.
Do you think noisemaker is a thing that people can learn how to do or that it is more am aspect of personality?
(I'm sure most things can be learnt, but I think some things really do spring from something we are born with and those things can be harder to learn.)
If one can learn how to be noisy, I wonder how one goes about it? Because it sounds like an exercise in being obnoxious, which is often something we train out of ourselves at a very early age.
To the extent that it's personality, or deeper, I think it's something that was learned earlier. I'm confident that I can be noisy if I dedicate myself to being noisy. But I suspect I have a lot of personality range and tend to sit on one end of it most of the time. That might not be universal.
The safest way would be to copy the noises of someone else that is not obnoxious and learn to vary the noise. Otherwise I'd do away with preemptive labelling, start making noise, any noise you can muster, then label and learn empirically.
much better classified both a essa the same, scammers together to them to avoid any kind of bs and lost of time.
Is there an argument that this is like a boomer saying we must use paper road atlases and learn to read them to navigate rather than use satellite navigation
But then on reflection the world wasn't flooded with fake bullshit maps, I guess there was a bit of roads not being in the right place but then your point wins over as the boomer who knows how to read the paper atlas in the glovebox can get himself out of trouble
Or is the draughtsman that hand draws the schematics for the architect rather than CAD which ironically has probably been replaced by an even further advanced option
Actually there's so many I could list like the quill pen over the typewriter which again supercedes into computers slotting closer to our present day point you make
Is there an argument that technology just moves on and although it's nice to look back in wonder that code was written all by hand it's just easier to let technology do it's thing
The one thing that counts is Technology moves on when it delivers superior results at lower cost that's key and if it's bullshit it's not superior
And how do we verify what is superior? Currently do the work like k00b says but it won't be long until technology solves this problem and in the future we'll be lamenting about how we sifted for hours looking for bugs while the young kid on his hoverboard is thinking OK boomer
And lastly this is a tough one to explain but we come from a mindset of work of getting up everyday and going to work, in the future people will look at us going to the fiat mines for 40 years the same way they look at children in the mills in the Victorian era
It might look like bullshit but at some point you have to let go of the reigns and let the engine takeover
Unless im just suffering from proof of work derangement syndrome
This essay reserved a mere fraction for LLMs/technology. On that point, I think you're spot on. While vibe coding/writing carelessly produces mostly noisy bullshit today, and empowers imposters and liars more than most, one day it will produce mostly incredible things. While the algorithms promote bullshit today, one day they'll be replaced by something that doesn't promote bullshit.
This essay spends most of its time on bullshit which is primitive and timeless. People lie to their advantage. Competing with them requires telling the truth louder.
It's a waste of time to hate the technology or the bullshitters imo. There is something to learn from them though.
Ah yes more like bullshit in the sense of saying word salad that sounds true
It's difficult to even explain a bullshitter, there are so many nuances, we as hierarchical creatures have an inbuilt need to clamber to the top like the lobsters 🦞
I know a few software sales guys and they are particularly good at massaging the truth
Look at buying shit, at retail, sometimes if I can't sleep I'll put on the late night shopping channels for background noise and I get sucked in to their bs 🤣🤣🤣
Could end up buying a 6000 dollar water bed that massages your balls
Def a lot of BS out there
Could be a good analysis but Linkedin is expensive compared to Coursera and Udemy so Linkedin Learning is the highest price for subscribe and also for find a job compared to Upwork and Micro1 Zara and Turing.
As an empire declines bullshittification is a common trend.
Trump exemplifies this.
People are more in need of and receptive to bullshit when reality does not concur with their biases and expectations.
The US exceptionalists who cannot cope with the reality that China won the trade war want salve for their delusions...and the bullshitters, led by Donald J Trump provide it!
BTW what is the half life of downzaps @k00b?
Someone has been vigorously downzapping all posts about the war and The Greater Israel Project and I would like to know how to logically respond so can I know the precise downzap weighting algorithm?
https://stacker.news/items/1464032