It's scandalous that no-one has yet posted Gary Larson's Far Side cartoon "Bullknitters".<p><a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/C2OQtokvzCa/" rel="nofollow">https://www.instagram.com/p/C2OQtokvzCa/</a><p>(or google image search)

Wow I’d never have expected Kate Davies to show up on Hacker News. I think it’s important to understand her background a bit when she talks about knitting as a matter of life and death. She was a scholar of 18th century literature before she suffered a stroke young[0]. She focused on knitting as a means of recovery and never looked back. She built a business and a community and attributes a lot of her physical and mental health to knitting.<p>So while this post hopefully hits a chord for anyone in a creative field she embodies a particular type of person for whom slop is a genuine risk to their being. Not their job; their whole personhood. In a world where slop has chased out the humanity of things and the bullshit machines fill all content what are the chances someone like her could build a second life better than her first?<p>0: <a href="https://katedaviesdesigns.com/2015/01/28/five-years-on-part-1/" rel="nofollow">https://katedaviesdesigns.com/2015/01/28/five-years-on-part-...</a>

Am I to believe that those 700K+ downloads are organic traffic? Who's listening to all this stuff?

I wonder if (or, more accurately hope that) this kind of slop will eventually die out as people realise how little care is put into it. I am more and more convinced that if the devil existed he'd take care of the bigger stuff, but have an army of little devils that encourage people to do things like make unsupervised automated podcasts about knitting, relentlessly chipping away at the messy joys of living.

> one of the most pernicious things about this particular kind of bullshit is the way it casts any form of critical scrutiny as a terrible failure of sensibility.<p>What a great line. And you'll probably notice this technique being used by very skilled bullshitters and master manipulators: any request for rigor or scrutiny is met by something like genteel condescension. You're treated as if you've committed a breach of etiquette, and that's one of the reasons the technique is powerful -- you're likely to feel embarrassed and, following that, to back off.

I remember this kind of slop from times well before the LLM explosion.<p>I'm specifically thinking of a print magazine that was designed to make you <i>feel</i> like you are a smart reader of science articles, without any useful information about the actual science or technology.

Interestingly, <i>Inception AI</i> seem to have pivoted from content slop for "gardening, [...] knitting, cooking" - or "things we can afford to be wrong" - to "AI Immigration Drafting Software for Law Firms": <a href="https://www.inceptionai.co/" rel="nofollow">https://www.inceptionai.co/</a><p>I'm somewhat curious how that'll work out. Hint: I'm not.<p>EDIT: My bad, wrong company, it's "Inception <i>Point</i> AI": <a href="https://www.inceptionpoint.ai/" rel="nofollow">https://www.inceptionpoint.ai/</a>

Why does this site want to access apps and services on my local network?<p>On topic, I do wonder how "the market" is going to sort this out. At this moment I'm leaning towards just banning this shit, but maybe there is a better way?

[dead]

TL;DR: there are brainrot farms with help from AI.<p>But I saw this one coming three or four years ago.<p>Actually, I've been listening to AI-generated brainrot music. I prefer it to some human-generated brainrot music (there's "I Hate Boys" from Christina Aguilera. Sorry if you are a fan).<p>Brainrot serves a specific social purpose: relieving stress, incoherently winning elections. It's a kind of drug that dulls the dangerous part of the brain while leaving the he-is-a-good-tool and she-is-blonde brain hemispheres in working order.<p>In fact, I do believe that if there were to be an uprising in a couple of decades against AI, and the human side were to rise victorious, the aftermath's social order would be studiously anti-AI and anti-science, but they would make a carve-out for AI brainrot (yes, I published a short fiction story with that premise, because I'm brainrot-vers).

For someone complaining about slop, I found this unreadable.

Extremely long winded. I think this person is trying to throw stones at someone else’s work, but their own is so elliptical I lost the will to find out.

I like the blog but the premise of the blog is an engineering/epistemological perspective on the craft. The writer clearly cares more about the process, technique and history more than the feeling and validation.<p>It could be, that a big part of the the future of hobby's and entertainment in this way is the feeling and validation over the actual performance. Or it can be that a massive amount of people find their value in this content.