The trick is to not fight the spam. You're trying to dam an ocean. Nothing you do is going to stop the flood.

Instead, teach people how to evaluate content and sources so they are media savvy (and this is not just for tech blogs). Promote the sources that you know are reliable. There's plenty of good stuff out there and it's easy to find if people try. However, the people most affected by bad sources are those looking for quick fixes who don't really care about quality anyway.

> I don't think ChatGPT and other things are going to make that much of a difference since people have been plagiarizing and republishing crap content for ages.

I'm afraid you're being too optimistic here. True, the internet has been full of rehashed, google-bait "content", in fact there have been lamentations recently that search engines have became useless because of these (because most of the hits on the first (few) page(s) point to such less than useless "articles").

What ChatGPT et al. change is that they make creating such content almost effortlessly easy.

An illustrative recent anecdote from an adjacent field: Clarkesworld, a reputable science-fiction magazine, had to suspend evaluating submissions completely for a while, because they were overwhelmed by the sudden influx of bad AI submissions.

It's always been like this to some degree, and the internet is already full of crap content.

If you think it's bad for Perl and Python, you probably haven't worked with Arduinos much. You have to double- and tripple-check absolutely everything. Doesn't matter if it's beginner code, schematics or commercially produced circuit boards. Things like real time clock boards becoming a fire hazard to SD card modules monopolizing a multi-device SPI bus are too common. I won't even go into the mess that many I2C libraries internally initialize the bus, leading to problems when you use multiple of them in a single project...

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Thanks, sorry for the delay, it took me some meditation to come up with a position.

> The trick is to not fight the spam.

I agree here, reacting to those blogs would be akin to feeding trolls. The added attention would help them.

> There's plenty of good stuff out there

yes!

> and it's easy to find if people try.

I'm not to sure about that, clever SEO is more and more dominating.

Just today I tried finding old threads of mine on Perlmonks via DuckDuckGo and got only hits on StackOverflow. (WTF?)

> However, the people most affected by bad sources

Mass matters and at some point the dams breaks , and not only out of laziness.

Of course I can tell people "don't trust the search engines", "ask me" or "read good books". But who will constantly spend 10min to 1h for the latter if the search engine is only seconds away?

And I agree with kikuchiyo here, that the economical aspect plays a role.

Producing nonsense also takes energy and time. But once it is cheap enough to use "AI" for that, we might end up in a sea of BS.

As an example:

Just look at how the quality ensuring mechanisms of "old media" were already bypassed by algorithms and trolls spamming "new media".

That was already possible with "old media" - like "letter to the editors", buying journalists or whole outlets - but is now far cheaper.

Cheers Rolf
_{(addicted to the 𐍀𐌴𐍂𐌻 Programming Language :)
Wikisyntax for the Monastery}

I'm confronted with a young developer who is producing a lot of blog posts concerning Perl with plenty of speculative, untested and broken code.

Use the comment function to try and guide him to a place where he can actually learn to do things the right way, e.g. PerlMonks.

I can't tell yet if it's genuinely from him° or if he just ran it through ChatGPT.

Any chance we could get a link so we could all could take a look at it?

> Use the comment function

I agree with Brian that it's like feeding a troll.

I gave him feedback on SO tho, and he deleted some of his posts instead of replying.

> Any chance we could get a link so we could all could take a look at it?

no, I don't wanna push his SEO.

Cheers Rolf
_{(addicted to the 𐍀𐌴𐍂𐌻 Programming Language :)
Wikisyntax for the Monastery}

no, I don't wanna push his SEO.

Fair enough.

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