Greg20h ago

I just want to highlight the kind of slop that presently is hitting the r/c_programming subreddit. Every single day brings one or more of these kind of posts:
* brand new Reddit username
* brand new Github repo with one giant commit
* entire post and README sounds like a sales pitch
* any followup commits usually just faffing about with markdown in the README (no code updates)
* reinvents some kind of wheel or toy project with no chance of uptake
* no co-contributors or team behind it
* user never replies - or if they do, it's in broken English that is totally incongruous with the README phrasing (and betrays zero understanding of the code)

This one is a bit easier, because the (wrong) URLs point to some kind of AI phone startup or something, which makes it obvious that their well is poisoned

#ai #c #programming

Show threadGreg

I don't usually end up looking too hard at the code of these any more, because it's kind of a trap - commenters often ask "how do you know it's AI" but the answer isn't in the codebase.
* reviewing code now takes vastly more effort than producing it
* but checking the network of the author is much much simpler and more reliable

There's also common AI "tells" similar to those that give away generative prose (em-dash, not-this-but-that, etc) and for C projects it tends to be things like "lightweight" or *especially* "ZERO DEPENDENCIES". Maybe it's hard for agents to install C libraries or something but so many of these proudly say they've got zero dependencies and include some half-baked HTTP server or something.

Apr 6 at 9:14pmWeb
Show threadGreg20h ago

I can't ever really tell what the goal is here - github star inflation, maybe? - but the odds of getting uptake or contributors on these is so slim. The user (or bot) DID try to send this to some "awesome C" curated list, which maybe establishes credibility. No idea. The new Reddit account also tends to spam the same intro post across a swath of subreddits. Often they get banned for it.

It's not free, is the thing, it costs some money to buy tokens to play the lottery with this kind of spam. So I just really wonder what the jackpot looks like.

Show threadGreg20h ago
one guy brought some amazing thing he claimed ran on a Pentium 3 700mhz, but then when challenged in the comments said he couldn't actually run it and didn't know how lol
Show threadnamgyaaal20h ago
@greg the guy that made that infamous “wifi densepose” slop repo with random numbers for wifi sensing sells consultancy at around hundreds of dollars for 30 minutes. So the grift sells for some people like this.
Show threadjnkrtech18h ago
@greg yeah this is one of the things that’s been getting me lately. There are so many accounts posting made-up slop stories to different subreddits. New accounts, default username, no engagement after the initial post, and I just can’t figure out what the end-game is. Do some folks just enjoy destroying the social fabric for its own sake? Are people so attached to getting upvotes that they want to automate receiving them even if it’s not their own experiences being highlighted? It borders on disturbing.
Show threadDMA14h ago
@jnkrtech @greg My guess for a lot of the reddit posting is that people are spinning up agents to try and "make money", and one of the things that the agent then tries to do is spam. Of course, any of the valuable subreddits have reputation hurdles, so the LLM does what a billion black-hat marketing blog posts suggest: make some unrelated but engagement-bait-y posts in less moderated subreddits first to try and earn enough karma to make the post you actually want to make.