Slop-O-Meter™

Written by Human™ _(mostly)

TL;DR

I got a little burnt from my last submission to HN with this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50336557. And point taken! I appreciate those who commented and were honest, and I, in turn, aim to do the same.

I’m trialling some options to be up front with readers about the source of the words being put down in my posts/articles. Below are the reasons why I’ve started writing, and why some posts are on one end of the AI spectrum and some are all in my own words. Essentially, my motivators to publish a mixture of slop and HU™ content, in a somewhat balanced potpourri mix.

Each post/article’s title will have something along the lines of [HU-90%] or [AI-10%] or a combo - I still haven’t decided yet. And also a gauge of some sort for those more visual among us.

Cartoon by Claude Opus 5.5 High, created 2026-11-05.
Couldn’t have a 0% AI-produced post, could I? 😉

The long read

I believe there is a place for slop… please hear me out.

I also believe there is a place for e-bikes. I’ll explain and use this as the analogy to reason and convince myself as to why there is a place for AI slop on the internet, but it has its intricacies. When you’re fit or you’ve been riding often, you don’t need an e-bike. You might even look down on people with e-bikes. But as you get older, or if you’re not fit or have an injury or disability, you’re going to find it hard to get started, and a lot of rides and rail trails would be a no-go for months/years. E-bikes are perfect for augmenting your abilities, permanently or temporarily until you recover, heal or build up the mental and physical ability. Using an e-bike allows those who were previously unable to join their friends/family on rides they would never have been able to join in otherwise. Now the segue - and that’s how I feel about using AI to augment my writing, and the writing of others. I’ll use it as a tool to get me started, and learn along the way. And over time, I’ll replace the AI slop with well-curated content.

All photos are my own, except for those clearly marked, and to date there are fewer than a handful of photos not taken with my phone. The cartoons, on the other hand, are all AI-generated, but I have plans to also replace these with my own drawings, augmented with AI (truth be told, I’m crap at drawing, in fact at anything that’s “art” creative) - you get the gist. I’m up front about my AI use because of the type of content I create here (content that hopefully ages well and stands the test of time, somewhat, just like Stack Overflow RIP 🪦 Q&A, except without the heavy-handed moderators).

Quick note about my writing style and formatting - I like to lay things out step by step, just like I have written code for the last few decades. You should have an idea of the whole article by just reading the titles and subtitles ((sub-)function names and variables), and the content is, well, the implementation, the proof in the pudding. The reader can choose to read just the sub/titles and have a pretty good gist of what I’m harping on about (this article/note is not a good example of this), or get into the nitty-gritty.

Prelude

When I was 12 years old (Grade 7 in Queensland, Australia), I asked Mum for an air rifle for my birthday. We went to the army disposal store and I picked out the Diana air rifle at the discounted rate of $99. A few kids on my street had them, and we would walk around the bushland across the road and try our best to hit flying foxes 🦊 (fruit bats). No animals were ever hurt - but it was fun.

Anyways, we went to see my dad at work, and he told me (and my mum) to immediately return the rifle and meet him at home - very disappointing, to say the least. We got home to be welcomed by my very first PC - the IBM 5160 XT, sporting an 8088 processor, a 20MB hard drive and a 5.25” floppy drive. It came with floppy disks (MS-DOS 3.2 and GW-BASIC 3.2) and the thick, binder-style GW-BASIC book. Oh, and a clicky keyboard! Post about my first PC coming soon, but for the time being check out this awesome post about the IBM 5160 XT.

Anyway, that’s my backstory. The real reason I’m telling you this story is that it’s not like I started working on projects yesterday. I started a long time ago; I just got older, and life gave me less time to work on these projects. Back then, and in my 20s and 30s, I could pull all-nighters and spend whole weekends working on these projects, but now I have kids, work is more demanding, and I just can’t deal with the lack of sleep. I need some sort of multiplier to keep doing my projects, the thing that I love. So this multiplier is what’s rekindled my love of tinkering and sharing. BTW, I used to run a BBS (Maximus) back in the ’90s; that was my way of giving back, before the internet.

Reasons why I write these posts/articles

• Not everyone has access to the best AI models money can buy, and the internet does not always have all the information in single posts, all in one place, to fix something or work on a project. So I write these posts to share that knowledge for free, with no tracking, no advertisements, no paywalls, … I do it in my free time and offer it up to anyone who wants to consume it. I have also done all I can to ensure all bots and scrapers are not blocked and have all the access and metadata they need to suck up all the info I have in here. I’ve even made the Markdown available for each page, indexed and searchable.
• My sons may one day, when I’m no longer around, show it to their kids, or read it for themselves with my voice and accent in their heads, taking them back to a time in their lives when things were simpler and their old man was alive, coherent and healthy, and cracking half a century of spins around the sun.
• Working through and then writing (and rewriting) articles on new topics helps me learn, and I enjoy doing so.

The Slop-O-Meter

This indicator (can also be known as sloppo meter) is a quick indicator for readers to ignore my posts if they are not interested in so-called AI-slop content that’s roughly put together with bubblegum and sticky tape. But some people may just want to look at the photos I took of the project, or get the gist of it for their own projects, pull out the ideas and snippets and run with it.

The slop-o-meter tag/label displayed as [HU-100%] indicates that the article/post they are going to read is 100% from my brain only (which I’ve built up from years of reading books/blogs/articles/…, and listening to parents, teachers and friends - the LLM neural network in my head).

Articles that show 100% made by a human will have spelling and grammatical errors in the initial drafting, which are then corrected by me after proofreading, but mostly corrected with AI, so it’s still assisted, but not with the producing of the content - only with ensuring correct grammar, punctuation and spelling.

The indicators are both:

1. Bottom of the summary:
   • [HU-90%] or [AI-10%], depending on which number is higher
2. A visual indicator (gauge) at the top of the post/article, which is a simple TUI/ASCII horizontal scale with AI on the left and HU on the right. The plan over time is to make changes to the “living” document (article/post) and move that indicator slowly to the right.

Living documentation

The plan is to write posts that hopefully stand the test of time, and I plan on revisiting them all, and updating them to keep them current and add details of any further progression, mods or improvements. During that process, I will replace most, if not all, of the AI-generated content with my own words from the learnings. I guess the idea of this site is to get something out fairly quickly to learn, and then refine each post over time as I learn more from these projects and find the time to revise the content to make it more personal.

What’s with the trademark ™ symbols?

It’s just a bit of a joke - it’s not a legal trademark - don’t get upset.

Slop-O-Meter™

Cool name for a gauge, a little click-baity, but who cares. Move along, nothing to see here.

Written by Human™

It is what it says on the box, but grammatically incorrect on purpose - something an LLM wouldn’t do - adding that “human touch”.

Questions or comments? Discuss on Hacker News.

Change history

• 5 Nov 2026: First published.

This note as plain Markdown, for LLMs and scripts: slop-o-meter.md. All posts: API and Markdown.