"Just 12 People Are Behind Most [COVID-19] Vaccine Hoaxes On Social Media, Research [from 2021] Shows"

https://www.npr.org/2021/05/13...

Whatever their motives, social media supercharged their capacity to find gullible fools, especially with Americans' legitimately decreasing trust in institutions.

Pet peeve: using AI for problems subject to classical quantitative optimization methods.

Not saying AI might not have a role, but the impression I get from a lot of managers etc is they're wholly ignorant of the rich palette of existing mathematical tools that don't require a stranger's data center to run.

Then they aren't available. Oh no! Stop using your hypothetical charity case as a lever for pushing for mass surveillance. It's not worth the cost to everyone else.

And BTW, there are other ways to address these medical use cases without normalizing stylish, lightweight perpetual social surveillance. Integrate a body cam with an SoC and a pair of earbud. That's already possible and cheap, at least before FDA certification.

Hmmm... seems like I remember all the rage over taking a knee being manufactured by Conservative media.

Why be a pessimist? Imagine what could go right: a battle for the planet between dinosaurs and AI-controlled robots would be awesome!

Also reminds me of the release of Careless People last year (the one where Facebook got a gag order on the author so she can't talk about her own book)... it seemed you couldn't talk about the company's complicity in, for instance, the Malaysian genocide without someone trying to paint the author as morally compromised by association.

Yeah, it's a pretty eye-watering account. And most likely it will kill internet competition, because the big guys will figure out all the exceptions and technical hacks to minimize the tax bill.

There's a more optimistic outcome: they rewrite preserving bug-for-bug compatiblity, but all the bugs get flagged. And then they can start remediating those, carefully considering the impacts on compatability. Along the way, perhaps they pick up other wins on performance, dead/duplicate code elimination, compilation speed, and/or test coverage. And perhaps they stir up new ideas or find they can reallocate talent or reduce personnel. It's a gamble to be sure, but it's what investors want to see right now.

Is that the motivation for all the AI slop hitting open source projects? People trying to pick up cheap credibility and resume points? I'm really curious why it's such a problem...

I've had a long professional development career, and the 2026 frontier models do most coding and debugging work far faster and better than me. I wish like hell that LLMs could be un-invented, but to be an effective person, one must deal with reality.

All the trust and verification issues you mention are issues with human developers as well. Even "accountability" for software faults doesn't really stick to individual developers unless it's egregious and frequent... bugs are expected. The only real differences on the software quality front are scale: the LLM can write more code more quickly, but it can also review and test more coffee more quickly.

I do agree that many orgs will fall into the trap of writing unmaintainable software simply because they don't balance that increase in scale. The great improvement is that when these systems collapse under their own weight or sing technology, the pros will be able to rewrite them much faster.

Does anyone actually use these browsers or is it just a ploy to soak up VC dollars?

Yeah, my Musk sycophant friend says the same whenever I express skepticism about Elon's endeavors or character. Which is funny since I rarely read Electik and my arguments aren't from there.

If you climb a mountain and see the sunrise from the summit, you feel like a champ. Because you've done something hard. Now what if the park service builds a road up the other side and you finish your climb only to find the top crowded with tourist buses? Well now you feel like a chump... a superior chump maybe, but the sense of satisfaction you got from summiting will be gone.

That's all really complicated... just confiscate their toys and bar them from using smartphones and social media for one year. Maybe throw in a few hours of community service.

Done. Problem solved. They'll grow up to be well-adjusted, or at least well-adjusted enough not to robo-rape girls.