There are lots of smart people in this community who are deeply specialised in all sorts of domains. I'll bet there are some fascinating counter-consensus views at the edges on what the future holds in these domains.
Let's hear them!
What do you think is true in your domain that most of your peers don't?
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30322001
Creating fingerprints out of metadata is actually much, much harder to do in practice and at scale than you would think. And fingerprints have a much shorter useful half-life than you would think - 48 hours or less if you are on a smartphone.
And the problem scales exponentially the bigger the dataset you are dealing with. Cramming in more and more datasets actually makes weaker connections. And the data available in data brokerages are garbage and riddled with inaccuracies. Your old AOL account from 12 years ago is doing more to gum up these systems than you realize.
Even if these systems were as robust as they are sometimes portrayed, all of the investment and decision making is being handled by some Marketing Executive named Brent or something who thinks a spreadsheet is too technical and doesn't think much harder than "let's target this ad to young mothers". There's a reason you still see dumb, out-of-place ads even by the most accomplished tech companies.
From that point there is something harmful bout the personalization economy. It’s bad enough that I want to share pictures of flowers, landscapes and athletes on instagram and I get followed (allegedly) by creepy girls with the same hair and makeup and slinky dress and take the same photos at the squat rack at the gym. Or I click on a YouTube short of a Chinese lady turning into a fox on America’s Got Talent and they want to show me hundreds of slop videos of transformations with the same music and reaction shots.
The harm is more clear when young men use YouTube and get sucked into cartoon pornography, or blackpill incel content that promotes body dysmorphia, or endless videos by dumbasses who don’t know Captain Marvel was always a girl and didn’t get genderswapped like a fate grand order character in a fit of wokeness.
Here's my carefully chosen pseudo-contrarian viewpoint: voting systems on any forum, including this one, create filter bubbles just as intense as the ones created by social media algorithms. You're in a filter bubble on this site just as much as on reddit, and nearly as much as on Facebook, TikTok, or YouTube. You'll never see any genuine discussion around contrarian viewpoints here.
Unfortunately, removing the voting system would massively increase mod workload, to an unworkable degree. This means the concept of a non filter bubble forum or website is an impossibility. We either get a filter bubble, or a spam and scam filled cesspool. There's no other options.
Is this one legitimate area that LLMs could help out with? Weeding out the most obvious spam and scams?
There was a discussion on Tildes though which asked “what opinions do you feel can’t be expressed?” and my answer got me kicked out which proved I was right but I got so sick of arguing with people there who explicitly rejected the categorical imperative so I was better off for it.
It helps that the points are hidden to other viewers, so they serve more as vague feedback to the commenter instead of causing voting wars and blocs like they do on reddit.
Speaking for myself, I generally post whatever I feel like as long as it's not overtly hostile, like when I'm in a bad mood. Through the course of a day I'll often see a comment upvoted a few times and then downvoted into the negative and then come back up, usually ending up at 1 or 2 points after a couple days.
When someone strongly disagrees though, I do wish they'd just comment and discuss it instead of leaving a drive-by vote with no comment.
I very rarely downvote (usually it's just by accident because the mobile UX sucks), but frequently share dissenting opinions here. I don't know or care what my karma is (I didn't realize the downvotes even count toward it). I also keep showdead on and frequently vouch for things.
That said, I've done some side project work lately where I've let that slide, largely in cases where the code is really throw away (an importer script I'll run once) or when I really don't know what the hell I'm doing (a library that is partially compatible with python-arango for porting my personal arangodb applications to postgres/SQLAlchemy where I am learning SQLAlchemy as I go along)
I don't mean your superstar geniuses that singlehandedly design new algorithms and invent new fields, but just your standard lowly programmer or designer at some insignificant company. There's no reason people like that (myself included) should be paid more than, say, teachers, nurses, veterinary technicians, soldiers, and tradespeople -- who all require a lot of training and/or education and produce socially useful things that usually don't negatively impact their communities.
Meanwhile we sit in front of a screen, often turning institutional investment dollars into advertisement engines and engagement spam that makes the internet and society worse for everyone around the world.
I understand that our salaries aren't measured by social worth, but are instead a natural consequence of supply and demand in the market. I just wish that weren't the case.
I've seen tech salaries drive up costs of living in too many places and kick out locals and turn small towns into luxury playgrounds for the rich. I wish our field could just be another down to earth niche trade, done by people who actually have an interest in it and aren't just in it to get rich quick.
I also think we're vastly overpaid compared to international devs of similar skill, but that's a whole different topic. Mostly I'm just annoyed that tech salaries are so high here. It feels deeply unfair to everyone else who works just as hard if not harder, serves a social good every day, but goes home stressing about all their bills.
Also, I really don't like marine mammals at all. Possible exception for otters