gtowey

Indeed. Especially since we know that they know that they reserve the worst of it for face to face conversation and nothing gets recorded and it's all for the sake of maintaining plausible deniability. When asked about their private conversations they can and do lie.

I know about discovery. I have a hard time believing that Meta is being perfectly transparent or comprehensive in what they disclose to the prosecution.

The antidote to that would be for Meta to reveal all their internal communications. But they'll never do that because their own words and actions are likely far more damning than any story the DOJ could weave.

The trend I have noticed is anytime the actual truth leaks from these actors and companies, it's so much more evil than I could have imagined. Like the recent tell-all book from someone who worked directly with Zuckerberg, Careless People -- I was shocked at just how amoral those in leadership there. I had a dim view of them before, but their actual words and deeds were worse than I could have imagined.

I'm leaning against the user flagging model of content moderation because it keeps the incentive for bad actors to try to game the system. Bad content, even briefly included can still do a lot of damage. It's like spam email -- even though something like 99.9% gets filtered out, that 0.1% is still valuable enough for spam senders to keep trying. If the problem of spam is just a numbers game, then bad actors will just increase the volume to compensate.

Isn't that kind of the point though? We don't need 100 years of video uploads every day. We need fewer, higher quality videos. If 90% of those were likely to get rejected, such as all the low-effort AI spam videos generated today, then there wouldn't be much incentive to submit them in the first place. The volume of uploads would drop. This is only a problem if you're an advertising platform who needs an endless stream of new crap to recommend to your users to try to keep them on the platform as long as possible.

This is why I keep landing on moderation-before-inclusion as the standard. Review systems that flag bad content means that bad content still gets seen, and often still has enough of an effect to make it worthwhile for bad actors to churn out. IMO that's part of explanation of why there's 100 years of videos uploaded to YouTube every day. Even videos that get taken down get some exposure; increasing the volume of crap is a solution for their short life span. It seems like a self-reinforcing problem there, even if there were an honest attempt at moderation.

The old content doesn't go away, but YouTube is incredibly bad at making it effectively searchable. They don't want you to find the highest quality videos on a topic, they want you to plug in to the endless new stream of slop which just recapitulates things which were done better before.

This isn't really an "old man yelling at kids to get off his lawn" take that everything older is better. Instead I'm saying that the Wikipedia approach to help users find and collaborate on good content to make it even better or more comprehensive is preferable to the approach that the only way to be seen is to endlessly publish new content, which is meant to obscure what came before it on a topic. It's like if you walked into a library, but the only thing visible was a "new releases" shelf and searching the stacks was nearly impossible. That would make it basically a matter of luck if you found anything relevant, and makes deep research impossible.

I'm increasingly thinking that the only solution may be to have a search index with human editorial control. As much as I think Google deserves scorn for how badly they have made the search experience on the web, we have to remember that they're fighting a battle against SEO and spam. It feels like they have mostly given up. Any automatic solution will always be an arms race where they will be one step behind. The only way to get ahead is to ensure that all content has to pass through human moderation before it can be included -- that's the only way I can think of to break the cat and mouse game dynamics at play here.

Google, Facebook and others will never do this because it's expensive. Their cost savings is our toxic waste.

So what does a viable solution look like? I'm not sure. Maybe a system with distributed, volunteer moderators like Wikipedia. It's not perfect, but that model has held up remarkably well over its lifespan and has seemed to mostly hold its own against increasingly sophisticated attacks.

It's almost like what we really need is someone to simply index the sites that have the actual primary sources so we can search them and find them quickly! /s

We could have both. The "save" button just becomes a pointer to a specific point in the revision history, the same way we already have that with git.

No, I think they mean that it used to take a giant lab full of specialists with lots of funding to do lots of damage before.

Now, the worry is a lone nut in a basement with no money could pull off an act of bio terrorism.

Yes, but on whom does it work?

Does it work because you're taking advantage of a group of people who are extremely vulnerable to manipulation? People who already struggle with impulse control, who are prone to making bad financial decisions? The elderly, kids?

We have to escape this mentality that anything that makes money is valid, that the money itself is the validation of "rightness".

Some of us, just some think that maybe enterprises that prey on the vulnerable just don't deserve to be in business. Otherwise everything might as well be payday loans and online gambling. I'm not saying OP is definitely in that category, but I would encourage them to think long and hard about weather or not using dark patterns to goose their sales is really the kind of world we want to be fostering.

"This time it's different" is also a refrain we've heard with every new bubble. It shouldn't be surprising that some people want to take a measured, skeptical approach. Even if it means they are slightly behind the bleeding edge. Even if you have to play catch-up, it can be more efficient to let others find all the dead ends first and avoid them.

Kudos to the author for taking responsibility and doing the ethical thing here.

It's not the whole story. The biggest change is actually the internal rules for how downtime was reported, it wasn't actually such a large change in the actual reliability then.

> If they don't want to make a movie properly, why make it at all?

Hollywood moves have little to do with art or even entrainment for that matter. They are simply revenue generating machines. Rich people invest in a movie production and expect a return. Hollywood moves don't take artistic risks anymore which is why franchises have become such a big thing. If it make money before, it will probably make money again. Even if it's bad, fans of the last movie will buy a ticket just to see. If it's bad, well, you have their money already!

It's pretty similar to Silicon valley these days. The technology is just a vehicle to produce a return on VC money.

Back in the days of spinning rust, we had RAID controller cards with batteries, so that if someone pulled the plug, there would be enough power to keep the drives going until any buffered writes were completed.

I certainly wouldn't mind if modern servers had something similar to make sure programs could stop gracefully. But then that doesn't help if you have a hardware failure...

I would expect to have a method that explicitly stops program execution immediately without further side effects.

An unresolved promise that causes other code to be skipped while program execution continues after the block is, well, unintuitive to say the least.

Solar harvest time.

Finally isn't bullet proof. If you execute a promise in a try block and it happens to end without resolving, the finally block will be never be executed. Fun stuff.

I'm a native English speaker and before your comment, I never noticed that palette, pallet, and palate are different words!

> And the barriers are far more social, organizational and political than they are technical.

At the core it's even more of an economic barrier which isn't even unique to capitalism.

I recall an article talking about why the Romans didn't invent steam engines and things like railroads considering people were aware that steam could be used to do work. The answer was largely that slave labor was so cheap that nobody really cared about finding more efficiency. It didn't solve any problem they had at the time.

The analogy transfers to the tech industry today, economics tend to drive most decisions. While I love technology and think research and innovation is important for its own sake -- particularly because we might not know what we're missing out on unless we explore -- but those controlling the purse strings have other priorities.

Others might point out that the economic cost of the bugs and failure cases in programming languages without memory safety might actually be greater than the cost of developing alternatives or accepting less performance in exchange for correctness. They're probably right! But unless you can measure it and present it on a spreadsheet to the management class, they won't acknowledge or understand it. It's really difficult to measure "incidents you didn't have". In any case it still might be cheaper to work on the next big startup idea, hype it & sell equity -- that strategy has produced trillion-dollar valuations recently. However correctly or incorrectly that may be, the benefit to an elite few is very real.

The thing is, I'm not even against it. The point of the sarcasm was to say that the most massive projects on which everything is built are in C-flavored languages so the claim that it's not fit for large projects is absurd. And to say that replacing those foundations is going to take time. I would love memory safety in those, but it is going to take time to build something as battle-tested.

We call them blunders mostly because the solutions are so well known.

In contrast, the last company I worked for did everything in typescript and the amount of problems caused by code that blocked the main event loop was staggering. And at that, our best JavaScript people generally just threw up their arms saying there wasn't a good way to fix it.

Between the two, I prefer a language that lets me fix problems.

I'll await your Rust ports of Windows, Linux and MacOS then.

This isn't really a fair take. Keep in mind that C/C++ has been the backbone of the most important software in the world since the 1970s. At that time we didn't have virtually unlimited compute and memory at our fingertips the way we do now. It was a huge improvement to have a high level language which still could be optimized nearly as well as assembly.

Its staying power is due to the fact that we really haven't had many good alternatives until maybe the last few years. Things are not going to get ported and rewritten overnight, especially when they largely just work like Linux & PostgreSQL. We'd nuke a huge amount of institutional knowledge and inertia to change those up.

And C/C++ are still key in the embedded space where we still have devices constrained on compute and memory. That's not going to go away anytime soon.

This criticism feel like someone complaining about why anyone still uses horses on the day the Model T was announced. Change takes time.

The thing is we have a lot of models which make very accurate predictions most of the time, which are useful for doing some impressive science.

But we have no accepted theory of what is actually happening behind the math. What we have is that in 1925 most theoretical physicists decided that we have already uncovered the most fundamental structures of the universe and further investigation into how or why things are the way they are is fruitless. This view has dominated for the last 100 years. Physics has been focused only on modeling and testing, but nobody knows exactly what the models are telling us about the universe.

I agree with the above poster that this is wrong and we may yet learn that our models are only very close to reality, but the actual mechanics are different. At least I think more research should be pointed in this direction.

Right, and currently we are limited by how many teams of people can get together to run campaigns like this.

Now imagine that LLM agents make this possible for nearly anyone. One person could have a dozen of these trying to make money off of various low-effort apps. Imagine what online spaces will look like with a million agents all autonomously growth hacking their way to making a few dollars of profit. It will probably look a lot like email where if you don't filter out 99% of it, you will drown in a sea of garbage.

> Cosmos DB's engine translated Gremlin queries into .NET code, enforcing a set of restrictions designed to prevent queries from reaching beyond Gremlin operations. These restrictions, however, didn't sufficiently account for .NET reflection

Wow, this is so unbelievably amateurish.

> “I’ve got four bottles of something that I take twice a week sitting here,” Callaghan said.

Profits are up! A smashing success!

Interesting perspective and I don't disagree. Though on one hand engineering has always been about building the bridge that barely stands. On the other hand it often feels like we are not even close to designing bridges in modern tech companies, and instead we're closer to throwing garbage into the river and floating across on it, and saying that's engineering.

For instance, carefully choosing regions close together to show transaction commit times which are not horrible. But if your region distribution is not ideal...

I literally just wrote a blog post which explains the kind of problem they're trying to solve and why any solution is just choosing where the pain is.

https://gtowey.blogspot.com/2026/07/why-are-databases-so-har...

Their paper talks about a lot of the same things I do, and if you read both, you can see the nature of the tradeoffs they make and where the pain points are still hiding.