The AI slop problem is not going away, unfortunately. Its surprising that the social media companies don't see AI slop as an existential threat to their platform? I guess its an indicator of how low we've sunk that 'any' engagement is good engagement.
If it was up to me, I think AI content should be OPT IN. I must choose to view AI content and not be force fed from the conveyor of slop. This is where governments should legislate but we'll never see this happen.
> Regret: Not adopting an identity platform early on. I stuck with Google Workspace at the start...
I've worked with hundreds of customers to integrate IdP's with our application and Google Workspace was by far the worst of the big players (Entra ID, Okta, Ping). Its extremely inflexible for even the most basic SAML configuration. Stay far, far away.
And it's a horrible moat. I've gotten locked out of a Google Workspace permanently because the person who set it up left, used a personal email/phone to do it, and despite us owning/controlling the domain, Google wouldn't unlock admin access to the Workspace for us, they would only delete it. Unacceptable business risk.
Fascinating tracker. So we started 2025 with nearly every browser under 80% and ending the year with every browser with >98% interop? That's a lot of amazing work done by a lot of teams. Incredible!
Just to clarify the meaning of the measurement, it doesn't mean they're 98% interoperable across everything, it's across the specific set of goals for 2025. (Which is still really good!)
I think they realized that shipping the features out of sync meant nobody could use them until all browsers adopted them, which took years, so now they coordinate
The learning is the point. Learning by nature shouldn't be optimized for efficiency. You learn deeply when you have to read sources, draw conclusions, synthesize information, and connect it to your own experiences. I recall writing essays in grade school and what mattered wasn't the end product but the process to arrive at the end product. The hours of research and analysis... figuring out what was true and what was questionable. When you skip steps 1-10 and arrive at the final deliverable a la ChatGPT, you miss the entire point of the assignment. Unfortunately, students are only judged on the final deliverable.
Truly, I think the only way we get back to real learning is through paper and pencil. The problem is that we've optimized our systems for learning efficiency, not learning efficacy.
Execution is the point for the vast majority of the population, and academia has always been tone deaf to the raison d'etre of their enrollment base. people are there for jobs, academia is aware they are there for jobs, academia pretends they are the elite socioeconomic class there for knowledge and networking or on the path to be. they are not, they are an underclass in a world where it was temporarily beneficial for a broad population to be knowledge workers. A brief half century that caused all problems that academia faces today.
A half century that will be a footnote in the millenium of these institutions as a reversion to total class segregation returns, glasses clinking to laughs over this case study of folly.
Now, we're experiencing the industrialization of knowledge work, a segment that has been spared for 260 years of the industrial revolution. The nihilism is entirely warranted, and those validating the output of agents should remain specialized in their domain, trained by niche organizations on an adhoc basis via apprenticeships.
academia is for research, not for jobs. our obsession with academic degrees is an abuse of the academic system. it is used as a tool to filter candidates, but in my opinion it should actually be illegal to require an academic degree for any job that isn't about research. that's not what academic degrees were designed for. academia isn't tone deaf, it's the industry that is misguided.
germany introduced the concept of fachhochschule, which is specifically designed to fill that gap. fachhochschule is not academia, but it is designed to teach skills for jobs. the US could do something similar by designating colleges for jobs and limiting universities to research. an institution could offer both on the same campus, and there could be overlap in the classes. it just should be clear what is a job qualification and what is a research qualification.
my comment about apprenticeships was modeled on Germany's system too
I agree that the industry is misguided, but academia knew what it was gatekeeping and that their admitted population was not there for research, but for the industry
that's true, but it's not reasonable to expect them to change that. we need academia for research. i don't want universities to change. if people don't want research then we should build other institutions for that.
I gotta say, it's kinda nice when that happens... work just kinda pauses for everyone, from providers to customers. It kinda feels like a national holiday, and everyone downstream from the affected cloud can just kinda sit back and relax cuz there's nothing they can do anyway except wait.
When it's your own outage, it's all-hands-on-deck panic mode. When it's half the internet down, it's no longer your problem, lol
I guess it depends on what your company's acceptable level of downtime is. If you're like Cloudflare (who handled this well), you take this as a sign to build fault tolerance around your 3rd party providers.
If your application is mission-critical, downtime is anything but a holiday.
This week, I posted about a women in engineering conference happening in my hometown and got zero engagement. 1000+ connections on my profile, used hashtags, and tagged the organization and received zero engagement on the post?
I hate to assume the worst but something stinks. When I open my feed, 9 out of 10 posts are from others that I don't follow or have never engaged with. Reading about your experience has confirmed my suspicions that something nefarious is going on under the hood.
If it was up to me, I think AI content should be OPT IN. I must choose to view AI content and not be force fed from the conveyor of slop. This is where governments should legislate but we'll never see this happen.
reply