A content farm having a disparate range of websites, for the sole purpose of SEO needs to be able to create engaging content quickly. AI generation allows for that; and by purposefully keeping a name that we can try to trace back to a real human as the author, the post itself lends credence to the theory that it’s AI generated.

> By 1980, Moscow was under intense scrutiny from Western intelligence agencies.

> The city hosted the 1980 Summer Olympics during a period of heightened Cold War tension following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. CIA maps like this would have been useful for diplomatic security planning, intelligence analysis, and understanding the geography of Soviet government operations.

The clean graphic design is characteristic of late Cold War CIA cartography.

> Rather than artistic relief shading seen in earlier maps, this style focused on clarity, precision, and rapid interpretation. E (sic)

> very rail yard, roadway, and public site could hold intelligence value, especially in a closed society like the USSR where reliable geographic information was often difficult for outsiders to obtain.

I can’t find a human behind any of this on the website. I’m certain there is one, but I’m not certain the summary is anything other than AI generated. Content farms at a new level? To what end?

Ah, the company that owns the site “Brilliant British Ltd” is a content farm. Its managing director says this on his own LinkedIn profile (https://www.linkedin.com/in/ian-wright-2079531b?originalSubd...):

> I am currently the Managing Director of Brilliant British Ltd, which owns and operates several websites in the UK payment, energy and small business sectors.

> Previously I was the Senior SEO manager for the EMEA region at Hotels.com and the Head of B2B SEO at MVF (Winner of the Sunday Times Tech Track 2013). I have over 13 years experience in SEO and online marketing and have worked for large corporations, startups and independently over that time.

> In my spare time I continue to operate a few test websites to see what's working in the world of SEO and also run my blog RandomlyLondon.com which has been featured in the Londonist, TimeOut and The Guardian.

And in the ‘blurb’ in his current company, he says:

> I'm currently the Managing Director of Brilliant British Ltd which publishes websites in various sectors including, business finance, payments and home improvements.

Heck, if nothing else, the lack of a clear CTA would be on brand with OSS Marketing.

I grew up in a very conservative household, and until the tea party/Trumpian alliance would have called myself a small-l libertarian.

Now? I won’t vote republican for a whole host of reasons, not the least of which is that it rhymes with the worst parts of the political parties we destroyed in world wars.

There’s something new almost every day that should, in a sane culture, cause folks to abandon the Republican Party en masse. Today’s example? The 1.776 Billion “anti-weaponization” fund that is a slush fund for Trump and his allies, including folks that stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021. The grift of this administration is shocking, but the fact that rank-and-file conservatives aren’t abandoning it by the millions gives away the game. It isn’t about principles, it’s about one party winning, no matter what.

We used to fight for what’s right, but we have become the villain. Tim is right about the declination of America (realizing his title is a double-entendre), and I can’t help but wonder if there is even a line that Trump could cross to the modern “Republican” party.

“Let’s slap AI on it and see if we can make money” is…. Depressing as a world view. Besides the sheer amount of computational power it uses to produce a worse result than dedicated humans, the fact that if this wins out our future is promise to be replete with humans farming out any part of humanity they can to a dataset that promises to deliver a median outcome at the price the market is willing to bear to those that don’t care, from those that don’t care.

Lower left, lower right, upper left, upper right, inside left, inside right, dollar bills left, dollar bills right.

It would seem that functionally the only real world impact would be spending more money to service that debt.

Ok, what about just cancelling that debt? Some economists have said “it’s money we owe ourselves”, so why not just forgive ourselves of our own debt? What would be the real world impact? What would happen?

We keep attaching political value judgments to this without reasonably discussing the practical implications free of our own political dogmas.

We don’t have any serious leaders on this issue. We don’t have scholarship divorced from politics about this issue. Maybe we never will. The Austrian school basically thinks this is the end of the world. The MMT folks think this is business as usual. The Keynesians are somewhere in the middle, but being in the middle of the road politically is not the same as an apolitical view on this.

As a lay person who hasn’t studied economics enough to understand if this is an actual issue or a theoretical issue, I really need some politics-free scholarship on this.

It doesn’t help that our political leaders say it’s an issue, unless it’s their party that wants that spending, then it’s fine. The right says it’s fine as long as it goes to endless wars, and the left says it’s fine when we spend the money on social programs. Both say it’s bad when the other side spends it, but not when their own spends it.

This is exhausting and demonstrably not helping us resolve the fundamental issue of how do you manage a large society without it imploding.

In less than three years, we’ve gone from strict checks and entire sets of engineering procedure to keep this sort of thing from happening, to “yea, let’s embrace the agentic future.”

Not only that, the OP blames the Cursor team and the team that provided the API the AI used. Notice who is missing from the blame, and where the blame is actually due: the team that wholly embraced agentic AI to run their business. That’s where the fault lies.

It is not a fun condition to have, and leads to lots of problems in my everyday life. This blog post accidentally accentuated that issue, since the colors are (to what I can understand) very similar looking to me as a colorblind person.

1 in 12 men and 1 in 200 women go through the same sorts of experiences, and it’s worth it, if you aren’t color deficient, to try out some of the colorblindness sites and see the world as we do.

https://www.colourblindawareness.org/colour-blindness/colour...

We wouldn't give our children a pass like this, nor would we teach our children to act this way, but we're perfectly willing to allow fully grown adults to act like this.

Here's just one example, there are plenty more:

Cheryl Sandberg inviting the author of the book to sleep in her bed next to her on the company jet, and the petulent and vindictive behavior when the author said 'no'.

Everyone in the orbit of the executive team knew about this behavior, and everyone gave it a pass, even going so far as to defend it and to protect Cheryl. This behavior should be universally deplored, and yet is not.

> Allow GitHub to use my data for AI model training: Allow GitHub to collect and use my Inputs, Outputs, and associated context to train and improve AI models. Read more in the Privacy Statement.

“Associated Context” is the repo. If I use copilot, I’m giving it access to my repo.

I don’t know in all the ways copilot can be triggered, and I’m not certain that I could stop it from being triggered, given Microsoft’s past behaviors in slapping Copilot on everything that exists.

I want to draw out this comment because it's so antithetical to what Apple marketed that it stood for (if you remember, the wonderful 1984 commercial Apple created; which was very much against the big behemoths of the day and the way they operated).

We're at the point where we've normalized crappy behavior and crappy software so long as the bottom line keeps moving up and to the right on the graph.

Not, "Let's build great software that people love.", but "How much profit can we squeeze out? Let's try to squeeze some more."

We've optimized for profit instead of happiness and customer satisfaction. That's why it feels like quality in general is getting worse, profit became the end goal, not the by-product of a customer-centric focus. We've numbed ourselves to the pain and discomfort we endure and cause every single day in the name of profit.

The sentiment feels like software folks are optimizing for the local optimum.

It's the programmer equivalent of "if it's important they'll call back." while completely ignoring the real world first and second-order effects of such a policy.