My boss was looking at them, but even the simple ones he was pointing claude at it and asked it to make a document explaining it. Then he'd send me the document and ask me to check if it was accurate. I added a line to the last page "this is an ai summary and may contain mistakes. Use the project readme for validated information" and told him it was grand.

Also you're not forced to come back and read it again every month which is the real problem.

I tried three different contacts I could find, only one came back to me and wanted to know what the systems did what the risk was etc. I pointed out I have no idea, and I'm absolutely not logging into mysterious systems to find out - pass it to your own IT so they can see what needs to be changed, rotated etc.

I did eventually get a message back from someone who thanked me for my diligence and said it was solved as they had now removed the photo... I really hope they had someone who understood look at it, but I decided not to engage further...

I feel like one of the less discussed issues of the hyper-connected world is there are no small ponds to be the big fish in anymore. Used to be you could be the best in your school, church, town even city etc - even if you weren't that good. I remember being astounded as a kid by a woman who juggled 5 tennis balls in a local talent show. Now I can hop on youtube and watch people do way more impressive feats it doesn't seem so unique. I suspect that 5 ball routine might still be the greatest juggling I've seen in person, but it still doesn't compare to random acts I've seen online.

But especially with the para-social relationships of social media people feel connected even to big names now. You might not compare the local young singer to Taylor Swift, but people will to the tiktok singer they 'know' who liked their reply once.

It's gratifying and inspiring to be top of your class in something, but in a world where it's always a class of millions, you know you'll never reach the top.

One of the best apps I've bought for android is buzz kill which lets you set rules around notifications. I have cool downs on family chats and social media so it doesn't keep buzzing when things kick off, filter Amazon alerts to only "we're two stops away" and "We've delivered" messages and dismiss the rest.

I have custom buzz patterns and sounds for urgent alerts and rules that batch notifications depending what WiFi I'm on, time outs on things that don't matter after a few hours etc.

My notifications list is now way smaller and far more relevant.

Also quickest way to sort out notifications is to take your phone off silent. Hearing everything coming in, you see more when it you can then decide if the notification should make noise, or exist at all on a per app basis.

Convincing people it's an important part of working though, that was the tough one. And now if you spend any time thinking people want you to use Ai for the thinking bit...

The combo of rushing with a technology that isn't very easy to control, understand or securely limit is just mad to me.

Not that you really want to stop open source contributors from getting help from contributor forks anyway, although like the article says you then end up with overloaded maintainer(s) who can't keep up or triage legit issues easily.

It all seems like a hard product to monitize, easy on corporate code maybe, but in open source maintainers have to pay for scans that will give them more to do, or risk exploitors getting some big zero days very cheap. Starts to feel a bit mafia protection racket somehow.

Maybe they'll just decide not to care about the impact as someone else will do it anyway? Maybe they continue their surprisingly slow role or to responsibly bring it up. Maybe there's a clever project to tell if code is a fork even if you obscure it, or they'll make something that will only give you the patches not the problem... I'd love to be a fly on the wall for their risk analysis of the whole situation.

Now the paper company got into the hotel business seems a far better example. No idea how that happens.

Change might be inevitable, but I'm not sure your list shows or proves that.

I left over a year ago when all of them just became dominated by the same nft and crypto posts everywhere. Couldn't scroll my timeline without seeing fake BBC news articles promising "David Attenboroughs best crypto investment " whatever account I was in. I'm not sure cleaning up a mess they made themselves is really "actively innovating", but I'd agree the country thing would have been interesting back when I used it

Of course if you record created/updated timestamps on both, insert both records in the same order, accidently record the user code in the response data, take backups in between responses, have identifying questions or just don't have that many people responding it's easy/not hard to reverse engineer.

But it's quite possible to do right, I did it quite effectively almost by mistake years ago. Sent a customer survey out with generated codes as identifiers recorded with answers. Before sending reminder emails a script grabbed the codes, marked the customer as responded and wiped the code (so I could just get future responses where code was not null to mark next people off). Although I had timestamps the script meant customers were updated in blocks, there really wasn't any data to link them.

I know because the Boss was not happy he couldn't find out which customer had said what, and I had to point out all the communication (with customers and me) called it an anonymous survey, so why would I have saved them?

So it is possible, just not easy even if you intend it, and it's often not intentional...

I don't trust anonymous surveys either now...

The early release channel is sensible, but if you're a bad actor who's compromised a package you're not going to early release are you, you get it straight out there.

I struggle to remember even relatively simple maths like working out "what percentage of X is Y" so if I write a formula like that I'll put in some simple values like 12 and 6 or 10,000 and 2,456 just to confirm I haven't got the values backwards or something. I've been shown sheets where someone put a formula in that they don't understand, checked it with numbers they can't easily eyeball and just assumed it was right as it's roughly in their ball park / they had no idea what the end result should be.

Then again I've also seen sheets where a 10% discount column always had a larger number than the standard price so even obviously wrong things aren't always checked.

This does make more sense to some of the big claims "95% of our code is ai generated" though. By the logic here a lot of my code would be considered generated for years. ide auto complete on variables, functions, closing brackets, class names etc. Lines changes by linters and formatters to add so much as a comma are not mine anymore. Add in refactoring and my use of ide templates and framework generators to make common files and increasingly small amounts would be considered my written code.