Not to be overly negative, but have you really looked at the vast majority of the content on the internet? There are good pockets of real, in depth content. But the absolute vast majority of it is surface level basics at best, and completely wrong hot takes at worst. Content farms and click spam have made up huge portions of the internet for a while, never mind the absolute hell holes that places like Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr were and have been. And that's before you consider how often news media gets stuff wrong and then everyone copies everyone else's homework. Knowledge propagation, and more specifically correct knowledge propagation has always been difficult, slow and rare. You have always needed to check primary sources, and AI is just the latest in a long line of reminders of that fact.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_transition_to_Intel_proces...

In my opinion I consider a friendship any relationship where no matter how long ago it ended or how long ago you last talked you wouldn't mind hearing from them again, even if it might only be awkward small talk. Old schoolmates, college roommates, military squadmates, and co-workers can all be friends. They can all be acquaintances too. But crucially the fact that you stopped talking at one point or stopped spending time together isn't the demarcating factor between the two.

It's true for some of us introverted people as well, especially given that without some "reason" to get together, some of us might never interact with another person ever.

You're getting paid to be friends with your co-workers? Or are you being paid to work, and work, like many other situations where multiple people gather and share experiences and spend time together are also places that people tend to form friendships in. You had friends in school that you stopped maintaining the friendship when you stopped attending school together I'm sure. Were those people not actually your friends? How long does a "social interaction" have to last, and over what distances before it becomes a "friendship" instead of a "transactional relationship"? If it ever ends was it never a real friendship? It's certainly possible to view every relationship you build with people that you share circumstances with as transactional relationships, but that to me seems like a good way to never actually build a friendship with anyone.

This is reductive to the point of absurdity. Situational friends are still friends. How many of your elementary school friends are still your friends these days? High school? Summer camp? Heck college friends? Unless you're living in the same town with the same people, there's a good chance that most of them aren't anymore. Were these people also not your friends? When you leave that book club, when you stop showing up at the corner cafe, when you move out of the neighborhood, how many of those people will you still be spending time with 5 years later. For the ones that you aren't, were they also not really friends?

Friendship isn't a binary thing. Not every friend you make will help you bury a body, but not every friend or friendship needs to (or should) run that deep. And sure not everyone you're "friendly" with at work are friends, it's a spectrum. But situational friends are friends. People you bond with for a short while over a shared experience and then when life moves one or both of you on the friendship ends are still friends.

Are you suggesting that “urban hubs” and “immigration tension” are code words for “black people” and “slavery”? Because I regret to inform you that when New York City established the first US police department in 1845 (per britanica) the “immigration tension” at the time would have been the influx of Irish immigrants. And while Cincinnati had indeed had a white on black race riot in 1841, when it established its own police department in 1852 the anti-catholic / anti-German immigrant riots in 1853 and 1855 were the more contemporary “immigration tensions” I was referring to. Boston too when it founded its police department in 1854 was in the middle of a surge of Irish immigrants. Certainly these northern state city centers weren’t simply giving uniforms and badges to “slave patrols” when they founded their police forces, regardless of what other racial tensions may or may not have played a hand in the demands for a police force.

All of which is to say if you recall your American history, we have a long and storied tradition of hating on our immigrant populations and having conflicts with them. Yes white vs black was a problem at the time. And so was “white vs Irish” and “white vs German”. Our history is littered with racial tensions across just about every set of ethnic lines you could care to draw.

Edit:

I note now that my britanica link in my first post was the wrong one, this would be the more appropriate for the topic at hand: https://www.britannica.com/topic/police/Early-police-in-the-...

Slave patrols were a form of early organized policing, but only one of many and hardly the first. And certainly this isn’t to say that racial tensions didn’t drive various forms of law enforcement. But this idea that police in general and American Police in particular are some direct descendant of salve patrols or wouldn’t exist without the institution of slavery ignores so much of human history and the long history of organized forms of law enforcement that predates the American colonies.

https://www.britannica.com/topic/police/Due-process-and-indi...

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/the-origins-of-policing-in...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police

Is it really “disrespectful” to make an observation of how the world is even if it maybe isn’t how it should be? That fact of the matter is no one “needs” to accept these wages. Software development in general and game development in particular are labor fields of choice. Being a software developer can pay you better in so many different parts of the field, even today long after the dot com boom. People are choosing to accept these bad offers because they value working in this part of the industry more than they value the higher wages they can get elsewhere. Just like plenty of us choose not to make FAANG levels of money because we value our work life balance, or our specific living locations or our principles and beliefs over the money that those companies are throwing at people.

We can talk about how these bad offers are knowingly abusive or artificially suppressed and still acknowledge that people are making informed choices to accept those offers.

To really drive this point home, the gaming community recently lost their minds when it became clear that this generation of video games were going to retail for ~$90 per game. Never mind that even in the early 90’s an average game might retail for $40 and what we would call a AAA game could reach as high as $70. In 2025 gamers declared that $90 was highway robbery. But go look at the credits for an early 90s video game. That $40-90 per unit in the early 90s might need to cover the salaries of 23 people (the size of the credits list for Super Mario World on the SNES). Now $90 has to cover 435 people (the credit list for Super Mario Wonder on the switch). Sure we’re selling a lot more copies now, and (some of) the manufacturing costs are lower. But that’s a nearly 20x increase in personnel for a mere 2x increase in (non inflation adjusted) price.

At least with a cdata tag your being explicitly told “here be dragons”

If you're really lucky, maybe a lot of this is documented in some wiki page somewhere, but everyone knows the documentation is never as complete as you'd like it to be. The longer a team works together without new people coming on board, the more likely it is that the documentation of these soft requirements and knowledge has drifted from reality. IME nothing shows how much you've failed to document than revisiting your onboarding process documents for the first time 2-3 years after you wrote them.

As I've experimented with the various AI tools, I feel like a lot of these extra documents I've written are documenting a lot of these things "everyone knows". But I'm also not at the "80% of the professional code I write is generated" stage yet. So I'm curious if you're finding that you're creating documentation that goes beyond just documenting what we used to just keep in our heads and are now getting into "writing a book about how to code" territory?

Edit:

Found the permit in the news article linked from the original article. It seems like the wording comes directly from from the permit (https://ewscripps.brightspotcdn.com/14/fb/2a0cdfa24e8791af37...). That reads to me though that this is then the second case (this specific ditch, which is unnamed) and not “an unnamed ditch, of which this is the wrong one”

As far as where those pollutants are coming from, multiple other commenters have noted there is another near by oil and gas processing equipment facility/manufacturer, a highway and multiple farmlands in the same area, all perfectly viable sources of pollution. Especially since as other commenters have pointed out a lot of these values appear to be just slightly above the local background values. And again given the overall lack of communication and the apparent need for manual monitoring, it seems pretty fair to say that you can’t just assume that the measured values are because of this pipe and not any of the other potential sources that are also going to be flowing into this ditch.

Perhaps more crucially though, it's also the same thing someone would say who is actually innocent of leeching contaminants. Whether they are or not, nothing in this article is providing any useful evidence.