As is dramatizing license plates as "overwhelming vulnerability". Just look at the US's 40k traffic deaths per year, with countless lesser injuries and accidents. Balanced against which specific harms of license plates?

The problem with Flock, etc, is their massive, unaccountable, for profit surveillance, which uses much more than license plates, and is working hard to move beyond them.

People who claim they want privacy while acting in society instead want something else, usually a lack of accountability.

I'm all for privacy for things that are truly private. But wanting to secretly consume public resources and remain unaccountable for harm to others is what I think is truly absurd. Although it's an increasingly popular one recently.

Academic fraud is done to boost the reputation of the academic. There isn't a lot of point in academic fraud with one paper on each of 50 fake names.

Brand was wrong. Information doesn't want to be free, just cheap.

[1] https://variety.com/2026/tv/news/how-much-us-households-spen...

In the beforetimes there were a lot of would-be founders running around looking for people who actually knew things and could do things (that is, technical cofounders). Will some of those people use Claude Code to make successful products on their own? A few, I'm sure. But I expect a lot of them will stay ignorant fools who have prompted their way to a pile of garbage.

I can be confident of that because there were plenty of founders with FFF money who could suddenly hire "capable coworkers" that produced garbage. "AI" is certainly removing barriers. But as I deal with a big increase in polished but idiotic email and PRs, I have to think that barriers were helpful both to the world at large (by keeping fools at bay) and to the promising but incompetent (by giving them a chance to build character and wisdom).

Culture is something we inherit, but it's something we can change. If we want things to be less fucked up for the next generation, we can do that. As many before us have.

I'm not the OP, but anybody honestly wanting to know why people think good humans should not use Twitter does not have far to look.

1. E.g., https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/feb/12/elon-musk... and https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/04/24/musk-on... or his Economist interview.

One of my open questions is how much that increases over time. It could be that is a constant. But it also could be that, say, coding agents will infer false needs from the excess code/docs and elaborate further.

That seems implausible to me. I think at best you could claim that cause and effect are quite tangled here.

If we're going to promote a policy of personal responsibility, let's at least look at all the persons involved.

Having worked for market makers, I find it weird to get lectured on what they really are. That never goes down well, but especially not when the lecture is wrong. https://xkcd.com/793/

Maybe this will be the rare case where founders survive corporate shenanigans and keep on doing their thing. But I'm bummed, as I've heard that optimism many more times than I've seen it happen.