I believe quality control is a customer-facing concept and customers aren't who employers optimize for.
This is what the original article and most comments are missing here in my opinion. Theories of value matter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_(economics)#Theories . To some degree I might agree with subjective value theory, so in essence everyone values things differently.
However as a framework it describes outcomes without being able to critique them, so whatever happens in a market gets called efficient by definition, including monopoly rents, regulatory capture and the steady drift of returns from labor to capital.
In my opinion labor theory of value describes the underlying relation correctly. The fundamental relation is between employer and employee and the structural goal of that relation becomes extraction of surplus. Customers and product quality enter only as the means through which surplus gets realized.
Once you see it this way, the just-say-no engineer situation makes sense without bringing ZIRP into it. They were doing customer-facing work, defending product quality, inside a structure that doesn't actually want it. They were tolerated, not central. When tolerance shrank, so did they. Good products are incidental to extraction, sometimes useful for it, sometimes in the way.
Imagine the world, where instead of making billionaires and trillionaires, we would actually share with society. Providing affordable products/services to common people. Decommodification of life.
There's no money for public investments, but there is always money for wars. There's no money for raises and bonuses for workers, until workers show there's no company without them.
So, if there's no money for public investments, it's time to show there's no public for their wars and exploitation.
Personally I think we should at least discuss changing this system into something that is more sustainable. Money is main thing, because it was decided that private property is more important than people. People like Joseph Stiglitz show that there's no such a thing as an invisible hand, even though he still believes in free market.
On the other hand you can make good, but controversial argument and if you use AI in any way, it might be rejected by moderator, just because some places have strict rules on AI. In some cases it might be rejected, even if no AI was involved, if any fragment of your text might look like not written by human and if they don't like your text.
At certain point it's no longer about AI specifically, but about power and showing who makes decisions.
I agree that there might be some threshold for obvious spam, but if you're making argument in good faith and you don't claim to have authority on some matter, there will be always people that think differently or disagree with you, because they have different interpretation or they need better sources, more evidence. It's actually typical, because different people use different perspectives, different assumptions, different tools. I don't believe that rules should be used to silence people that have different opinions and that's the biggest risk I see, because penalty for not following such rules, which are hard to measure correctly, creates power imbalance.
At some points it becomes dogma, not fair debate and not everyone likes to stick to dogma and it's hard to do creative or innovative work, if your work has to meet strict, but subjective, possibly incomplete criteria, to be considered valid work at all.
Isn't the whole point to understand? If the task is to write and you expect only final result, but you question if it looks legit enough, how is it fair judgement? People can deliver partial results and show progress as well, but you won't see it in some comments on the internet, but if something is expected to take many days, it's easy to show different stages of work. It's easy to accuse people of plagiarism or not thinking for themselves, and of course there are indicators when someone uses AI, but the problem is that you can't distinguish in reliable way, if something was created by AI or not.
Like, there is this computer game, authors used some models or something like that, generated by AI, but it was only used during prototyping and later it was replaced by proper models. No one would know about that, if authors would not tell about it. So, if someone writes in their own words what AI generated for him, is it still argument made by human or by AI? What if someone uses AI only as placeholder and replaces all that content, so you never actually see actual AI usage, but it was used in the process?
For me, premise that using AI in any form invalidates your work, starts with logical fallacy, so such arguments against using AI are weak. It's like saying that your work is wrong, because you used calculator, so your calculations can't be right, if done by machine, because it had to make mistake or that's wrong for ethical reasons or whatever.
Work generated by AI can be easily poor, because these models make mistakes and like to repeat in certain ways, but is it wrong that I'm writing comment with keyboard, instead of writing letters with pen? Is it wrong, when I use IDE or some CLI to write code with AI, instead of using vim and typing everything on my own? Is it wrong that someone uses spell-checking?
In the end it doesn't matter who seems smarter, when you're expected to use AI at work. Reality shows you actual expectations.
I don't really see the issue, as long as there's human thought behind whatever anyone posts. It's frustrating to argue against someone that lazily uses AI, but if argument is fair, then I don't care if that's written by AI or human, what difference does it make? It's frustrating, if someone is incoherent and makes dumb argument, but again, I don't care if it's dumb argument from human or machine.
For me it sounds just as yet another form of gatekeeping, so either you sound human or you're not good enough to post/comment. Like, really? How isn't that genetic fallacy? It doesn't matter what someone thinks, because someone used AI to make their thought clearer, so their whole argument is trash? Like it has to hurt to read and write, if you're not using English perfectly and your work is seen as inferior based on superficial factors like proper grammar and style?
It's dumb crusade, I did not use AI to write this comment, but I hate when people try to monopolize the truth and tell who is "better, smarter" based on irrelevant facts. Not using AI doesn't make anyone superior. Using AI also doesn't make you superior. Focus on what you mean, because that's what matters.
I'm not overthinking it, if you were right and everything was simple, statistics on popularity of decentralized platforms would look different. That's empirical proof. It's science, you can read what Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, Shoshana Zuboff or Tristan Harri wrote about media, you can notice that right now it's all global Skinner box experiment or you may ignore all that and go with "vibes" on why decentralized platforms fail to gain real popularity.
One approach is based on science, other bases on unfounded feelings. Some people will use these decentralized platforms, but that's not the point. My point is that it's not as simple as just telling people around you "just use this". There are systemic reasons why most people don't use them and serious analysis starts once you get it. Without that it's just wishful thinking, so sure, you will get something on these platforms, but it's like one commenter here mentioned, he tried Loops, used it for a while and it's mostly trash for him, while better community will never appear there.
To get real traction and user base on such decentralized platforms, we would need to change the way society functions first. That's why it's impossibly hard challenge. Without foundations, such projects are doomed to fail, they just can't compete with mainstream, centralized platforms.
> so I would encourage you to create the content or communities you want to see.
There are hidden reasons behind centralized solutions, that make decentralized solutions unpopular. If anyone suggests "just go out and make it better", it's missing the point. That's like saying: "don't participate in society, just start your own". In theory it makes sense, in practice it's just ignorance and lack of awareness on how difficult and complex task it is.
Centralized solutions are often just a business, they're not transparent, they're not cooperative, they're not ethical, they're there to conquer market and there's big money behind them, they're part of surveillance capitalism.
These are just examples, but there's lot more, so in context of social media, it's intertwined with the rest of simulation called "real world", so almost no one is going to know what you're talking about, when mention Loops/Mastodon/Bluesky, people know dominant platforms and stick to them and they may do so as part of social pressure and because they compete for status. In this society, you won't gain status by using Loops. People are buying iPhone for status, even though something like Samsung or Fairphone would be good as well. People are buying luxury frames for glasses, because they want to show brand, they don't care that it's more expensive and quality is basically they same.
Ostrom provided the solution to the tragedy of the commons: self-organizing, collective governance. It is no coincidence that Agile is a convergent solution to the exact same principles. We were told for decades that the only options are the state or the market, Ostrom proved that false.
But we don't live in an evidence-based world, we live in one shaped by power dynamics. We have the blueprint for collective prosperity, but we choose extraction. In the US, this has gone so far that Christianity has been twisted into a prosperity gospel, a heresy that serves as a moral shield for raw capitalism. It allows the system to pretend that business interests are actually virtues.
The world is in a mess because we ignore the mechanics of the systems we build. Be it capitalism, feudalism, or authoritarian communism, they all fail the same way, they lead to elite overproduction (Turchin).
When you funnel all resources to the very top, you create too many aspiring elites with no productive role to play. They inevitably turn on the system and each other. These systems are mathematically destined to collapse. Ostrom polycentric governance is one of the few ways out.
Anyone can recommend similar articles/blogs that focus on optimization of networking/computing in Linux/cloud environments? This kind of articles are very informative, because they refer to advanced mechanisms that I either haven't heard about or newer saw in practical use.
This is what the original article and most comments are missing here in my opinion. Theories of value matter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_(economics)#Theories . To some degree I might agree with subjective value theory, so in essence everyone values things differently.
However as a framework it describes outcomes without being able to critique them, so whatever happens in a market gets called efficient by definition, including monopoly rents, regulatory capture and the steady drift of returns from labor to capital.
In my opinion labor theory of value describes the underlying relation correctly. The fundamental relation is between employer and employee and the structural goal of that relation becomes extraction of surplus. Customers and product quality enter only as the means through which surplus gets realized.
Once you see it this way, the just-say-no engineer situation makes sense without bringing ZIRP into it. They were doing customer-facing work, defending product quality, inside a structure that doesn't actually want it. They were tolerated, not central. When tolerance shrank, so did they. Good products are incidental to extraction, sometimes useful for it, sometimes in the way.