While obviously requiring real-world ID verification will reduce privacy, is there really any actual privacy left on today's internet? Every company from your ISP to Google to every vendor you shop at can read your browser fingerprint and IP address, which in most cases is enough to uniquely identify you. For serious privacy-concerned users there are ways around all of this but the vast majority of internet users don't really seem to care. What additional level of privacy reduction do the ID-based plans cause beyond what we already have today?
Many parents don’t have the technical aptitude to set the controls up properly. I am a software engineer and I find it challenging to keep up with the nuances of parental control setup and how to adjust it as kids get older. Content is also imperfectly tagged and smart kids can easily find loopholes in most controls. Having a centralized ID validation system wouldn’t be an ideal solution but having something baked into the Internet itself to help parents shield their kids from inappropriate would be a good thing.
I think he means "eyeware is next" in the sense that it's the industry he'll be covering next. Pretty much every brand and every layer of the eyewear industry has been owned by Luxxotica for a long time.
They really picked a strange set of claims to ask people about.
- For the protein one, it's too general of a question. Some plant proteins aren't complete proteins while others are, and animal proteins can range from super-healthy oily fish to less-healthy bacon.
- The next three are more standard "almost certainly false" claims that would make sense to ask in a survey like this.
- The acetaminophen/autism thing was in headlines recently with lots of people either hyping it up or trying to discredit it. It's hard to say anything is clear either way, but it isn't completely outrageous to believe this one.
- Finally, "vaccines are used for population control" is just an outright conspiracy theory and not even mainstream for "false health claims."
Lumping different types of questions together like this is like saying "more than 70% of people believe that butter isn't as bad as we thought or that the moon landing was faked."
UPDATE: Solar was 37.6, not 27.7. I'm not quite sure where I got the incorrect number from. The corrected total is 121.93, which is indeed greater than the 120 for natural gas. I apologize for the error but I can't edit my original comment anymore so I'll just post the correction here. Thanks to mekdoonggi and 0xdde for correcting my mistake.
I don't think this article did the math right. In the linked source from the article (https://ember-energy.org/data/electricity-data-explorer/?ent...), in 03/2026 combined generation from hydro (26 TWh), wind (53), solar (27.7), bioenergy (3.82), and other renewables (1.51) is 112.03 TWh, vs 120 TWh for natural gas. It's still an impressive number but it is still slightly less than natural gas.
They are increasing, but the level is still lower than it's been since Oct 2020. In my experience at two different companies since 2020, hiring more or less stopped sometime in 2022 to early 2023. In early 2025, some hiring started again but it's still a very low rate compared to pre-COVID, particularly for new college grads. While I don't believe that AI has actually taken any significant number of jobs in the software field, I do think it's being used as a convenient excuse by executives to lay people off. Regardless of the actual numbers though, the general perception in tech is "lots of layoffs are happening with not so much hiring" and "AI has something to do with it (either directly or as an excuse)."
This has mirrored what I've seen in my company. People in the data science/ML part of the company are super excited about AI and are always giving presentations on it and evangelizing it. Most engineers in other areas, though, are generally underwhelmed every time they try using it. It's being heavily pushed by AI "experts" and senior leaders, but the enthusiasm on the ground is lacking as results rarely live up to the extremely rosy promises that the "experts" keep making. Meanwhile, everyone can read the news about layoffs attributed to AI and can see that hiring (especially of junior engineers) has slowed to a trickle. You can only fool people for so long.
Every engineer in a given department knows who the good and bad managers are. If you don't care about your engineers' development, you won't be able to keep good engineers on your team as they will transfer internally. Engineers also talk to directors and make sure they know who the good managers are. There's really no upside to treating your engineers like crap.
I've been an engineering manager for 9 years and I've always understood that a big part of my job is career development for people on my team. An EM's role is to hire, retain, and develop talented engineers so that the team they manage can succeed. It always amazes me when I hear that managers don't do this. If they aren't developing their team, what are they doing?
The problem is that Congress has delegated a lot of its traditional law making power to the Executive Branch. Laws are written in vague ways with executive agencies given liberty to implement as they see fit. This gives a lot of additional power to the President (who can at least be dealt with by impeachment or being voted out in the next election) as well as independent executive agency heads (who can't be directly fired by anybody). I agree that Congress should be the ones passing laws as the excessive delegation of lawmaking by Congress is what's gotten us into the current situation
It's a fair question to ask "who are independent executive agency heads accountable to" in a constitutional context. It is true that the Executive Branch has grown far beyond what the Founding Fathers could have imagined, but the idea of a unitary executive is that the President is responsible and accountable for everything that happens in the Executive Branch. If the voters don't like what the Executive Branch is doing, they can replace the President in the next election. What happens if voters don't like what independent executive agencies are doing? There's no democratic recourse.
Think of a scenario where a President was elected with a large-ish majority and promised during the campaign to change broadband regulations to reduce broadband prices across the country. Unfortunately, the FCC commissioners were all appointed by the previous president and block this policy change that the voters clearly support. How does that square with democratic accountability?
I work at a company trying very hard to incorporate AI into pretty much everything we do. The people pushing it tend to have little understanding of the technology, while the more experienced technical people see a huge mismatch between its advertised benefits and actual results. I have yet to see any evidence that AI is "paradigm shifting" much less "revolutionary." I would be curious to hear any data or examples you have backing those claims up.
In regards to why tech people should be skeptical of AI: technology exists solely to benefit humans in some way. Companies that employ technology should use it to benefit at least one human stakeholder group (employees, customers, shareholders, etc). So far what I have seen is that AI has reduced hiring (negatively impacting employees), created a lot of bad user interfaces (bad for customers), and cost way more money to companies than they are making off of it (bad to shareholders, at least in the long run). AI is an interesting and so far mildly useful technology that is being inflated by hype and causing a lot of damage in the process. Whether it becomes revolutionary like the Internet or falls by the wayside like NFTs and 3D TV's is unknowable at this point.
When I'm hiring an engineer, HR will easily let me bump up the offer by $10-20K if the candidate counters. It is nearly impossible to get that same $10-20K bump for an existing engineer that is performing extremely well. Companies themselves set up this perverse incentive structure.
There is some truth to this, but I think this way of thinking is overly simplistic. From a material standpoint, any job that can provide for you and your family's needs is "meaningful" since you can't really have a meaningful life without having basic needs provided for. From a spiritual standpoint, however, I think it is detrimental for someone to know that their job is largely pointless or achieves no tangible outcomes in the world. I think this same criticism applies to UBI and other "end of work" ideas, since a person with no job is likely to suffer from the same lack of purpose as someone who senses their job is BS. People are intrinsically wired to want to do work and make some kind of difference (even if that difference is just knowing that you helped manufacture 500 cars that day, dug a ditch that will be used for some useful purpose, whatever).