So you can't sideload apps on iOS, installing your own apps in dev mode is unnecessarily hard and restricted, and you can't release an app in the app store that is not open to the general public? So if I want to build an app just for my family, what do I do?
I think the answer is to use TestFlight? So you can provide a link to your family that will let them install the test version of the app. Unfortunately it does expire after some time, IIRC
There's a German gay social/dating app called Romeo that has a feature where you can show which people you know personally. There's no physical validation though, so it's easy to fake.
It's been well know to happen on reddit too for many years. Whole posts and comment threads copied verbatim with new accounts. Nowadays with AI you can make it way more dynamic.
I've acquired a sense for at least some of the bots. There's this set of bots that post a high-engagement post about once a day to an implausibly large range of subreddits, with implausible regularity. I can tell by the way I remove them and the way that the other subs are mostly not that most subs have not figured this out yet.
There is an obvious solution to that problem, which I haven't wanted to put out there, but I've become increasingly suspicious that it's already been figured out anyhow, which is to limit a specific user account to a specific "persona" with plausible interests and posting rates.
And that's where I think the race may well end, victory spammers. If there's a winning move against that in general I haven't figured it out.
I know reddit is concerned about this at the corporate level but I'm not sure they realize this is possibly their #1 threat, towering above all others. Not that I have any specific suggestions about what to do about it either. And it's years before the masses realize this and stop visiting, and by the time that happens all the social media companies are going to be in trouble for the same reason. You can see the leading edge here on HN but it's still only an almost negligible fraction of the total userbase of something like Reddit today. But that will change.
Reddit's also famous for NSFW content. There are also stories about harrasing people who post in the "wrong" subreddit (e.g. political subreddits that are the opposite view).
Reddit has a P/E ratio higher than Nvidia. Go ahead and think about that for a little while and then try and explain it with anything other than their value is being a bot-driven propaganda-pushing device for sale.
Out of curiosity, has anyone noticed a non-negligible presence of bots in threads on HN? I haven't, but I'm not sure if that's because I'm bad at spotting them or because HN is good at getting rid of them or because HN is a niche platform.
Yes, they’re very identifiable. New or resurrected account makes multi-paragraph comments on random topics with “insights” that read like AI, even if they don’t have em-dashes or “it’s not X it’s Y” (and sometimes they do).
Fortunately and in fairness to this site, they’ve become rarer, and most seem to be flagged within hours. Usually I look at the comments to confirm, and most are already dead.
I made a post here a bit ago where one of the few replies I got was one of these conversational ad-bots, albeit on the more obvious side. It was getting flagged which gives me hope that HN is good at filtering it, but I also mildly worry I'm (or we're) just missing it when it's subtle. I do suspect it's a huge volume in terms of comment count either way though.
I have suspicions but there's fewer signals on HN available to the general public so it's harder to tell.
Well... to be more precise... I'm abundantly positive there are bots and shills here in a general sense. But when it comes to identifying specific accounts as bots or shills, it gets difficult. Yeah, a lot of us have gotten pretty good at identifying the "default LLM voice", but it is trivial to kick it out of that.
I have done some formal writing with AI, and I always feed it a sample of my own writing to emulate. It doesn't do it perfectly. For instance, I'm a semi-colon kind of guy and it still em-dashes without more explicitly instructions to avoid them. But what comes out the other end would definitely pass most people's "default LLM voice" sniff test; it eliminates most of the tells [1] people look for. (I just checked. The resulting output may actually be "better" at avoiding the tells than my own actual text...)
The upshot of all of that is that we are approaching a point with the current AIs that with just a bit of clever prompting it may take many, many kilobytes of text for someone to form a justified (!) opinion that some set of posts is actually AI.
> It's been well know to happen on reddit too for many years
"For many years" being around 20 years at this point. Not sure reddit is a great example, given the founders admitted to using sockpuppets almost since day 1 in order to generate fake activity on the platform.
Still not great if consumed regularly, sugar is one of the worst thing we pump our bodies. Its basically a slow acting poison that kills our organs. Complex carbs are better, but stuff in drinks is same as eating spoonfulls of it directly
Totally agree. One thing I really like about HN is it reminds you that nobody's individual experience is indicative of the industry at large.
The parent comment stated "Most codebases I encounter just have "changed stuff" or "hope this works now"." I worked at 6 tech companies in my career and a slew of contracting gigs, and I literally never encountered the problem of commit messages being uninformative. Most of the companies developed strict rules for commit comments like always including an issue number (with occasional [NO-ISSUE] tags allowed for minor changes) or something like Conventional Commits, https://www.conventionalcommits.org/en/v1.0.0/ .
That would never work. Have you never been mindlessly walking and stepped on a bike way without realizing? Cities are for people after all. There's also so many places where bikes and pedestrians share the way, like roads under construction, and shared streets. We need to stop thinking of cities as these perfect automated places where humans are not welcome.
I think it's still very important for adaptability. yes, a land rover can run for years and run thousands of experiments, but it's limited to whatever scientific probes it was equipped with. Humans are right now more flexible and could adapt experiments to findings, which would then inform the next rovers. And when the time comes that we start mining and building on the moon, a few humans will probably need to live there. So any data on human survival outside the Earth is useful data. https://humanresearchroadmap.nasa.gov/
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