Gotcha, thanks. I must’ve missed that one.

He also thinks that the number of lines of code produced is a relevant measure of productivity, so him not understanding this isn’t super surprising.

I assume it’s a joke about Elon asking for developers to willingly put their code into a predatory but apparently welcoming input for digestion.

Then they’re big enough to fight back.

My wife and I theorize that babies start smiling at around 2-3 months because that’s about the time that new parent adrenaline wears off, and if they didn’t start smiling the human race would’ve been collectively dropped off at the nearest bear’s den.

This is such a bizarre phenomenon. Not “micro-retirement,” but business news outlets learning about something that’s incredibly normal but might have a new name or angle, and then writing it up as if it’s this insane and reckless overreach (occasionally throwing the bone of “…though there might also be good reasons for this”).

How do the writers behind a “micro-retirement” not get halfway through the research for this and then go “oh wait, I guess this is just normal PTO”?

Same with all of the “millennials are destroying X industry” articles. Literally just “oh, this generation doesn’t like that product.” Or “people are house-hacking” articles (literally just having roommates). Or “Quiet quitting” (literally just doing your job).

Probably this has a lot to do with people who are old, or who were born rich (or both) not remembering what it’s like to be young and poor, I guess. Or having corporate pressure to write an article lambasting young people for not working hard enough. Or just feeling the pressure to write something every day.

I can’t believe it’s clickbait. That hasn’t worked in a decade or more, right?

Probably. “We’ve investigated! No issues here!”

Yeah, good point.

Ooh, good point. Well, they’re both going to ship from the factory in nonworking condition, so that’ll be tough to tell.

Absolutely gonna be “made in America” in that the application of the cheap Chinese gold decal to the cheap Chinese handset will be done in America.

It’s definitely going to be the Escobar Phone all over again. Anyone who accidentally receives one will get a foil-wrapped $150 Huawei handset with a preinstalled background image.

Easier than spotting the Cybertrucks?

“Law and order”

“ChatGPT, here’s an executive order, make it sound legalish”

No problem! This is the sort of thing I think everyone will have to learn how to do sooner or later. Viewing source, checking archive.org, and such are just going to be a part of evaluating a site for legitimacy. I’m happy to help make it seem more attainable!

You know, I thought I heard it did, but now I can’t find any sources so it may just be Winforms or something.

Definitely fake, imo. They don’t pass the sniff test for me.

1. The design is identical on all four sites, with the exception of the logo. Now, this in and of itself isn’t a smoking gun: the design appears to be the WordPress default design from 2024. But it was the first thing I noticed, and with everything else…

2. The subjects are all the same but the copy is conspicuously different–if you and I were to each write an article about the same ramen, we wouldn’t write the same article, but we would probably come up with a couple of similar sentences or sentence fragments. These are intentionally making an effort to be as different as possible, but with the same title and topic.

3. I checked the Whois of each site you linked, and they’re all registered through Reykjavik despite having nothing to do with Iceland. Three of them are even pointing to the same Cloudflare servers.

4. The relationship between the “writers” and the content here make no sense. I could potentially see the Alabama Delta Gamma chapter posting some of these reviews, but Ninjago? Men’s shirts? Shadow the Hedgehog soft toy? “Evan Feinberg” says that he’s an advocate for “limited government,” and “his” photo is of a white dude, so why is “he” “reviewing” women’s fashion and Korean music? What does Cap City Energy have to do with any of this stuff?

5. By looking into the RSS feed, you can see that most of the articles on a given site were published within the same hour: Evan Feinberg’s articles were all posted between 0800-0900 UTC on June 13, 2024. There are only seconds in between them.

6. Subjective: The content feels very much like slop. Not even current slop, either, but year-ago slop.

7. Also subjective: The Cap City Energy site doesn’t seem to know that “Cap” is probably supposed to be short for “Capital.”

If you look in the Internet Archive, you can see that a few (maybe all?) of them used to be real, legitimate sites. Bama Delta Gamma has an archived version that even links to an Instagram that certainly seems to actually be for a sorority. I think that whoever is behind these waited for a URL to become available, snagged it when it expired, copied some of the details (maybe the logo and some images), then fed it along with a list of topics to an AI, and plugged the output into a WordPress site.

Sorry, I think I must have had a small stroke while writing that. I think I meant C++.

Those are silly folks lmao

Eh, I kind of get it. OpenAI’s malfeasance with regard to energy usage, data theft, and the aforementioned rampant shoe-horning (maybe “misapplication” is a better word) of the technology has sort of poisoned the entire AI well for them, and it doesn’t feel (and honestly isn’t) necessary enough that it’s worth considering ways that it might be done ethically.

I don’t agree with them entirely, but I do get where they’re coming from. Personally, I think once the hype dies down enough and the corporate money (and VC money) gets out of it, it can finally settle into a more reasonable solid-state and the money can actually go into truly useful implementations of it.

So it turns out that it’s just the “Recommended” section, and it’s actually the Microsoft flavor of React Native that spits out real Windows (I think C++) code, but still…yeah.