this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2026
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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Not to sound like a conspiracy theory, but after the Russian bot farm thing I think this is a race to have the means to Astro turf the Internet for propaganda.
I think we are going to end up with infranetworks, regionally and nationally to avoid this. And I fear that the only way to confirm that someone is not a bot soon will be ID or some sort of biometrics. I think this is a controversial take, but I’d support a non-anonymous internet/social media alternative if it meant everyone I talk to is a human.
As for a more optimistic take…. I’m sure there’s a lot of complex science shit that instead of actually mindfully researching and experimenting with, can instead just be brute forced. Kinda like those videos where they train “AI” to play racing games or Mario levels, but letting it randomly attempt it thousands of times — and eventually it even beats humans playing it in time and efficiency. Maybe we can use AI to generate more efficient machines?….
I think we are at the point where AI would be okay enough to do simple shit like simplified farm and factory work, low stakes stuff where it fucking up can’t actually have that severe of consequences. That’d require sweeping economical and social reforms to tackle unemployment, and that’s too optimistic for me. This probably won’t get us to a post scarcity society, but it could make a lot of things very trivial and cheap… if introduced ethically. There might be a point where there’s a lot of people that won’t/can’t get a job, many that shouldn’t need to get a job, and what to do with them. Not everyone can be the guy that fixes and builds the AI. Maybe being unemployed will become not a big deal
that's great thanks
If the Russian Bot Farm thing you're talking about is Ukraine bombing a data center and seeing 90% fewer right wing posts, I regret to inform you that it wasn't accurate [bluesky thread source]
The bots they were talking about were search crawler bots from Yandex. Actual Twitter/X bots saw no change in traffic.
Admitted speculation:
I did, however, notice of my own accord that I had 4 days with zero scam calls instead of my usual 10-15, which in retrospect looking back corresponds with when a bunch of Russian services went down. I suspect that the automated crawlers and VOIP systems and aggregators perform a background hum of utility for scam and troll services that makes them much less effective in their absence.
There was likely some overlap, but there was no major network shakeup like some people were claiming.