benoau

But AI could certainly make some poor choices and cause havoc - if AI messed up Walmart's refrigerator configuration that would be 15x greater effect than France earlier this month, there would certainly be localized food shortages:

> On 11 October 2026, an unknown party hacked into the refrigeration controllers at up to 700 French supermarkets[2] and set them to defrost mode overnight, causing their refrigerators to overheat.

There must be many situations like this entrenched in industries that could be brought to their knees maliciously or accidentally - even where there should be security like eMudhra the certificate authority:

> The affected refrigeration controllers each ran a web server reachable over the public internet, many of them[2] accessible using login credentials 'admin' as the username and the current date as the password.

About ten years ago I deliberately started doubling-down on JavaScript instead, it's good-enough for practically any use case and I've been able to leverage it for web, mobile, desktop, server and games. There are things other languages can do better, but I love not having to install them and manage their different versions and dependencies, and stay familiar with their idiomatic approaches, and keep up-to-date with their evolution.

There are outcomes where a monoculture can be bad, but structurally I think JavaScript is in a good place - open standard, open governance, open to proposals, massive open source culture.

I can still remember when they hired dang and he's still around, I see people posting I recognize from 18 years ago when I first started reading this site...

UnFoUnDeD!

> Meta internally projected late last year that it would earn about 10% of its overall annual revenue – or $16 billion – from running advertising for scams and banned goods, internal company documents show.

> Much of the fraud came from marketers acting suspiciously enough to be flagged by Meta's internal warning systems. But the company only bans advertisers if its automated systems predict the marketers are at least 95% certain to be committing fraud, the documents show. If the company is less certain – but still believes the advertiser is a likely scammer – Meta charges higher ad rates as a penalty, according to the documents. The idea is to dissuade suspect advertisers from placing ads.

> The documents further note that users who click on scam ads are likely to see more of them because of Meta's ad-personalization system, which tries to deliver ads based on a user's interests.

> At the same time, the documents indicate that Meta's own research suggests its products have become a pillar of the global fraud economy. A May 2025 presentation by its safety staff estimated that the company's platforms were involved in a third of all successful scams in the US Meta also acknowledged in other internal documents that some of its main competitors were doing a better job at weeding out fraud on their platforms.