Duped

I came across a LinkedIn post that was illustrated with a comic that in guessing was created by generative automation. Having an LLM create a brief comic in the style of XKCD, so that one can avoid drawing literal stick figures for themselves contributes to a world in which people will see something that looks like XKCD, and wonder whether it was created by a random computer somewhere, or if Randall Munroe has decided to sell out and shill for some random thing.

Not really XKCD

It occurred to me that this dilution of trust in XCKD isn't a problem for the people who use generative automation to copy it... but for Mr. Munroe, this has consequences, now having to pay costs for other people's actions among them.

Along with all of its other capabilities, generative automation can be an effective way to externalize costs. Because it doesn't matter if someone makes $100 from being creative, being efficient or saddling someone else with the bill; it still spends the same. And the more people come to feel that they're the ones left holding the bag for the benefits other people are receiving, the more pressure they will feel to externalize their own costs, just to keep up. Because that's nothing new; most likely, it's worked that way for all of human history.

That lack of a genuine functional difference between providing value and externalizing costs has always been a primary reason why technology doesn't live up to the promises made on its behalf, namely that the relationship between people and businesses will be partnerships; symbiotic, if you will. Because since a parasite doesn't contribute anything in exchange for the resources it receives, parasitic returns are necessarily higher than symbiotic returns. It's the same incentive that drives any form of rent-seeking; it exists when it's less capital-intensive than providing value.

And so the question becomes: How much parasitism can a system withstand before it begins to die? This is especially important in scenarios where the parasite can survive the death of the host; if people using generative automation to copy someone ruin that person's credibility, they can simply go on to copying someone else. It's a tragedy of the commons; there's a positive disincentive to preserve the original, if all that happens is someone else benefits. And eventually, all that's left is a wasteland.

Rejected

And the kind of helplessness that people feel, that leads to this kind of violence, is also unacceptable. And it's worth more scrutiny, from both the industry and our political leaders.
Nilay Patel. "Ronan Farrow on Sam Altman's 'unconstrained' relationship with the truth." Decoder with Nilay Patel. Thursday, 16 April, 2026.

Mr. Patel was giving an obligatory condemnation of violence, in response to the attacks on Sam Altman's home, which took place between when the Decoder episode was recorded, and when it was released. And I use "obligatory" here deliberately. Not in the sense that Mr. Patel felt some sort of pressure to make a statement that he didn't agree with, but in the sense that speaking out against violence is something that's expected. Mr. Patel had noted that the attacks on the Altman home didn't come up during the actual discussion with Mr. Farrow, and so it was clear that he was looking to head off criticism over that.

But what stood out for me was his labeling of a feeling of helplessness as "unacceptable." It seems that he was casting the blame for such emotions on the generative automation industry and the government, but the short statement that he made didn't offer anything to be done about it, other than have it scrutinized. Which is unlikely to happen. Because the kind of helplessness that people feel, that then leads to violence, has been around for quite some time. One wonders just what it would be about Sam Altman that would inspire people to look into it more deeply when the same people who Mr. Patel expects to do the looking have done such an excellent job of ignoring all of its previous incarnations. And the general public hasn't yet cared enough to punish them for it.

Because when people like Mr. Patel make the obligatory condemnations of violence, and advocate for someone (else) to do something about it, they tend not to offer an accountability mechanism to ensure that it's done. And maybe that's because, in the face of violence, they also feel a kind of helplessness, perhaps born of the realization that while they may have an audience, it's fairly tenuous. The public wants what it wants, and so while there are any number of people who will insist that the media leads the public, I'm of the opinion that the public more often leads the media.

And the public doesn't really have a problem with helplessness leading to violence, so long as it's directed somewhere else. Mainly, I think, because people don't see any other options. While Luigi Mangione is quite some distance from being a hero to the general public, there wasn't much in the way of condemnation for the killing of Brian Thompson on the grounds that it had foreclosed on, or even ignored, some better way of dealing with the problem. And so while Mr. Thompson's murder didn't solve anything, it did give people the idea that "one of the bad guys" had received what was coming to him. And, I suspect, had Mr. Altman been killed when his home was attacked, the same sentiment would have surfaced.

I don't think you can win [the War on Terror]. But I think you can create conditions so that those who use terror as a tool are less acceptable in parts of the world.
President George W. Bush. (NBC's "Today" show, 30 August, 2004.)

Creating conditions so that those who use violence as a tool are less acceptable requires large-scale disapproval of violence for its own sake, rather than out of disapproval for the specific ends to which violence (or terror) is being deployed. Even when those ends are punishing wrongdoers or acting in perceived self-defense. Violence of the sort that gains some level of public acceptance tends to occur when someone sees it as a reasonable response to the other person's actions (or inaction). It's rare for people, even a minority, to celebrate escalation. And the angrier and more upset people are, the less likely they are to see any given level of violence as an escalation.

I think that Mr. Patel's call for "industry and our political leaders" to scrutinize a general feeling of helplessness that then comes to be seen as the result of aggression against people, and therefore, a rationale for violence, may let the public off the hook, out of an agreement with the idea that most everyday people are, in fact, helpless. And maybe that's the problem that needs solving. But I think that the general public will need to be the ones who solve it. Which, when social trust is remarkably low, it something of a tall order. But trust is, in a lot of ways, a choice. So maybe step one is convincing people to make different ones.

Fabulous

In the end, LinkedIn is a social media site. And like any social media site, it has its share of people pushing dubious, but popular stories. Like this one, borrowed from X, I believe...

I'm pretty sure this story is bogus, because it doesn't make any sense...

A bot can't simply "hallucinate" a discount code. It has to create the code and the discount amount/percentage, then tell the sales (or whatever) database to allow it. Then it has to be advertised to customers, or simply applied to some or all orders. Any company that's allowing all that to happen in a production environment with no checks whatsoever is already being pretty badly mismanaged.

The development lead shouldn't need the former QA lead to tell him how to fix the problem. They simply go into the database and de-activate the discount code, presuming that this requires direct intervention from the developers at all, which strikes me as unlikely in any mature organization. If the "bot" had rewritten the code that managed discounting so that the code couldn't be turned off in production, the former QA lead isn't the person to describe how one fixes that. The QA lead would tell the development lead how to test for it.

If there's a legitimate use case for a 100%-off discount code, then it's entirely possible that it passed testing. Likewise if there's a legitimate use case for applying a discount code to all orders for a given amount of time (such as a promotion). It's rational to have a policy against applying discount codes of a certain type universally, but unless that policy's been fed into the system somewhere, it's reasonable the system wouldn't test for it. Accordingly, this is one of those things that could conceivably get by human testers, especially if they're using automated test tools, and not doing the testing manually, because it might not occur to anyone to ensure that a universal 100%-off code doesn't work unless there's something specifically in the specifications that demands it.

I get it, though. A lot of people are unhappy about the level of automation being deployed into the software and e-commerce industries, and the jobs being cut as a result. And it's hard to find someone who would never believe that corporate executives are capable of being penny-wise but pound-moronic. But having some limited experience in e-commerce and more experience as a QA manager, this story simply doesn't resonate with what I learned during those parts of my career. It may be framing the guilty, but it's a frame nevertheless, and it doesn't serve anyone to believe false stories of executive perfidy or generative automation malfunction.
 

And Another, And Another

The BBC has a story on their website about charges being filed against a young Florida man who has been accused of sexually assaulting and killing his stepsister during a family cruise vacation. The story is on the News homepage, one doesn't have to go to the "US & Canada" page to find it. In fact, it's more prominent on the News page.

On the one hand, I get it. The public likes these sorts of stories. They generate clicks, and thus, advertising revenue. But on the other hand, they don't seem to generate much else. The BBC, and other news organizations are willing to take on the stories of people who advocate for an end to violence against women, but tends to treat the individual stories about the violence as a form of salacious entertainment.

For my part, I am much more interested in the stepbrother. Or, I will be, once he's been found guilty. Because until then, it's not really worthwhile to ask him about the why of it all. And the why of it all is the important piece. Everyone seems to have an opinion on what causes violence against women, many of them woefully uninformed. But maybe that's to be expected in an environment where lurid stories are seen as newsworthy, but actionable, or perhaps simply explanatory information is too boring to post.

It's understood that people care about this. There's no shortage of anguished, or even outraged, essays about the subject on the internet. Families of the murdered can be heartbreakingly eloquent about the events that took their loved ones away from them. But if there's any broader response at all, it tends to be the same one that all crime that bothers people gets: Put more police officers on the streets, as if deputizing enough of the population will convince people to stay on the straight and narrow. But I'm not sure that any number of police officers would have been enough to stop a young man from murdering his stepsister and hiding her body under a bed.

Of course, part of the problem could be the blame game, and the need to expand the circle of responsibility beyond the perpetrator. That, along with familial loyalty, actively disincentivizes people from pointing out, or even seeing, potential warning signs. But that presumes that they actually know what to look for; and what to do if they saw it.

And that strikes me as the problem with crime news as a form of entertainment, something to be put in front of people around the world, to aid in their daily doomscroll. Crime has causes over and above the people who commit the individual crimes. It's unrealistic to presume that we could know them all, but I would be unsurprised to learn that there's more information out there than the general public has access to. And I fully expect that some amount of it could be very useful.

I live in the suburbs of Seattle. While there have been some really nice sunny stretches here and there, the Puget Sound region is still in the midst of the rainy season, which doesn't "officially" end until the beginning of July. Lots of people around here have at least a passing familiarity with Seasonal Affective Disorder, and the things that go along with it. Understanding how that fits into how crime manifests itself around here could be really helpful in curbing it; as much as it can be curbed in a reasonably dense urban/suburban area.

There's a distinct tendency to shy away from potential genetic causes of crime, and that makes perfect sense; the common reaction is to declare such people irredeemably broken from the start, and simply lock them away, so that everyone else need not be bothered with them. And that's another part of the problem. A person who confesses to wishing to harm themselves is seen as deserving of compassion and aid, while a person who confesses to wishing to harm another is simply a threat. But preventing harm is preventing harm... why does the source matter? And stigmatizing people who come forward to admit that they're having difficulties keeping themselves in check simply makes it less likely that people will come forward.

In the end, the fact that the sparse details of Anna Kepner's death are more interesting, and thus more useful to news organizations, than what steps might be taken to prevent the next death is simply another example of the perverse incentives that pervade human existence. Or maybe the issue is that they pervade human nature, as well.

Menswork

So there's an article on NPR that notes a growing sex disparity in new jobs and employment. As manufacturing continues to contract, and health care grows, women are finding it easier to land these roles than men. And the experts that NPR spoke with have some ideas on changing that.

 "If Trump really wants to get more Americans working," Betsey Stevenson, professor of public policy and economics at the University of Michigan, wrote in a December 2016 op-ed, "he'll have to do something out of his comfort zone: make girly jobs appeal to manly men." She notes in the NPR piece that there are ways of framing what had been seen as feminine roles, like nursing and preschool teachers, in more stereotypically masculine ways, such as emphasizing the need to lift people, or being able to engage in rough and tumble play.

But as someone who started their working life in a female-dominated profession, residential child and youth care, the problem wasn't that I felt that didn't belong in the job. It's that a lot of other people, regardless of gender, didn't feel that I belonged there. I still remember being at a party, back when I was in my twenties, where we were talking about my job, and a latecomer to the conversation was appalled that adult men were allowed to work with children. Surely, she reasoned, the only reason why a man would want to be around children was grooming. She was suitably embarrassed to be informed that it was me she was talking about, but that's different than rethinking the position.

[Richard] Reeves[, president of the American Institute for Boys and Men] notes that for years, the country has embraced policies and programs aimed at getting more women into science, technology, engineering and math, and the share of women in STEM jobs has grown.

I think that this is, in large part, because STEM jobs come with two things that people want: greater status, and higher pay. Healthcare and children's education come with neither. And it's unlikely that the people who currently have high status and well-paying jobs are going to want to share them.

And reducing the expectation, across society, that men are going to have to start moving into work that offers lower pay and status en masse, is going to be heavier lift than I suspect it's given credit for. Not to mention just the idea many families are going to have to get by with lower incomes across both partners. I've noted before that "I've come to understand that 'traditional masculinity' is a box, and any attempt to leave it is punishable." Attempting to show how what are widely considered "girly jobs" have somehow become more masculine is about piling more things into the box, when the box itself is the problem.