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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 26th, 2023

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  • I once worked for one of the largest media companies in my country and there was a project where they wanted to replace reCaptcha with a partner’s system that made users watch ads and ask a question about the ad instead of typing some hard to read text.

    Testing such system, I quickly realized that the captcha part of it could easily be bypassed by anyone with minimal JS knowledge (the answer was available in a global JS var), but the answer would not be accepted by the server unless the entirety of the ad video had been successfully streamed to the video component.

    I still remember clearly the response I got when I reported to the PO that the system was unfit due to being easily bypassed with JS:

    “no user is gonna be coding anything just to avoid typing the answer on the input”.

    Shouldn’t have expected much more from the same company that had me wait for the responsible person to get back from their 1-month vacation when I reported that their customers’ full credit card information was included in the output of a publicly available URL that only required an order ID.

    But I later found out that most orders in that particular project were actually made by bots with stolen credit card information (the bots would use this company’s shopping cart to validate which cards were still working so they could use it for something useful afterwards). In the end we were mostly just leaking information that had already been leaked before.






  • Another problem I’ve realized today, is the proliferation of data that was originally hallucinated by AI.

    I was discussing an issue on a software with a coworker and he asked an AI for help configure around it. He then sent me “apparently we can try changing this setting to this value”. I told him to first validate if that setting really existed because AI tends to make up things like that when it’s what you would want to hear and running a test would take us 20~30 minutes.

    He found some discussions about that setting not working as people expected. “ok at least it exists then” and we tried it. It didn’t work. I later cloned the source of that software and checked, the setting didn’t exist - ever.



  • Company trying to be cool by occasionally gathering employees on touristic destinations instead of an office. Employees really love it, as it’s just like a vacation if you just ignore that you can’t pick your own accommodations, or when/what to have breakfast, lunch or dinner, or that every “leisure” activity has specific start and end times and is mandatory, or the fact that everyone is still expected to work too.






  • Search WAS good when it was a simple search. Sites were indexed by the search engine and if you searched for the words you wanted to find, the results would be exactly that. In that context, it worked perfectly.

    But the problem was that most people used search engines in a different way. They weren’t searching for specific content, but searching for answers to questions. And for that, search engines would only show results that had that same question and then you’d need to hope that the question had been answered.

    Over time, search engines kept shifting into trying to better support the questions and answers format, making the basic content search worse as a result. Where we are now, neither or them works too well. Google is now better at understanding what people are trying to search, but worse at finding it.

    AI is just expanding this with yet another layer: it might make Google better at understanding what you search and maybe even might be better at finding it than the engine is now, but it’ll add the ability to misinterpret the results too.

    Honestly I’d be pretty happy if I had a simple indexed search again.