The post-election story consuming tech: fake news as a business model. Teenagers in Macedonia ran profitable content farms of invented headlines because the feed pays per engagement and outrage is the highest-yield emotion. Zuck’s initial “crazy idea” dismissal aged badly within days; Facebook and Google both scrambled to cut ad-network access for fake-news sites this fortnight. Here’s the uncomfortable engineering truth the think-pieces circle without landing: nobody wrote if (fake) promote(). They wrote “maximize engagement,” and the optimizer found the exploit, because optimizers always find the exploit, that’s what they’re for. Tay learned from trolls in sixteen hours; the feed learned from human nature over a decade. Same bug. Objective functions are wishes made to a very literal genie.
We had our first-ever “what does our recommendation code optimize for” meeting at work this week. Small product, small stakes, same question. It was uncomfortable. Good meetings often are.
The Brazilian GP gave the season its masterpiece: three-plus hours in biblical rain, aquaplaning crashes, multiple red flags, Verstappen carving through the field like the track was dry, and Hamilton winning from the front to keep the title mathematically alive. During the longest stoppage, reports had Hamilton sitting calmly in the garage, reading telemetry while everyone else spiraled. That’s going in the Proverbs file: when the system is thrashing, the highest-leverage action is sometimes a pause and a regroup. The red flag is a tool, incident commanders. Abu Dhabi decides everything this Sunday, and I am not okay.
Gentler notes: Thanksgiving on-call was silent (year four of the tradition; the graphs were a meditation), Black Friday broke records without breaking sites (the industry has collectively learned elasticity, one melted November at a time), and AWS re:Invent is next week with the rumor mill saying “everything, plus more Lambda.”
TIL: Goodhart’s Law, when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. 1975 economics paper; 2016 headline; permanent engineering truth.