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 (#079) 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.
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.