AI was supposed to replace juniors and then climb up the ladder with each new release, eventually leaving any work only for the creme of the crop. Which would make the current generation of software engineers the last, but who cares - stocks go up.
Now apparently we've switched to pairing poor kids with an agreeable digital moron that reads and types real fast and expecting them to somehow get good at the job. Stocks still go up, so I guess we'll be doing this for a while.
Invite only, laws, law enforcement, exile.
Federated sovereign clusters.
Digital nations, ultimately. Except you don't need weapons and a piece of land to establish a new one.
(We already have these, we just let corporations run them)
Corruption of power is an inherent property of power. It is expected that people in power will get corrupted. The methods of power grabs are also fairly universal.
The difference between a corrupt shithole and free world is not in what the government tries to do, but in how the governed respond.
US gets to decide how at least half the fund gets spent, so it's US businesses who get the investment and eventually reap the profits. Ukraine obviously doesn't have the cash to give back and it will never have any without reconstruction. This is one way US gets anything at all back at a pace it has any control over.
But you are correct that without security guarantees there will be no development, no reconstruction, no investments. The deal just does nothing.
The only part of you post that can be steelmanned into what can be considered an argument is "NATO expansion". And that argument falls apart if you actually think and explore it for like 15 minutes. Like, what is NATO and its purpose, how does "expansion" actually work in terms of process, what events took place on the continent between 90s and new NATO members joining, what else could have compelled parties to go through the process and how durable that would be?
And then the rest of your "question" is straight up factually false.
The article states fairly clearly that they've lost to clickbait (and, I would guess, increasingly, to AI-slop). I.e. it was advertising that defeated them, not the ad blockers.
The fundamentally corrupt business model has grown big enough to reach its own tail and has been happily chomping on it for a while. Now it's getting to the juicy parts.
I feel those are how Pandora and Last.fm (used to?) work respectively. Nowadays everything seems to just put a bunch of tags on a track and suggest you things with the same tags to the tracks you liked. Doesn't even need to match the same combination of tags, just some number of them. The problem is, you probably care about the small, specific tags, and the system cares about wide "popular" tags. If you like a couple niche genre covers of songs that happen to be featured in TV openings/OSTs, you are not getting more songs in that genre - you are getting a bunch of covers and OSTs.
I don't know from where came this idea that not having a certain thing will inevitably ruin child's relationship with the parent and cause a collapse of at least some part of their life, but if it was implanted - someone somewhere should have a pure gold Marketer of The Century award on their table.
Also, install Unhook Youtube - it allows reducing YT to pretty much just subscriptions and watch later.
The actual horrifying part is that this is more of a coping tool than a warning system, as its utility as the latter is limited even in Kyiv. If you are not at the point of accepting your fate, but have already given up on attempting to get to actual shelter, you can set this up and only hide from glass shrapnel for an hour when the cruise missiles and killer drones arrive instead of hiding for hours while they fly all over the country through the gaps of air defense.
For anywhere closer to the frontline than Kyiv this is almost completely useless. Travel time of even non-hypersonic ballistics, hell, even of glide bombs is so short you'd be listening to your alarm and the sound of explosions almost simultaneously.
Anonymous verification could be something like OAuth. Government run or certified probably. You'd need to provide an ID to OAuth provider once, but the actual service requesting verification would get as little as your age and email.
Modern internet is not in business of producing content and using ads as means of paying for said content production and delivery. Modern internet is in business of selling ads and is using content producers as means of keeping users in front of screens while ads are being shoved into their faces.
So, yeah, internet would be different, but to me it isn't obvious how it would be any worse or less in value.
The argument, I think, is that these book sales are in big (-er than historically) part driven not by their quality, but by either physical attraction to the author or admiration for their perceived success.
In somewhat related news Studio Ghibli recently released new last Miyazaki animated movie - The Boy and the Heron - with pretty much no marketing, as in not even a trailer. Its opening box office surpassed that of Spirited Away.
4chan maintains an up to date brief snapshot of internet consensus on represented topics. If I'm not interested in reading walls of text, watching 20 minute youtube essays, trying to discern genuine review from blog spam or infomercial, or doing 3 pass statistical analysis on rating aggregator as it's being brigaded by 3 different parties, and just want to find out what's good/bad/current - I don't really know any other place to go.
I do agree that in general case heavy moderation is preferable and most shitty communities are shitty because of too little moderation, not to much. But the rest of your reasoning gets destroyed by the fact that 4chan is, despite its age, infamy and continuous slide into lunacy, still an order of magnitude more popular website than HN and for a number of purposes, still the best community on the internet.
Again, it's not a hypothetical. The obvious goal of russian propaganda is to erode western support for Ukraine. Without western support Ukraine cannot fight country 4 times its size with infinite oil money. Armed Forces of Ukraine are the only thing standing between Ukrainan nation and its genocide. Russian propaganda succeeds - genocide completes. It's not that hard.
You are talking about hypotethicals and I'm talking about reality of today. If you let actual real innocent people die for your principles - you are not virtuous, the future you build and try to protect is not virtuous. It doesn't matter how correct your principles are.
Now apparently we've switched to pairing poor kids with an agreeable digital moron that reads and types real fast and expecting them to somehow get good at the job. Stocks still go up, so I guess we'll be doing this for a while.