What companies are examples of that bait and switch strategy?

Google tried to become a national security contractor, and the backlash among the engineers was very intense.

Google already does national security work.

https://cloud.google.com/distributed-cloud-air-gapped

https://www.defence.gov.au/news-events/releases/2025-12-19/d...

I’m not in the industry, but I would say Hermeus would be a perfect example. Ostensibly building a commercial airliner, but if you look closely it feels like a military oriented startup from the inside out.

Can't give any examples but I have definitely heard the same about a lot of aerospace startups through the grapevine. As for OP's point about private jets, Boom supersonic is your classic example.

I can't name names but 3 of the startups I've worked at.

Places I haven't worked:

Skydio

Applied Intuition

Saildrone

Planet Labs

Boom

Scale AI

Also worth noting that sometimes it's on purpose, sometimes the founders are all "we're gonna save the world" then AFWERX enters the chat with a big fucking check and the founders yell "Nevermind! Guess we're the baddies now! How many slaughterbots did you say?"

Does mercurial allow you to re-write history like that?

Yes, Mercurial has a very advanced history editing system via "evolution": https://wiki.mercurial-scm.org/ChangesetEvolution

A good way of thinking about it is that every commit is itself version-controlled, allowing unlimited edits. This even allows two people in an evolve-enabled repo to make changes to history at the same time, and Mercurial will resolve any conflicts. It makes it trivial to commit (and even share) a "WIP" commit which you can later amend/split/whatever. It's different from git where you basically can't edit history after pushing (in Mercurial this only becomes true if you push to a non-evolvution or "publishing" repo, where everything then gets squashed for public consumption).

The rules around CVE reporting changed recently and it would be expected a lot more are accepted.

My team has been using AI to add code, but also to aggressively remove old deprecated code. "Is anyone still using this? How does this get called" is easier to answer when you can toss your FE, BE, and entire codebase at an agent and let it create a map of your software project. IDEs can do this in a single language to some degree usually in a single project, but RPC, REST, etc... break some of these tools in a lot of IDEs.

Are you a dev? What does part time look like?

Yes, I write software. The company is 100% remote with an annual team meetup and an annual company meetup, but I only go to the team one.

4 days a week, online at 9-10 am, offline 2-3 pm most days. Sometimes I'm working a sticky problem and stay online later. Or if I start a deploy in late afternoon, I'll stick around to finish it, etc.

Still on group chats, may or may not mute them on my day off.

I have a similar problem in a community I'm a a part of? How are you reliably detecting AI?

It's not about perfectly identifying AI content. There's a relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/810/

When posts fall within "acceptable" then it does not actually matter where it comes from. Logorrhea, massively offtopic, and/or shitposting are bad when humans do it. Those should suffer the same fate.

Historically it was tolerable, but has become the highest priority today because machines have cranked up the volume. If we mis-identify human garbage as robot nonsense it does not matter.

You create an agency and give it a mandate that requires it to balance concerns.

This answer can be applied to pretty much any social question.

If it were so easy, we'd do this all the time. We already do it a lot, and there are heaps of examples where it goes wrong.

And examples where it goes right. Federal reserve, FDA, SEC, etc..

> The burden of proof should fall on the platform, not the victim. The question is not whether a harmed user can show specific damage. The question is whether the company can show, before rolling a product out to billions of people, that it is not predatory by design.

That's asking every company to prove a negative before rolling out new features.

Could we have a regulatory agency that keeps an eye on dark patterns and deals with them as evidence emerges that something is harmful.

> That's asking every company to prove a negative before rolling out new features.

That’s not as rediculous as it seems. That’s sort of model that drug manufacturers follow. It would also mean that if internally they see troubling behaviour they know they have to stop.

Practically, it would be corporate cover up. And applied earnestly it would make these businesses unviable.

Wait how?

Internal testing showed these features were addictive. They had resources allocated to creating addictive experiences for tweens.

The underlying behavioral science is well studied, down to the causal level.

Dark patterns are designed to make it hard to exit and unsubscribe. The language is purposefully obtuse, the options buried behind menu choices. We have enough A/B testing data to know how effective friction is at dissuading people from following a path.

How are we proving a negative here?

Proving something is addictive is not proving a negative

Ok. So is that you are saying that the quoted section is setting up a situation where the firm has to prove a negative?

Yes

> The question is whether the company can show, before rolling a product out to billions of people, that it is not predatory by design.

"Not predatory" is a negative

Only for a subset of people. Many would accept solutions that preserve privacy. Divide and conquer. Remove supporters from the anti-privacy group.

If I need to grab 100 locks, they are all moving around a lot, but I've got the first 10, will the order be the same for someome trying to get the same 100? Eg maybe someone swaps two that neither of us has grabbed yet.

That makes sense you could only move locks that are "after" all taken locks