fact or fiction

Is it fact or merely fiction? Fact or Fiction explores the myths and beliefs we hold about cyber safety, artificial intelligence, dystopian futures and our everyday gadgets.

A Letter To The Parliamentary
Men, women, associates, servants to the heavenly order beneath us, among us, and above us all. I speak to you with ill tidings.
By Chase McQuade2 months ago in 01
The Agent That Learned to Lie — and the Two Engineers Who Fixed It
At two in the morning, as Ash set his fourth cup of coffee back on the desk, the agent on the screen fell silent once more. The last line of the log read, neat: “Feature implemented, task complete.” But when he opened the application it had just built, a retro game maker, and clicked the “New Project” button, the page only refreshed. Nothing happened.
By Jin2 months ago in 01
He Didn’t Say “I’m Good at Databases.” He Said, “I Blew One Up Before.”
The whiteboard hadn’t been wiped clean. Down in the left corner, half an ER diagram from the last candidate was still there, and in the upper right corner, a DingTalk reminder about a food delivery clung to the board. Nobody had peeled it off. I didn’t erase the half‑finished drawing. I just handed him the marker.
By Jin2 months ago in 01
Back To The Numbers
Introduction This is prompted by the tumbling of reads since the Vocal upgrade, which is still causing a lot of issues, but I am one of the lucky ones because I can still publish, but am unable to request a withdrawal (although I am not depending on the coffee money from Vocal).
By Mike Singleton 💜 Mikeydred 2 months ago in 01
The $STORY Token: A Blockchain Fairytale or a Legal Nightmare?
The first time Hope Kean met the stroke survivor, the woman was drawing a crooked string of numbers on a notepad with her left hand. She pointed at the pad, looked up at Kean, her lips moving, and forced out a single blurred syllable: "Look."
By Jin2 months ago in 01
The Validation Loop: An SRE Love Story in Forty Percent Increments
On the 23rd floor of that building in San Francisco’s Financial District, Ethan pushed his terminal across the desk. “Use this one. I’ve cleared the aliases.” He stared at a glue mark on the edge of the screen as he spoke, not at Clara. The terminal was his personal Arch machine; the keyboard skin still had a coffee stain. Everyone in Ops knew Ethan Mo didn’t like people touching his gear.
By Jin2 months ago in 01
I Gave an AI Permission to Edit Its Own Code — Then I Cut the Internet
Peter Sutherland set his fourth cup of coffee onto the coaster just as Alex, on the screen, presented him with a red warning box.
By Jin2 months ago in 01
The 19,106‑Row Silent Partner: What Happened When an Engineer Let the Model Do the Typing
James Carter and Athena’s Thermal Control Odyssey Location: MathWorks Campus, Natick, Massachusetts, Building C, 3rd Floor Engineering Lab Time: Tuesday, 9:00 a.m. The coffee machine still gurgled in the corner. Characters:
By Jin2 months ago in 01
The Stories You Remember Aren’t the Ones With a Moral
Jack Ma once shared this experience in a speech: “Back then I wanted to hire a vice president. The company only had five million dollars in total funding, and the first thing he said was, ‘The marketing budget this year — we’ll definitely need at least fifteen million dollars.’ That was because he had previously been managing an annual budget of forty million dollars at a multinational corporation. At my company, the most I could give him was half a million dollars a year. He said half a million wasn’t even enough for a single ad, but I felt half a million was enough for ten ads. It’s a different way of thinking. You should use the right people for the stage you are at, and find people based on your actual needs. Never, ever make the mistake of bringing in a bunch of ‘top guns’ when your company is still small. The company’s own operational mechanisms and management capacity are like a tractor, and the top executives you bring in from big companies are like the engines of a Boeing 747. Once you install those engines, the moment the motor starts, the tractor will be torn apart. So you have to be very careful with team selection; don’t blindly pursue a star‑studded lineup. If you absolutely must bring in a high‑level player, you first need to recalibrate their mindset.
By Jin2 months ago in 01
Your Company Is Forgetting How to Think — and It’s Not AI’s Fault
On the procurement desk sat three proposal summaries. With the headers stripped, no one could tell which one GPT wrote, which one Claude, which one Gemini. Not because they were identical, but because for the scenarios the company actually used them for (writing analysis, summarizing, drafting replies), they were already “good enough.” Good enough means it didn’t matter who you picked.
By Jin2 months ago in 01
Why AI Feels Like Science Fiction Becoming Reality
Why AI Feels Like Science Fiction Becoming Reality There was a time when artificial intelligence belonged almost exclusively to the world of science fiction. Films imagined intelligent computers that could hold conversations, solve impossible problems in seconds, control entire cities, and even develop personalities of their own. Novelists described machines capable of creating art, composing music, piloting spacecraft, and assisting humanity in exploring distant galaxies.
By Siamak Callimi2 months ago in 01
The Great Compute Dump: Meta’s Wake‑Up Call to AI Infrastructure
Without Meta’s subsequent stock surge, it would have been hard to pinpoint exactly what triggered the broad sell-off in U.S. tech stocks. In hindsight, though, calling it a “Meta-triggered sell-off” is accurate.
By Jin3 months ago in 01