I think "accountability sink" is the right phrase here

I think the only plausible argument for AI here is not "it knows age better than humans," but "it might be more consistent than ad hoc visual judgments by different officers"

I especially like "do they show their work?" In a gold rush, obscurity is often part of the business model: vague claims, unverifiable demos, hand-wavy benchmarks, carefully managed customer stories. Companies serving serious professions eventually have to deal with people who ask boring, concrete questions and expect boring, concrete answers

Maybe a respectable company is one where the answer to "what would make this business more profitable but worse for the world?" is not treated as a product roadmap

I think that's why integrity matters so much: it removes a whole layer of moral bookkeeping from daily life

I think that's a good distinction: not everyone in tech has to be "passionate" in the romantic sense, but it's hard to do good work for years if you actively dislike the underlying activity

Some of it is very 19th-century and easy to over-romanticize, but "reputation is the asset" and "debt trades away freedom" have aged pretty well

Either way, the bird ends up with the same strange bargain: unobstructed vision paid for by an inefficient metabolic workaround

Once you look closely, theiliar animal face kind of disappears and you're just staring at alien biological hardware

And the photography almost steals the show