Made me laugh. Fun article, also really love the genre of "bored smart person goes too deep on something that the end result is obvious by common sense but proving it requires surprising amount of ingenuity and scrappiness"
And a great example that truth is complicated, expensive and uncomfortable. It's much easier to postulate an evil nation-state entity with a bad plan (without evidence) than to dig through the thicket of this article. It's much cheaper as well, certainly in terms of time and knowhow. And it's also much more comfortable to claim you're the victim and have uncovered a conspiracy, rather than realize this was just the result of the patchwork typical of engineering.
Kudos to the author.
The worst thing is this creates an environment where most people are either completely credulous and buy into everything or completely incredulous and think everything is unfounded. It's just exhausting to have a healthy level of skepticism these days, and maybe 1 out of 1000 times (number source: from thin air) something that sounds insane actually has some truth to it.
It's scary because if even those in the know are not resistant to such BS, who else is going to shield the general public from populism-fueled pushes to anarchy or worse? Detoriation of trust in media is one of the building blocks of that, and if even the experts of subject areas are fooled and/or don't care enough, all hope may be lost.
The silver lining though is that the HN submission got pushback in terms of comments and an eventual flagging.
I laughed. While there certainly are very smart people here, HN crowd is pretty diverse and large parts of crowd are startup/business/framework of the week/ai bros folks. Not someone who would know what spi is from the top of their head.