LinkedIn's AI Slop Button Hit 1M Reports in Two Weeks, Exposing Deeper Web Quality Crisis

·1 views

LinkedIn introduced a 'Seems like AI slop' reporting option on posts, which users clicked over one million times within its first two weeks, signalling widespread frustration with low-value content in feeds. The company's chief product officer confirmed the figure reflects total reports, not verified AI-generated posts or unique users. While most users view the issue as a social media moderation problem, developers building search engines and AI applications face a more fundamental challenge: the web can host millions of pages without containing millions of distinct, reliable facts. Experts caution that AI authorship is an unreliable proxy for content quality, since human-written articles can be hollow while AI-assisted ones may contain original research and verified sources. Separately, Anthropic announced that Claude models released on or after August 2, 2026 will embed machine-readable provenance markings in generated text, approaching the transparency problem from the content-creation side.

Read the full story at DEV Community

This is an AI-generated summary. ShortSingh links to the original source for the complete article.

Discussion (0)

Claude AI Doubles Protein Design Success Rate in Lab-Validated Tests

Anthropic has published lab-validated results showing its Claude AI designed effective protein binders against 14 of 15 targets tested in collaboration with Adaptyv Bio and Twist Bioscience, achieving a 22–35% success rate compared to the industry norm of 10–15%. The model also analyzed raw spectroscopy data in under 25 minutes with accuracy matching laboratory readings. Despite these results, Anthropic has restricted life-science capabilities in its most advanced model and is developing a structured access program for vetted scientists before wider release. The company cites the dual-use nature of protein design — which can serve both medicine and potential harm — as the reason for building safety vetting processes ahead of launch. If successful, Anthropic's controlled-access approach could serve as a broader template for managing other high-risk AI capabilities as they emerge.

0 comments Read more at DEV Community

ProgrammingDEV Community ·

Why better products lose government contracts — and how to stop it

Enterprise procurement processes are designed to produce defensible, auditable decisions rather than to select the best-performing product, which systematically disadvantages innovative or newer vendors. Criteria are typically set months before a formal tender is issued, often shaped by incumbents who engaged early, leaving latecomers scored against a definition of the problem they had no part in writing. Qualitative advantages such as usability, superior support, or stronger long-term architecture are difficult to score objectively and are therefore discounted, while measurable proxies like company size and certifications dominate evaluations. The decision-maker in these processes is usually the person who bears accountability if a contract fails, so they prioritise risk mitigation over upside potential. Founders and sales teams that engage early, address failure scenarios explicitly, and treat pilot programmes as trust-building exercises rather than proof-of-concept victories are better positioned to win.

0 comments Read more at DEV Community

ProgrammingDEV Community ·

How a Race Condition Between Workers Triggers OAuth invalid_grant Errors

A common but misunderstood cause of OAuth 'invalid_grant' errors is not clock skew or expired credentials, but two backend workers simultaneously submitting the same refresh token to a provider. When providers rotate refresh tokens, the second request presents an already-consumed token, which many providers treat as a replay attack and revoke the entire token family. This forces users to manually reconnect their accounts rather than allowing a simple retry. The recommended fix is to serialize token refresh operations using a single-flight mechanism, such as PostgreSQL advisory locks, so only one worker refreshes a given token at a time. Since refresh-token rotation is now standard practice under OAuth 2.0 security guidelines and expected in OAuth 2.1, developers should design integrations to treat every token refresh as a state mutation requiring coordination.

0 comments Read more at DEV Community

ProgrammingDEV Community ·

AutoHttps brings dependency-free automatic HTTPS to ASP.NET Core apps

A developer has released AutoHttps, a lightweight library that automates TLS certificate acquisition and renewal for ASP.NET Core applications without any NuGet dependencies. The library integrates directly with Kestrel, handles ACME http-01 and dns-01 challenges internally, and supports providers including Let's Encrypt, ZeroSSL, and Google Trust Services. It was built as a modern replacement for LettuceEncrypt, which was archived in April 2025 and last targeted .NET 6. AutoHttps also accommodates Let's Encrypt's newly introduced six-day short-lived certificates by following ACME Renewal Information (RFC 9773) for smarter renewal timing. The library currently targets .NET 8 and .NET 10 and is available on NuGet, with the author recommending the Let's Encrypt staging endpoint for initial testing due to production rate limits.

0 comments Read more at DEV Community