Social Credit Already Exists In The West…Just with Different Spins
November 4, 2025
China is a dystopian nightmare with its social credit system. Westerners believe they can breathe a sigh of relief because that doesn’t happen in their home countries. Oh, how wrong they are. Social credit systems are here, they’re just run by a capitalist system. The Nexus author Natalie Pang explores the idea in, “Your Phone Already Has Social Credit. We Just Lie About It.”
What exactly is social credit? It’s your digital reputation, a profile of your behavior captured by everything: Amazon, credit score, Airbnb, Uber, etc. There isn’t any difference between the social credit system in the west and China, except for one thing: transparency. China is 100% transparent that it rates people, while the West hides it behind many facades. China’s social credit system has been disbanded except for a few outliers. In the West, it’s alarming the impact it has on lives:
“Your credit score doesn’t just determine loan eligibility; it affects where you can live, which jobs you can get, and how much you pay for car insurance. But traditional credit scoring is expanding rapidly. Some specialized lenders scan social media profiles as part of alternative credit assessments, particularly for borrowers with limited credit histories. Payment apps and financial services increasingly track spending patterns and transaction behaviors to build comprehensive risk profiles. The European Central Bank has asked some institutions to monitor social media chatter for early warnings of bank runs, though this is more about systemic risk than individual account decisions. Background check companies routinely analyze social media presence for character assessment. LinkedIn algorithmically manages your professional visibility based on engagement patterns, posting frequency, and network connections, rankings that recruiters increasingly rely on to filter candidates. Even dating has become a scoring system: apps use engagement rates and response patterns to determine who rises to the top of the queue and who gets buried.”
Another difference between China and the West is that these apps don’t talk or affect each other. Amazon doesn’t impact your ride shares, while your dating app doesn’t impact your credit score. These data points can be described as proprietary data or a violation of a user’s privacy, so these companies don’t share them. Another way of putting it these companies don’t want to harm their bottom line.
Social crediting systems are already affecting the west, but only in realm of capitalism and social media. The bigger question to ask is what will happen if companies decide to share data for a profit? Then we’re screwed.
Whitney Grace, November 4, 2025
News Flash: Software Has a Quality Problem. Insight!
November 3, 2025
This essay is the work of a dumb dinobaby. No smart software required.
I read “The Great Software Quality Collapse: How We Normalized Catastrophe.” What’s interesting about this essay is that the author cares about doing good work.
The write up states:
We’ve normalized software catastrophes to the point where a Calculator leaking 32GB of RAM barely makes the news. This isn’t about AI. The quality crisis started years before ChatGPT existed. AI just weaponized existing incompetence.
Marketing is more important than software quality. Right, rube? Thanks, Venice.ai. Good enough.
The bound phrase “weaponized existing incompetence” points to an issue in a number of knowledge-value disciplines. The essay identifies some issues he has tracked; for example:
- Memory consumption in Google Chrome
- Windows 11 updates breaking the start menu and other things (printers, mice, keyboards, etc.)
- Security problems such as the long-forgotten CrowdStrike misstep that cost customers about $10 billion.
But the list of indifferent or incompetent coding leads to one stop on the information superhighway: Smart software. The essay notes:
But the real pattern is more disturbing. Our research found:
AI-generated code contains 322% more security vulnerabilities
45% of all AI-generated code has exploitable flaws
Junior developers using AI cause damage 4x faster than without it
70% of hiring managers trust AI output more than junior developer code
We’ve created a perfect storm: tools that amplify incompetence, used by developers who can’t evaluate the output, reviewed by managers who trust the machine more than their people.
I quite like the bound phrase “amplify incompetence.”
The essay makes clear that the wizards of Big Tech AI prefer to spend money on plumbing (infrastructure), not software quality. The write up points out:
When you need $364 billion in hardware to run software that should work on existing machines, you’re not scaling—you’re compensating for fundamental engineering failures.
The essay concludes that Big Tech AI as well as other software development firms shift focus.
Several observations:
- Good enough is now a standard of excellence
- “Go fast” is better than “good work”
- The appearance of something is more important than its substance.
Net net: It’s a TikTok-, YouTube, and carnival midway bundled into a new type of work environment.
Stephen E Arnold, November 3, 2025
Don Quixote Takes on AI in Research Integrity Battle. A La Vista!
November 3, 2025
Scientific publisher Frontiers asserts its new AI platform is the key to making the most of valuable research data. ScienceDaily crows, “90% of Science is Lost. This New AI Just Found It.” Wow, 90%. Now who is hallucinating? Turns out that percentage only applies if one is looking at new research submitted within Frontiers’ new system. Cutting out past and outside research really narrows the perspective. The press release explains:
“Out of every 100 datasets produced, about 80 stay within the lab, 20 are shared but seldom reused, fewer than two meet FAIR standards, and only one typically leads to new findings. … To change this, [Frontiers’ FAIR² Data Management Service] is designed to make data both reusable and properly credited by combining all essential steps — curation, compliance checks, AI-ready formatting, peer review, an interactive portal, certification, and permanent hosting — into one seamless process. The goal is to ensure that today’s research investments translate into faster advances in health, sustainability, and technology. FAIR² builds on the FAIR principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) with an expanded open framework that guarantees every dataset is AI-compatible and ethically reusable by both humans and machines.”
That does sound like quite the time- and hassle- saver. And we cannot argue with making it easier to enact the FAIR principles. But the system will only achieve its lofty goals with wide buy-in from the academic community. Will Frontiers get it? The write-up describes what participating researchers can expect:
“Researchers who submit their data receive four integrated outputs: a certified Data Package, a peer-reviewed and citable Data Article, an Interactive Data Portal featuring visualizations and AI chat, and a FAIR² Certificate. Each element includes quality controls and clear summaries that make the data easier to understand for general users and more compatible across research disciplines.”
The publisher asserts its system ensures data preservation, validation, and accessibility while giving researchers proper recognition. The press release describes four example datasets created with the system as well as glowing reviews from select researchers. See the post for those details.
Cynthia Murrell, November 3, 2025
Academic Libraries May Get Fast Journal Access
November 3, 2025
Here is a valuable resource for academic librarians. Katina Magazine tells us, “For the User Who Needed an Article Yesterday, This Platform Delivers.” Reviewer Josh Zeller tells us:
“Article Galaxy Scholar (AGS) is a premediated browser-based document delivery platform from Research Solutions (formerly Reprints Desk). Integrated with discovery search, it provides users ‘just-in-time’ access to PDFs of articles from a vast collection of titles at a relatively low per-article cost. The platform’s administrative tools are highly granular, allowing library staff to control every dimension of user purchasing, while its precise usage statistics can help inform future collection decisions.”
For better or worse, the system is powered by AWS and typically delivers results via email in fewer than seven seconds. It works with all major academic publishers and the average cost per article is $29. Though most AGS customers are in the US, enough are based in other countries to give Research Solutions experience in foreign copyright laws and access to more resources. Zeller describes the process:
“Both the front- and back-end interfaces of the AGS platform are entirely browser-based. Users typically submit AGS document delivery requests through their library’s discovery interface, into which AGS is fully integrated. For libraries using Ex Libris Primo, this is accomplished using the system’s OpenURL link resolver (Christopher & Edwards, 2024; Hlasten, 2024). Application programming interface (API) integrations are also available for all of the major interlibrary loan (ILL) and resource sharing platforms, including RapidILL, Rapido, ILLiad, Tipasa, and IDS Project (Landolt & Friesen, 2025). AGS links can also be integrated into other discovery services, like EBSCO FOLIO and WorldCat Discovery.”
Though AGS itself does not incorporate AI, it can be integrated with the AI source-evaluation tool Scite. See the write-up for those and other details.
Cynthia Murrell, November 3, 2025
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