Maya Chen

Scarcity by design isn't a bug or a conscience. It's a retention strategy that works better than infinite scroll.

A/B testing has evolved from optimizing button colors to systematically reshaping how millions of people use software, without their knowledge or consent.

The degradation of AI model performance under heavy use is a structural problem, not a scaling one. Here's what's actually happening.

AI models update constantly, and your carefully tuned prompts don't get notified. Here's what actually breaks and why.

Software ships with cryptographic fingerprints designed to catch corruption and tampering. Most users and developers ignore them entirely. That's a security failure hiding in plain sight.

Software companies frame legacy support as customer kindness. It is also, quietly, one of the most effective tools for keeping competitors out.

Bigger training sets don't automatically produce better models. Here's what actually happens when you feed an AI more data than it can use well.

The password advice you grew up with is wrong. Memorability and security pull in opposite directions, and your brain is the weakest link.

When ChatGPT says 'I think' or 'I believe,' that's not humility. It's a calculated product decision with legal, psychological, and technical roots.

The most powerful design choices in software aren't buttons or colors. They're the options users never see because they were already chosen for them.

No marketing campaign reaches 100% of users. Default settings do. Here's how tech companies use that to quietly shape behavior at scale.

The password advice you ignored for years was actually correct. The problem was never your memory. It was the system asking you to use it.

Microsoft invested in OpenAI. Google funded Anthropic. This looks like charity. It is the opposite.

Google Wave looked like a product disaster. It was actually a calculated research investment that paid off in ways the obituaries missed.

Contact list access isn't about making apps work better for you. It's about building a shadow graph of human relationships that no one consented to share.

The bug backlog isn't a failure of discipline or resources. It's a feature of how software economics actually work.

Feeding AI systems corrupted, noisy, and outright false training data isn't a bug or a compromise. It's one of the most important techniques in modern machine learning.

Rebooting isn't a lazy fix. It's the most reliable solution to a class of problems that modern software engineering has largely decided not to solve.