at google this was known as "buying the gnome". there's like a billion tweets about this already but basically the story goes back in like 2005 or something they were building out their shopping search system, and it was working pretty well. except for the fact that if you searched for sneakers, the top result was a garden gnome. engineers were going crazy trying to fix the ranking bug, but eventually someone noticed that the gnome listing was on ebay, and there was only one of them, and it cost like $50. so they just bought the gnome and suddenly the listing was gone, problem solved. why bother fixing software issues when you can just change the world to fit your software instead? Tenobrus (@tenobrus) if you're about to release a model that you know has the ability to reveal zerodays in every commonly used open source project you could delay release for a few years or spend another ten billion on alignment RL. or you could just secretly fix all the zerodays yourself first. — https://nitter.net/tenobrus/status/2039744655856939150#m

→ View original post on X — @whiteafrican, 2026-04-02 19:25 UTC