News and Updates
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(ICT Industry Development Bureau FB Page)
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It's good to see that the government has ongoing initiatives towards the responsible and ethical adoption of AI, especially in education and agriculture. But challenges that plagued other tech advancements also apply here, like digital illiteracy, internet connectivity, and funding.
It's also pleasant to find that not only are they considering the obvious risks of AI, but also the hidden costs to it, like its environmental impact. But there's no mention of any plan to penalize AI companies, like OpenAI and Google, and make them more accountable for any unethical or unsustainable practice.
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(Raphael Alicaya's Linkedin)
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Our company has also experienced this in the past year. Chinese developers, posing as Filipinos with Filipino-sounding names, applied to our open software positions. It was so creepy to experience.
They seem to have the same script:
- One of their parents is Chinese, the other is Filipino.
- They were born or grew up here in the Philippines, but had to go back to the Chinese Mainland to study.
- They went back here to the Philippines to go to college and find a job.
- None can speak any Tagalog word, despite claiming to have a Filipino parent.
Their resumés are really solid, that's why they get the interview. And during the interview itself, they provide really good answers, but it's so obvious that they're using AI-powered interview assistants. Sometimes the applicant will ask for a bit of time "to think about his answer carefully" but this is just to bide time so the AI tool to finish generating the answer they can read after. Worse, some may even use deepfake technology, which I found really weird, since why not use a fake Filipino video profile then? 😅
When we called a couple of them out, they became defensive then got angry and started harassing our CTO on Linkedin.
The remote job market is tough enough in 2025, and dubious schemes like this will only make it harder for legitimate candidates. Our engineering team had to resort to unconventional practices to screen out fake applicants as a result of our experience. I imagine other companies are now making their hiring process more rigid too.
If you're hiring via remote calls, be very careful, and make sure you vet the candidate thoroughly. No one is really sure what their endgame is, but even the FBI has issued a warning against them. They can potentially infiltrate your company and extract sensitive information from the inside.
I often try to tap into tech communities whenever I am on the lookout for promising talent to recruit. As a matter of fact, most of my first recruits in my current and previous companies are people I met in meetups we organized for freeCodeCamp.Manila and Tech Career Shifter Philippines. With AI enabling bad actors to exploit the online hiring process, tech communities and events will definitely play an even greater role in the remote job recruitment scene.
Have you ever been curious about how your code editor does code completion and suggestion for multiple programming languages without taking too much resources from your computer? I certainly have!
This article from freeCodeCamp doesn't dive into the internals of LSPs, but it does give a high level primer of how the code editor communicates with it. Interesting stuff.
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