Posts by Mostly Irrelevant

AI coding assistant Cline compromised to create more OpenClaw chaos

Re: Microslop

The analogy is missing one step, said AI client would need to autonomously access the web behind your back and compromise your security.

This is much worse than having a chat client installed. This is autonomous malware.

The idea of using a Raspberry Pi to run OpenClaw makes no sense

I have a friend who breathlessly falls for every AI fad, he's been excited about OpenClaw (ClawdBot) for about 2 months at this point. That's how I knew for sure I'd need to look into it much deeper before I considered using it.

Having an automated LLM with access to all your accounts, that can't tell the difference between your instructions and anything it's reading off the web? What happens when people add malicious commands to the bottom of web pages or even ads? What about spam messages?

The whole thing is brainless, both literally and figuratively.

Why AI writing is so generic, boring, and dangerous: Semantic ablation

That's hilarious.

Contain your Windows apps inside Linux Windows

Re: Yuck

If you have hardware that only supports Windows, you don't really have much option. I should point out here that you do have the option to not buy hardware that only supports Windows.

Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6 spends $20K trying to write a C compiler

I just checked, doesn't work at all. I have a fair amount of C code around and it doesn't even compile a Hello World template.

GitHub ponders kill switch for pull requests to stop AI slop

Re: AI Slop Jockeys versus reality

Anyone non-critically committing LLM slop is going to quickly have a maintenance nightmare. We haven't quite hit that state in most codebases yet, but it won't be pretty.

Microsoft spends billions on AI, converts just 3.3% of Copilot Chat users

I'm guessing that almost all uses of Co-pilot Pro have it bundled with Office 365. It's bundled with every version. I have it at work and I never use it.

'Ralph Wiggum' loop prompts Claude to vibe-clone commercial software for $10 an hour

Re: You can't make.. a ...nondeterministic system deterministic

LLMs are deterministic, they just fake nondeterminism by feeding a pseudorandom seed into the algorithm. If you run an LLM locally you can control/reuse the seed if you like.

Microsoft finally bids farewell to PowerShell 2.0

Have they fixed the issue where you can't remove Windows PowerShell and even if you set all your defaults to the new PowerShell the old one still opens sometimes.

I don't understand why I can't just replace the old one with the new one.

Microsoft Windows Media Player stops serving up CD album info

That's weird, seeing as MP3s have embedded tags for that information.

OpenAI putting bandaids on bandaids as prompt injection problems keep festering

Re: Idiots

The fundamental issue is that no one actually understands how the LLMs work. Most of the behaviour is emergent, so taping up the cracks is the only option.

Snowflake buys Observe to make 'Days Since Last Outage' counters obsolete

What they don't tell you is that the reason they're obsolete is that they're always 0.

Boffins probe commercial AI models, find an entire Harry Potter book

Re: Can it improve the Harry Potter books?

No, it's a complicated remixer. It just creates a pastiche of the input so it can't be better than it or novel in any meaningful way.

I'm just waiting for IP laws to catch up and require all the input be licensed. The current state is essentially allowing all this content be stolen with no compensation.

The Microsoft 365 Copilot app rebrand was bad, but there are far worse offenders

Does anyone use any of those other than GitHub Copilot? I find the other ones totally useless.

Microsoft scraps Exchange Online spam clamp after customers cry foul

Way to say your customers are spammers without straight up saying it.

Coming Wi-Fi 8 will bring reliability rather than greater speed

You know. I don't even remember what Wi-Fi standard I'm using at home, seems to work fine so I don't care.

Users prompt Elon Musk's Grok AI chatbot to remove clothes in photos then 'apologize' for it

Re: Consequences ... apparently ONLY happen to OTHER people !!!

Constitutional republic, that's what they always say. And of course the first like of the description of constitutional republic says that it's a form of a democracy. Even Wikipedia still says this after years of vandalism by people who blindly repeat dogma.

Safe CEO: AI is an assistant, not a replacement

Re: Not convinced

Are you a senior or higher level dev who uses this technology daily?

Because your post reads like it was written by someone with no firsthand experience at all. I use several different AI models and tools every day and the chance of these text generators replacing any developers no matter how junior is laughable. You need someone who understands what they're doing to operate these tools, because they make so many mistakes. In comparison to something simple like writing marketing copy there are so many factors involved in software engineering that are completely absent from LLM generated code that anyone with any experience with the technology would never write any of the things you're writing here.

The current LLM tools may enhance productivity, but require a lot of knowledge to use successfully. It sounds like you have knowledge in something substantially less complex that LLMs can do reasonably well and are applying that to the massively move complex task of software engineering. Even if the LLMs were good at producing code, that's the easiest part of the software engineering process. The author of this article is massively ahead of your understanding in this case.

An early end to the holidays: 'Heartbleed of MongoDB' is now under active exploit

This is why you firewall your databases.

All the major cloud providers support virtual networks.

Memory is running out, and so are excuses for software bloat

Re: Lovely idea - no chance of it ever happening

If the Logitech mouse is g-series there is a separate config app you can use to update your mouse config and save it to the mouse's built in memory. Then you don't need the software running at all.

Microsoft wants to replace its entire C and C++ codebase, perhaps by 2030

Re: Using Rust ist not the solution per se...

Core parts of an OS are that 1% case.

Re: One more thing

I would like that very much.

Mozilla Corporation installs Firefox driver in CEO reboot

The AI features in Firefox are worthless garbage, there is no reason at all to need AI features in a web browser.

If they continue down this path I foresee more Firefox minus garbage browsers coming out. I may even write my own.

Hot for its bot, McKinsey may cut thousands of jobs

With McKinsey's track record, they might even do better by replacing everyone past the front-line level with ChatGPT.

Smartphones face a memory cost crunch – and buyers aren't in the mood

I don't know about you. but the last 2 phones I had before my current one were only replaced because of hardware failure. There isn't much reason to upgrade now.

AWS admits AI coding tools cause problems, reckons its three new agents fix 'em

Sounds like a case of "when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail". Quick, use AI to compensate for the flaws in AI!

Windows 11 still barely pulling ahead of 10 despite end-of-support push

I disagree with your premise, that this is a forced upgrade. No one has turned off their Windows 10 machine and found it updated to Windows 11 the next day. iPhones and Android phones on the other hand, this is common. You have to actively opt out to disable this behaviour..

I think this is more a factor that people don't care too much about operating systems anymore. If it's doing all you want it to, then why upgrade?

GPUs aren't worth their weight in gold – it just feels like they are

Re: Pricing per gram please

In 'murica they use arcane ancient measurements.

FCC sounds alarm after emergency tones turned into potty-mouthed radio takeover

They should be glad this came out this way instead of as part of an organized attack by a foreign state actor.

Apple’s lousy AI didn’t stop it beating Samsung’s smartphone sales for the first time since 2011

Ironically the way Apple's Mac hardware is surprisingly good at running LLM models locally. The high-speed unified memory and passable iGPU's outclass similar commodity Windows machines by a lot.

Vibe coding: What is it good for? Absolutely nothing (Sorry, Linus)

I personally disagree, I've run in to lot of situations where junior developers have tried to check in poorly designed AI solutions just because they don't have the experience to understand their problems with the code.

LLMs can greatly exaggerate the Dunning-Kruger effect and that causes a lot of problems.

I normally apply the assistants in extremely limited scopes where I already know what I want. The error message lookup/explainer functionally can be helpful, particularly in the first thing you do is check sources.

I think we'll eventually have a good idea of what we should be using these things for, but the idea that inexperienced devs are the ones who get the most out of them seems completely backwards to me.

Boffins build 'AI Kill Switch' to thwart unwanted agents

Re: Race to the bottom

It's frustrating because it's so obvious that it's just a firehose of near-meaningless text but we still haven't developed automated defenses against it.

The main problem being that LLMs are fundamentally not designed to detect anomalies in the text.

Microsoft blanks out BSODs on public displays with new ‘Digital Signage mode’

This won't change a thing, all those systems use years old versions of Windows and will continue to. Not only that, the people who create them are unlikely to turn this feature on anyway, based on their general attention to detail.

Windows boss defends 'agentic OS' push as users plead for reliability

Could they just do the OS thing right? We don't need a bunch of extra features, we can download any third party apps we want.

Secret setting hints haptic feedback coming to Windows 11 UI

Re: No!

This sort of feature could really help people with vision problems, so I'm in the pro camp. Did you know that there are other, less bloated OSes you could be running? I suggest NetBSD if bloat is your main problem.

Re: Logitech iFeel mouse

Yeah, it's right about time that the parent should be expired. I had one of those mice too.

Altman sticks a different hand out, wants tax credits instead of gov loans

Re: Workshy Layabouts

Rich beggars are hard working "job creators" and we should give them piles of money. Disabled single mother war veterans are well fair queens shall have nothing.

It's the American way. Venerate the rich, punish the poor.

Meta can't afford its $600B love letter to Trump

It would be hillarious if this was the thing that brought "Meta" down. Zuck has been tilting at windmills for years while his company becomes less and less relevant and buys up rivals to survive.

LLMs are lousy at reading Asian languages, finds Singapore’s Grab

Indonesia, the Philippines, and Vietnam all use Latin script.

Most LLMs are good at reading Chinese and Japanese so I think it's more a matter of amount of content included in the model than the script used.

Deploying to Amazon's cloud is a pain in the AWS younger devs won't tolerate

I don't know, my employer makes me use... Azure.

Ministry of Defence's F-35 blunder: £57B and counting

I think everything to do with the F-35 is overbudget.

Paradox: Agentic AI dev roles are less in demand as agents take over

IEEE used to be a respectable organization, I guess they're just another industry mouthpiece now.

From Intel to the infinite, Pat Gelsinger wants Christian AI to change the world

Re: Hold your horses there, Pat

Pat's an American Protestant, the call themselves "Christians", but would not consider the Pope an authority of any kind.

Is PHP declining? JetBrains says yes. And no

PHP uses a dated paradigm so I'm not surprised. It's not a good choice for new development so I expect we'll see it continue to decline. Right now it's mostly the thing WordPress runs on.

BOFH: Recover a database from five years ago? It's as easy as flicking a switch

Overtime? I've never heard of that. IT people in North America (unless you're a contractor and that's another level of terrible) are all "salaried employees" and paid by the day so it doesn't matter how many hours they make you work.

OpenAI's ChatGPT is so popular that almost no one will pay for it

The main issue OpenAI has is that most of the ChatGPT use has no economic value, it's people using it like a search engine or chatting to it or making intentionally silly images. People aren't going to pay the cost for things that don't make them money. It's not worth $100/month to most people and I'm not even sure that's enough to operate profitably.

AIs have a favorite number, and it's not 42

Re: You say tomato, I say tomato

My ChatGPT answered brocolli, which suspiciously is my favourite vegetable. Is yours carrots?

New GitHub Copilot limits push AI users to pricier tiers

If they did that, almost all of them would be free. Almost all coding AI responses are at least a little bit wrong.

Re: What are people using AI for anyway?

I use it to search for error messages, autocomplete obvious code, write comments, write boilerplate like the base for unit tests, anything where starting with a synthetic approximation of the correct code saves time.