Posts by sarusa

Rockstar Games gets a taste of grand theft data

Data in the Cloud is stolen!

Gee, nobody could have seen this coming.

Two different attackers poisoned popular open source tools - and showed us the future of supply chain compromise

CPU-Z and HWMonitor got hit too

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4HbH2Ic7nA

Taking a legit and popular utility, extension, package, etc. is near the top of malware favorites now because it comes with a built in audience of thousands if not millions.

Microsoft locks out VeraCrypt and WireGuard devs, blames verification process

As expected from Microslop

Vibe coding working as designed. And why they couldn't figure out instantly what had happened.

Stack Overflow abandons redesign after loyalists criticize it

Yeah, just give it up

StackOverflow's entire business model was being what bad outsourced programmers / students went on to beg people to do their work / homework for them and/or to just cut and paste together existing answers and bang on them till it compiled and call that done. And then on the other hand you had the karma / resume whores who actually knew how to program who fed them (which I totally get, glass houses!).

Well, 'AI' makes complete incompetents slightly competent. All those completely incompetent coders can now just get Claude or Gemini to write their code for them far better than they would have been able to do themselves with SO. The only thing StackOverflow could usefully do is turn into a site where actual expert coders can ask for help with serious problems from other actual experts. But that's too low volume and would remove most of their membership, they wouldn't do that. So they have no reason to exist.

Only 28% of AI infrastructure projects fully pay off, survey finds

Ahaha all lies

That number is far too large. They can't possibly have recovered all the money they've dumped down the AI toilet. They're lying out their ass, like Microslop does when they count every sale of Office and Windows 11 as 'AI revenue' because they've shoe-horned copilot into those, as if people only bought them for Microslop's worst in class AI.

I do know that in some businesses it actually works, like for telemarketing, ransomware, customer support, and consultancies it doesn't matter how much the AI is wrong and lies - because you don't give a fig about your customers, they're just fools to be milked. So I do believe some predatory businesses are actually in the black from going AI. But certainly not 28%.

Microsoft shivs OpenAI with three new AI models for speech and images

Microslop is doing everything with vibe coding now (Nadella bragged about it) so of course they can only produce derivative steaming piles.

Three new steaming piles

But it's Microslop, they'll all be worst in class.

Then again, lots of consumers who prefer terrible but free since their standards are as low as Microslop's.

Cloudflare previews 'EmDash' – an AI-driven rebuild of WordPress in TypeScript

Hmmm, I'm torn

Normally I'd hate AI slop, but I'm not sure that hate is as intense as my hate for Mullenweg (I find it hilarious they're all named Matt here) and the sheer security disaster that is WordPress. Though I guess if this became popular enough then all the gaping security holes in this (there have to be, it's vibe coded) will be exploited.

202x, the Decade of Hate.

GitHub backs down, kills Copilot pull-request ads after backlash

'Mistake'

Every single thing Microslop has done since at least 2021 has been a 'mistake'. And this omni-shambles is Slopya Nadella's vision. As long as he's driving the company right into the ground a temporary pause like this is the best you can get.

Memory-makers' shares are down. Some RAM prices have eased. Blaming Google is not a good idea

And oops, Micron

Also this week, Micron discovered that Scam Altman, who has 'secured' 40% of the global DRAM supply for OpenAI (which is what precipitated the RAM price spiral), doesn't actually have any money.

Contracts are in C++26 despite disagreement over their value

Re: Virtual functions

> The entire concept of correctness seems to be lost on many programmers.

That's okay, because it's 100% lost on vibe coding tools and that's what everyone's using now. The idea of correctness is dead. You get Windows 11 instead.

GitHub hits CTRL-Z, decides it will train its AI with user data after all

Re: If you're still on GitHub you probably deserve this

Neither company has a competent IT guy, no way we're getting an in-house repository. We wouldn't even have source control if it relied on these clowns. So I'd set the (shared) repository up on my personal computer except I'm remote... so if the company doesn't care, I don't care any more than moving from GitHub to GitLab. And the personal stuff I have there is actually public repositories I want people to see. Which, okay, means the AI bots will probably find it anyhow, but at least I'm not standing in one of those red light district booths in Amsterdam by staying on Microslop Github.

If you're still on GitHub you probably deserve this

I moved all my (and my companies') repositories over to Gitlab 6 months ago, which is arguably even late to the game, and deleted everything we had on GitHub. Of course nothing is ever truly deleted, but...

It's been 100% predictable (and was predicted) where all this has been going since GIthub got bought by Microslop. There was no other reason for MS to buy it other than to hoover up all your code for slop training and it was inevitable all your stuff would go to train their shit. Any exceptions for now are just part of the slow erosion, they can't last. Because literally the only thing Slopya cares about is slop. Good thing his parents named him that, huh?

Telling an AI model that it’s an expert programmer makes it a worse programmer

Exactly like vibe corders

Most tedious vibe coders I've ever dealt with, even second or third hand, go to great lengths to tell you what expart codars they are but Claude has just transformed their life because now they can shit out a completely fragile insecure app in a day, which they couldn't do before even though they were total expart codars!1one!

Except... of course, any actually competent can turn out an app in a day, this is a solved problem and there are plenty of existing frameworks.

As usual an LLM makes total incompetents slightly competent so they think it's a miracle. And of course they don't have the experience or knowledge to know about all the downsides which make them worse for anyone competent doing anything they actually care about.

Like cryptocurrency, the people the LLM coding bots help the most are criminals.

Windows boss promises to heal the operating system's self-inflicted wounds

Eh, it was all obvious lies, don't read too much into it

The email/post was 100% obviously all lies, complete damage control, has zero real world implication or credibility.

Like 'Oh we're taking WIndows reliability really srs now!1@one!' This is at least the 4th time they've promised to do better then things just got worse.

And the big reason it's very clearly 100% lies is that the ONLY THING Slopya cares about is AI.

Besides AI being irredeemably shitty, insecure, fragile, slop, Microslop also has the worst in class 'AI'. So as long as MS is 100% AI driven and all employee evaluations and performance bonuses are driven by AI, nothing can possibly get better.

Hide and sleek: Latest Vivaldi release can tuck its UI away until summoned

I really like Vivaldi after six months

When I decided to totally ditch Firefox and Chrome for being insufferable AI (and privacy) twats I looked at a ton of browsers, took two weeks.

I settled on Vivaldi as 'Chrome' and Waterfox as 'Firefox'. Mostly use Waterfox, but occasionally need Vivaldi because like the Bad Old Days of Internet Explorer Everywhere, some douchebag sites just code to Chrome. And when I need it, it works great. I'm not using Vivaldi for main browsing just because I have a ton of Firefox extensions that don't have Chrome equivs and I'm unwilling to give up, not its fault.

Re: Somebody check my memory

> Everything I've read about Vivaldi suggests its internal ad blocker is very weak compared to a more typical Firefox + uBO + DNS.

I just use the uBO (uBlock Origin) Chrome extension with it. It still works great with Vivaldi, which still supports Manifest v2.

PwC will say goodbye to staff who aren't convinced about AI

Why do we even need PWC? Or any consultancy?

Why do we even need to hire shitty consultancies like PWC or Deloitte, whose only job is to charge millions of dollars and tell C-level morons what they wanted to hear, when we can just have Gemini do that for us for free?

'AI brain fry' affects employees managing too many agents

Makes sense

If you're overseeing a fleet of AI agents you obviously didn't have much brainpower to spare to begin with.

AWS would rather blame its own engineers than its AI

Re: Blaming the humans is just stupid

> This is the way it works with self driving cars. The person sitting behind the steering wheel is still responsible.

Yes, legally, because the giant evil corporations say in the EULA the 'full self driving' (LOL) can deliberately target toddlers for 200 points and it's not their fault, it's yours.

But if you actually gave a shit about doing something useful, this is not the way to do it.

Blaming the humans is just stupid

You are deliberately creating 'engineers' who are just sloperators and don't know how to do jack shit and then blaming them when they don't catch the AI's mistakes because they have no idea what the AI is doing? Brillant.

Gamers furious as indie studio Cloud Imperium quietly admits to data breach

Gee what a surprise

You are fans of a company whose entire business model is a grift taking advantage of dumbasses like you. And are so competent that after 15 years still can't manage to keep you from falling through floors in the starting area.

Wow, who would have guessed their security would be shite? They don't give a single fig about their players other than how hard they can milk you stupid ****s.

Discord drama delays age verification debut until the second half of 2026

Re: "turn identity verification data into a government-controlled people tracker"

The problem is that Turning The Internet into Big Brother is the end goal, not just an accidental byproduct. Protecting 'the chiiiiiilllldurrrrn' is just the excuse, as always.

Ffffft

This changes NOTHING, just delays it a bit to get it out of the current news cycle.

And gives Persona time to set up some shell companies.

Microsoft teases ‘reimagined SharePoint experience’ with added AI

Eldritch Horror!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Holy shite, Sharepoint is already cancer. Now it's cancer with Copilot.

(And yes I'm fully aware of the Pterry quote 'Five exclamation marks, the sure sign of an insane mind'. This is what imagining the eldritch horror of Sharepoint and Copilot linking their foul tentacles and writhing around dripping acid slime everywhere has done to me)

Microsoft execs worry AI will eat entry level coding jobs

Worse, it's completely crippling the ones who keep their jobs

Even if a junior dev manages to figure out the LLM is generating crap and navigate through why the LLM is generating crap, their own skills are completely neutered. They're just the maid for the LLM and have no idea how any of this crap works. I see it every day. We have one guy who had the brilliant idea to do a config generation app for [internal stuff I can't say, but it's annoying and complicated]. If some of the network guys had this tool it would save a lot of time. So he decided to make one with Claude.

It's 6 months later and it still breaks on normal use cases every single time he has a release candidate. He has no idea why so he goes back to Claude with 'no no this isn't working please fix this' and Claude regenerates the code. And breaks two other things. Of course he has no idea how to write unit tests. He asked Claude to do some and it wrote some hilariously trivial stuff that doesn't really test anything - his broken code passes the unit tests just fine but always breaks when anyone tries to do anything with it. And he doesn't have the skills to go in and see 'oh it did this wrong, maybe I can tweak this...' He's allowed to completely waste his time like this because one of the VPs is 'oooo, AI!' FWIW I think I could write the app, go through a couple rounds of testing and adjustments and confidently document it and deploy a 1.0 in about a week of work (two weeks actual time because I wouldn't be doing it full time, and waiting for tester feedback).

So this kid isn't learning shit about software engineering. He's just a sloperator poking at a black box. And that's our new generation of junior software engineers.

Microsoft boffins cook up archival storage using Pyrex glass they say can last over 10,000 years

Re: Eh, it's Microslop

This is why I love El Reg comments. Occasionally stupid techbro dumbasses, but @inventor and @simonlb ran with my comment, definitely made it better, and best (worst!) of all made me go 'dammit I should have said that!'

Eh, it's Microslop

The big question here is how, if they decide to move forward, they'll ruin it with AI. Slopya wouldn't let anything like this move forward without somehow ramming Copilot sideways up its arse. Perhaps every cartridge will ship with an LLM that will be your only way to actually read the data? Yes, there is a slight bit of CNN involved in reading the data, but that won't be annoying enough for Slopya.

Oh, and then you'll need a monthly subscription so MS can pretend it's making any actual AI revenue. So 10,000 years in the future, the aliens will find these in the smoking ruins of Earth, attempt to access the information and, 'Glork, it says we need an Enterprise Subscription to Office, do we have one?'

Copilot spills the beans, summarizing emails it's not supposed to read

Re: my email

@captain veg: This is where I triage. Most things I send I don't care if I see if Google sees it. Of course I'd rather not, but... not enough to cut me Mum off from email! For other things, no way in hell.

And most people don't have a decent privacy focused mail provider (like Proton, there are definitely a few), they're using crap like Outlook or Gmail or even, yes, still AOL. And these are not people you can just get to switch their email provider. So if there's something super sensitive and I need to share with people on one of those AI training email services I put it on my proton drive.

This is pure Copilot

What the hell do you expect when the worst LLM on the market, Copilot, is making the decisions about whether emails should be sent through Copilot? And of course Microslop has serious incentive to be pretty loose about that wink wink.

Gentoo dumps GitHub over Copilot nagware

> models have hit a plateau where code generation is pretty good...

They have not, unless you think 'drunken college intern whose code is entirely unmaintainable' is 'pretty good'. The standards have been re-calibrated so f@#$ing low just to keep the hype train going. Sometimes it does manage to work, yes. It's still a security, maintainability, and readability nightmare. And all the edge cases will break.

Ironically this makes it great for churning out malware, where none of that matters. But it is not 'pretty good'.

Why does the Windows 11 taskbar hurt me like that?

Re: Nobody cares

Yeah it was part of Gates's plan to own the internet. And IE did NOT suck back then. It was arguably better than Netscape or other browsers.

It sucked later when, like Chrome, they had completely dominated the browser market and used their monopoly position to break compatibility with HTML standards and impose their own, and then it just got shittier and shittier. Like Google search!

Stardock Start11 will fix all this

No I don't work for them, and it sucks that you should have to pay to fix something that was working just fine but Microslop broke because they wanted to sling more ads at you.

But for 20$ (or local equiv) for 5 PCs (or $10 for one PC) Start11 will make your WIndows 11 start menu and task bar work even better than Windows 10's (I used Start 10 there). You can even have your vertical taskbar back - this is still in beta mode, there are a few quirks, but it mostly works fine. Make your start menu look like Win XP's, Win 7's, Win 10's, or even Win 11's without the crap. Very configurable.

Anyhow, you can demo it for free. https://www.stardock.com/products/start11/

Open Shell is a free alternative, might look at that first too. https://github.com/Open-Shell/Open-Shell-Menu

I know, I know - 'Well Microslop should fix it!' Yes. And you can keep waiting forever for something that will never come. Or if it does come it will be 30% vibe coded shite, as mandated by Slopya Nadella. Meanwhile my Windows 11 taskbar and start menu have been working great with Start11 for 5 years.

Dutch cops arrest man after sending him confidential files by mistake

Hey chaps, he tried to blackmail the rozzers - that's why he was arrested

I think a lot of you lot never finished the article. Yes, the first half makes it sound entirely the cops' fault... and it was! They gave him the link to the repository instead of the upload page.

So he downloaded a bunch of stuff. Which is... uhhh... okay, now we're getting shady. He knew he wasn't supposed to be downloading all this, but you can kind of excuse it because the cop gave him the link?

Then the cops figured out their cockup and said 'Uh, no, our bad, please delete those.' And this guy replied 'only if you give me a little sumthin sumthin capeesh?' (yes I'm sure this Nederlander had an italian mafia accent). That's when he got arrested. So just complete bungling all around.

How AI could eat itself: Competitors can probe models to steal their secrets and clone them

Re: Baffled

There's no specific secret sauce, just money and the model weights that produced.

Basically, the Big Evil American Corporations have spent hundreds of billions of dollars stealing zetabytes of data and training their models with it. This is a very laborious process which takes hundreds of millions of dollars, shiteloads of GPUs, shiteloads of power, running for months for a single run. They map out how all the tokens relate to each other in thousands dimensional space, like 'car' appears pretty much in the same location in this space as 'automobile'. 'Kiwi' is a long ways from those but is close to both 'fruit' and 'New Zealand'. But then 'Ford' is close to both 'car' and 'unreliable piece of shite' (I know, I know, that's not actually a single token). Then they compress this a lot, like saying okay you can treat 'automobile' and 'car' as the same thing, because you can't distribute or efficiently run something that needs trillions of numbers. What comes out at the end, after months of processing and hundreds of millions of dollars, is their model, like ChatGPT 4.1.

Well, then DeepSeek comes along and just queries the shite out of ChatGPT from tens of thousands of separate PCs, pretending to be different actual people, but the goal is basically 'what are your final weights?' . And they were able to do this for $300K-6M (they have been deliberately cagey, because they pretended they weren't just stealing from other models, but the $6M is probably inflated to make 'we weren't stealing!' seem less likely).

Honestly, I'm fine with this. 'Oh noes, you stole all the stuff I stole from the peasants, you [racial slur] miscreants!' Well Boo Effing Hoo. You wouldn't have DeepSeek if the US companies hadn't spent billions of dollars stealing that stuff first. But then it's absolutely fine for someone else to liberate that and distribute it.

OK, so Anthropic's AI built a C compiler. That don't impress me much

And it HAD everything it needed but still failed

I pointed this out in the other article, but it had already ingested dozens of working C compilers (which as you say, are trivial if you don't care too much about optimization, I wrote one as a college freshman too). It had already ingested tens of thousands of Rust programs and hundreds of 'this is how Rust works' tutorials and the Rust language spec.

It had everything it needed to just spit out a working compiler the first time, no problem. But no, it took extensive handholding, two weeks (as you said, you can write this in a day, and I did), and $20,000 to make something that sorta kinda works if you squint at it.

So this is the usual 'LLMs work great for making complete incompetents slightly competent but is worse than anyone competent for anything'.

30+ Chrome extensions disguised as AI chatbots steal users' API keys, emails, other sensitive data

So many cows for the slaughter

If you're someone dumb enough to install these, things are gonna get much worse for you real fast.

Apple's Creator Studio creates a subscription where free apps used to live

This is half great

Honestly it's great that all the AI shite is locked behind a paywall. I can fully support that I will never get AI unless I'm a dumbass and pay for it!

The ads, however, are not copacetic.

GitHub appears to be struggling with measly three nines availability

Microslop gonna Slop

Github has gone full Microslop, so with their new infatuation with vibe coding and vibe administration it's no surprise they're suddenly as unreliable as their parent company.

Don't expect this to get any better, ever, till the bubble bursts - if even then. I fled to GitLab.

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

Zero Intelligence

Great, you spent $20K (and lots of human oversight and prodding) letting 16 claude instances 'write' a C compiler that mostly works.

Except... Claude has the stolen code of dozens of perfectly working C compilers in its weights. It has tens of thousands of stolen Rust programs in its weights.

If it had any 'intelligence' at all it would have 'realized' it already had everything it needed to spit out a perfectly working Rust-based C compiler on the first try.

If you tried something that hadn't been done dozens of times before it would be a totally different story.

Ad blocking is alive and well, despite Chrome's attempts to make it harder

Re: Unfortunately Chrome

Literally the only thing Chrome devs care about since Prabhakar Raghavan took over is making you watch more ads. Yes, I know he's been shuffled around but that changed nothing.

Microsoft declares 'reliability' a priority for Visual Studio AI

Looool No

Microslop hasn't given a single f@#$ about reliability or security for over half a decade under Slopya Nadella. You could argue for much earlier, but they sporadically did give a f#@$ here and there. But it's really been open and brazen since 'AI' hit. LLMs are doing the coding, doing the 'QA', doing the vibe patches for the previous vibe patches, etc. etc.

So any declaration they do suddenly give a f@#$ has less than zero credibility because it is very obviously a cynical lie.

Firefox makes AI optional, like it probably should have been all along

Close enough

If you're currently using Firefox just move to Waterfox. It's just FF fork with the shite removed. Very transparent. If you're using FF Sync everything just comes across, all your cookies, settings, extensions, bookmarks, etc. There are other FF options like LibreWolf and Zen but they are more locked down and less transparently compatible. But a lot of people like them!

If you're using Chrome, try Vivaldi. They're explicitly no AI. Even more of your Chrome extensions will work than in modern Chrome.

Yeah, don't think you're safe

The CEO now is the scumbag who's been aggressively pushing the enshittification of FireFox for a couple years now and has outright stated he wants to make it 'your AI browser'.

So you know how this goes:

- Company introduces shitty thing everyone hates.

- Big backlash.

- 'Oh no, so sorry, we will make it opt-out!' (when it should be opt-in)

- It's opt-out for a while.

- They start sneakily turning it back on with updates.

- You can't opt-out of everything.

- The opt-out opt disappears.

This is all tried and true evil pioneered by Facebook. Until he goes, this is the plan. And even if you have the option to turn it off it's still in there bloating it up and wasting space and dev time.

HP CEO prints final page after six years, moves to PayPal

Shuffling the poop deck

So a scum and villain moved from one hive of scum and villainy to an even bigger hive of scum and villainy. Yep, that's C-level execery.

DWP finds Copilot saves civil servants a whopping 19 minutes a day

Wrong Faster!

Of course what they're getting faster is incorrect, but DWP wouldn't care about that.

Microsoft's 'atypical' emergency Windows patches are becoming awfully typical

Re: And Then There's All The Other "Cloud" Oligopolies...........

Because this was mostly about Windows, not Azure. Yes, the other clouds are just as bad as Azure, but you're not running Oracle or Amazon's OS on your company desktops/laptops.

Should fewer company PCs be running Windows? Absolutely. But in practice large companies are locked in (or consider themselves to be) especially because they are so dependent on the abominations of Exchange / Outlook / Office / Teams. So Windows update quality control being complete vibe coded shite is a uniquely Microslop problem. I don't have to worry about Google taking down my PC with an update... yet!

Re: Don't say "AI Slop"!

Slopya Nadella

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

Re: Where there's a will there's a way

Yeah, MS has been doing everything it can to cook the books on this, like counting Office sales as 'AI Revenue'. And even with that the best they can come up with is 3.3%? I suspect it what's you said.

Patch Tuesday meets Groundhog Day as Windows hibernation bug returns

Vibe coding going great still

Remember, all this stuff is vibe coded now. Who woulda guessed?