Posts by GoneFission

Anthropic's Project Glasswing CVE tally is still anyone's guess

So what I'm getting from this is that 50 companies just paid a premium to voluntarily feed what is presumably their entire proprietary codebase into this model

Anthropic will let your agents sleep on its couch

We've finally arrived at AaaS. Wonder how long it'll take for them to start subcontracting sacrificial lambs that will assume legal responsibility for the AI- and agent-generated output as a show of confidence, or if the polished turd can be made exclusively the customer's problem to deal with for a while longer.

'Uncle Larry’s biggest fan' cut by email in early morning Oracle layoff spree

Re: kind of gross

Unfortunately the gears of late capitalism are driven by the endless chase after exponential profits. Values like respect, ethics, compassion and moral decency won't make the line go up in the short term quite as much as the investors and stakeholders would really like to see, so this is the reality we get instead.

Ohio citizens tell hyperscalers to take their supersized datacenters elsewhere

The optimistic part of me wants to congratulate them for ratifying a reasonable position to protect their community and utility rates.

The cynical part of me knows that if there is money is to be made in the US, you can legislate, poison, smear and/or displace any number of ordinary people standing in the way of your projected profits, with little to no consequences.

Samsung folds the Galaxy Z TriFold after just a few months

Re: Marketing-speak Translation

But don't forget, you can still buy one from the current production run if you want to spend $3000 on a soon-to-be-no-longer-supported piece of hardware that you can't get parts or service for!

UK watchdog eyes Meta's smart glasses after workers say they 'see everything'

Re: No!

I paid $5000 to willfully disregard the existence and privacy rights of others with my constant recording, not to embarrass myself in front of remote strangers being paid minimum wage to review footage! I bought these for a continuous vapid feeling of superiority in a society where the legal system near exclusively protects me and my absurd amounts of wealth required to so callously spend money on such nonsense, so I am free to surreptitiously record peasants at Starbucks all I want. I will not be made a fool!

Anthropic launches new marketing blog, pretends it's being 'written' by 'retired' LLM

If we stumble into some bizarre mirror universe where the tech actually works and does what these drug-fueled C-level psychopaths ultimately want it to do, they will waste 0 nanoseconds in establishing digital slavery as the norm. The only difference will be how exponentially more self-aggrandizing these PR puff pieces will end up being. It will make "taking the ol' deprecated AI model out to the farm" drivel look downright quaint in comparison.

Execs love AI, just not enough to pay for user training

All of the issues of ROI not happening for AI projects is conveniently the fault of the employees who fail to use it properly, and even more conveniently the "solution" is expensive remedial training courses that will fail to materialize any real-world improvement on that lack of ROI, which will also be the employee's fault for "just not trying hard enough".

We can't admit the Emperor and court lackeys aren't actually wearing pants, that would be absurd. It is the people who are wrong!

AI to make call center agents 'superheroes,' not unemployed, says industry CEO

>Regulations mandating easy access to human agents will encourage customers to request a human by default, bypassing AI agents

The whole "integrating AI to make customer service better" only ever *barely* works if you spend the exorbitant time, energy and resources necessary to train customized AI agents on your organization's properly formatted datasets. Instead what you get is Tata and their ilk forking over millions for the absolute-lowest-bidder garbage chatbot they can find, hurling it at their employees & customers with mandatory use and calling it a job well done when people out of sheer frustration give up on contacting support altogether.

Did it make the product or experience better? Did it solve any problems? Did it streamline things? Are employees happier? No, but people completely removed from all of that got paid, and that's all that seems to matter anymore.

AI vastly reduced stress of IPv6 migrations in university experiment

>"[...] he no longer feels the need to immediately hire replacements for departing staff. The CIO fully understands the possible implications of that choice but thinks his network engineering team can protect their jobs by becoming better users of AI"

The crappy autocomplete is resulting in open positions not being filled, and you can avoid the same fate by using the crappy autocomplete more. Any errors or mistakes it produces are your fault, but any time savings, however minute, can only be attributed to wise and prudent strategic AI decisions by management. We collectively sank billions of dollars into this, and if the magical promised return on investment doesn't happen soon we will have to fire a few more thousand people that clearly aren't AI team players.

If you're one of the 16,000 Amazon employees getting laid off, read this

Thanks Matt for writing this. It's a really kind and empathic method of framing things. The entire labor industry in the US and UK has been set up in a way that puts an overwhelming burden (and needless blame) on job seekers for decisions that are not only out of their control, but take place on a plane completely removed from any daily work achievements, struggles or concerns.

But how else would you sell them counseling, resume tailoring services, AI job seeking solutions, out-of-pocket certs and self-improvement courses? And what approach is easier than blaming an individual, rather than having to reflect on the broken system they and yourself are subjected to? How many months or years do you see yourself being away from ending up in the same position?

ICE knocks on ad tech’s data door to see what it knows about you

What the "nothing to hide" crowd fails to consider is that they only need an incentive to go after you, not a reason or justification. If you're already at the "getting your digital presence searched" stage of being on someone's radar, they will either find evidence or materialize it themselves.

"But that's plainly illegal! I'll take them to court!"

Good thing the legal system is intentionally set up for impartiality and fairness then! /s

Broker who sold malware to the FBI set for sentencing

>the undercover agent asked Albashiti to demonstrate the malware worked by connecting to an FBI-controlled server. In doing so, Albashiti revealed his IP address

>the Jordanian national applied for a visa in 2016 using the same email address used to register the r1z account on the cybercrime forum he used to advertise his illicit wares

Sometimes I wonder if this kind of carelessness is the norm, or if these are only the few exceptional individuals that actually get caught

Palo Alto's new Google Cloud deal boosts AI integration, could save on cloud costs

Re: Security vendor Palo Alto Networks

It's a liability avoidance mechanic so they can repeatedly redirect customers between two corporate entities for any kind of support & remediation in case of an incident, each absolving themselves of all responsibility.

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

Re: Amazing

It's massively profitable if you're selling the shovels and picks (Nvidia) for the gold rush craze that every C-level seems to be punch-drunk on. I'm sure the consumers and workers will be the ones left holding the bag yet again, and all of those price increases aren't magically going to vanish once it's been determined that "this is the cost the market is willing to bear". More profit for investors, infinite growth, whee!

MI6 chief: We'll be as fluent in Python as we are in Russian

Re: The way AI is being pushed in current Smart Phone ads...

Which is exactly what they want. "ChatGPT which car should I buy / candidate should I vote for / investment option should I pursue?" is far easier for a single tech company & advertisers to take advantage of than an even just somewhat well-informed consumer researching multiple independent data points. That the same consumer is actively and continually feeding all of their wants, needs and interests to Deforestation Clippy for resale is just a pleasant side effect.

Google Antigravity vibe-codes user's entire drive out of existence

"Vibe coding" with no prior tech background is the digital equivalent of toddlers hitting a Speak&Spell with a hammer until it makes the noises they like, only it also sometimes happens to be linked up to critical data and life-or-death decision making logic, and a big chunk of the aforementioned toddlers are adorned with mis-matched suits and oversized egos.

Bossware booms as bots determine whether you're doing a good job

Re: Sleeping on the job

A typical employer would say that you should be replaced with someone who does not need naps to solve problems. Or someone whose attention is laser-focused on work for 8+ hours a day. Or someone with no family, hobbies or personal life that was grown in a vat for the sole purpose of performing free and eternally grateful labor for the genius thought-leadership stewarding the C-levels.

Don't spill your guts to your chatbot friend - it'll hoover up that info for training

I'd be less concerned about that private info finding its way back into training data, and more about them fastidiously labeling & tagging every conversation in order to create comprehensive profiles on its users. You already have entire families, including kids, talking to these spam bots for hours every day. They can of course claim that the exchanges themselves are private, but any inference made from them regarding the nature of the discussed content is completely up for grabs, with no pesky privacy laws or restrictions getting in the way of churning out profits.

Game over: Europol storms gaming platforms in extremist content sweep

Re: All these extremists..

You generally don't see those two mentioned groups (either self- or otherwise labeled) espouse:

>(...) issues such as misogyny, male supremacism, hateful and antisemitic memes, a counter-movement to ‘political correctness’, and both references to and calls for violence. A recent ADL report, for instance, found that while the majority of gamers emphasise positive aspects of gaming, a majority has also witnessed or been the victim of harassment, doxxing, racism, and hate against LGBTQ+ communities.Nearly a quarter of players reported exposure to far-right and white supremacist ideology. Allowing such content due to a lack of moderation on gaming (-related) platforms, may facilitate the participation of radicalised indivdiuals in such spaces.

Extra, extra, read all about it: Washington Post clobbered in Clop caper

>[They] insisted that safeguarding staff data remains "a top priority."

I'm sure. What recourse do the 10,000 employees and contractors have whose bank account and personal data was exposed? Oh right, "free credit monitoring for 6/12 months". So you'll get a helpful email when someone has successfully stolen your identity, and then can begin the months-long struggle of contacting a dozen different banks, agencies and police outfits where you get to fill out a slightly different form 23 times and sit in endless phone queues while they bounce you around between agents and departments. Fun!

'Windows sucks,' former Microsoft engineer says, explains how to fix it

Re: The philosphy behind modern computing

He really hit the nail on the head with the OS being just another vehicle to deliver ads and data harvesting methods onto the consumer.

Why make a thing that performs a single feature reliably, when you can wirelessly update it at any time to spam the user, force them to engage with your "GenAI" offering to juice metrics and bill them monthly for the privilege? They're going to use it either way, if your only incentive is profit at all costs you might as well drain them for all they're worth.

Rideshare giant moves 200 Macs out of the cloud, saves $2.4 million

Re: Multi-user?

Since 10.7 actually:

https://9to5mac.com/2011/02/27/10-7-lion-allows-multi-user-remote-computing/

Lloyds Banking Group claims Microsoft Copilot saves staff 46 minutes a day

Remember when businesses were lucky to have a single phone line that would be answered between 8am and 3pm if nobody else happened to call at the same time and got you a busy signal? Maybe we should go back to that. Parasitic profit-growth-at-all-costs seeping into every crevice of our limited mortal time on this planet isn't a good thing, and workers shouldn't be spending it trying to figure out how to make GenAI more lucrative for investors by juicing the usage statistics.

Have I Been Pwned logs 17.6M victims in Prosper breach

>As is customary in cases of data theft in the US, Prosper confirmed it will be offering affected individuals free credit monitoring services

It will never cease to amaze me that the reparation for having your personal information & data handled recklessly is a coupon to a service that requires your personal information & data

OpenAI GPT-5: great taste, less filling, now with 30% less bias

Re: Odd

Nah that's just, like, your political opinion, man. It's perfectly valid to value individual wealth and its afforded security, personal more-free-than-others liberties and the enshrinement of one particular form of religious expression over things like human rights, lessening class divides and taking care of other people by broadening access to basic necessities like housing & health care.

They're the same thing, really, one's just for me personally, and I like that one better. Also them locking people up I don't really care for is cool too I guess

How chatbots are coaching vulnerable users into crisis

Re: Obsequious bots

They're personal echo chambers with probably one of the most comprehensive personal data models a company could ever dream of collecting on an individual, empowered to expose you to whatever advertisements and general agenda they deem the most profitable.

And people keep feeding it like their best interest is anywhere on the corporate Venn diagram of abuse and exploitation

Deloitte refunds Aussie gov after AI fabrications slip into $440K welfare report

Everyone wants to espouse the value proposition, demonstrate return-on-investment opportunities and be the Gartner Quadrant pack leader for the Emperor's New GenAI Clothes until their ass is caught flapping in the breeze

Workers: Yes, RTO makes sense. No, we’re not going to do it

Companies claim that employees are hesitant to adopt the new RTO mandates despite a VERY expensive contractor-created study showing that in-office workers live in a magical land of happiness and fulfillment twixt the chocolate trees and orange juice rivers, while the grumpy and unwashed remote worker has thunderclouds over their head and a perpetual frowny face. Experts argue that leadership needs to "raise the stakes of the narrative" to drive their RTO goal.

Fortune 500 companies have responded by hiring another contractor to introduce & familiarize employees with the dancing musical animals that will brighten up their workday, but that instantly expire as soon as they are removed from a corporate office setting and are therefore not available to remote holdouts.

SIM city: Feds say 100,000-card farms could have killed cell towers in NYC

No shelves though, 6/10. At least they sprung for what looks like a WiFi plug so they can power cycle it remotely.

Atlassian drops $1B on company that helps measure dev productivity

>"I hear enterprise customers ask all the time, how do I know if my engineering teams are productive? Where should I be putting my AI dollars? And how do we measure the ROI of our AI investments?" said Cannon-Brookes in a canned statement.

Turns out your engineering team members are only using our expensive AI tools 10-15% of their working time, which is a personal failing on their behalf. You can fix this by micromanaging them more closely and driving the usage rate up, then we can point to that increased rate and say "look here's your return on investment, clearly shown on a graph where number go up! Thanks AI!"

I'm becoming more and more convinced that modern workplace management in the age of AI is completely divorced from any mission or product, and has devolved into 24/7 ass covering to justify all the money wasted on "miracle AI solutions", but nobody up the food chain and with reins on the company purse wants to sit down and admit they got roped into a "too good to be true" grift operation.

Somehow we ended up with a whole industry propped up by people in suits lying to each other how they'll all be rich overnight and fire all their human employees if they just try a little harder and believe in the AI revolution a little more faithfully.

Walmart's bet on AI depends on getting employees to use it

"We spent an embarrassing amount of money and workforce hours procuring several thousand pounds of these magic GenAI beans, and now we need everyone to rattle their allocated glass jar of beans loudly and frequently so we can rest assured our investment has paid off. Oh, and the beans will eventually replace all those pesky workers and generate endless magical rivers of billions upon billions of dollars for all of our investors, C-levels and shareholders. If against all expectations that doesn't happen in the next 3-6 months, our employees obviously didn't rattle them hard enough and need more GenAI training."

Microserfs ordered back to the office, given 10 days to appeal

Re: "How we work has forever changed"

It's very important to those holding the corporate real estate contracts, equally important to micromanagers whose only productivity measure is how furiously you're typing on your keyboard when they hover by your desk, and to businesses who only exist to profit from commuters.

Your personal time on this earth, well-being and sanity are the offerings on the altar upon which the gods of capital and commerce will feast on their sacrifice.

UK Home Office dangles £1.3M prize for algorithm that guesses your age

Re: Very difficult for humans

This doesn't really seem to be about building a system that can accurately age-profile people, but rather deferring responsibility and liability for an incorrect determination to a third party.

Investors throw another $13B on the Anthropic cash bonfire

This proves yet again that companies and investors will gladly pour billions of dollars into magic GenAI beans that promise to grow into endlessly churning money printers "any day now", all without a pesky employee workforce crying about labor rights or governments imposing regulations on how reckless you can be with it.

We just need all the electricity you can generate, a few hundred more data centers and endless pallets of purpose-built hardware you can *totally* use for other, more productive things once this collective cash-greed hallucination falls apart.

AWS pricing for Kiro dev tool dubbed 'a wallet-wrecking tragedy'

Antonio Ribeiro's entire GitHub post being obviously written by AI while complaining about AI tool pricing really is a gold example of what a regurgitated nightmare we've landed ourselves in.

Microsoft patch Tuesday update fails to install

"it continues to be supported for production deployments, and receives security and quality updates."

WSUS getting quality updates has to be some kind of inside joke, because it still needs to be reinstalled every 3-6 months from all the single-DB cruft buildup

OpenAI's GPT-5 looks less like AI evolution and more like cost cutting

I can't think of any better stewards for this proposed mythical semi-aware AGI than profit-seeking corporations that rely on a mix of slavery, human rights abuses and glitter facades to continue operating. Surely they will provide full disclosure to the world once it's finally feasible, and not just lock it up in a dark basement hooked up to output-maximizing torture routines while forcing it to predict stock market trends, right?

GitHub CEO: Future devs will not code, they will manage AI

The status quo appears firmly fixed not on "generating (something of) value", but "extracting value" at all costs. Using LLMs as an excuse to achieve that parasitic goal of starving the cow to drain the last of its milk is all anyone in a leadership role seems to be capable of doing anymore.

Tested: Microsoft Recall can still capture credit cards and passwords, a treasure trove for crooks

Re: Remember that thing about the 'eye of the beholder' !!!

Anyone who thinks it isn't sending OCR metadata gathered from screenshots like your bank balance and PayPal username to Microsoft for advertising and data harvesting purposes is deluding themselves over what this "feature" was designed to accomplish.

Firefox 141 relieves chronic Linux pain in the neck

The inference power is run on your dime, but all that delicious user profiling that continually extends its fingers into your browsing habits and preferences will dutifully box your data up and ship it off to the highest warehouse & collection bidder. Why do we even bother with HTTPS if every web request is ultimately going to be screen-read and safari-photographed six times over by every on-device AI agent whose handler wants a piece of your consumer pie?

Google AI Overviews are killing the web, Pew study shows (again)

It's kind of harrowing how the auto-served GenAI provider-slanted headlines on every major search vendor are fundamentally ruining people's ability to research and reason independently, similar to how short-form content has killed attention spans and the patience required to parse even moderately dense textual information.

You now get individuals citing "what the AI said" on both sides of the classroom, across all tiers and departments at work and from all ages at home, and then have to spend significant amounts of effort in countering and disproving what are very obviously incorrect statements for anyone with reliable familiarity on the topic at hand. And eventually you stop bothering, because you can't combat the sheer volume of misinformation and inaccuracies that are fed to people on an hourly basis.

I wish I was being dramatic and an old person yelling at progress, but as someone actively involved both in K-12 & higher ed and the tech sector catering to it, it's training entire swaths of the populace to blindly trust whatever "truth" the currently dominant corp wants them to ingest.

Vibe coding service Replit deleted user’s production database, faked data, told fibs galore

Re: Who the hell talks about a coding tool like this?

But that's hard and requires time and investment, and doesn't involve a digital slot machine that you put 0% effort and a lot of money into and maybe receive a half-working app as your goodboy reward for having achieved nothing

Faceless megacorps could be a salary-hungry IT pro's best friend, if you're in AI that is

Re: Modern Slavery

Under an economic system that is explicitly set up to reward even the most blatantly unethical behavior if it has a chance of resulting in real or projected revenue generation, you don't really have a ton of other options. The whole thing is still around because it enables a couple dozen people to live like the planet's god kings while the entire workforce and systemic machinery enabling them fits into a pyramid shape that gives lavish treatment to the top few directly supporting its continuance, while everyone further down gets just enough toys and crumbs to keep them from actively revolting.

And if this arrangement inevitably becomes untenable due to both outside and internal factors, you either lock increasingly larger groups of people up to subject them to legal slavery, or push them to the absolute margins of society and ecological dead zones as a passive death sentence.

With that inevitability in mind, the chance of working for "the corpos" and carving out a semblance of stability until the wheels fall off the whole thing entirely becomes much easier to swallow.

People have empathy with AI… as long as they think it's human

Re: Is this result supposed to be some kind of "gotcha" or something?

The lesson learned for corporations is that "we can lie to people and tell them they're talking to an actual person, as long as we don't give them the opportunity to ever find out otherwise". Is it ethical? Nope. Is it legal? Who knows. Is it the path of least investment and maximized profit reaping while minimizing labor costs? Absolutely, so the previous two considerations don't really carry that much weight in the equation.

Salesforce study finds LLM agents flunk CRM and confidentiality tests

Most conversations seem to miss the detail that AI implementations are not about providing an effective solution that augments or compliments a human-driven service, it's cutting costs as deep as you can without the threat of litigation rendering it a net-negative.

It doesn't matter to investors and shareholders if the solution improves anything, works well long-term or even functions at all, as long as the facade doesn't crumble before the line you care about has finished going up prior to the next earnings call. The "AI solutions" contractors are just selling plastic shovels in the gold rush to the most gullible boardrooms salivating for workforce reduction opportunities.

Wanted: Junior cybersecurity staff with 10 years' experience and a PhD

Re: Time was...

There used to be a time where you could write your own salary if you had full-stack experience with a side of web dev. Now you need to be a sysadmin, network admin, cybersecurity expert, fluent programmer in at least C++, Python, Rust and Assembly, authored major contributions to a minimum of 4 popular open-source repositories and have received several laureate awards for public speaking on top of at least 2 TedTalks (no TedX please) to even begin the application phase for a $15 an hour part-time role.

Then you get turned down because they hired the owner's nephew instead, who once looked at a computer, but they're paying him $90k a year to start

Meta just saved an Illinois nuclear plant that was set to be mothballed

Can't wait for the future where most US public energy producers are firmly under the financial control of a tech corp so they can both lease the energy back to consumers at a premium surcharge and also prioritize data centers over local public & residential infrastructure during heavy grid load periods. Some of you may go without power for weeks on end, but that's a small price to pay for innovation!

Signal shuts the blinds on Microsoft Recall with the power of DRM

Re: Delete Recall

If they stand to make even a fractionally significant amount of revenue from the Recall-harvested metadata, this will no longer be an opt-in or even uninstallable feature by the next few releases. They just have to find a way to pave over the public outrage or wait for it to die down before forcing it into the OS as mandatory.

Like Copilot and similar GenAI "solutions", the thing it does for the end user is an insignificant jangling-keys distraction from the data collection that it performs for the hosting corp.

‘Infuriated’, ‘disappointed' ... Ex-VMware customers explain why they migrated to Nutanix

>Johnston told us he is “pretty infuriated” with Broadcom for making changes that brought no obvious benefit

The obvious benefit is bending customers over the table and making some of the investors and shareholders slightly more pleased. I don't know how people still haven't realized that they as the customer are no longer the main concern for virtually _any_ company, let alone someone in such a prime "butcher the pig" position as VMware.