Posts by Mythical Ham-Lunch

OS-busting bug so bad that Microsoft blocks Windows Insider release

Constantinople had gates too, the trouble is when you leave one open...

We’re calling it now: Agentic AI will win RSAC buzzword Bingo

LLM-powered tools to detect intrusions into crappy software created by LLMs? If that sounds like a good idea, I've got an awesome rocket that I'd like to sell you. It just doesn't have quite enough fuel to get to Mars. We only need to make it a bit bigger, so it can carry more fuel!

Show top LLMs some code and they'll merrily add in the bugs they saw in training

The real shock is that somehow, researchers keep winning grant applications to study properties of LLMs when they should have known the answer in the first place because they understood the technology!

Get my tinfoil hat, because I almost wonder if some of these 'studies' are funded by the LLM makers themselves. Sure, there's a bit of bad press in "emits buggy code," but they also prop up the much larger and more important narrative that these technologies are mysterious black boxes worthy of study in the first place. As if there is ANY mystery to why a predictive tool, when fed crap, suggests more crap! Because one bad line of code, statistically, is most likely to appear near other bad lines of code!

Framing it as a problem that requires study suggests that there is an as-yet-unknown solution that could fix the aforesaid problem, when really, OpenAI just needs that sweet investor cash.

Ex-Googler Schmidt warns US: Try an AI 'Manhattan Project' and get MAIM'd

He tried this before in that book with Kissinger but I guess it's worth another kick at the can. I mean, what IF we could just squash research to preserve our hegemony in the current crappy state of the art?

"We own Nvidia stock and those GPUs ain't gonna buy themselves!"(At least not without AI....)

'Cybertruck ownership comes with ... interesting fan mail'

Re: "Firstly, normal people don't care what car they or anyone else is driving"

Truly, those are some of the cars of all time.

IBM return-to-office order hits finance, ops teams amid push to dump staff for AI

Re: what comes around...

Where are you working that the C-suite was intelligent, or at the office, to begin with?

National Public Data files for bankruptcy, admits 'hundreds of millions' potentially affected

Re: No, absolutely not

Wrong example, the engine will explode no matter what you put in and the insurers know it :)

Datacenters bleed watts and cash – all because they're afraid to flip a switch

I had a job where the rules for preparing any new server were to disable all automatic updates and power-saving features, and install third-party remote access tools.

It's not around any more.

Key aspects of Palantir's Federated Data Platform lack legal basis, lawyers tell NHS England

"This data includes the number of beds in a hospital, the size of waiting lists for elective care services, or the availability of medical supplies."

Okay, so the only justification they can provide is to optimize the finite amount of medical care that the system can provide. Lord forbid they spend the 450 million on, uh, beds, and salaries, and bandages!

Rust for Linux maintainer steps down in frustration with 'nontechnical nonsense'

> ... requires continuous scrutiny ...

... from Microsoft?! Larf and a harf, surely.

I can admire the goals of Rust but I find it very telling that Microsoft pushes it so hard. The selling points of the language seem to be, at a gross level, that for a given final system state it takes comparatively fewer tokens than C to represent the instructions to achieve that state, and that the parts of the system state that are relevant to the user are described by tokens which, statistically, are likely to be close to one another in the source code.

In other words, because of the strong statistical relationship between code blocks and user-observed behaviour, it's amenable for generation by LLMs because the LLM input (the program specification) will have a very tight relationship with the LLM output/compiler input (the source code). Any given line of specification is more likely to correlate to a series of characters in the LLM data model which has been associated by someone else with the same specification already.

A particularly paranoid person might even wonder if the push to get Rust into the kernel is so that an unpaid developer community will generate a whole bunch of Rusty systems code and associated documentation which can then be ingested by Copilot and barfed back out for Microsoft devs. A paranoid person. Might think that.

The graying open source community needs fresh blood

Re: Not likely

But is six pounds of lead more or less balanced than six pounds of feathers?