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AWS CEO: It's funny when people ask me if AI is overhyped

You don't go to an AI conference unless you are think AI is going somewhere.

AI will make anyone a 10x programmer, but with 10x the cleanup

Nothing has changedd

I once new a really good programmer who would sit round, apparently doing nothing for months. He would then type for a couple of weeks an a program would emerge that was brilliant. I asked him what his trick was and he said, "I sit around thinking about the problem a lot.". Our bosses were frustrated with this behavior. From their perspective, if he had been typing the entire time they would have even more genius code.

AI enables a new generation of developers to avoid thinking about the problem. It enables a new generation of bosses to press for more speed - and then whine about the lack of quality later.

Even Microsoft knows Copilot shouldn't be trusted with anything important

Re: MicroSlop

Microsoft finds the word "MicroSlop" very hurtful. Be kind. Just because Microsoft is a soulless corporation intent on accumulating all the world's wealth doesn't mean it doesn't have feelings.

Everyone MUST us AI

But if anything goes wrong, blame the human user.

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

Recursive inshitification

Microsoft is now inshitifying the tools used to inshit things. Its as if everyone on the Internet is competing to be #1! in shit. Microsoft pulled out front with this stunt.

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

For the good of all

I am sure that many of you, like me, in an effort to get away from Copilot, have switch to other git providers like codeberg.org. Even so, if you still have a github.com account I suggest that you log in to github and follow the instructions to disable Copilot completely - or as completely as Microsoft will allow. This will register every so slightly on the Microsoft corporate "brain" that people don't like Copilot and it is an foolish business venture. At least we can hope.

Microsoft and Nvidia claim AI can speed approval of new atomic plants

AI can also speed up nuclear disasters

The evidence suggests that AI should not be trusted with anything life threatening.

Age checks creep into Linux as systemd gets a DOB field

That didn't take long

Someone forked systemd to take out the user age system.

It would be even easier to always return 99.

https://itsfoss.com/news/systemd-fork-strips-out-age-verification/

This is purely performative.

Linux is open source. Patches that make the system reply to an age query with "going on 99" will be trivial and popular.

We got here because workable policies that protect kids would cost sites like YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, and all the porn sites way too much money. To protect kids from harmful contents these sites need to be liable for the damage and be forced to use strong identity for each user. Anything else is just politicians "doing something" about the problem.

IBM CEO pay pack jumps 51% for 2025 in target smash and grab

Office politics, with stockholders being included in the office politics.

Users protest as Google Antigravity price floats upward

Do people think this should (will) be free?

Really, you should at least pay for the electricity.

Microsoft ships VS Code weekly, adds Autopilot mode so AI can wreak havoc without bothering you

Might I suggest VSCodium?

VS Code is an open source project. Prior it a VS Code release, Microsoft takes the code, puts it in their own private environment, and then adds the Microsoft stuff, which includes telemetry and features like Copilot. If you don't care for the Microsoft extra sauce, you can easily install VSCodium instead. It's just a build of the open source project.

If you find yourself spending 5-10 minutes on each update of VS Code, turning off the features that Microsoft keeps adding back (yeah, that's you I am looking at Copilot), VSCodium might be for you.

Check it out: https://vscodium.com

US state laws push age checks into the operating system

It always depends

Like all questions in software it depends. If this law simply means that a date of birth must be associated with every account when that account is created it doesn't invade privacy. It might provide diligent parents with the ability to limit what their children do and see on the Internet. (I refuse to argue how likely this will be, most parents are busy and/or lazy.) Giving up your date of birth in this manner is not an invasion of privacy. That's why DOB is used in the US to identify a person, for example, when accessing private medical records like prescriptions. A DOB does not uniquely identify an individual while a Social Security number does.

If there is a requirement to first prove the user's identity before creating the account that would be a different thing but I see no evidence that it is. This entire conversation seems to be based on slippery slope fears.

Supposedly big-brained execs are outsourcing decisionmaking to AI

Re: AI is the modern equivalent of astrology

Yes like "Do I have to pee?"

Perhaps this has been going on longer than we think!

This might explain why so much of the Internet is built on JavaScript!

Open source devs consider making hogs pay for every download

Re: Doing it right takes more effort than people think

Yeah, I was thinking it would be pretty straight forward to create the necessary deployment tools that

1) creates the instance of the caching repo

2) points it to the target repo

3) pulls from the main branch. (Assuming you don't want all the history).

It really would matter much if it was deployed in the cloud or locally, it could all be scripted.

Re: Doing it right takes more effort than people think

On think the "on Prem" repo you are talking about is really just a caching proxy where you refresh the cache by hand. You are right though, that will work.

Doing it right takes more effort than people think

I think you'd need to set up a caching proxy repository for every open source repository you are accessing. https://github.com/google/goblet is an example. You don't want to simply copy the latest code in the open source repository somewhere, you need a way of tracking the updates in the original repo - so "get latest" actually means get latest. Alternatively, you could manually get the latest code from the open source repo and store it in the repository holding you applications's code, but that sort of manual versioning creates problems that source code control systems were supposed to solve in the first place.

I had no idea that caching proxy git repos were a thing. Who knew?

Trump orders purge of 'woke' Anthropic from government

Another definition of "woke"

People on the right generally use the term "woke" do describe anything they don't like. It is equivalent to the red neck using of the term "socialist" in the US. The usage has no connection to the original usage of the term.

Now "woke" means "responsible" and responsible is apparently a bad thing.

Bcachefs creator insists his custom LLM is female and 'fully conscious'

Someone ought to set this fella up with a blind date...

He clearly isn't getting out enough.

Jack Dorsey’s fintech outfit Block announces 40% layoffs, blames AI, gets 23% stock bump

Never trust anyone with a beard like that.

Never.

Anthropic to Pentagon: Autonomous weapons could hurt US troops and civilians

Typical Double Speak

The Department of Defense - sorry, Department of War - says it doesn't want to produce autonomous weapons or use AI to spy on Americans. It just doesn't want Anthropic to restrict them from producing autonomous weapons or spying on Americans with their product.

Riiiiiiiighttttt.

Founder ditches AWS for Euro stack, finds sovereignty isn't plug-and-play

Early Adopters

Hopefully these early adopters will make it easier for those that follow.

Amazon's vibe-coding tool Kiro reportedly vibed too hard and brought down AWS

User Error

Yes, Jeff. Using Kiro was definitely a user error. I suppose we should expect this now. AI is credited with making things better, when thing go wrong it is the humans fault.

6,000 execs struggle to find the AI productivity boom

Survey's like this don't mean much.

Business leader hate admitting that they made a mistake. While you might get one to say "AI isn't providing us with the productivity gains we expected - yet", they will never answer the question with "I made a big mistake investing in this stuff, I wish I hadn't".

AI agents can't teach themselves new tricks – only people can

This sound familiar

Like the old Simpson's monkey butler joke.

Contain your Windows apps inside Linux Windows

Oh great!

I can run the Windows version of Teams on Ubuntu! This is exactly what I want!

Notepad's new Markdown powers served with a side of remote code execution

They just don't know when to let things be.

Markdown support in notepad is about as useful as a screen door on a submarine.

Palantir CEO claims AI will mean western economies won't need immigration

When the bubble is about to pop

Appeal to the bigots.

Ready for a newbie-friendly Linux? Mint team officially releases v 22.3, 'Zena'

Great on older hardware but...

Linux Mint is great on older hardware. It is definitely easy to transition from the Windows user interface, since Cinnamon feels a lot like Windows 10. On the other hand, I have found that installing it on newer hardware (Razerblade 15, 2025). Ubuntu just worked. Have others seen the same thing?

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

Strong identification for Chat Bot users.

Chat bot users should be strongly identified so that when the user instructs the bot to do something it shouldn't everyone knows who that person is. Images especially should come with a username watermark

Finally - a terminal solution to the browser wars

But why

I am sure there must be a practical reason for this - I just don't see it.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella becomes AI influencer, asks us all to move beyond slop

Well yeah!

Sure Nadella wants people to focus on the possible ways AI can help society - he can't think of any so please, please, please if any of you guys can let him know. He has billions to make!

Everybody has a theory about why Nvidia dropped $20B on Groq - they're mostly wrong

Re: other optionsI

I think the money merry go round is the best explanation. People building hardware and data centers are making money from AI, people actually selling AI are not. NVIDIA is highly motivated to keep the bubble going as long as possible.

One real reason AI isn't delivering: Meatbags in manglement

Investment capitalism can be weird

Quite often in business, being the one guy who figures out that a business can generate profits is the best thing. This is the Warren Buffet thing. Investment capitalism is different. The profitability of the business is besides the point as long as you can convince other people that they should buy your stock for more than you paid. You want everybody to believe that the investment is great and thus bid against each other. That's what's going on with AI. There is little evidence that the development at Open AI, Google, Microsoft, and others is AI, much less profitable. Those early investors are not going to let the high probability of failure stop them from trying to get people to pay more for the stock than they, the early investors did.

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

Yet another AI marketing stunt.

I am sure that no one at Microsoft honestly expects to sell an operating system created this way. They are hoping that some IT managers will say "Hey, if Microsoft is willing to rewrite Windows using AI then surely we can rewrite our line of business applications that way. Let's pay Microsoft for Copilot!"

AI faces closing time at the cash buffet

Business guys making technical, enterprise architecture decisions.

My years working as a consultant working for major corporate customers taught me the following:

1) The corporate business guys who sign off on technical decisions have little knowledge or interest in technical issues.They delegate to business guys down the chain of command who also have little knowledge or interest in anything other than moving up in chain of command.

2) At the bottom of the chain is the least experienced business guy who listens to salesmen. The best salesman wins. The decision seldom has anything to do with "what is the best technology" or heavens forbid, "what is good for the business". Instead it generally depends on salesman like-ability. Also, new stuff is more fun to sell. Also, if the junior guys is the first person to champion something new they will have a leg up on moving up the chain.

3) Once top business guy has made a decision based on the decision made buy the most junior guy, admitting a mistake is unthinkable since it might result in losing his position in the organization. Blaming the mistake on the junior guys doesn't always work. This is why projects that are failing continue for long after it is obvious that they are a waste of money. As long as the dead horse continues to be beaten, the top business guy keeps his position - and maybe has time to find somewhere else to go.

There is no chance that corporate consumers of AI will admit their mistakes prior to the bubble bursting. The most they will refuse to pay for price increases for something that isn't working.

Purdue makes 'AI working competency' a graduation requirement

It's about money

Someone has a vested interest in seeing AI take off, independent of its merits.

GitHub walks back plan to charge for self-hosted runners

Stop being mean to Microsoft

Somebody has to pay for Copilot, some how.

Browser 'privacy' extensions have eye on your AI, log all your chats

Who is Bea Urban - I assume that was a misspelling.

From Georgia to Essex, AI datacenters are testing public goodwill

Nothing for something

It might be different if LLMs were things that people actually wanted. Right now, it appears that data centers are being opened to support the continuing techbro effort to score more investments - and maybe ward off the collapse of the "AI" bubble.

Workday project at Washington University hits $266M

Is Workday and improvement

It is understandable that people feel they should upgrade their software to something more modern, but when doing so, they should carefully analyze and quantify what they expect from the new software. Can the cost of converting to Workday be recouped in operational costs long term? Are some requirements that Workday meets that the old apps do not meet? Was upgrading the old apps considered? While it sounds cool to say "we replaced 90 apps with on big one", that is often a misleading statement and it probably buy you anything.

Most of the time, business administration type organizational leaders who know very little about software make these decisions. Once they have wasted a bunch of the organizations money they can't very well admit they made a mistake.

Windows 11 needs an XP SP2 moment, says ex-Microsoft engineer

I need to stop

I left Windows for Linux some time ago, so articles like this are rage bait rather than information - to me.

HP to sack up to six thousand staff under AI adoption plan, fresh round of cost-cutting

Is the AI bubble crashing?

If you were on the HP board and you thought that all this AI investment was going to cause a stock market devaluation like the Dot Com bust in the 90s, wouldn't you try to increase stock prices and payouts to the board before it all happens? After all, no one is buying those "AI Powered PCs" now, who will be buying them after the crash?

Re: Man vs Machine

Your comment is spot on, but a bit too long for most people to bother reading. :-)

Seven years later, Airbus is still trying to kick its Microsoft habit

Doing the easy thing is often pointless

Why would an organization switch from Office to Google Workspace - they are effectively the same thing with the same sorts of problem. I get it that switching to something like LibreOffice woivuld be hard, but switching between Google and Microsoft seems performative more than anything else.

70-hour work weeks no longer enough for Infosys founder, who praises China’s 996 culture

72 hr week

This guy might be the most convincing argument ever for the 2nd Amendment.

Cloudflare broke itself – and a big chunk of the Internet – with a bad database query

To big to fail is not good

Having everyone depend on the same infrastructure providers is a problem. When they go bad they take down too much of the internet. Countries should pass laws that encourage lots of these providers instead of supporting the very big ones.

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

Windows users "just want an OS that's actually performant, reliable, and stable."

Yeah but how does that increase Microsoft shareholder value?

Cloudflare coughs, half the internet catches a cold

Too big to fail

"Given the importance of Cloudflare's services, any outage is unacceptable. "

That is a true statement, but outages will happen. The Internet is facing the issue that there are some very widely used infrastructure providers that are too big to fail. A larger number of providers that are competing would prevent these mass outages. Sure, some sites would be impacted when a mini-Cloudflare went down (sorry The Register) but it would not take down so many other sites at the same time.