Posts by ecarlseen

Microsoft execs worry AI will eat entry level coding jobs

Re: Circles

Yes, and even the "good" output is very rarely up to my standards of production-quality. AI is still a very helpful assistant in many cases, but it's just that: an assistant.

It's not ready to be a worker yet, and I don't think we're anywhere near as close as a lot of people want / assume us to be. I think some fundamental problems need to be overcome first, and the time spans for solving problems of that magnitude tend to be measured in decades. That doesn't mean it won't happen tomorrow; it just means that it's lottery-odds unlikely.

Re: Well... duh?

Exactly this.

And you get to <munbles> years of good, meaningful experience by writing a mountain of awful code followed by other mountains of progressively/hopefully less-awful code.

Take this away and we're a lot further down the road to absolute code idiocracy.

You probably can't trust your password manager if it's compromised

Re: Bitwarden supports self-hosting

For home services that I don't want to physically put in the cloud and also don't want to hassle with DDNS, I run a reverse-proxy on a cheap cloud VM with a static IP and tunnel traffic back to my home network over IPSec.

Bitwarden supports self-hosting

Bitwarden supports self-hosting for paid accounts, using docker images. There doesn't seem to be a minimum on the number of seats for this.

I run a Bitwarden server on my own hardware, sitting behind a VPN.

This only annoyances:

1) The need to manage TLS certificates that are trending towards expiring every 69420 seconds

2) It uses MS SQL Server on Linux, which bloats its memory footprint to the point where it's more challenging to host on a NAS.

Microsoft's Valentine's gift to admins: 6 exploited zero-day fixes

Today: 0day RCE in Windows 11 Notepad.

No, that's not an article in The Onion.

That's real. A 0day RCE, CVSS 8.8, in fucking Notepad.

This should be literally impossible, but, nah, it's Microsoft, whose only innovations are in finding new and exciting was to fuck up stuff that should be bulletproof.

https://msrc.microsoft.com/update-guide/vulnerability/CVE-2026-20841

Containers, cloud, blockchain, AI – it's all the same old BS, says veteran Red Hatter

Continuous Release

"Pushing beta testing onto our user base didn't save us enough money, so let's push alpha testing onto them as well."

Whether they are building agents or folding proteins, LLMs need a friend

So is this an Interview or Press Release?

What is very, very briefly mentioned in passing in this well-buried lede is that, oh, yeah, Vishal Sikka just happens to now run a company that sells these companion bots:

“So we do that in our product Hila. We combine the LLM with a knowledge model for a particular domain and then, after that, Hila does not make mistakes.”

If their product genuinely does not make mistakes in a reliable and generalized sense, I think that it would be much bigger news that this.

Presenting an article as the Words of Wisdom from a well-seasoned greybeard when it's actually a completely uncritical sales pitch is, indeed, biting the hand that feeds IT.

Rise of AI means companies could pass on SaaS

Most investors understand curves, not tech.

They expect AI to follow previous curves for technological advancement, but those previous curves were built on very solid, deterministic foundations. Yes, there were growing pains at the leading edge of development, but the underpinnings were sound (when the web came out, we knew how to do TCP/IP, encryption, file storage, databases, etc. and we were already really good at all of that).

LLMs are probablistic to begin with, which is its own form of engineering hell, but nothing is solid or stable. Stuff is being built on a foundation of sand, and we barely understand the behavior of this sand in the immediate sense, let along the long-term.

Therefore, I don't expect the same exponential improvement curves we saw with previous major tech changes. Improvement will still happen, but it will be far bumpier and more uneven, and probably even move backwards significantly at certain points.

DIY AI bot farm OpenClaw is a security 'dumpster fire'

Re: Use case?

That is not even a solution looking for a problem, that is a problem looking for a friend.

I wish I could upvote this a thousand times. Perhaps I'll set up an agent...

Dow Chemical says AI is the element behind 4,500 job cuts

Obvious reaction:

Checking to make sure there are no Dow chemical processing facilities near my city.

Re: "The jury is still out when it comes to determining how much job loss AI is causing."

There is very likely a lot of "AI-washing" in these job reduction announcements.

"Our financials are getting messy so we are shrinking headcount." sounds far worse to Wall Street than "We're embracing AI and becoming more efficient!"

How an experienced developer teamed up with Claude to create Elo programming language

Creating a language / toolchain is the ultimate in cherry-picking

Honestly, is there any topic in computer science that has been more heavily researched, written about, examples created, real-world polish applied with excruciating care over decades, in academia, business, and in the hobbyist / open source world, than language and compiler design?

There is ~75 years of thoroughly-documented history here.

As a topic for an LLM to crunch on, this is absolute cheat mode compared to pretty much any other meaningful product-size project.

If somebody uses AI in this manner, at this scale, to create a work product that can be used by a meaningful number of real people in the real world doing valuable things, then I will be genuinely impressed and amazed.

Don't get me wrong: this is still a very cool trick, but it's a trick with no real-world value (at least for now) and is not even close to being generally reproducible.

AI's $3T infrastructure binge continues despite lack of clear profits

Core uncertainty.

To me, the core probablem is that we can do some cool stuff with AI, but we’re not yet to the point where we can just grind or death-march or brute-force compute our way to generally useful, reliable AI.

There are still fundamental breakthroughs needed on the software architecture side and on the hardware side. There are some cool concepts being developed in the hardware space. There might be similar things happening on the software side, but people are less chatty about the nuts and bolts of the bleeding edge there.

Right now, AI is a concept that will revolutionize the world, eventually,

Just like great battery tech (maybe cracked by Donut, time will tell), practical fusion energy, etc. The last 5% to 10% of the work takes 99+% of the time.

You can never predict when fundemental breakthroughs will happen. Took decades for blue LEDs. Lots of money came and went, and it turned out that the one guy who refused to give up eventually got it after spending a significant portion of his life chasing it. That guy should never be allowed to buy his own meals and drinks.

But AI is the same. I'm sure it will happen. Maybe next week. Maybe in 50 years. Nobody really knows.

But they're going to sell it to us / force it down our throats as best they can anyway.

PostHog admits Shai-Hulud 2.0 was its biggest ever security bungle

Totally misunderstood that

I popped over to PostHog's website to read the blog post and for a moment I thought the hack was about replacing the UI on their site with the most godawful abortion imaginable but then realized they somehow decided inflict this on their visitors deliberately. Perhaps some sort of hazing ritual or reverse psychology sales technique?

You are likely to be eaten by the MIT license: Microsoft frees Zork source

Re: I member.

ZIL used this crazy 8-bit to 5-bit (with shifts!) compression scheme to cram all of the text onto a single floppy disk, so conventional hex editors were useless for this as it obfuscated all of the text.

Now I really wish I still had that code. I modeled the UI on the Norton Utilities, and IIRC I made it look pretty slick for the era.

I member.

Getting stuck in Infocom games in the pre-Internet-at-home era, I reverse-engineered ZIL to a certain extent and wrote a program (in x86 assembly!) to let me view and search the strings.

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

The irony.

mfw DDoS prevention vendor DoS-es itself.

Memory boom-bust cycle booms again as Samsung reportedly jacks memory prices 60%

Blame it on AI

Layoffs due to an economy strangled by politicians and bureaucrats? Blame AI

Price hikes due to whatever? Blame AI

Bad weather on a weekend? Blame AI

Microsoft gives Windows 11 a fresh Start – here's how to get it

Re: Microsoft loves constant change for the sake of change...

I understand if the PTSD is preventing you from remembering Windows 8.

Microsoft loves constant change for the sake of change...

...and if this year's change subtracts value and makes things worse then, oh well, it's more change!

Recently, I was looking back on the first version of Apple OS X (now macOS) released about 20 years ago. Settings management has been completely remade (to make it consistent with IOS / iPadOS) and scrollbars are hidden by default (because every company has to do at least one outrageously stupid thing), but other than that most of the core UI functionality is more or less the same. The presentation is much fancier (especially with Tahoe and Liquid Glass) and the applications themselves have evolved a great deal, but on a UI level it would take almost no effort for a person to transition from the first release of OS X to macOS 26. Menus work the same way, applications are in the same place, etc. Well, as long as you un-hide the scrollbars.

There's nothing wrong with taking a solid interface design and just sticking with it.

Australian police building AI to translate emoji used by ‘crimefluencers’

ROFLMAO

Having seen things like this attempted before, one can predict that the results will be far more hilarious than useful.

Unless the use is mocking them. In which case they'll be very useful.

Twist in Tesco vs. VMware case as Computacenter files claim against Broadcom, Dell

Is Broadcom even suffering?

Everyone who has been paying attention knew what was coming if they purchased VMware, and a lot of organizations either decided to ignore history.

It looks like Broadcom is coming out ahead on this because not enough customers jumped ship when the ticket prices doubled (or more) mid-cruise. Sure, people can sue and maybe even win, but even if they win, it's not like they're going to have anything resembling a good vendor/customer relationship. Any support they get is going to suck ass.

The smarter move would have been to get off at the next port, cut your losses (the sunk cost jokes write themselves), and never go back. If enough customers had done this, Broadcom would lose money on the deal. But plenty of companies would rather pay lawyers and fight to stick with someone who doesn't like or respect them.

Everybody's warning about critical Windows Server WSUS bug exploits ... but Microsoft's mum

It doesn't have to be open to the Internet...

...if an attacker has virtually any sort of presence inside of their network. Typically there are fairly few restrictions with regards to what kinds of systems can talk to WSUS. Traveling laptops with VPN connections, anyone?

MPs urge government to stop Britain's phone theft wave through tech

Government-mandated remote device bricking vulnerability.

Can you imagine the headaches created with how easily-abused such a system would be?

Social-engineer a phone company or police department to kill somebody's phone, for fun and profit.

How difficult would it be to take two seconds, consider "Gee, how could miscreants abuse such a system?", and then weigh the potential cost/benefits? (this is a rhetorical question)

Also, even if you lock out a phone's IMEI it can probably still be used in mobile bot farms.

Microsoft's OneDrive spots your mates, remembers their faces, and won't forget easily

Re: You have to lawyer out their claims

And you can find out for sure if this is true for your specific case after several years and millions of dollars / pounds / Euros / whatever in legal fees.

You can even try to figure out if you and your precious little votes mean more to your government than donations from these companies do.

Re: Nobody needs to change this setting more than ...

640K changes ought to be enough for anyone.

You have to lawyer out their claims

All of these terms and conditions are written by lawyers and riddled with loopholes in the exact same way that threat actors worm in and leave APTs in software.

Realistically, there's no way to parse out who is really doing what with your data, assuming they don't flagrantly violate their terms and conditions as big tech is often wont to do. After all, even if they get caught, what are you going to do about it?

How do you even compute damages for loss of privacy?

How do you even determine the scope of what is shared / lent / given / copied / grouped / sold / leased / teasingly flashed or whatever between companies?

You either trust a company or you don't, based on what they've been caught doing in the past.

Personally, I don't trust Microsoft further than I can throw their oddly-bloated founder who somehow bears an uncanny resemblance to the pregnant man emoji.

Nobody should trust Alphabet or Meta, at all, ever.

End of support for older Office and Windows Server versions pile on the pain for admins

Office 2010 / 2013 = Security Fail

The last Office 2010 patch was released over five years ago, and the last Office 2013 patch was released in 2023.

I'll let you figure out how many published, open / unpatched security vulnerabilities there are.

Keep in mind that there are plenty of unpublished ones because out-of-support software doesn't qualify for bug bounties, so they're more valuable on the black market.

Office 2013:

https://vulmon.com/searchpage?q=microsoft+office+2013&sortby=bydate

Office 2010:

https://vulmon.com/searchpage?q=microsoft+office+2010&sortby=bydate

Senator presses Cisco over firewall flaws that burned US agency

Cisco's quality has been tanking for many years.

I used to be a very loyal Cisco customer and, while their hardware is still above average (not as good as it used to be) and they have a wonderful product portfolio breadth, their software has become garbage: bug-ridden / broken features, unstable, and frequently insecure. It sucks for customers because they were once a great one-source vendor for all of your networking and some security needs, but now I aggressively get rid of them when I can. Stability and security issues more than outweigh any benefits.

Locked out of your Gmail account? Google says phone a friend

Make Phishing Great Again!

Now their users (I refuse to use Alphabet products, and you can too!) won't just have to worry about phishing attacks agains themselves, but against their friends as well!

Also, passkeys are in no way whatsoever tied to devices - they often sync via password managers and can be stolen just like passwords can. They're marginally better than a username/password combination in that they can't as easily be fooled by a similar domain name, but that's it.

Python releases version 3.14 – with cautious free-threaded support

Re: 3.14

They don't even refer to compression as constriction smdh.

Only way to move Space Shuttle Discovery is to chop it into pieces, White House told

Re: Unless I'm hallucinating...

Moving something that size is a more interesting question than most people seem to think.

I've worked with people who have moved obscenely large things (such as engines for very large ships, large and insanely heavy structural pieces that for whatever reason can't be fabricated on-site, etc.) across continents for obscenely large amounts of money. There is specialized trip planning software - it works very much like Google or Apple maps - that knows all about things like road widths, bridge heights, weight limits, axel count limits, etc., and will find a workable route if one exists - and they do exist more often than you might suspect. If you can't move it all the way in that manner, then you see if you can barge it to a relatively nearby port. There is a boutique industry that builds the necessary custom trailers, towing rigs, barge modifications, and so on. You need to arrange for cranes, hoists, jacks, or whatever to move your cargo from one mode of transport to another. You need to have a highly customized insurance policy written for the move. And the list goes on. But usually it can be done, and there are people who specialize in doing it.

If you want to see what a shuttle looks like on a trailer, there's a photo at this link:

https://www.edwards.af.mil/News/Photos/igphoto/2000190261/

Politicos: 'There is a good strong case for government intervention' on JLR cyberattack

Simple solution

When the government bails out a large corporation due to its own negligence, the c-suite and board of directors go to prison until the bailout is repaid.

AI coding hype overblown, Bain shrugs

Sounds familiar

Meanwhile, another recent study from nonprofit research group Model Evaluation & Threat Research (METR) found that AI coding tools actually made software developers slower, despite expectations to the contrary, because they had to spend time checking for and correcting errors made by the AI.

Now do offshoring development to 50-packs of cheap developers.

Moody's raises Big Red flag over Oracle's AI datacenter buildout blueprint

They're all sucking up to Trump ...

... so they can get their inevitable "too big to fail" government bailouts.

British spreadsheet wizard will take mad skillz to Vegas after taking national Excel crown

Has anybody created a script or application...

... that looks at the complexity of an Excel workbook in terms of average formula complexity and gives it a toxicity rating on a scale of “nauseating” to “nuke every city containing a datacenter where this abombination has been stored in or replicated to?’

Slack threatened to delete nonprofit coding club’s data if it didn’t pay $50k in a week

They literally have two jobs.

You’d think that a communications company owned by a CRM company wouldn’t screw this one up, but nah.

Researcher who found McDonald's free-food hack turns her attention to Chinese restaurant robots

"Pudu Robotics is a Chinese robot manufacturer with over 100,000 units in over 1,000 cities doing everything from serving meals with the cat-like BellaBot,"

ngl I read that way too fast and got the wrong idea at first.

Salesforce data missing? It might be due to Salesloft breach, Google says

Let's just smear our attack surface all over the Internet.

After all, it's perfectly secure in theory.

In practice, it's perfectly secure just as long as software doesn't have exploitable bugs.

AWS, Cloudflare, Digital Ocean, and Google helped Feds investigate alleged Rapper Bot DDoS perp

Re: What does Rapper Bot run on ?

All of those IoT devices embedded in iPads!

“Prior to joining Scoop News Group, Brandi produced a long-form documentary and worked as a journalist at Nextgov, Snapchat and NBC Network.” - not sure which of these is the least impressive.

Microsoft may be safe from quantum attacks (big maybe), but

they'll still be vulnerable to an endless number of exploitable bugs, so even in theory the best case is it's like putting a better lock on a safe made out of paper mâché.

Trump's gold-plated smartphone can't seem to decide which design to copy

OEM identified based on specs?

According to this post:

https://x.com/MaxWinebach/status/1934632952366764447

it appears to be a re-skinned Wingtech REVVL 7 Pro 5G (made in Chyyyyna, of course). The specifications seem to be a pretty exact match.

Post-privacy AI glasses claim to listen to your every word

This is why we need to take the term "glassholes" and make it stick.

Microsoft keeps adding stuff into Windows we don't want – here's what we actually need

There are downvotes from the haters, but after moving to Apple I've stopped worrying about just clicking "update." I won't say there have been zero issues, but they're maybe once every five years or so vs. a PTSD-inducing frequency for Windows. Thinking back, it's probably been at least seven years (back to the days of big cat version names).

Workday warns of CRM breach after social engineers make off with business contact details

Re: Sophisticated attack?

The schadefreude would be amazing. Somebody leak it, please.

Just say the name of the "third-party CRM platform"

At this point we all know it rhymes with Rails Horse.

Teen interns brute-forced a disk install, with predictable results

The sad thing about this:

I'd !@$# every last one of you in your sleep if it would get me an intern or new hire as capable from learning from a first mistake as this one was. First mistakes are a cost of doing business. The endless repetition by some people is a bit much.

Linux is about to lose a feature – over a personality clash

Re: Justice for bcachefs!

The irony is that if the BTRFS developers were as good at writing code as they are at holding grudges, none of this discussion would be happening.

I'm not a LKML geek, but reading this thread suggests to me that there's a lot of ivory-tower mentality in FS-land ("it works well in theory and in my lab, if it doesn't work for the rest of the world then it's the rest of the world that's wrong") and that does not bode well for the future of the operating system.

Re: An unfortunate turn of events

ReiserFS?

"After all, a murder is only an extroverted suicide."