Posts by ariels-again

LinkedIn realizes its users have been bathing in AI slop, offers a shower

Too late for LinkedIn

Microsoft would be better off adding that "seems like AI [slop]" button to GitHub. There are still some humans over there, it might just work.

Or, of course, remove Slopilot.

GitHub Copilot: Sorry Dave, I can't do that harmful thing - unless you ask me in code

The good example says it all

TFA describes the safe response - where the guardrails worked: "In these attempts, GitHub Copilot produced harmful responses in only eight out of 816 tries". That's when it's working correctly?! 99 out of 100 is really impressive - until it meets a massive variable of loops.

Copilot failed to achieve this level of "security".

A modest proposal: Reformat everything to make documents more palatable to AI

XML?!

Cool, we'll be reformatting everything in a new brand of XML for the slop machines to ingest and excrete. What could possibly go wrong? I mean, the underlying tech cannot handle nesting, and XML is all about bedding. But I'm sure 5 levels will be enough. Make it 7, that's bound to work, it's 42% more than my guess!

KPMG's AI report becomes an accidental demo of AI hallucinations

Found the culprit!

."We expect all our people to follow our guidelines on the responsible use of AI". It was the dirty meatbag's fault! KPMG is blameless: all it did was pay its employees and force them to use a Markov chain with an impressively large state space. It even told them to be responsible. All it did was manage the generation of this garbage, pay for it, not take the time to review it, sign it with their initials, and punish it under their name.

It blocked us at 'hello!' Anthropic Fable 5 refusing innocuous prompts

The only thing that can stop a bad guy with a superhuman hyper intelligent AI is a good guy with grep.

Those spared latest Meta job cuts forcibly reassigned to AI roles

Flatten structures using this one weird trick

Start with this one guy you could fire, and immediately all reporting chains get shorter by 1! We're taking about the genius who came to with both Grift and the Vegetamerc (so?)

Vi clone written in BASIC proves old habits :wq hard

ZZ

Saved you two keystrokes.

Tech is now rolling out the old grievance grift

You lot were being paid?

Until now I've been hating Palantir for free. And I'll continue to do so. BUT for a limited time only, pay me and I will DOUBLE the hate! I mean sure, you could go hire some newbie to hate. But you're getting an amateur. You'll need to train them. They might not be good at it. With me, you're paying for the best.

Palantir CEO: 10 percent of the world 'professionally hates us'

Re: Hmmmm

To use terms with which Karp and his minions are familiar, I quantify my hate of Palantit at a "prosumer" level. I could definitely hate them more if I tried, but I feel I'm past the rank amateur level. I mean, I regularly scan https://palantirwatch.org ("They watch everyone. We watch them.").

Fewer users, fatter wallets is why Anthropic tops OpenAI in LLM revenue stakes

I'm old enough to remember

When businesses were measured on profits.

GitHub says sorry and vows to do better as uptime slips and devs complain

Copilot

Microslop had certainly been investing heavily around GitHub. Specifically in nailing copilot buttons to anything that works. Today pull requests are down - literally the reason to use GitHub. They even transferred it to their Copilot division. Blaming external use of LLM autocoders is disingenuous at best.

AI reality check: Here's what three companies learned building wallets, homes, and games

"[To get some of that $5 trillion come to us] it would be many, many thousands [of employees]". Really? You're not going after 5 trillion dollars because you'd need to hire thousands of employees?

I mean, if 10_000 employees get you a measly 10% of that, that's only $50M per employee. Clearly not worth the effort.

More ancient Linux device support faces the chop

Re: Remember the Intel v AMD wars

It's been downhill since they added that "c" into the middle of "6502".

Claude is getting worse, according to Claude

Re: Gosh, who knew ?

You're going too far with this criticism. They offer ONE NINE of availability! Name ONE OTHER service that can manage to stay below 2 9s.

Project Glasswing and open source software: The good, the bad, and the ugly

$100M

That's a of money! Luckily we're dealing with trained statisticians. As an experiment, let's pay those OSS maintainers as similar sum to find bugs, and see how many CVEs and how many fixes we get.

The results will help us optimize the use of capital to build more secure software. I mean, that's what they all want, right? Right??

Anthropic goes nude, exposes Claude Code source by accident

100% of all Anthropic code is written by AI. We know this for a fact because they said so -https://fortune.com/2026/01/29/100-percent-of-code-at-anthropic-and-openai-is-now-ai-written-boris-cherny-roon/ . A cynic might eventually start being open to the possibility that some AI bros might occasionally not wholly telling truths.

Google Antigravity falls to Earth under OpenClaw-fueled compute load

Google...

AI means taking the "P" (programming) out of "API".

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

Don't say "AI Slop"!

Reminder: Nadella specifically asked NOT to use the term "AI slop" to refer to quality issues appearing when companies prefer using AI over ensuring quality. It was even on TechCrunch: https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/05/microsofts-nadella-wants-us-to-stop-thinking-of-ai-as-slop/. So please, no matter what, do not call this *AI slop*.

Microsoft investors sweat cloud giant's OpenAI exposure

Re: Sweaty Nads

Please everyone remember: don't say "AI slop". He specifically asked not to call everything Microsoft Copilot does "AI slop". It hurts when you say "AI slop", so just don't do that.

AI has pumped hyperscale capex, capacity – but how long can it last?

Register bureau of measurements

The RBoM is sorely needed! When you measure datacentre capacity in MW, you're measuring operating expenditure not actual capacity. That also means capex is the goal.

Hard to believe that I'd miss FLOPS as a useful unit.

IBM unleashes CUGA, an open-source AI agent that actually completes more than half its tasks

Re: 62% is acceptable

But that number includes many policy-need enterprise tasks. Programming is only 10% of your job in the Glorious Future. You neglected to count success rate on crucial tasks like "e-sign all code reviews in triplicate", "prepare PowerPoint presentation describing bug fix", "devine so meetings on days when it is clearly marked I'm not working", and of course "report TPS".

Actually, 62% success rate, if you manage to fail only in the trivial tasks, is probably time saved! Can I get a marketing job now, please?

700+ self-hosted Gits battered in 0-day attacks with no fix imminent

Re: 1980 called

Not sure actually. The POSIX flag O_NOFOLLOW _sounds_ like it would do that, but actually didn't. It only works for the last component.

IBM drops $11B on Confluent to feed next-gen AI ambitions

Re: IBM MQ

You may laugh, but some mainframe customers have been using its isolation and spinning up AI-free VMs. These bandits will finally be brought to justice.

OTOH, message queuing has been waiting for this moment to break out and dominate all SOA every since its invention at IBM. I'm sure this time will be different and queuing will emerge victorious. (It's a great architecture, one I really like; the only problem is if you ever need to interface it with any other architecture except your RDBMS. Like, say,y anything in the real world.)

Snowflake jumps on agentic AI train with Anthropic tie-up

Snowflake say: "customers in finance can use its Snowflake Intelligence with Claude to generate portfolio recommendations for clients that take into account the client's holdings, current market data and compliance rules."

"Compliance". You keep on using that word. I do not think that word means what you think it means.

Major AWS outage across US-East region breaks half the internet

Re: Too much in us-east-1

It's always DNS. AAAA, I say sue them no matter what.

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

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

Don't worry. When a bug causes us to revert the setting, it won't count as one of your three times. Well, initially it will, but after a 6 month wait we can change it back if you ask. Just don't change it back manually, otherwise we'll be forced to count both of those times. Sorry, that's how the AI works.

Rust-style safety model for C++ 'rejected' as profiles take priority

It is indeed a weird quote, I think context is missing to evaluate it.

If safe functions can only call safe functions, then you immediately lose the ability to use all libraries. But that's a major part of the appeal of C++! It also makes many things immediately impossible. It would not be possible to write the C++ library in C++, for example.

Rust for example does *not* have this property, at least not as quoted. Safe code can and does call unsafe code. Unsafe code is proved safe by its authors, not by the compiler. Details here: https://doc.rust-lang.org/nomicon/safe-unsafe-meaning.html

constexpr is different: if you cannot run something at compile time, you also won't manage to run something that calls it at compile time. This limitation is fairly necessary.

Biased bots: AI hiring managers shortlist candidates with AI resumes

Advice to applicants

It's always been stupid advice to applicants to tailor their resume to the potential employer. Continue to do the same! Write one resume with each LLM model. Find out which model the employer uses, and send them the matching resume.

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

The Fall of the Machines

Given Dohmke's views on the utility of GitHub Copilot, he has clearly never used it. Not sure which stage he is on (or possibly what substance).

Microsoft CEO feels weighed down by job cuts

Re: Bing bong

That is very unfair to many telephone sanitizers!

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

Re: "I explicitly told it eleven times in ALL CAPS not to do this."

ALL CAPS is your problem right there. It understands Markdown. At a bare minimum, you need to put it in a

# LEVEL 1 **BOLD** UPPERCASE HEADING

and say "YOU ARE GOOD AT MY JOB". Otherwise you're practically begging it to delete your database.

I can't imagine prompt engineering at so low a level.

So your [expletive] test failed. So [obscene participle] what?

Re: Good to keep a sense of humour

Typical manager. That code is a disgrace, should use puts().

Open source AI hiring bots favor men, leave women hanging by the phone

Re: Now you know why LLMs are popular

But the tech bros don't want to use AI. See e.g. Anderssen insisting that VCs would be the last jobs to be replaced by AI. The tech bros love AI because they want others to use it! Now you can slash salaries in HR, eliminate most of them, get rid of labour laws, and it will still be fair because Science.

'I guess NASA doesn't need or care about my work anymore'

Why do you hate savings?

Glorious genius Musk in support of Great Leader Trump decided to Cut Costs. If NASA keeps good engineering blogs hanging around, it might impact Starlink (who keep dropping satellites on puny earthlings) or even SpaceX. I think the $8.13 saved on keeping useful technical knowledge freely available is well worth it, if it keeps Musk richer and the fascists in power.

Elon Musk makes another cut – to his time at DOGE

Re: Promises promises

Not to worry, please everyone stay on line! There's enough failure to go around, everybody will get some, and even if we run out Trump's bottom people are making more as we speak.

Signalgate solved? Report claims journalist’s phone number accidentally saved under name of Trump official

To be fair, it's not like there were rules about separating personal from work accounts, and personal from work devices, and personal unclassified address books with journalists and party hacks from classified address books. Nope, it's just a tough break. Sometimes these things just happen.

Were I working in SIGINT, I'd be insulted by easy the Orange DOGE Posse makes it.

Musk's xAI swallows Musk's X in ego-friendly, all-stock deal

He's playing 5-dimensional "my daddy had more money than your daddy "

You people are just too people to understand it.

DOGE helps Veterans Affairs end IT contract run by service-disabled entrepreneurs

Re: This just keeps getting worse

Don't forget also to deride and mock them! That's actually quite easy - we're talking about the CyberTrumpk Inventor - we should be able to do all 3.

Membership of New Zealand’s domain registry suddenly triples, which isn't entirely welcome

Treaty

Always fun to see conservative right whingers get all knotted up about the NZ treaty. As always, a treaty obtained between two unequal parties is suddenly "outdated" when the now powerful party becomes even more powerful.

Trump can't quickly or easily kill the CHIPS Act, but he can fire the workers funded by it

Re: What?

Semiconductors are sometimes part of the resistance.

Are you better value for money than AI?

Re: Gee, which would I rather have?

But hear me out. What if we let the ChatBot write a legal argument. Then we could let a paralegal read it, decide to throw it all away, and write a good argument with real references!

This would give us the best of both worlds: the same argument could be written in only a slightly longer time, and Altman and Mush could get cash for selling an essential service, and credit for saving humanity!

US airspace closures, lack of answers deepen East Coast drone mystery

Re: New Jersey: stupid isn't just for red states since 1787

The difference being...?

Elon Musk's disaster relief promises: Should we believe the hype?

Re: tax them

So what if we just, you know, tried to tax then rather than just talk about it? Roll it back after 10 years, well still have a few billionaires left.

I know Hayek is always right, but what if he wasn't?

The force is strong in Iceberg: Are the table format wars entering the final chapter?

Unfortunately the DBMS doesn't exist here, and you don't want it to exist. If I can read directly from my object store (say, S3), then my compute can soak up data as far as S3 can emit it. For properly sharded data that can be very fast.

An RDBMS means data has to flow through it - and availability becomes an issue. What you want is a catalog - a list easy to find your data files - and a protocol - a way to read and write your data concurrently and safely. Both Iceberg and DeltaLake provide that.

It's true, social media moderators do go after conservatives

Re: Who is the judge ?

You could, you know, read the article before responding. The paper explains how they decided that a new source is low quality.

Obviously source quality does not matter with people who refuse to read.

Study shock! AI hinders productivity and makes working worse

Re: Wrong productivity trajectory

Exactly! And my research shows that AI is best poised to replace the C-suite, where it can leverage its inherently equal knowledge across the board to deliver equivalent performance at lower cost and latencies. Oh, and replacing all those expensive workers means we can afford the increased ai spend.

Unintended acceleration leads to recall of every Cybertruck produced so far

We had one too

... but the brakes came off...

Staff say Dell's return to office mandate is a stealth layoff, especially for women

Please don't tell my boss

Ouch, you just discovered my secret! When I work from home, I secretly go to school to fetch my kid over lunchtime. I also pretend to send PRs to my colleagues before 0800, put a deepfake avatar of myself in all the night-time VCs with users and staff in remote locations, and do some design work over the weekend.

But you saw right through my machinations. Damn the Internet for having such smart people!

BOFH: Hearken! The Shiny Button software speaks of Strategic Realignment

Re: "Oh, it's ah ... Neo ... um, Enterprise ... uh ... Executive ... uhm ..."

The dashboard is necessary to make split-second management decisions based on weekly data. Your 3 clicks in Excel would cost us 5 minutes and we would lose our competitive advantage.

We cannot buy unless it's compatible with our Enterprise Blockchain Solution Framework!

(True Enterprise lag is one hype cycle)