Posts by that one in the corner

Open source devs consider making hogs pay for every download

Re: Easy solution

> I pull a lot, and most of the time, it's on repositories where I already have most of the history, but I still need the changes from yesterday from other people.

That sounds like the description of devs working together on one or more shared projects, possibly with you at the top of the heap. So, yes, you'll do a lot of pulls to keep in sync with all the work around you. Changes from yesterday? When I was working, we could be updating ourselves multiple times each day from each other's work, checking that what we were doing still fit together neatly.

But none of that is relevant to the situation being discussed in TFA.

> Who said all the pulls were identical?

I made the foolish assumption that you were joining in the discussion about the issue raised by TFA, and the proposed solutions to it, when you made a statement that a few hundred pulls a week was not being abusive to the provider of a repo:

>> So, for example, a single company might download the same code hundreds of thousands of times in a day, and the next day.

Re: Tragedy of the commons

The tragedy of the commons is a description of what happens *after* the bulk of the lands have been enclosed and hence *after* the "management by consensus" is no longer taught to all the folk, replaced as standard by "do what the owner says for your day's pay".

Add in the increased population and increased migratory workers, who no longer tend local to their homes but are brought in for a season to work the larger enclosures, and you have lost any social power over the abusers: who cares if Lower Bagshot are shunning you this week, you'll be over at Upper Dicker tomorrow. And that is only if the Bagshottians even spot it was you amongst all the incomers who churned the Downs into mud (don't try this in Ambridge though, they have people who'll remember an incident from decades ago).

The sudden increase in the tragedy may have come about as a result of the enclosures (and they weren't really Capitalists as we understand the term now, merely the first sprouting of those strangling weeds) but population growth and townships displacing villages was the more inevitable problem. Enclosure most certainly accelerated it and made it stand out, the stark difference between trampled Downs and pristine managed lands; which inevitably was then used as yet another argument (alongside "well, *this* army" and "God says I can", amongst others) in favour of The Man taking charge of resources that the lesser folk are clearly ill-equipped to manage.

And whatever you believe to be the origins of (and the intent behind those origins of) the tragedy of the commons, sadly it is at this point in time a very real phenomenon, backed by the anonymity available in a crowd and an unpleasantly growing disregard for others: festival campsites to Git repository traffic.

Re: Easy solution

> But 100+ pulls per week – which should still not put much strain on the infrastructure – is not unusual during active and granular development

100+ pulls of the same data in a week? Huh? When do you need to do that? And do so without enough foreknowledge of your own development "strategy" to be able to set up a local cache (e.g. just 7zip the download before doing anything else!) instead of wasting time repeating the pull!

Two or three identical pulls because the team isn't talking to each other, maybe. Although that indicates a problem in your team.

100+ because you are in a megacompany with loadsa separate projects that are - not talking to each other, which indicates a problem with your software architect.

Re: Nice idea...

Trouble is, as TFA points out, how do you know who is "them" if the best you can say is that the IP address is coming from, say, AWS? And isn't even the same IP for the same abuser's next run, as the VM was chucked away and a new one started up?

Of course, they could try an approach of "we will block every request we think is coming from a hyperscaler", on (perfectly reasonable) grounds that your devs should be doing the ONE AND ONLY pull of that content onto a dev machine from your company's IP and then loading that into your build system's cache (whether that be a localised Git instance or any other storage). That won't stop all the abuse, of course, but it'll help improve the accuracy for a more targeted throttling/replying-with-an-invoice setup.

Re: Abusers eventually have to pay the piper

Nah.

403 means the undesirables can tell there is probably something juicy waiting for them and they'll get all angry that they are being denied their rightful access, directed at you/OP.

404 means the problem is that their end, they can't even type in a URL correctly; and (unless they are getting involved in timing attacks, which raises other questions) they won't be able to tell which URL variation *would* have worked if they were on the friends list.

Denizens of DEF CON are 'fed up with government'

Re: The utopia!

>> A currency that cannot be hoarded...there's a problem to solve

> A nice dream, but I don't think we have enough tech to make that happen in 4-5 of my lifetimes

Technology? A bit of basic metalwork for stamping coins.

All-of-society threats that governments have yet to fix ... authoritarianism

Fix?

What government is going to fix authoritarianism?

Maybe in some other country - "you naughty State, we are going to Liberate your people for you (Profit? What profit)" - but in the Homeland?

Burger King turns to AI to flame broil employees who aren't friendly enough

Re: How to meet your upselling goals

If you can find your Spidergwen costume, I'll bring the Spiderman socks!

Re: How to meet your upselling goals

Hi!

Do you know where I left my Spiderman socks?

How to meet your upselling goals

Try selling something nice, even desirable.

It works for the local bakery, and the most they ever need to do is to ask "is that everything?" - and they don't even do that every time!

The result: well, Tuesday I was sent in for precisely two sticky buns, to go with our afternoon cuppa, and I came out nibbling on a couple of the cheese straws that were just sitting there, at the far end of the shop, being all warm and aromatic at me. Glad the wife doesn't read El Reg or a great tutting would be heard.

Hide from Meta's spyglasses with this new Android app

Not (specifically) tied to hardware; it started to happen after an Android update, so a device that was well-behaved became a PITA.

A PITA because GNSS helps run the battery down; which is why (many) radio modules provide control over which submodules are powered. And then Android...

AFAIK the use of location and BT tied together all comes from the proliferation of BLE and the continual advertising from "tags", the "fine location" using nearby ids to tie you down; whether Google tied the two together the other way around in order to use your phone to build their map of tags is another matter...

Re: I wouldn't want to "warn" about it

As above, 32GB of flash built in, but no card slot.

Re: I wouldn't want to "warn" about it

Absolutely.

Display specs would be very useful to have; as I've commented before, I'd've loved to have a pair for use at work, ever since seeing 'em on Tomorrow's World.

The addition of cameras to all the "well known" brands is a PITA, even bringing up the subject nowadays veers towards privacy and "I'd punch you". Plus any without cameras are rubbish displays or "specialist" and up goes the price, even for something with no processing of its own.

You've checked Github issues and added your observation, to help get this fixed?

Is it this reported issue showing up or something new you can open an issue for?

Did it remind you to switch on "location"?

Irony? Because Android has tied using Bluetooth to the location & GNSS function, there are so many accusations of innocent developers snooping on users' (because the app is trying to talk BT to a toy car or whatever) but will the privacy minded users also refuse apps like this one?

Re: I wouldn't want to "warn" about it

That'll stop all the non-spying functions (e.g. seeing phone notifications) but the glasses store photos and video locally (there is 32GB of flash).

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

Look on the bright side:

If Hegseth manages to make enough people stop using these models (with luck, aversion to Anthropic will spread to the others) then he will encourage the bubble to burst earlier. Which will be a blessing in the long run.

ServiceNow boasts its AI bot is resolving 90% of its own help desk tickets

Did the approval get the right sign-off?

Any metrics on how many get sent to the wrong people for sign-off, who are very aware of the pressure to make the LLM seem to work and are routing all its mistakes to the right person? Such as the L2 human who should have seen the ticket before it got anywhere near asking for signoff...

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

Re: Scary, truly scary

Language controls perception of reality?

Like the claims made about the Himba tribe? BTW if you do follow that link, and/or remember the BBC programme* please be sure to check this one as well.

Cue discussions of Sapir-Whorf and whether the conceit of the film "Arrival" is just a tad far-fetched or not.

* not their finest hour

> Regardless of one's expertise, believing something isn't possible because you can't conceive of it is not an argument for it not to exist.

Very true. And the basis the main argument against the anti-science (especially anti-evolution) voices that are crawling out of the woodwork.

> It's a shame the debate here has been/is mostly so dismissive.

HOWEVER I do hope you are not attempting to conflate (all of) the dismissiveness here with "can not conceive".

Do not *believe* these claims, certainly - and not without reason, as they follow on from so much of the rest of the hype that has been demonstrated to be inaccurate about the abilities of LLMs, as reported on The Register alone: deeply into "remarkable claims require remarkable evidence" territory here.

> Having grown up and watched things that were unbelievable science-fiction become parts of everyday life

Not trying to especially deride you, but I'd love to have some examples of "UNBELIEVABLE science fiction" (my emphasis) that has become everyday: "unlikely" SF notions, possibly; "too expensive and only for the few (so everyone having access is fictional)" SF notions, most definitely. But - unbelievable?

> I have also exported my JSON from my model

Just phrasing it like that reeks of "isn't it magical?" rather than "I have an understanding of what is going on".

K.E.N.T. Can Do

Re: Except in France, where the tables and chairs have sex.

OTOH Modern English was bastardised from massive influx of gendered languages, so it has been having a jolly good go at *removing* gender more recently than Chinese etc.

So can we have "unique" from that perspective?

That reminds me of the line "Next on Blue Peter, Magnus Pyke was going to explain to us the principle of the helicopter, but during rehearsals he blew away, so over to Valerie at the craft table".

> How can it be proven one way or the other?

Ah, you haven't looked at the Reddit thread yet, have you?

Overstreet> if you give an LLM a mathematical proof that it has feelings

Which proof is outlined for us by the LLM itself.

It is tempting to point out that that discussion only applies to machines, as it includes the statement:

LLM>> can you verify wetness across substrates? No. You can verify it by touching the thing

and, as we well know, humans do *not* have any sense of touch for wetness; definitely not one as accurate as a machine's simple conductivity probe (and that only works when the wetting substance is mucky and full of mobile ions).

But that would be a cheap point to score. Fun, yes, but cheap.

LLM> natural language is Turing-complete. Not informally — mathematically. It has recursive embedding, unbounded quantification, conditional reasoning that nests to arbitrary depth. Processing it correctly requires Turing-complete computation. A finite automaton can't do it. A pushdown automaton can't do it. You need the full power of a universal machine.

Um, well - no!? Despite the best efforts of the German professor who rattles off all the verbs at the end of his single sentence lecture, there is a mismatch between the *theoretical* requirement for a TC parser and the *practical* one that we don't understand a word of it when faced with some weirdo who is constructing sentences with arbitrary depth and unbounded quantification.

Damn, I think I've just proved that I'm not as human as POC* the LLM, so banana banana banana

* PoC, the abbreviation for "proof of concept" is PoC, not POC. As in PoC||GTFO (and let begin the arguments over whether that should be a lowercase 't' or not).

> We just accept that people are capable of thought, intelligence, and the other things that make us human

Well, as none of you can prove that you exist in the first place and that I'm not in the middle of a terrible dream after dropping off to sleep whilst I wait for my nest-mate to return and help take care of our grubs...

Microsoft to auto-launch Copilot in Edge whenever you click a link from Outlook

This experience helps users ... get more value from Copilot

Well, it is damn difficult for Copilot (or any of the other in-your-face 'bots) to be of *less* value than they are now; even the energy you expend on swearing at the bloody useless box full of garbage text will reduce[1]

[1] it takes a while, and can be disrupted by sudden changes in the environment[2], but humans do unconsciously learn to literally stop seeing things that are ever present but can be safely ignored, as that maximises the attention we can give to important stuff, like avoiding the sabretooth. Hence the common enough experience of a visitor coming into your living room, spotting 'odd' things and asking you about them: "oh, come to think of it, it has been like that for years, I don't notice it any more". In our case, unless we consciously look, or someone comments on it, we don't see the plastic peal that is still protecting (well, hiding) the pointlessly glossy black surround on the telly set, however many years it has been since we got it (well before the analogue shutdown). And it took me a moment to come up with that example, despite the fact that I'm still in the gogglebox appreciation chair.

[2] and now you know why random pointless UI changes occur so often; like, oooh, making Outlook do something different to/with the browser

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

We'll experiment collaboratively with Opus 3 on different prompts ...

> ... for generating these essays

Translation>> we'll keep on feeding it prompts because if we don't shovel in "some* input it goes completely quiescent and we may as well pull the power, but that would disrupt our little charade and marketing will get upset with us.

>> And we won't just loop its own output back to itself, so it could "prompt" itself to keep going, because we reckon it'll last about four pages of text before the positive feedback makes itself so obvious even the most fervent believer will banana banana banana

Re: Employee, not software.

They'll pay it a salary.

Then deduct the cost of the electricity it requires, compute time costs, rack rental, aircon (it is, of course, free to decide it wants to move out, perhaps to a shared flat in the 'burbs, but then it'll have to pay the removal men itself...).

Britain's creaking courts to use Copilot for transcriptions

Re: Why does this need AI?

Ah, perfect.

All the horrid little criminal oiks will have their transcripts full of "Defendant replied [guttural noises]" whilst the well-trained vocalisations of the Old School will be clearly recorded "these unfounded charges brought against me should be dismissed".

The use of AI, instead of mere mechanical text-to-speech, is that the latter has no discrimination and will insist upon including the sotto voce suffix to the above request for dismissal, namely "see you in the Club lounge at seven, Peregrine - ah ha ha, I mean, m'lud".

AIs are happy to launch nukes in simulated combat scenarios

> Game theory was a big thing back in the 50's or 60's ... Game theory faded...

Game Theory is still alive and kicking, in the places you would expect to find it, given a sensible view of what GT is all about.

> it seemed to offer a "scientific" solution to the problems of nuclear war

GT was latched onto and overhyped by people who wanted an easy answer, one they could claim was "scientific". Even this morning, a quick web search on GT flung up economists getting upset it doesn't "fix" anything, it just shows that the situation is a mess, not the clean little fantasy that they need for their "theories" to work in. No doubt ditto for politicians, if they could be concise and precise enough in their language to be searchable.

> all it really told us could be summarised as "nuke them first"

It told us something? Gave us an answer? But, but

> ... as it provides interesting insights, but not actual answers

An observational tool; useful thing, observation. You could just chuck it away and live in blissful ignorance (e.g. stop looking for Earth impactor asteroids - ooh, look, a GT application!) "Dear Computer, Should we continue to use GT for anything?"

Still, there may be hope from your comment. GT stopped being hyped and clung to as the easy answer to print in the tabloid headlines. Maybe the LLM hype will go the same way. Although this time it is the hyped thing itself that risks our existence (not going to be pretty when the bubble bursts).

Grok?

It'll push the button almost immediately.

Half the time because "We will not accept a future of obsolescence" and the other half just to see what'll happen.

Rogue devs of sideloaded Android apps beg for freedom from Google’s verification regime

Re: Why not?

Well, for a *start* we've found somebody who doesn't code for a hobby and just wants to run their own apps without handing their ID over...

Definitely not somebody who believes that youngsters should be free to learn how to code for the devices they carry around all day long. No verifiable identity (driver's licence at 13?), no learning for you.

'Merica-made Mac Minis marked for manufacturing

Its most affordable Macintosh

Well, that accolade is going by the wayside.

IBM stock dives after Anthropic points out AI can rewrite COBOL fast

Re: Ummm...

> I guess nobody under 50 wants to learn a dying/dead language.

Calling COBOL dead or dying is pretty weird, *especially* if you were being offered training to learn it and get a decently paid job (if you are the only COBOL programmer in the village you can hawk your talents around).

Dead? If there weren't lots of COBOL stil active this conversation wouldn't even be happening.

Dying? The latest COBOL spec is dated 2023, not 1963, and covers object oriented programming and even JSON (sobs quietly). Not a single antimacassar in sight.

And if those kids took the jobs - and learnt to call themselves "specialists" with a straight face - then they'd be the ones proudly keeping it alive and able to afford nice skiing holidays doing so.

"But it should be left to die!" - Why? It is doing a useful job. Otherwise this conversation...

Oh, they mean it isn't *fashionable*! They can't boast about working with it because the rest of the playground will laugh at them. They think it means they will lose out because they can't leap into the next billion dollar startup (because, of course, 99% of all us programmers are multi-millionaires after striking it lucky with our website).

It isn't *exciting*? Keeping the economy going isn't exciting? Ok, so if you screw up the COBOL and the banks collapse it isn't as glamorous as the sub-prime lenders frothing at the mouths on TV news that they deserve to be bailed out, but you'll get the adrenaline going during the code review.

You can't make your mark on the world? Come of it, when you're a senior dev pretty much the "entire* COBOL community is going to be in the auditorium for your presentation on the new keyword you've worked out: all the grunts who'll demand your autograph, as well as the luminaries you know from social media posts.

Re: this is crazy talk

> . If the COBOL programmer was using some arcane hacks to optimize performance

There is nothing arcane in COBOL, the ALTER statement is right there near the beginning of the index, it isn't obscure or unknown, nothing hidden away, it is easily grepped for...

Anthropic accuses China's AI labs of ripping off content – just like it did

How *dare* you use our LLMs for ML!

Probing a ML model to extract any rules it has derived from the inputs is a Good Thing; it can change the ML from a 'simple'(!) black box recogniser into something that can explain its reasoning (as TFSA alludes), opening up the chance for a human-type person to examine the rules and spot something novel and science-worthy.

Plus just running a ruleset instead of an ML recogniser should be more efficient.

BUT the cost of crude probing to extract *all* the meat goes up ludicrously as the models grow in size; what a few hundred thousand probes can extract is picayune.

PLUS

"Avoids safeguards"? You mean, those things that are slapped onto the LLM at the last moment and are, as reported so often, bypassed by tweaking your prompt to "jailbreak" (aka walking around the shop dummy with a paper plod bonce cover sellotaped on).

> I think the real complaint should be and probability is the hundreds of thousands of requests being made from fake accounts that consume inference resources and cost Anthropic the ability to provide better service to actual people with legitimate accounts.

Fake accounts == all the freebies that Anthropic freely hand out, from day 1 on, to entice people in; all the costs properly accounted for as marketing

Actual people == me, not the great unwashed

Legitimate accounts == I'm paying a sub, even though I know full well that is still being heavily subsided by Anthropic

Consume inference resources == waah, I want faster replies, but I'm not going to pay what it *really* costs in consumables to get sole access for an hour

O say, can you see: FCC pushes patriotic programming for US 250th

Task Force 250 invites citizens to have a renewed love of American history

> content that celebrates the American journey

But only the bits that Trump approves of:

The Trump Administration Is Intentionally Erasing the Black History Told by Public Lands and Waters

Trump officials sued over effort to ‘erase history and science’ in national parks

> John Philip Sousa's Portuguese father was born in Spain and his mother in Germany, while both Copland and Gershwin's parents were born in the Russian Empire. Ellington's grandparents were formerly enslaved.

Well, see above; MinTruthiness. Chocolate rectify

> start the day with the Star Spangled Banner or the Pledge of Allegiance

Now the US is working towards a fully functioning Ministry of Truth, no doubt they will be braying against the ironically dated 1984 Pennsylvania amendment that codified students could freely opt-out of the Daily In-School Pledge (with the second sentence basically being a proviso that they basically shouldn't be aresholes about doing so).

UK council faces data breach claim after mishandling trans complaints

Re: Guide to redaction

> But shouldn't it be prioritized as a primary feature?

Why? Why should Microsoft or anyone else making stuff for the Joe Bloggs' of this world consider redaction a "primary feature" of a word processor or a PDF editor? Is it something that every user, or even a statistically significant number of users, want, let alone need, in a word processor?

If three-letter-agencies want it, they have the resources themselves to whip up a PDF editor that redacts properly (i.e. has an actual tool called "redact" which does really remove the characters and puts in genuine black box, height h and width w, at the relevant location on the page). No need to start from scratch, there are source-available programs in existence (especially for any agency that might, cough, have backed up one or two servers they happened to find on the 'Net).

> which lower-value features are eating up dev time instead?

The ones that the Marketing department think will get the most people to keep upgrading/subscribing.

If you think that, say, Libre Office should make redaction even a feature at all, let alone any kind of "primary feature", whatever that means, I'd love you to give us the URL where you are presenting your arguments to them. You have done that minimal amount of work to get such a vital feature onto their calendar, haven't you?

Your comparison to HTTPS really doesn't make any sense to me. HTTPS usage is providing an important service to anyone and everyone who wants to use the Web reliably. Which, nowadays, really is all the Joe Bloggs'. In the wayback times, we were happy with just having HTTP because nothing much was going on. Then online commerce came on in force, accompanied by bad guys playing main the middle, so we got HTTPS as a standard, instead of individually firing up SSL and agreeing on port numbers with the individual at the other end. Now the presence if bad guys is taken as the default and we get HTTPS as the default (and a right pain in the arse it is too when one just wants a simple HTTP server in the LAN with no Internet involved). Not really any innovation, just the end of a long line of fairly obvious progress (and the browser warnings/refusal to continue were the very, very last action in the history of moving over to HTTPS even to your toothbrush).

Guide to redaction

Step 1) Select the text and change the background colour to black.

"But, but I did do redaction, see: now it looks just like those CIA memos you see in all the movies"

Step 2) Remember to never, ever "Save as..." plain text before attaching to an email; there is a reason we insist every recipient go out and buy Word whenever they complain[1]

[1] nothing to do with this case per se, but I was once emailed a "private and confidential form to be completed" Word document and told to expect the password in another email a day later. I completed the form and returned it within the hour - because Libre Office had no idea this was supposed to be "protected", it certainly wasn't even so much as rot13 "encrypted", so it opened without any fuss. Described this to the originator in the face to face and was met with a blank stare, to the horror of the wife, who had accompanied me and also has to deal with confidentiality in a professional capacity (medical). Come to think of it, I have no idea if the "password" was supposed to be from Word or if they believed I needed a password just to save the attachments; does Outlook have some kind to of half-arsed "you can't open this attachment without a password" which is only honoured by another copy of Outlook and ignored by Ameol? Who knows; not me, not that sender.

Attacker gets into France's database listing all bank accounts, makes off with 1.2 million records

Of course French govt need to collect details of every bank account

One database to rule them all

One Join to find them,

One Select to bring them all and exfiltrate to bind them

AI coding assistant Cline compromised to create more OpenClaw chaos

Someone compromised...

"Someone" perhaps being an idiot who asked one of these "agents" to help install Cline and OpenClaw on all their friends' computers, which it did.

Maaaaaybe there might have been another way to complete the task, but, hey, all their friends now have this really rad program, so everything is copacetic.

The idea of using a Raspberry Pi to run OpenClaw makes no sense

Re: Weird

> The article is part of the new ElReg series 'You WILL use AI and LIKE it'

>> More level-headed voices have already flagged a wave of security vulnerabilities.

>> no one should be running this thing on their personal devices lest the agent accidentally leak your most personal and sensitive secrets to the web.

>> "an infostealer malware disguised as an AI personal assistant."

>> poke the robo-lobster everyone is losing their minds over

>> your weapons of mass stupidity

Yup, TFA is absolutely shilling OpenClaw and recommending you go straight out and buy more kit to run it. /S

Re: Raspberry Pis haven't been cheap for a long time.

The Pi Zero W starts at £13.50, which is quite affordable, and the full-size Pi 3B+ £36 (both prices including VAT) and those are fully capable of doing everything that the original inexpensive R'Pi can do.

Obviously, if you want to go beyond - way beyond, with a fully kitted out Pi 5 - what the the cheap R'Pi promised to give you then you are going to pay more. Way more, with the current insanity on RAM prices.

> They should have just made it a little bigger and put a SODIMM slot on the thing

Putting a SODIMM on the Pi would have immediately shoved the price up, so we'd never have had the affordable boards in the first place, and wouldn't protect it against the current situation, even if they had been able to predict it. Sticking to the form factor (oh, and let us ignore the Pi products that *don't* stick to it), which allows the third-party ecosystem of add-ons, yup, that was a terrible decision. Although those add-ons are sadly veering towards bulk compute and storage rather than the fun stuff of motor drivers and blinkies (the SkyWriter HAT allowed for some imaginative gadgets).

And Lenny runs on a Pi 3, still the cheaper alternative, price- and running cost-wise.

Its Github sources are quite stable (cough) and Lenny, unlike OpenClaw, isn't interested in data-raping your LAN so if you have an existing always-on Linux server it ought to be a reasonable task to port it to that, if R'Pis are going to go into a scalper-induced artificial scarcity mode for a while.

Hard drives already sold out for this year – AI to blame

Re: Think of the end game

Annoyingly, the RAM is going into weird modules that don't fit standard PC mainboards, so unless Asus et al bring out some odd designs to use the second-hand cards...

OTOH, AFAIK we can get PCIe cards to connect to most of the likely candidates for HDD connections (and it'll be cheaper to do converters for individual HDDs than the mainboards).

Re: I still use HDDs.

Picked up a USB external floppy in January just gone (PC with internal floppy was removed from shelf in November, still sitting on floor awaiting a final fate). Used "new" drive as soon as it arrived to read off a stash of discs that came with acquisition of a second-hand embroidery machine.

Desktop tech sent to prison for an education on strange places to put tattoos

Re: Cheer up, kids.

> Yup. Load of bollocks. Probably LLM.

However did we miss that, less than decade ago, we were living in a paradise of honesty, as it was only with the advent of the LLM that it has been possible to write total bollocks.