Posts by NapTime ForTruth

Anthropic is removing its covert code for catching Chinese competitors

Re: Of course, I get one "AI" ...

Whoa, wait a second. Quitting at just one paraphrasing is lazy. Instead, get the AIs to paraphrase each other in an infinite loop. That will give it even more AI-idness, back and forth, forever.

Might have happened. After all, Roddenberry originally pitched the show as "Wagon Train to the stars".

Wait...how deep might this retro-futurist conspiracy go?!?!

Re: Do these high-value AI companies actually know what they're doing?

Or, given the quality of AI, a few new faeces.

OpenAI: Yoo-hoo, look over here, we do that security stuff too!

"Of these, human reviewers have manually marked about 70,000 findings as fixed, and AIs have auto-determined that more than 500,000 findings are fixed."

Interesting.

Are these findings and fixes correct?

Britain plots digital bedtime after kicking under-16s off social media

Everybody is so focused on the downside! I'm going to exploit this market:

Welcome to Monty Python's Wholesale Beard Emporium! Three free stones with every beard purchase! Remember: these beards are definitely not for women or children who are also definitely not here for the stoning and/or online access.

AI heavyweights warn their tech could help terrorists develop bioweapons

Re: We're speedrunning

If we're going to ride the Great Filter, best we get there early. No sense dragging our feet and having to wait in line!

Remote work – not AI – is killing job prospects for the youth

“Our analysis suggests that these trends are related, with remote work making it more difficult for managers to train and mentor new employees,”

That sounds like a management problem, not an employee problem. Perhaps managers who struggle to do their jobs after significant social and work-style changes should be replaced with managers who are more flexible and more willing to embrace new contexts.

Putin sends submarines to survey Britain's subsea cables. UK deploys Royal Navy, mobilizes parliamentary draftsmen

"...with Putin out of the picture by whatever means it leaves open the door for even more hard line thinking..."

One of the fundamental characteristics of war is that it tends to remove more than one leader, potential leader, or other obstacle to change, and is likely to continue the culling until behavior improves.

The short-term effectiveness is quite high; the long term outcomes are a bit more...nuanced.

Most generative AI and custom model projects will be a bust: Gartner

Re: The big question

Magic 8-Ball says: The answer to your question is "yes".

Chrome silently installs a 4 GB local LLM on your computer

Re: Hoist by their own petard

No. The point of digital identity is to track everything you do online, and thus to track you everywhere and always. And then to make sure that all services and access are online-only or online connected wherever possible.

Somewhere the ghost of George Orwell weeps for us forever.

India orders infosec red alert in case Mythos sparks crime spree

"...run a serious SOC and take its advice..."

Right, so that's the logical point of failure, yeah? I mean, first they have to create the cost center, er, I mean SOC, and then they have to actually listen to that group and follow their inevitably inconvenient recommendations.

In my experience this has happened

...<calculating>...<calculating>...<calculating>...

...negative eight billion times.

Anything that doesn't immediately turn into actual money or the promise thereof is the enemy of the notional good, all else is damned

Phone users know when to hold ’em, delay upgrades amid inflation

My understanding is that foldable phones are a "killer" feature in the sense that using the folding part eventually kills the screen.

Planned obsolescence for the win...for some values of "win".

Security is an illusion.

Microsoft boss tells investors the company is working to 'win back fans'

Re: Fans! Fans! Fans!

Depends on what you're into.

NASA boss: make Pluto a planet again

Re: Still seems arbitrary

Yes, and if it doesn't hurry up and get it done it's going to bed without supper.

Re: Cleared orbit

"That's called being part of a dynamic system".

Huh. I thought it was called "Dave".

Re: Cleared orbit

Indeed...but Y did they do it? Or was it Y they did it?

Microsoft opens door to the past by releasing 86-DOS and PC-DOS 1.00

I miss the early days of personal computing, when everything was new and presented so many opportunities to learn, discover, and create - usually all at the same time.

And the ensuing multitudes of machines and operating systems, and trying to rewrite code to work on different platforms.

And a half-dozen friends and colleagues all gathered around one computer, chiming in with corrections and suggestions late into the night.

And taking turns raiding the refrigerator or the corner store, falling asleep wherever it was convenient, being awakened by colleagues cheering success or decrying mistakes and failures.

And doing it all over again.

It used to be fun, and personal, and rewarding. Now it's just another job.

Sic Transit Gloria Mundi.

Hashicorp co-founder Mitchell Hashimoto says GitHub ‘no longer a place for serious work’

Re: Redmond-centric

They are, and stop calling me Shirley!

(Sorry, I had to do that. It was a moral imperative.)

Microsoft updates the Windows Update Experience: You can hit pause now

Pseuperiority, surely.

NASA working on 'Big Bang' upgrade to keep the Voyagers alive for longer

Alternatively, we could just launch Elon in a Starship pointed in that general direction and...honestly, that's mission accomplished. Whatever happens after that is a guaranteed, albeit quite cold, win.

HP's remote desktop push retreats as Anyware heads for end of life

Re: Thanks for the heads-up!

Sounds legit, very CEO.

Apple update looks like Czech mate for locked-out iPhone user

Re: It is hard to feel sorry

Eh... Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.

We've all cocked it up on occasion, we've all gotten it wrong. If we've been lucky, good on us that we got a second chance; if we've not been lucky, maybe someone else stepped in to assist.

Disappointed that the nominally elite, or at least hypothetically competent members of this august community are more concerned with shaming than with helping.

Re: iPhone linguistics fail

"...can't help this guy..."

Correction: WON'T help this guy. It's not an impossible feat, Apple just doesn't care and can't be bothered.

By comparison, other tech companies across the board differ significantly in the sense that... just kidding, no tech company will reliably help its users.

Farmers take care of their cattle because that's how they get future food. It's not because they love and want to help the cattle.

Tech companies are farmers. We are the cattle.

Anthropic: All your zero-days are belong to Mythos

Re: Not sus

"Can this bubble just crash already?"

Regrettably, no. This is the predicable - perhaps inevitable - outcome of a particular explicit intent. The AI ouroboros show doesn't end until the snake chokes to death on it's own tail, and this particular snake appears to be at once both voracious and possibly explosive.

Rome, like the Internet, wasn't built in a day; the sacking thereof was somewhat more expedient and notionally more effective, albeit with some...pronounced negative outcomes.

If exploiting prior art is, like imitation, a sincere form of flattery, perhaps AI will flatter our technological hubris by revisiting a Romanesque decline upon our era.

AI slop got better, so now maintainers have more work

Given this context, it seems the logical response to an excess of plausible or accurate bug reports delivered by external AI is to pass them along for replication, validation, and correction (You down with R-V-C? Yeah, you know me!) via local internal AI.

...on the assumption that either and both AIs are reliable, consistent, and effective for that work, of course. Plus the fun of watching the afternoon bot-slop battles unfold.

If AI (writ large) can get its sh...tuff together, quality assurance becomes fully automated, development and cleanup costs drop to sub-minimum wage levels, and nobody has to go to work ever again...nor have access to food or shelter.

That's a big win for somebody, innit?

Artemis II astronaut: 'I have two Microsoft Outlooks, and neither one of those are working'

Isn't it odd...

...that we keep using software that we know isn't reliable, run by companies we know we can't trust because they abuse us at every opportunity and blame us for the abuse.

It's like intimate partner violence at worldwide - and now spacewide - scale.

We need to break the habit, we need to get out, and once we do we need to help others to safety.

This is a moral imperative.

Only Trump can decide when cyberwar turns into real war

Re: Who's propaganda do you trust, POTUS or IRGC?

No one is telling the truth. Everything else falls in line with that certainty.

Cryptographers engage in war of words over RustSec bug reports and subsequent ban

Eh, this appears to fall under the heading of "people suck", but branded as "Conflict in a Dev Community!" .

If the bugs are valid, shut up and fix them. If the bugs are maybe valid or definitely valid but not crucial show-stoppers, go ahead and fix them anyway while it's fresh in your orgs distributed mind and before they're exploited in ways you didn't anticipate. If you don't like the person or tone in the reporting, fix the bugs anyway, and show gratitude that someone bothered to prevent your code from shanking your org and its users.

"For want of a nail a shoe was lost", etc.

Anthropic bods rework AI damage yardstick, find scant labor impact

"But even this draws a "meh" from Anthropic's researchers, who note that the 14 percent average estimated decline in the job finding rate between the introduction of ChatGPT in 2022 and now "is just barely statistically significant."

But they would say that, wouldn't they? Lies, damned lies, and statistics, init?

UK watchdog eyes Meta's smart glasses after workers say they 'see everything'

Re: Who would wear AI glasses during "extremely private moments" ...

Ah, the "be your own best friend" model. It never goes out of style.

Re: GDPR's position on CCTV?

Bent over, by the sound of it.

Re: What a surprise

Easy there, let's not be exclusive! Low paid workers deserve to get some jollies, too. Especially at low, low discount prices. Whether they like it or not.

Re: Easy fix?

So we're updating Equus? Now it's MetaEquus, I guess, presumably with automated ocular extraction.

In fairness, in this day and age so very few people are out standing in their fields. It's mostly farm hands and fruit cakes.

Google feels the need for security speed, so will ship Chrome updates every two weeks

I like where this is heading. With luck and further technological advancement maybe we'll break the nanosecond barrier and have every part of every system fully dedicated to an infinite volume of continuous change. Forever.

That'll teach 'em/us, whoever 'em/us* is/are.

On a more serious but still sarcastic note, I'm getting pretty tired of tech companies. (I was going to add more there but I ran out of caring.)

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* Does not involve actual emus, probably, and especially not emus being slashed in half the way the typography suggests. Unless that's what you're into - I'm not here to judge...as far as you know.

NASA safety watchdog says it's time to rethink Moon landing

The American space program is a weak shadow of its former self, not because Americans are fundamentally incompetent or technologically deficient, but because they have become lazy, complacent, and almost child-like in their thinking - on the rare occasion that they can be bothered to think at all.

American leadership is now modeled on graft, exploitation, and power-by-threat - or murder; quality education is in the doldrums; competence and expertise run a distant second, third, or fourth to brand, fealty, and social approbation. A much larger than zero percentage of the population have learned to *like* seeing people harmed, humbled, and humiliated

Most disappointing is that they did this to themselves, literally choosing this model, these actions, these incompetent but extractive leaders - sorry, "leaders" - to guide them to exactly this outcome.

It's all bread and circuses - the Las Vegas prototype edition - but the bread is mouldy, the entertainment is as cheap as it is vicious, and the outcomes are all bad. Perhaps more regrettably, they're getting it all over everyone else, too.

This is not an environment conducive to success, especially not in fields as complex and risk-laden as space exploration. America is done. Last one out please turn off the lights.

At this point, the only external solutions are isolating the U.S., firewalling against local contamination, and preparing a robust defense.

Elon Musk merges xAI into SpaceX to spread universal consciousness via a sentient sun

... Any chance we can pull that implied inevitability forward into, say, the current quarter? Purely for convenience in balancing the books, of course. The good of humanity as a whole is merely a coincidentally positive side effect.

AI security startup CEO posts a job. Deepfake candidate applies, inner turmoil ensues

Re: Test

Came here to quote this, pleased to see you got there first. Your next pint's on me.

My takeaway here was that the interviewer was more concerned about rushing to fill an open position while being kind and generous to the ostensible candidate than they were about extracting meaningful information from that while not getting scammed.

"He has researched deepfakes for years, and even used them in his presentations - so he's not an easy target for this type of scam."

He wasn't even *trying* to be thoughtful about the interview or the candidate, and performed no kind of risk profiling *at all*. He was, *by definition*, "an easy target for this type of scam".

How is the interviewer qualified to even participate in interviews, much less be the leader of anything?

"I did not think it was going to happen to me, but here we are." Yes, because you literally - and by your own admission - weren't thinking. At all. And it didn't "happen to you", you all but begged to make it happen.

Look, the bottom line is that interviewing candidates is - and must be - an adversarial process, *especially for security*. The conversation should be courtroom tough, the questions should be genuinely and uncomfortably challenging, and - by all the gods and other imaginary things - the goal should be to find out who the candidate is, what they have done that matches your needs, and whether they are competent, honest, and also not an enemy attacker. Especially not a synthetic simulacrum of an enemy attacker.

Paranoid WhatsApp users rejoice: Encrypted app gets one-click privacy toggle

"Paranoid WhatsApp users rejoice: Encrypted app gets one-click privacy toggle"

I'm pretty sure "privacy" was meant to be in quotes, possibly with laughing emoji.

Meta retreats from metaverse after virtual reality check

We can misread it for you wholesale...

...which I suddenly realize is the basis for current AI.

Stop dragging feet on AI nudification ban, UK government told

Re: Knickers in a twist?

Much like:

Automatic weapons are just a tool.

It doesn't do anything you couldn't do before, just makes it a whole lot easier. (I believe the current version of the US in particular has form here, as do as several South American nations).

Similarly:

Nuclear weapons are just a tool.

It doesn't do anything you couldn't do before, just makes it a whole lot easier.

The "making it easier" part is really the main part. The difference between local individual action and action at worldwide scale is the difference between argument and total war.

Headset hype meets harsh reality as Apple and Meta VR shipments fizzle in 2025

Re: The Next Big Thing

How dare you, sir! How very dare you insult the good name of goldfish!

I will have you know that I have seen those fools and ruffians of the TikTok mindset and attention span, and they, sir, - en masse and in toto - could not compete for attention span with even a single goldfish of no particularly exceptional mind.

And on that note, sir, I shall collect my coat and hat and take my leave of you. Harrumph!

Diversion to power datacenters earns Boom Supersonic a ticket to revive fast air transport

Am I the only one disappointed that the title "CEO" has become largely indistinguishable from "memelord"?

Notā bene:

May also apply to leaders of entire countries, for some values of "leaders" and "countries".

Block all AI browsers for the foreseeable future: Gartner

Re: Well I'm shocked...

Open question as to whether they used AI to arrive at this conclusion.

Hegseth needs to go to secure messaging school, report says

There was a time, not so long ago, when leaking government secrets, whether intentionally or unintentionally, resulted in a prison sentence or similar punishment - not merely to make clear the illegality of the act and the risks and consequences stemming therefrom, but also to deter others from committing such acts.¹

That the U.S. no longer sees the need to hold its government leaders and employees liable for their breaches, errors, or crimes is remarkable in the worst sense and further underscores the continuing collapse of that once great nation.

We live in interesting times.

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1. https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R41404#

(Icon representative of the current establishment, perhaps.)

Cloudflare coughs, half the internet catches a cold

...and so begins the era of vibe networking.

Microsoft is building datacenter superclusters that span continents

All of this energy and destruction and investment for what? Slightly improved synthesized cat pictures, high-availability lies at hyper scale, and studies regarding how many artificially unintelligent angels can dance on the head of a pin - for some notional values of angels, dances, and pins.

Such a waste.

Thoreau was right, we have become the tools of our tools.

Who's watching the watchers? This Mozilla fellow, and her Surveillance Watch map

Re: In the 90ies I still had hope the internet might be a blessing for the development of humanity

You ask "Why don't other nations take a look at our history and learn to better behave but instead try to repeat our mistakes again and again?"

Too many leaders of other nations do look at your history and the history of others...and belive that those histories offer useful opportunities for power. This isn't a nation problem, this is a malicious human problem.

My question is: why don't we humans choose better leaders, and choose to be better people?

(Also, I have an original "Strange Days" DVD. I watch it occasionally, but more frequently of late.)