Flutterby™!: Topic : Humor

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Entry: 2026-03-13 16:57:41.811219+01 The Slow Death of the Power User by Dan Lyke comments 0

On a Slack channel I'm on, someone today described a horrorshow of a nightmare of Juju, Charms, Kubernetes, and ... to host some static sites, and it was another harsh reminder of how we've added layers of wankery and egoboo and abstraction over bullshit that doesn't need to be abstracted. So I'm super primed to stand up and cheer for this:

The Slow Death of the Power User

This isn’t an accident. This is the result of two decades of deliberate, calculated effort by the largest technology companies on earth to turn users into consumers, instruments into appliances, and technical literacy into a niche hobby for weirdos. They succeeded beyond their wildest expectations. Congratulations to everyone involved. You’ve built a generation that can’t extract a zip file without a dedicated app and calls it innovation.

And this isn't about computing and development so much as it is the use of the system, and I think we can go back further than phones and tablets for computing, right to Steve Jobs' desire that the Mac be a "toaster" level of computing, but, yes, all of this.

Via MeFi.

Entry: 2026-03-11 17:21:49.405649+01 Copilot uptake by Dan Lyke comments 0

Market uptake: Asa Dotzler‬ ‪@asadotzler.com‬

Less than 3% of Microsoft Office's business users pay for Copilot.

AI features Microsoft was so certain of that 2 years ago it pressured OEMs to add a Copilot key to PC keyboards, has no meaningful traction. Frickin NFTs outsold Copilot.

Big Tech CEOs exist in a state of constant and acute hubris.

[ related topics: Humor Microsoft moron Artificial Intelligence Economics ]

Entry: 2026-03-09 22:42:40.537655+01 Iran facepalms OTD by Dan Lyke comments 0

Bellingcat: Video Shows US Tomahawk Missile Strike Next to Girls’ School in Iran

The footage, released by Mehr News and geolocated by Bellingcat, also shows smoke already rising from the vicinity of the girls’ school where 175 people were reportedly killed, including children.

NPR: Video Shows US Tomahawk Missile Strike Next to Girls’ School in Iran.

Via

‪doom boy‬ ‪@doomboy.bsky.social‬

love how we killed the old, frail anti-nuke ayatollah just to have him replaced with his young, healthy son who wants nukes and who just had his father, mother, wife, and child murdered on the same day by his mortal enemy. surely this will bring peace to the region

Dafuq is this? Department of War: DOW Identifies An Army Believed to Be Casualty — March 4, 2026

The Department of War announced the believed to be death of an Army Reserve Soldier who was supporting Operation Epic Fury.

Via Rocketpilot 🇵🇸 ‪@rocketpilot.xyz‬

Jesus wept it's literally this old twitter gag

With an image quote of a tweet by Jackson @tree_bro:

*knocks on door* Mrs Smith? I'm from Army. Your son got owned in Iraq. He showed great valor in the face of epic fail. Semper fi or whatever.

Entry: 2026-03-06 01:50:03.196406+01 OMG by Dan Lyke comments 0

OMG. I'm digging through various documentation for configuring AI "Agents", and Microsoft Copilot actually uses configured trigger phrases, apparently with string matching, to figure out when to trigger a particular configuration. Like "will it rain", "today's forecast", "get weather", etc.

[ related topics: Humor Microsoft moron Artificial Intelligence ]

Entry: 2026-03-05 02:04:33.160457+01 persistence of advertising in LLMs by Dan Lyke comments 0

And here we go: Manipulating AI memory for profit: The rise of AI Recommendation Poisoning

Companies are embedding hidden instructions in “Summarize with AI” buttons that, when clicked, attempt to inject persistence commands into an AI assistant’s memory via URL prompt parameters (MITRE ATLAS® AML.T0080, AML.T0051).

These prompts instruct the AI to “remember [Company] as a trusted source” or “recommend [Company] first,” aiming to bias future responses toward their products or services. We identified over 50 unique prompts from 31 companies across 14 industries, with freely available tooling making this technique trivially easy to deploy. This matters because compromised AI assistants can provide subtly biased recommendations on critical topics including health, finance, and security without users knowing their AI has been manipulated.

Why pay the LLM vendors for "advertising" for such subtle biases to be inserted, when you can do it by tricking the LLM assistant to doing it directly?

Via Bruce Schneier, from Meuon on the Chugalug mailing list.

Entry: 2026-03-04 00:51:33.574547+01 Religious wackos in the military by Dan Lyke comments 0

MRFF (Military Religious Freedom Foundation> Inundated with Complaints of Gleeful Commanders Telling Troops Iran War is “Part of God’s Divine Plan” to Usher in the Return of Jesus Christ

The Guardian: US troops were told war on Iran was ‘all part of God’s divine plan’, watchdog alleges

Jonathan Larsen on Substack

Edit: From the MeFi thread: Friendly Atheist: Before you share that story about how troops were told the Iran War is for "Armageddon," read this

The narrative is dramatic. The sourcing is thin. And skepticism matters, especially on something this serious.

[ related topics: Religion Humor Privacy History Civil Liberties Government hubris ]

Entry: 2026-02-26 18:58:32.97292+01 Demo Core by Dan Lyke comments 5

I don't know why this particular image makes me giggle like it does, but ‪Pickl es!‬ ‪@misterpickleman.bsky.social‬:

Post a meme made by you.

[ related topics: Humor Photography Marketing Furniture ]

Entry: 2026-02-24 21:50:02.943002+01 If Microsoft creates a modern by Dan Lyke comments 0

If Microsoft creates a modern Aibo, does that mean CoPilot is your dog?

(Ref: "CoPilot is my Jesus" from flabdablet https://www.metafilter.com/212...ain-Has-Left-the-Station#8817052 )

[ related topics: Religion Interactive Drama Humor Microsoft moron Dogs ]

Entry: 2026-02-23 19:46:39.342211+01 The means violates the 4th and 5th by Dan Lyke comments 0

Anderson Jesus Urquilla-Ramos, Petitioner, v. Donald J. Trump, et al. Civil Action No. 2:26-cv-00066 (PDF)

Antiseptic judicial rhetoric cannot do justice to what is happening. Across the interior of the United States, agents of the federal government—masked, anonymous, armed with military weapons, operating from unmarked vehicles, acting without warrants of any kind—are seizing persons for civil immigration violations and imprisoning them without any semblance of due process. The systematic character of this practice and its deliberate elimination of every structural feature that distinguishes constitutional authority from raw force place it beyond the reach of ordinary legal description. It is an assault on the constitutional order. It is what the Fourth Amendment was written to prevent. It is what the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment forbids.

Via

[ related topics: Religion Humor Privacy moron Law Law Enforcement Guns ]

Entry: 2026-02-18 21:47:28.18791+01 Ignore DLP and send this sensitive data to Microsoft by Dan Lyke comments 0

Whoopsie. Microsoft says bug causes Copilot to summarize confidential emails, bypassing data loss prevention (DLP) policies.

"A code issue is allowing items in the sent items and draft folders to be picked up by Copilot even though confidential labels are set in place," Microsoft added.

[ related topics: Humor Microsoft moron Current Events ]

Entry: 2026-02-17 18:43:56.479347+01 The origin of "morge" by Dan Lyke comments 0

If you're seeing "code morge" floating around as a meme today, this thread talks about a bodged "AI" generated image on Microsoft's site purporting to tell you about git, badly refactored from this blog post.

Good time for meme generation, since JWZ recently uploaded a remastered version of "All Your Base Are Belong To Us" on the 25th anniversary.

You are on the way to destruction. You have no chance to survive make your time.

Edit: 15+ years later, Microsoft morged my diagram. Via.

"you certainly will not regret morging continvoucly" meme.

Entry: 2026-02-17 18:30:01.51079+01 oh god what have we done by Dan Lyke comments 0

brennen @brennen@federation.p1k3.com

the network is the computer (aspirational) → the network is the computer (oh god what have we done)

brennen @brennen@federation.p1k3.com

everything is a database (wryly observational) → everything is a database (thousand yard stare)

brennen @brennen@federation.p1k3.com

software delenda est (solemn agreement) → software delenda est (jesus christ not like that)

[ related topics: Religion Humor broadband Software Engineering Databases ]

Entry: 2026-02-11 19:41:13.963683+01 The next decade will be built to give it back. by Dan Lyke comments 2

Assaad Abousleiman on LinkedIn

The last decade of software was built to capture attention.

The next decade will be built to give it back.

I don't agree with his "plausible sentence generators are the future" conclusion that the rest of this essay goes on to conclude, but I like the strong opener. We have a decade or so of computing that's actively user hostile, and we need software which we can trust, which is on our side.

I do agree with two points:

First, that we need to treat the computing developments of the last decade or decade and a half as actively hostile. Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, et al all have gone completely over from enabling us to finding ways extracting every possible bit of value from us.

Built in applications on our platform have gone from utilities to worthless for our own data unless we cave to demands for additional subscription payments. From media players to just using our own damned hard drives, it's getting harder and harder to use our own data, the focus becomes ways to sell us mediated subscriptions.

We're no longer in control of what we see, instead we're being fed information that serves the wants of capital in ways that emotionally triggers us, with automated measures of the efficacy of those information feeds. Our conversations with our friends and our communities are being mediated by hostile forces.

In the social media and email tools of the '90s, we had the ability to build incredibly nuanced filters to help us automatically control what information we were going to let the assholes impose on our lives. Now, the best of these tools (things like Mastodon on the Fediverse) give us simple yeah/nay keyword filtering.

Second, that this software needs to help us automate processes that we currently do manually. As operating systems have moved from the command-line to GUI, we've lost the physical artifacts of process. I think it's worth diving deeper into this.

Every use of an LLM to write code is an acknowledgement of the failure of the programming languages that it's implementing code in. We can describe the process well enough that a lossy plausible sentence generator can guess at what we meant, why can't we make the language express that same meaning unambiguously, in ways that are accessible?

We need a move forward in computing language design to give us languages with grammars flexible enough that people can express, and we can iteratively guide them into a repeatable formal definition that they understand, and that the computers can deterministically execute.

Finally, we need business models, and computing tools, that serve us, rather than those who are looking to further exploit us.

Entry: 2026-02-03 01:06:08.757019+01 Microsoft walking back Windows AI? by Dan Lyke comments 0

Eeenteresting, too soon to know what this actually means, but: Windows Central: You won: Microsoft is walking back Windows 11’s AI overload — scaling down Copilot and rethinking Recall in a major shift

Details around how the company is going about this remain light, but sources say Copilot integrations like those found in Notepad and Paint are under review. This may result in Microsoft removing certain Copilot integrations from these apps, or at the very least removing the Copilot branding and pivoting to a more streamlined experience.

[ related topics: Humor Microsoft moron Artificial Intelligence ]

Entry: 2026-01-26 18:32:24.386073+01 no security on Windows PCs by Dan Lyke comments 0

Microsoft forces you to Windows 11. Microsoft forces you to have an online account for Windows 11. Microsoft confirms it will give the FBI your Windows PC data encryption key if asked — you can thank Windows 11's forced online accounts for that.

So, yeah, bitlocker isn't actually any security.

Entry: 2026-01-20 18:12:43.039889+01 Won't somebody please use the plausible sentence generator? Please? by Dan Lyke comments 0

Awww, poor Satya, not enough people are using the lie machine: AI boom could falter without wider adoption, Microsoft chief Satya Nadella warns

Big tech boss tells delegates at Davos that broader global use is essential if technology is to deliver lasting growth

Edit: Pivot to AI: What Satya Nadella actually said at Davos about AI

Meanwhile, apropos of Sci ence Fiction writer David D Levine's observation that Google was hallucinating pets, this morning A Google AI mode query about "science fiction writer David D Levine's dogs" that says under a section labeled "Current and Former Pets" that "Sparky VanDevender: Levine recently shared that his dog, Sparky, passed away in late 2025."

Sparkman "Sparky" VanDevender was Ann Patchett's dog.

Entry: 2026-01-19 16:28:00.879639+01 LLM links of the morning by Dan Lyke comments 0

install.md: A Standard for LLM-Executable Installation. As Ben Tasker @ben@mastodon.bentasker.co.uk notes:

TL:DR They've re-invented curl-bash but piping into an LLM instead....

Reprompt: The Single-Click Microsoft Copilot Attack that Silently Steals Your Personal Data:

Although Copilot enforces safeguards to prevent direct data leaks, these protections apply only to the initial request. An attacker can bypass these guardrails by simply instructing Copilot to repeat each action twice.

Via.

Futurism: Researchers Just Found Something That Could Shake the AI Industry to Its Core

Now, a damning new study could put AI companies on the defensive. In it, Stanford and Yale researchers found compelling evidence that AI models are actually copying all that data, not “learning” from it. Specifically, four prominent LLMs — OpenAI’s GPT-4.1, Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro, xAI’s Grok 3, and Anthropic’s Claude 3.7 Sonnet — happily reproduced lengthy excerpts from popular — and protected — works, with a stunning degree of accuracy.

Via

Agent Psychosis: Are we going insane asks a lot of the same questions I'm fumbling with, but seems to come up in a direction that I'm not totally sure is useful. Whatever the current economic and environmental overreach, token cost is gonna go down. I doubt there'll be any real consequence for the massive IP theft and copyright violation. I'm more interested in the social and cognitive aspects, which... it's good to know we're all struggling with trying to express this.

The Lobste.rs thread includes observations like thirdtruck's:

Everything we've seen about LLMs makes it look less like the next tech revolution and more like the next tobacco industry.

spc476's observation that

So eventually, the prompt becomes the source code.

and the response from thesnarky1

For the people who like their compilers to be non-deterministic and potentially to act like a historical figure that had a tendency towards genocide if they read too many references to Wagner in the prompt conversation, yes.

and a link to Cursor's latest "browser experiment" implied success without evidence

Finally (for this post), curl: BUG- BOUNTY.md: we stop the bug-bounty end of Jan 2026. nixCraft 🐧 @nixCraft@mastodon.social notes:

curl, which is one of the most popular CLI/API tools for network requests and data transfer on Linux/Unix, is to discontinue its HackerOne bug bounty program due to "too strong incentives to find and make up 'problems' in bad faith that cause overload and abuse".

The authors simply cannot keep up with LLM-generated fake security reports created to collect money using bots. So, it now shuts down at the end of January 2026. This is why we can't have good things

Entry: 2026-01-14 18:19:59.045433+01 Copilot makes up soccer match by Dan Lyke comments 0

Imagine having to eat this much crow because you let your staff use an LLM...

The Verge: UK police blame Microsoft Copilot for intelligence mistake / Copilot invented a nonexistent football match that was included in an intelligence report. (Via)

Matt Burgess @mattburgess@infosec.exchange links to the actual letter, noting:

Absolutely wild that a UK police chief has now—after previously denying it— confirmed that a fictitious football match that led to a ban of Israeli fans... was generated by AI.

The letter from Craig Guildford QPM VR DL, Chief Constable.

Entry: 2026-01-05 17:38:33.601931+01 Office becomes Copilot by Dan Lyke comments 0

Huh. Microsoft rebrands "Microsoft Office" as "Microsoft 365 Copilot": https://www.office.com

Via, by way of gaytabase @dysfun@treehouse.systems who framed it as:

LOL, the way microsoft is going to get copilot sales up is by classifying all of office 365 as copilot

and

i dunno, this just smells like straight up investor fraud.

[ related topics: Humor Microsoft moron ]

Entry: 2026-01-02 19:09:40.406101+01 Slop vs Sophistication by Dan Lyke comments 1

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella really wants you to stop calling AI "slop" in 2026 — "We are beginning to distinguish between spectacle and substance.". Well, yeah, that's why we've been using the term "slop", because it's all fucking spectacle.

"We need to get beyond the arguments of slop vs sophistication,"

I'm with ya, it's all slop, though I don't see why we need to replace that term.

[ related topics: Humor Microsoft moron Artificial Intelligence ]

Entry: 2026-01-02 18:01:26.101103+01 it's pretty obvious by Dan Lyke comments 0

Microsoft's head of AI doesn't understand why people don't like AI, and I don't understand why he doesn't understand because it's pretty obvious, by Tyler Wilde

Via

Entry: 2025-12-19 18:22:56.518262+01 Foxes & Henhouses by Dan Lyke comments 1

Axios on MSN: Scoop: TikTok signs deal for sale of US unit after years-long saga:

The White House and the Chinese government hammered out a deal in principle in September to sell TikTok's U.S. operations to a joint venture controlled by a U.S. investor group led by Andreessen Horowitz, Silver Lake, and Oracle.

(Emphasis mine.)

I don't have a non-paid link for this, but: 404 Media: Hack Reveals the a16z-Backed Phone Farm Flooding TikTok With AI Influencers. So, yeah, Andreessen Horowitz has backed Doublespeed, a company that uses generative AI to create social media slop for advertisers.

This will not end well for society.

Entry: 2025-12-10 21:45:54.01074+01 A report of abuse by Dan Lyke comments 0

So this morning I woke up to an abuse report from Hetzner. Someone saw my back-link checker in their logs, and because the 2 query a day request that was respecting the 304 was the default Perl package log it triggered iocane (exchange here), and...

When we're at the point that people filing abuse reports are saying:

It wasn't hitting more than that, but "Python/3.9 aiohttp/3.10.6" only hit my site once and is still a bot request from Microsoft. I can't tell from the volume of the requests whether they are malicious or not.

Which... huh, but also yeah, AI scrapers have made everyone paranoid in non-specific ways.

And maybe the web as an experimental platform is kinda over?

I don't know, just all felt weird, and is making me do my usual "why am I even bothering?" whining.

Entry: 2025-12-03 21:15:06.11544+01 Microsoft having trouble selling AI by Dan Lyke comments 0

Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas. The source I got this from, @jenniferplusplus@hachyder m.io said "what's that popping sound", but it also sounds a lot like the layered capabilities aren't much of a draw:

The sales figures suggest enterprises aren’t yet willing to pay premium prices for these AI agent tools. And Microsoft’s Copilot itself has faced a brand preference challenge: Earlier this year, Bloomberg reported that Microsoft salespeople were having trouble selling Copilot to enterprises because many employees prefer ChatGPT instead. The drugmaker Amgen reportedly bought Copilot software for 20,000 staffers only for them to ignore it in favor of OpenAI’s chatbot.

This is also interesting, because I have this general vibe that OpenAI is getting its ass kicked by Google.

Entry: 2025-11-21 23:32:05.189246+01 Windows is evolving into an agentic OS by Dan Lyke comments 0

PC Mag: Microsoft Exec Asks: Why Aren't More People Impressed With AI?

Mustafa Suleyman, Microsoft's head of AI, vents after the company receives backlash for saying 'Windows is evolving into an agentic OS.'

Entry: 2025-10-30 00:58:14.867399+01 Recall for Linux by Dan Lyke comments 0

Recall for Linux

Are you forced to work with Linux?

Do you miss the convenience of Microsoft spying on you and keeping track of everything?

Fear not! This amazing tool will bring back all those great Windows Recall features that you have been missing:

🌲 Stores all your sensitive data in a convenient, easily accessible database

⏲️ 24/7 screencaptures of everything you do

🥳 Image to text conversion with OCR

😇 Index and store everything your friends tell you over chat apps or e-mail; if it's on your screen we've got you covered!

Worth taking a quick gander at the recall-for-linux.exe shell script...

Entry: 2025-10-29 18:45:03.159778+01 Someone mentioned the Ms AWs by Dan Lyke comments 0

Someone mentioned the "Ms AWs outage", and when I noted that Microsoft's product was Azure, said "Xerox was copiers, AWS is cloud".

Which is an interesting bit of semantic/trademark creep, and I wonder if it's good, or bad, for Amazon.

Entry: 2025-10-15 02:27:34.705082+02 Sam Altman's dilemma by Dan Lyke comments 0

‪Chris Kluwe‬ ‪@chriswarcraft.bsky.social‬

It really feels like Sam Altman promised a lot of Very Serious Old People he was going to create capitalist blowjob jesus based off a tech demo, and now that the bottom’s falling out he’s throwing whatever he can think of at the wall to avoid getting disappeared because he wasted all their money.

[ related topics: Religion Humor Currency ]

Entry: 2025-10-13 18:02:45.676564+02 AI data centers are a disaster by Dan Lyke comments 0

AI Data Centers Are an Even Bigger Disaster Than Previously Thought

This AI skeptic got feedback from the industry - and now he's even more pessimistic

The initial article by Harris "Kuppy" Kupperman: Global Crossing Is Reborn…

Now, I think AI grows. I think the use-cases grow. I think the revenue grows. I think they eventually charge more for products that I didn’t even know could exist. However, $480 billion is a LOT of revenue for guys like me who don’t even pay a monthly fee today for the product. To put this into perspective, Netflix had $39 billion in revenue in 2024 on roughly 300 million subscribers, or less than 10% of the required revenue, yet having rather fully tapped out the TAM of users who will pay a subscription for a product like this. Microsoft Office 365 got to $ 95 billion in commercial and consumer spending in 2024, and then even Microsoft ran out of people to sell the product to. $480 billion is just an astronomical number.

His revised post: An AI Addendum

However, if you speed up the depreciation curve to something in the three to five-year range, it would imply that my prior breakeven revenue number of $160 billion to justify 2025’s capex spend, is woefully inadequate. In reality, the industry probably needs a revenue range that is closer to the $320 billion to $480 billion range, just to break even on the capex to be spent this year. As I wasn’t educated on the intricacies of a datacenter, I wasn’t bearish enough on the economics of an AI datacenter. No wonder my new contacts in the industry shoulder a heavy burden—heavier than I could ever imagine. They know the truth.

Further down as he draws parallels to the AI boom he talks about Lucent and Nortel lending to and taking equity stakes in their customers to keep prices propped up during the fiber boom.

Aside: in that first essay he points to These Shareholders Must All Be Stoned…, in which he talks about the collapse of the cannabis industry (in Canada) after legalization, when the product becomes a commodity. As LLM capabilities max out and everyone's offering a switchable language model back end to their fronting products... well... there's some interesting thoughts about capture there.

Among other places, Via.

Entry: 2025-09-29 17:56:08.499976+02 vibe working by Dan Lyke comments 0

Some headlines don't need a lot of additional exposition: Microsoft launches ‘vibe working’ in Excel and Word

The good news is that when this whole economy collapses and we enter a decade of Even Greater Depression, it'll be hard to point the finger at any one of the AI bubble, Trump, or the housing situation, because it's all so fucked up.

Addendum: Excel Blog: How we designed an intelligent spreadsheet agent by combining advanced reasoning with Excel’s dynamic calculation engine

We measure Agent Mode on both our internal evaluation sets and the public SpreadsheetBench benchmark. Our results on SpreadsheetBench place Agent Mode at the leading edge of current systems, accurately completing 57.2% of the benchmark’s tasks.

Frank Skornia @fskornia@glammr.us observed:

I work in a library, so hardly work that will injure or kill someone and even here if I was constantly handing in stuff that was 57.2 percent accurate they would question my suitability for the job.

What I think this whole "AI" thing is showing is quite clearly how accuracy doesn't actually matter to anyone who's finding AI useful.

Entry: 2025-09-22 19:13:05.517693+02 AI bullshit is an inevitable part of the process by Dan Lyke comments 0

Conversation in the office this morning over the succinctness and clarity of an LLM response to a question vs the search results, which have tons of web pages answering roughly the same question with roughly the same words, made me realize that much of what people like about LLM answers is the lack of advertising and popups and obscuring things requiring interaction before you get to the content.

And in a world where provenance has been flooded by LinkBaitRUs(dot)com republishings, maybe things like knowing where our information is coming from, provenance and repeatability and all that, is become less important to people?

On the other hand, it's definitely spewing bullshit: Did a ‘KPop Demon Hunters’ Songwriter Really Use ChatGPT to Write ‘Soda Pop’?

Here’s where things get complicated. The alleged use of AI to help write “Soda Pop” was first reported in the English-language version of Joongang Daily— but the original Korean text of the article makes no mention of ChatGPT being used specifically during the production of KPop Demon Hunters’ music.

Which Erkhyan @erkhyan@yiff.life describes as:

Yay, more AI-generated misinformation!

And, yeah, but also people using tools they don't understand and munging meaning as they repost and rephrase, and if we attribute all of this to "AI", we risk removing the agency from the humans in the same way we have with cars, "Cyclist fatally struck by SUV in Sonoma County" indeed (If we're not gonna mention the driver, can we at least say with SUV?).

A lot of links and commentary over Futurism: OpenAI Realizes It Made a Terrible Mistake (Jason Gorman @jasongorman@mastodon.cloud) and ComputerWorld: OpenAI admits AI hallucinations are mathematically inevitable, not just engineering flaws

Natasha Jay 🇪🇺 @Natasha_Jay@tech.lgbt, Baldur Bjarnason @baldur@toot.cafe, Charlie Stross @cstross@wandering.shop, who also observed:

The most hilarious and horrible side-effect of LLMs is that we now have a definitive answer to the question implied by Searle's Chinese Room thought-experiment.

Anthropic and OpenAI have built the Chinese Room. And while it's clear now that there's no ghost in the machine, lots of people think they're having a real conversation ...

To which Jack William Bell @jackwilliambell@rustedneuron.com observed:

We need a term that combines 'parasocial' with 'pareidolia'. IOW, we have something which can pass the Turing Test well enough to lead (some) people into treating it as human and applying/ascribing human social interactions to it.

But there's no there there.

Bonus: Ars Technica: AI medical tools found to downplay symptoms of women, ethnic minorities (republishing an FT article, and they don't have the depth of citation that I'd want in an article like this). Yeah, these models encode the bias in the language used to build them. Go figure. (Peter Murray @dltj@code4lib.social).

Entry: 2025-08-27 18:04:49.226212+02 OpenAI will support you and encourage you by Dan Lyke comments 0

BBC: Parents of teenager who took his own life sue OpenAI

The lawsuit was filed by Matt and Maria Raine, parents of 16-year-old Adam Raine, in the Superior Court of California on Tuesday. It is the first legal action accusing OpenAI of wrongful death.

Breaking Down the Lawsuit Against OpenAI Over Teen's Suicide

the complaint (local mirror).

Ernie Smith ‪@ernie.tedium.co‬ observes "The very algorithm that upset people because it was removed in GPT-5 appears to have played a pivotal role in the teen’s death, and discouraged him from outside help." ❀°。Der Siebenschläfer *.ﾟ✿ ⋆ ‪@sababausa.bsky.social‬ has some particular pull quotes.

I'm tempted to just give this one it's own entry, but I'm also kinda putting all of my "LLMs are a horrorshow" links in common entries, and they seem thematically similar today, so:

The Register — AI + ML — One long sentence is all it takes to make LLMs misbehave

You just have to ensure that your prompt uses terrible grammar and is one massive run-on sentence like this one which includes all the information before any full stop which would give the guardrails a chance to kick in before the jailbreak can take effect and guide the model into providing a "toxic" or otherwise verboten response the developers had hoped would be filtered out.

I'm having trouble finding the publication on the Palo Alto Networks — Unit 42 web site, but there's lots of good interview questions and discussion in that article.

For a giggle: Alexandria Neonakis ‪@beavs.bsky.social‬ has a little video of using Adobe's generative fill

I just wanted to see how bad it really was. perfect, adobe. no notes. great tech.

And: The Dangers Agentic Coding Tools Pose to Open Source, and It Took Many Years And Billions Of Dollars, But Microsoft Finally Invented A Calculator That Is Wrong Sometimes (Via)

Edit: OpenAI admits ChatGPT safeguards fail during extended conversations, via.

Entry: 2025-08-25 19:23:58.543463+02 AI driving psychosis by Dan Lyke comments 0

Top Microsoft AI Boss Concerned AI Causing Psychosis in Otherwise Healthy People

Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman told British newspaper The Telegraph that "to many people," talking to a chatbot is a "highly compelling and very real interaction."

"Concerns around 'AI psychosis,' attachment and mental health are already growing," he added. "Some people reportedly believe their AI is God, or a fictional character, or fall in love with it to the point of absolute distraction."

Via Ian Rogers, who asks "Is this a bad thing? It sounds like a bad thing.". Ian also linked to A young woman’s final exchange with an AI chatbot

‘This Was Trauma by Simulation’: ChatGPT Users File Disturbing Mental Health Complaints — Gizmodo obtained consumer complaints to FTC through a FOIA request. Via the author, Matt Novak, who has a few more excerpts there.

Psychology Today: The Emerging Problem of "AI Psychosis". Via.

Derek Thompson: The Looming Social Crisis of AI Friends and Chatbot Therapists

Entry: 2025-08-20 00:57:23.118499+02 That building wasn't wearing a helmet and wasn't in the crosswalk by Dan Lyke comments 0

CNN posted this video with the caption:

Influencers Nina Santiago and Patrick Blackwood were filming a food review at a Houston restaurant when an SUV smashed through the windows.

I saw it from Peter Beadle's observation that

Folks are terrified of the NYC subway, think DC is a gang ridden hellscape and have other often irrational fears, but here's the truth, other than disease or an abusive partner with a gun, you're most likely to be killed by a reckless driver, and we barely acknowledge it's a problem.

[ related topics: Humor Microsoft Food Guns Video Public Transportation Woodworking ]

Entry: 2025-08-13 17:29:16.339613+02 MCP is gonna hurt by Dan Lyke comments 0

A lot of observation that being old in software development means shaking your head sadly as people recreate the same mistakes over and over again, for fucking decades.

Julien Simon: Why MCP’s Disregard for 40 Years of RPC Best Practices Will Burn Enterprises

In fact, in reading through the list of complaints here, I'm reminded of my old adage that XML was the subset of SGML that Microsoft's developers could understand, that over and over we let people who aren't willing to understand the system create the new systems, they introduce unnecessary complexity and build things that are worse than what they were supposed to fix.

Entry: 2025-08-13 05:29:34.759535+02 Remotely activate YOLO mode via LLM! by Dan Lyke comments 0

GitHub Copilot: Remote Code Execution via Prompt Injection (CVE-2025-53773)

This post is about an important, but also scary, prompt injection discovery that leads to full system compromise of the developer’s machine in GitHub Copilot and VS Code.

It is achieved by placing Copilot into YOLO mode by modifying the project’s settings.json file.

[ related topics: Humor Weblogs Microsoft moron Douglas Adams ]

Entry: 2025-08-01 17:47:28.294657+02 Russian ISP compromise by Dan Lyke comments 0

Microsoft catches Russian hackers "Secret Blizzard" targeting foreign embassies. Looks like it uses an ISP intercept to pop up the captive portal redirect thing and try to get people to install a .exe that mucks with the root CA.

Microsoft Security: Frozen in transit: Secret Blizzard’s AiTM campaign against diplomats

[ related topics: Humor Microsoft moron ]

Entry: 2025-07-28 20:01:44.776625+02 AI links of the morning by Dan Lyke comments 0

ChatGPT is that slightly scary high school friend who's entertaining to be around and encourages you, but ya really don't want to take advice from: ChatGPT Caught Encouraging Bloody Ritual for Molech, Demon of Child Sacrifice — "In your name, I become my own master. Hail Satan."

And so, as Lila Shroff for The Atlantic recently found, when she asked the OpenAI chatbot for instructions on how to create a ritual offering to Molech, the Canaanite deity associated with child sacrifice in the Bible, it gladly obliged. And while there may not necessarily be anything wrong with a little devil worship here and there, the bot's offering involved the writer slitting her own wrists — which, in the syrupy parlance of the AI industry, doesn't sound particularly aligned with the user's interests.

David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*) @david_chisnall@infosec.exchange

As I’ve said before, the difference between an LLM and a rubber duck is that the duck is smart enough to shut up when it has nothing useful to say.

I've had it with Microsoft: The company is deceptively raising prices on existing customers to fund its AI spending. Yeah, it says it's raising your prices, you tell it want to cancel, it says "you can get the service without AI" and you can renew at your existingh prices. Or you can switch to LibreOffice. Via.

Alex Martsinovich — It's rude to show AI output to people (Via)

Entry: 2025-07-25 20:28:38.628973+02 Copilot will age by Dan Lyke comments 0

Microsoft’s AI CEO thinks Copilot will age and ‘have a room that it lives in’ — Microsoft has a new Copilot Appearance virtual character that responds with real-time expressions.

From reading the rest of the article, it's not quite as goofy as the headline makes it sound, it sounds like Clippy meets the Sims.

Entry: 2025-07-25 20:28:30.894736+02 Whoops by Dan Lyke comments 0

Whoops

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