Entry: 2025-10-30 00:58:14.867399+01 Recall for Linux by Dan Lyke comments 0
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...
[ related topics: Free Software Interactive Drama Humor Microsoft Spam Open Source moron Work, productivity and environment Databases ]
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.
[ related topics: Intellectual Property Interactive Drama Humor Books Microsoft moron Copyright/Trademark ]
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.
[ related topics: Drugs Interactive Drama Humor Libertarian Microsoft Invention and Design moron Writing Current Events Consumerism and advertising Artificial Intelligence Economics ]
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.
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.
[ related topics: Humor Microsoft moron Current Events Work, productivity and environment Artificial Intelligence Economics Real Estate ]
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
[ related topics: Religion Humor Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality Weblogs Microsoft Health moron Consumerism and advertising Journalism and Media Artificial Intelligence ]
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.
[ related topics: Humor Web development Content Management Microsoft Invention and Design Software Engineering moron ]
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.jsonfile.
[ related topics: Humor Weblogs Microsoft moron Douglas Adams ]
Entry: 2025-08-12 05:57:39.969874+02 Neurodivertence & LLMs by Dan Lyke comments 0
Christopher Neugebauer @chrisjrn@social.coop
I (and several other people I know) have observed that autism-spectrum people are more averse to LLMs than NT people.
It was pointed out to me that for NT programmers, LLMs turn a necessary intermediate step – structuring your thinking so it's suitable for writing code – into something that has "productive output". I can see how if you need to do that extra thinking, a tool that "helps" with it can be useful.
Likewise, it's hard to see the value in something that does work I don't need to do.
[ related topics: Interactive Drama Microsoft Writing Work, productivity and environment ]
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)
[ related topics: Children and growing up Humor Weblogs Microsoft moron Writing Artificial Intelligence ]
Entry: 2025-07-25 20:28:38.628973+02 Copilot will age by Dan Lyke comments 0
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.
[ related topics: Humor Microsoft Invention and Design moron Current Events Artificial Intelligence ]
Entry: 2025-07-25 20:28:30.894736+02 Whoops by Dan Lyke comments 0
Whoops
[ related topics: Humor Microsoft Invention and Design moron Current Events Artificial Intelligence ]
Entry: 2025-07-16 17:54:32.140294+02 The cloud is other people's computers by Dan Lyke comments 1
Valerie Aurora 🇺🇦 @vaurora@mstdn.social
I'm impressed by the neoliberal circular logic here.
The U.S. DoD "had" to move off its own computers to the cloud to save money. But the only way the cloud was cheaper was if Microsoft employed people in China at much lower wages to maintain it. So they "had" to invent American "digital escorts."
Basically, the cloud is only cheaper for the U.S. military if it is completely and totally compromised by its most powerful geopolitical adversary... 🤔
ProPublica: A Little-Known Microsoft Program Could Expose the Defense Department to Chinese Hackers
[ related topics: Interactive Drama Humor Microsoft Software Engineering moron Work, productivity and environment Currency ]
Entry: 2025-07-12 00:41:34.276909+02 LensNode by Dan Lyke comments 0
Haven't had an application where I needed to account for lens distortion and chromatic abberation and whatnot in a long time, but this is cool: Node Mill LensNode — DaVinci Resolve plugin for macOS and Windows
Fast, fun and accurate emulation of real-world lens characteristics.
Fully GPU powered, it's simple to use and quick to apply.
Get creative, get technical, and tinker as much as you want.
[ related topics: Microsoft Macintosh Woodworking ]
Entry: 2025-07-01 19:24:13.894339+02 AI links of the morning by Dan Lyke comments 0
The dawn of micropayments: Cloudflare To Block AI Crawlers By Default & Pay Per Crawl Model
Cloudflare wrote that they are the "first Internet infrastructure provider to block AI crawlers accessing content without permission or compensation, by default." Now, new customers that sign up for Cloudflare by default will automatically block AI crawlers. Existing customers can block AI crawlers anytime with a single click in their Cloudflare dashboard. This shifts content scraping from an opt-out to opt-in format. There is a lot of buzz on Techmeme on this news.
Via. As clicks to useful information require more and more pauses and "I am not a bot" click, I'm wondering how this is gonna shake out.
daniel:// stenberg:// @bagder@mastodon.social
I've been talking to GitHub and giving them feedback on their "create issues with Copilot" thing they have in the works.
Today I tested a version for them and using it I asked copilot to find and report a security problem in curl and make it sound terrifying.
In about ten seconds it had a 100-line description of a "catastrophic vulnerability" it was happy to create an issue for. Entirely made up of course, but sounded plausible.
Proved my point excellently.
Kevin Beaumont @GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social
If you see this GitHub PoC for CVE-2025-5777 doing the rounds:
https://github.com/mingshenhk/CitrixBleed-2-CVE-2025-5777-PoC-
It’s not for CVE-2025-5777. It’s AI generated. The links in the README still have ChatGPT UTM sources.
The PoC itself is for a vuln addressed in 2023 - ChatGPT has hallucinated (made up) the cause of the vuln using an old BishopFox write up of the other vuln.
Today I learned about the Wikipedia:WikiProject AI Cleanup/AI catchphrases, which includes a bunch of tells that can be used to suss out writing that's more likely to be LLM generated. Via.
And Pivot To AI: ‘AI is no longer optional’ — Microsoft admits AI doesn’t help at work is the take I thought of when I heard that MS was strongly encouraging LLM use.
[ related topics: Interactive Drama Humor Weblogs Microsoft Invention and Design moron Writing Current Events Work, productivity and environment Net Culture Artificial Intelligence ]
Entry: 2025-06-12 01:28:55.386276+02 Zero-Click AI vulnerability by Dan Lyke comments 0
[ related topics: Humor Microsoft moron Artificial Intelligence ]
Entry: 2025-06-09 17:24:02.040339+02 Hope is the thing with Linux by Dan Lyke comments 0
I feel this so hard. Especially as the Mac just gets worse with every release: afreytes 🇵🇷 ☭ @afreytes@mastodon.gamedev.place
I'm sorry in advance if this sounds cringe or sappy. Or if it is something well known. But right now the difference, for me, in using Linux versus Windows is hope. It really is. Let me explain.
On Linux, if I have an issue, or a problem, something I don't understand. I have hope that I can find a way, an alternative, a forum, someone that will help, or even make it better by myself. No matter the issue hope drives me forward.
On Windows, there is no hope anything will get better.
[ related topics: Free Software Interactive Drama Microsoft Open Source Macintosh Community ]
Entry: 2025-05-23 17:48:54.940864+02 The functionality may still be there by Dan Lyke comments 3
Jason Lefkowitz @jalefkowit@vmst.io observed
What being a Windows user is like in 2025
With a link to very-jaded on this Ars Technica article:
There's a difference between the "Notepad app" and notepad.exe. The Notepad app has the AI and all the new stuff in it. But the old C : \windows\system32\notepad.exe still exists, and is unencumbered by all those new features.
By uninstalling the "Notepad app", the old notepad.exe takes over as the default text editor. And you can once again edit a config file without having the quotation marks automatically replaced by smart quotes.
EDIT: I've only done this on my work Windows 11 Pro 23H2 laptop. I don't know about other versions of Windows.
[ related topics: Quotes Microsoft Invention and Design Work, productivity and environment Artificial Intelligence ]
Entry: 2025-05-22 19:42:03.095075+02 Charlie Stross on Office 365 by Dan Lyke comments 0
Charlie Stross @cstross@wandering.shop
Welp, I have just cancelled my Microsoft Office 365 recurring subscription.
Two reasons.
1. I only ever use it to check tracked changes to the copy edits on novels—once a year—which my publishers process in Word. As of this month, LibreOffice is good enough for the job (just tested at book length).
2. CoPilot in Office would open me up to accusations of breach of contract—my book contracts warrant that they're all my own work: CoPilot brings that into question.
So good riddance to Office365!
[ related topics: Humor Books Privacy Microsoft moron Work, productivity and environment Heinlein ]
Entry: 2025-05-22 17:26:58.323496+02 Github issues showing fighting with CoPilot by Dan Lyke comments 0
Dusty Burwell @dustyburwell@twit.social
Oh my god. I just had the terrible realization that AI coding agents take the Mythical Man Month and make it last forever. They're new to the project and they'll never learn anything, so they're always new to the project.
in response to Reddit /r/ExperiencedDevs: My new hobby: watching AI slowly drive Microsoft employees insane
Jokes aside, GitHub/Microsoft recently announced the public preview for their GitHub Copilot agent.
The agent has recently been deployed to open PRs on the .NET runtime repo and it’s…not great. It’s not my best trait, but I can't help enjoying some good schadenfreude. Here are some examples:
I actually feel bad for the employees being assigned to review these PRs. But, if this is the future of our field, I think I want off the ride.
The hilarity of people trying to fix bad code with English is...
As an Emacs user, one of the things I often wonder is how people get along in editors that don't have a lot of the capabilities that I've become used to. Block operations, keyboard playback, it's amazing how many times I've sat down at IDEs or modern editors over the years and the system just didn't have what I think of as core operations.
This brave new world of "describe in English what your edits should be, and then get something non-deterministic and wrong, and then describe again" seems like the even further stupidification of code editing.
[ related topics: Religion Interactive Drama Humor Microsoft Invention and Design Software Engineering moron Work, productivity and environment Artificial Intelligence hubris ]
Entry: 2025-05-19 21:24:59.709563+02 NLWeb by Dan Lyke comments 0
Microsoft: Introducing NLWeb: Bringing conversational interfaces directly to the web.
The Github repo has more:
There are two distinct components to NLWeb.
- A protocol, very simple to begin with, to interface with a site in natural language and a format, leveraging json and schema.org for the returned answer. See the documentation on the REST API for more details.
- A straightforward implementation of (1) that leverages existing markup, for sites that can be abstracted as lists of items (products, recipes, attractions, reviews, etc.). Together with a set of user interface widgets, sites can easily provide conversational interfaces to their content. See the documentation on Life of a chat query for more details on how this works.
Every NLWeb instance is a MCP (Model Context Protocol) server. Looks like this is mostly about human curating lists of products to be MCP accessible.
[ related topics: Humor User Interface Microsoft moron Current Events Archival ]
Entry: 2025-05-16 17:29:33.873986+02 Can we ditch the pop-ups? by Dan Lyke comments 0
Via Aral Balkan @aral@mastodon.ar.al
Those annoying “consent” cookie pop ups that Big Tech has been using as part of their malicious compliance efforts to convince you that data protection law in the EU is a nuisance?
Turns out they’re illegal.
[ related topics: Humor Books Microsoft moron Law Consumerism and advertising ]
Entry: 2025-05-16 17:17:35.60897+02 Bing limits search API? by Dan Lyke comments 0
In response to Microsoft Cuts Off Access to Bing Search Data as It Shifts Focus to Chatbots
Microsoft is limiting access to tools that boosted its rivals, but larger customers like DuckDuckGo say they won’t be affected.
Taggart :donor: @mttaggart@infosec.exchange
"People want something that works better than search."
Why doesn't search work?
WHY DOESN'T SEARCH WORK M__________R??
Also Via, and Ben Werd links to The Verge: Microsoft shuts off Bing Search APIs and recommends switching to AI
[ related topics: Objectivism Humor Microsoft moron Work, productivity and environment ]
Entry: 2025-05-12 20:59:37.568247+02 Clippy LLM front end by Dan Lyke comments 0
... Through Llama.cpp, it supports models in the popular GGUF format, which is to say most publicly available models. It comes with one-click installation support for Google's Gemma3, Meta's Llama 3.2, Microsoft's Phi-4, and Qwen's Qwen3.
[ related topics: Humor Microsoft moron Sports Artificial Intelligence ]
Entry: 2025-05-01 17:09:37.143967+02 Telling on themselves by Dan Lyke comments 0
In Adrianna Tan's "From Fintech to Fin Tech" talk at North Bay Python, she put up a slide which said:
DO NOT WANT
- Work on ads
- Work on weapons
- Abet genocides
- Make the world worse
- Use Microsoft Teams
making particular reference to Meta's involvement in the Myanmar genocides, but, of course the awful people said "this is anti-semitic", because any complaint about genocide is clearly about Palestine and "hey warfare is not genocide".
I've seen this locally too, where mentions of unhinged people harassing city staff and threatening people has been met with complaints of "the Petaluma Historic Advocates aren't unhinged".
So, yeah. People telling on themselves.
[ related topics: Humor Microsoft Movies moron Work, productivity and environment Monty Python California Culture Guns Python ]
Entry: 2025-04-30 16:30:03.153608+02 If 30 of code at Microsoft is being by Dan Lyke comments 0
If 30% of code at Microsoft is being written in a language that doesn't reliably compile to the same output, doesn't have a formal spec or grammar, and only has indirect error checking, what does that say about the languages specific to programming that we've been using?
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/2...osoft-code-is-written-by-ai.html
[ related topics: Interactive Drama Humor Microsoft Software Engineering moron Artificial Intelligence ]
Entry: 2025-04-10 18:35:56.601281+02 ChatGPT-powered pipelines by Dan Lyke comments 0
The dream was Spark magic, ChatGPT-powered pipelines, and effortless deployment.
[Emphasis mine] LOL.
[ related topics: Humor Microsoft moron Clowns ]
Entry: 2025-04-09 17:12:40.229423+02 Grok for thoughtcrimes by Dan Lyke comments 0
Reuters: Musk's DOGE using AI to snoop on U.S. federal workers, sources say
Trump-appointed officials who had taken up EPA posts told managers that DOGE was using AI to monitor communication apps and software, including Microsoft Teams, which is widely used for virtual calls and chats, said the two sources familiar with these comments. “We have been told they are looking for anti-Trump or anti-Musk language,” a third source familiar with the EPA said. Reuters could not independently confirm if the AI was being implemented.
[ related topics: Interactive Drama Humor Microsoft Software Engineering moron Artificial Intelligence ]
Entry: 2025-04-08 17:25:19.037731+02 a “solution” in the Microsoft sense by Dan Lyke comments 0
OH:
– I’m not sure I’d call it a “solution”, more like “an affront to god” or something
– it’s a “solution” in the Microsoft sense!
[ related topics: Religion Humor Microsoft moron ]
Entry: 2025-03-28 18:43:47.712141+01 CRWV (CoreWeave) IPO by Dan Lyke comments 0
Last night: Nvidia-backed CoreWeave downsizes US IPO
This morning: CoreWeave Stock Opens at $39 After Disappointing IPO.
CoreWeave, a rapidly growing AI cloud company, priced its initial public offering at $40 a share on Thursday night, well below an expected range of $47 to $55.
Peter @peter@thepit.social observes:
AI is such an exciting technology that the first big IPO for the sector is a bust. like, if you spun off Google and Microsoft's AI businesses, they would immediately be stripped for parts and shut down because generative AI is not a profitable business.
[ related topics: Interactive Drama Humor Microsoft moron Graphics Artificial Intelligence Economics ]
Entry: 2025-03-25 16:26:58.12269+01 AI pessimism of the morning by Dan Lyke comments 0
Ed Zitron — The Phony Comforts of AI Optimism
American Prospect: Bubble Trouble
Venture capital (VC) funds, drunk on a decade of “growth at all costs,” have poured about $200 billion into generative AI. Making matters worse, the stock market’s bull run is deeply dependent on the growth of the Big Tech companies fueling the AI bubble. In 2023, 71 percent of the total gains in the S&P 500 were attributable to the “Magnificent Seven”—Apple, Nvidia, Tesla, Alphabet, Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft—all of which are among the biggest spenders on AI. Just four—Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta—combined for $246 billion of capital expenditure in 2024 to support the AI build-out. Goldman Sachs expects Big Tech to spend over $1 trillion on chips and data centers to power AI over the next five years. Yet OpenAI, the current market leader, expects to lose $5 billion this year, and its annual losses to swell to $11 billion by 2026. If the AI bubble bursts, it not only threatens to wipe out VC firms in the Valley but also blow a gaping hole in the public markets and cause an economy-wide meltdown.
I especially like the ending observation of that one:
Maybe, after the fallout of the AI bubble is felt and the sun sets on Silicon Valley for a bit, the tech world can do a hard reset and return to its more innovative days again.
Via.
Edit: Alibaba’s Tsai Warns of ‘Bubble’ in AI Data Center Buildout
[ related topics: Apple Computer Interactive Drama Humor Books Microsoft Invention and Design moron Current Events Graphics Television Artificial Intelligence Economics Java ]
Entry: 2025-03-25 15:25:02.92101+01 Heard someone yesterday who's part of a by Dan Lyke comments 0
Heard someone yesterday who's part of a healthcare startup bemoan that their IT group isn't approving use of Microsoft's LLM product, and... We as an industry have done a really bad job educating people about privacy, security, *and* LLMs.
[ related topics: Humor Privacy Microsoft moron Heinlein ]
Entry: 2025-03-12 22:10:39.876039+01 Typescript compiler by Dan Lyke comments 0
Typescript is getting a native compiler, written in Go.
(Closed this tab this morning without actually getting it, then Zellyn Hunter mentioned it.)
[ related topics: Humor Microsoft moron ]
Entry: 2025-03-12 16:39:10.992978+01 Maybe mechanical door latches are a good idea? by Dan Lyke comments 0
Testimony Reveals Doors Would Not Open on Cybertruck That Caught Fire in Piedmont, Killing Three
Roirdan said that when he approached the burning vehicle, and tried to open the doors, they would not open. He said he “pulled for a few seconds, but nothing budged at all.” He also said “I then tried the button on the windshield of [survivor Jordan Miller’s] door, then [victim Krysta Tsukahara’s] door.”
He said he then pounded the windows with his fists, which did not work, and then struck the windows with a thick tree branch around a dozen times until he was able to crack and dislodge a passenger-side window. That was how he was able to pull Jordan Miller out of the vehicle.
Subscriber only: East Bay Times: Witness who rescued teenager recounted details of fatal Piedmont Cybertruck crash to authorities
Via, which also links to this incident with one of the other models in which 4 people were killed:
Harper told CBC News and the Toronto Star that when he came upon the crash, there were others already gathered outside the vehicle who were pounding at the back passenger window as they couldn’t open the doors. He recalled to CBC News, "Then somebody was yelling, 'You got a bar? You got a bar? Somebody's in there.' "
[ related topics: Children and growing up Microsoft Space & Astronomy Current Events Work, productivity and environment Beer California Culture Pyrotechnics Aviation - Helicopters ]
Entry: 2025-03-04 00:12:12.144162+01 MS scaling back data centers, SoftBank stretching even futher by Dan Lyke comments 0
As a result, based on TD Cowen's analysis, Microsoft has, through a combination of canceled leases, pullbacks on Statements of Qualifications, cancellations of land parcels and deliberate expiration of Letters of Intent, effectively abandoned data center expansion equivalent to over 14% of its current capacity.
And, yeah, the Microsoft pullback is the first part of this, but make sure you get down to the funding of the "Stargate" project and Softbank borrowing money to invest in his.
No, wait, read down further to the discussion about how this all ties together in predicting demand, especially as OpenAI is moving features that were part of the "Pro" package down into the cheaper packages, in a way that sure feels a lot like "maybe this time they'll like it?", and how Microsoft's language about demand suggests that Microsoft thinks that LLMs and Generative AI have gotten into the commodity phase, where we're not gonna see a lot of improvement, and now it's about delivering the current level of technology cheap enough to turn a profit with. Which is a hell of a lot cheaper than right now.
[ related topics: Humor Microsoft moron Community Currency Artificial Intelligence Real Estate ]
Entry: 2025-02-25 19:24:47.589278+01 AI of the morning by Dan Lyke comments 0
The Deep Research problem — Benedict Evans. On trying to get useful information out of ChatGPT, using OpenAI's examples:
We’re asking for a deterministic answer from a probabilistic question, and there it looks like the model really is failing on its own terms. In my opinion, or given my expertise, it shouldn’t be using Statcounter or Statistica, but even if it should, it hasn’t taken the correct number from them.
Every: I Created a Hacker News Simulator to Reverse-engineer Virality
Given a more detailed persona based on a two-hour interview with a human, ChatGPT can replicate their answers on surveys with as much as 85 percent accuracy.
Uh. Yay?
Back to Benedict Evans, in his summary he notes:
... OpenAI and all the other foundation model labs have no moat or defensibility except access to capital ...
Emphasis mine. With Microsoft dialing back on data center leases, maybe we're starting to see the bubble deflate.
[ related topics: Interactive Drama Humor Microsoft moron Current Events Artificial Intelligence Model Building ]
Entry: 2025-02-17 19:11:55.728518+01 AI grumblings of the morning by Dan Lyke comments 0
Interesting to read this from Namanyay, who self-pitches as "I’m now making developers more productive with AI": New Junior Developers Can’t Actually Code
RT Christine Lemmer-Webber @cwebber@social.coop
Study after study also shows that AI assistants erode the development of critical thinking skills and knowledge *retention*. People, finding information isn't the biggest missing skillset in our population, it's CRITICAL THINKING, so this is fucked up
AI assistants also introduce more errors at a high volume, and harder to spot too
https://www.microsoft.com/en-u..._ai_critical_thinking_survey.pdf
https://slejournal.springerope...icles/10.1186/s40561-024-00316-7
https://www.techrepublic.com/article/ai-generated-code-outages/
https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.03622
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11128619/
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Entry: 2025-02-09 23:09:43.43351+01 AI use & critical thinking by Dan Lyke comments 0
Moreover, while GenAI can improve worker efficiency, it can inhibit critical engagement with work and can potentially lead to long-term overreliance on the tool and diminished skill for independent problem-solving. Higher confidence in GenAI’s ability to perform a task is related to less critical thinking effort.
Via Pivot To AI: Microsoft research: Use AI chatbots and turn yourself into a dumbass
404 Media: Microsoft Study Finds AI Makes Human Cognition “Atrophied and Unprepared”
The Register: Some workers already let AI do the thinking for them, Microsoft researchers find
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Entry: 2025-01-20 23:16:17.213327+01 Doom in Word by Dan Lyke comments 0
Doom ported to a standalone Microsoft Word document — plays well but there's no sound
6.6MB document runs on x86 systems with modern Microsoft Office installations.
Following up on Doom in a PDF
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