Flutterby™!: Topic : Microsoft

Due to excessive server load and DDOS attacks, this list may be truncated.

Entry: 2026-08-23 00:15:02.902032+02 It was around this time that I opened by Dan Lyke comments 0

It was around this time that I opened the windows and turned on the fans...

[ related topics: Photography Microsoft ]

Entry: 2026-08-17 03:47:25.041101+02 AI links OTD by Dan Lyke comments 0

Young People Hate AI CEOs So Passionately That It’s Almost Hard to Believe

Drawing from an CNBC poll, New CNBC Generation Lab poll shows almost half of 18- to 34-year-olds see democratic socialism positively

When given the names of nine key people in the AI industry and asked whether they trust each leader to act responsibly on AI, in each case a majority of respondents said they don’t. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella scored the best, with 65% reporting they don’t trust him. Palantir CEO Alex Karp scored the worst: 81% said they don’t trust him. About 75% of respondents said they don’t trust Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai and about the same percentage said they don’t trust Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk all scored about the same, each with about 70% of respondents saying they don’t trust them, and 79% said they don’t trust Palantir Chairman Peter Thiel.

Catching up on older links: Operator fatigue is a thing: Error by AI scribe during medical appointment leaves patient devastated, in which a transcription error snowballs.

Australia's peak regulator of medical practitioners, AHPRA, said clinicians must always check all output from an AI scribe for accuracy to ensure they meet their professional obligations. Ms Green said it was clear her doctor did not do this.

"If you had checked that letter you would have been able to correct that before it was sent out … why aren't you in tune with each of your patients and what's going on?"

Very Sane AI Newsletter: FelonyBench Style Points.

Entry: 2026-07-31 19:40:02.493736+02 whole class of Microsoft Copilot as an by Dan Lyke comments 0

The whole class of Microsoft Copilot as an environment for self-replicating worms sure is making me think about humans and memes a lot.

[ related topics: Humor Microsoft Nature and environment moron ]

Entry: 2026-07-31 18:09:28.830103+02 AI Working through Word by Dan Lyke comments 0

Whee! Context Collapse, Part 3 - AI Worming through Word

The reported scenario is:
Malicious instructions hidden in an externally shared document could make Copilot alter drafted or edited documents in Word and propagate the attack to new documents.

Via Microsoft confirms an AI worm is propagating through Copilot and other MS apps, Via.

Edit: Pivot to AI weighs in.

Entry: 2026-07-30 19:47:10.564628+02 AI teething pains by Dan Lyke comments 1

Amazon accidentally spent $1.8 million using Claude for menial coding task, went 860% over budget — 'catastrophically expensive' coding blunders discovered in internal Amazon AI usage metrics

Amazon has several internal reports that show how AI is causing the company to overspend on various projects. The Financial Times reports that the cost overruns reached $1.8 million, and that is just for one project. These mistakes used to be “trivially cheap,” but AI models made them “catastrophically expensive,” especially as token spending drastically increased with the deployment of AI agents.

Entry: 2026-07-30 18:54:18.838+02 Microsoft says LLMs are a commodity by Dan Lyke comments 0

Microsoft Q4 2026 earnings call transcript.

We offer the broadest model catalog in the cloud with over 11,000 models, including the latest from OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral, xAI, as well as our own MAI family. Since the start of the year, we have seen 5x increase in the number of customers building with models from multiple providers.

Via Reddit /r/BetterOffline: Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella agrees that LLMs are a commodity and other notes from MSFT earnings call. Which also notes:

In other words, Microsoft tweaked an accounting assumption to shift data center leases from 15 to 25 years which means those are now treated as annual expense, not upfront capex. The cash flow doesn't change at all but the market saw lower capex and decided that yes, this was good. Note to the future: if anyone is reading this in 2051, please go check if those data centers are still running.

Entry: 2026-07-29 18:10:19.399238+02 Google shuts down Alpha Fold for Gemini by Dan Lyke comments 3

Google Shuts Down Its Nobel-Prize Winning AlphaFold Project As It Focuses On Gemini.

Via.

I'm working on a feature that... I mean, it's kinda cool, but there's a lot of conceptual thinking that I don't think has underlaid it, so it's clear that we're exploring the idea space and not building something deep here. [sigh, yeah, I'm feeling this]

So I asked Antigravity to implement it. And then, of course, I had to go into the code and fix it.

I'm thinking a lot about code quality today. With the ProPublica report that Anthropic’s New AI Model Can Identify More Software Bugs Than Ever. Microsoft Is Struggling to Fix Them Fast Enough (Via, and acknowledging that it's kinda a puff piece for Anthropic), it's clear that Microsoft's software development processes have been broken for years.

Anyone using MacOS can tell you that Apple's software development processes are seriously fucked up.

I'm not, of course, the only person to notice this. In a thread about how disappointing it is that CS professors are deep in LLM boosterism, [object Object] @zzt@mas.to observes that:

it’s a straight line from this to “the AI can solve anything if you throw enough tokens at it” from someone fundamentally incurious about both how problems are solved and how computers solve problems

and their incuriousity was honed and rewarded in the CS program that granted them a degree in spite of their lack of knowledge on anything other than how to take an exam and get a good result in a job interview shaped like an exam for a company whose mission is to use technology to accelerate and cover for genocide

Anyway...

If Gemini is regurgitating the code that's out there, we have a severe code quality problem. Even worse, we have a severe "how we think about code" problem.

I keep thinking about how, in the early '90s (and into the noughts), we enthusiastically brought the online world to the meatspace world because we said "this is an amazing community, we need the world to be this!", and in so doing we destroyed the online world.

And how we said "we need to teach everyone how to program", and we did, and this is the world we got.

Entry: 2026-07-22 20:36:18.478895+02 Circular financialization by Dan Lyke comments 0

I've had The Next Web: Five tech giants are hiding $1.65tn in AI debt, using the trick that toppled Enron tab open for a day or two now, haven't posted it here because... well... I didn't take the time to dig into it, and anyone who's been following Ed Zitron knows the balance sheets are hinky, but today it seems to have gotten around to Tom's Hardware: AI tech companies have ‘hidden debt’ worth around $1.65 trillion, report claims — amount is 122% of debt reflected on the balance sheets of Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, and Oracle.

Anyway, AMD is selling Anthropic AI servers while investing up to $5B in Anthropic.

I mean, it's not quite Miniscribe shipping bricks, but...

Entry: 2026-06-25 01:32:05.822684+02 Did Microsoft biff their quantum computing calculations? by Dan Lyke comments 0

Bwahahaha! The Register: Boffin claims Microsoft's supposed quantum leap does not compute due to 'basic Python errors'

Both the paper and the response are paywalled.

Nature: Matters Arising: On the robustness of topological gap detection via transport Henry F. Legg.

Nature: Matters Arising : Reply to: On the robustness of topological gap detection via transport Microsoft Quantum.

Via.

Entry: 2026-06-23 01:24:32.925995+02 Chevron & Microsoft & AI by Dan Lyke comments 0

Energy Chevron to fuel massive Microsoft data center in Texas using natural gas

The rapid growth of AI “requires energy infrastructure that can scale quickly and reliably,” Noelle Walsh, Microsoft’s president of cloud operations and innovation, said in a statement Monday.

Via.

[ related topics: Humor Microsoft moron Artificial Intelligence ]

Entry: 2026-06-18 17:47:44.439468+02 Business is how psychopaths fuck. by Dan Lyke comments 0

Penny Arcade on the news that Xbox Game Studios Head Craig Duncan & Chief of Staff Louise O'Connor leave Microsoft:

Ultimately, it's based on something like a religious belief: that wealthy companies have discerned some proprietary, secret knowledge about how the world works, and they should be allowed to do whatever the eff they want, when what usually happens is that they know somebody who knows somebody, got a firm grip on the teat of public money, or are psychopaths playing a game made by psychopaths for the benefit of psychopaths. Business is how psychopaths fuck.

Entry: 2026-06-12 15:09:05.027855+02 Microsoft announces way to disable AI in Bing by Dan Lyke comments 0

Search Engine Roundtable: Bing Gives Searchers A Way To Disable AI Copilot Answers

Jordi Ribas, the President, Head of Search at Microsoft, wrote on X about this saying, "We just shipped a preview extension in Bing that lets you toggle AI chat-like features on or off with just one click."

Microsoft Bing AI Search Choice for Chrome
Microsoft Bing AI Search Choice for Edge

Windows Central: Bing users can now disable AI Copilot search results with this new extension

Installing the Chrome data extension warns that

It can:

Read and change your data on bing.com and www.bing.com

Replace the page you see when opening a new tab

Read your browsing history

Change your search settings to bing.com

I was alerted to this by elilla& com pomba-gira de frente @elilla@transmom.love

Entry: 2026-06-08 23:16:14.182026+02 Azure Functions repo compromised by Dan Lyke comments 0

Whoopsie. The Blight Reaches Microsoft: 73 Repos Disabled in 105 Seconds

GitHub disabled 73 Microsoft repositories across four of its GitHub organizations — the entire Azure Functions org, the whole Durable Task family, and a row of AI sample apps — in a 105-second sweep on June 5. The recompromised durabletask package sits at the center, and the fingerprints point at the open-sourced Miasma worm.

Via Kevin Beaumont @GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social, that thread pointed to this thread which mentions a bunch of forked repos also getting blocked.

Speculation that this is related to the Miasma breach. Also notes about an "internal technical issue".

Anyway, do I need to go find a Satya Nadella AI quote for this, or can we just pretend I did?

Entry: 2026-06-04 17:38:23.214364+02 A/B tested for compulsion by Dan Lyke comments 0

Thomas Fuchs @thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io

Steve Jobs: “Computers are a bicycle for your mind.”

Satya Nadella: “Computers are heroin for your mind.”

404 Media: Microsoft Wants to 'Make People Addicted' to its New AI Assistant, Internal Documents Reveal

Futurism: In Leaked Document, Microsoft Plots How to Get People “Addicted” to Its AI.

Entry: 2026-05-29 19:44:41.097746+02 Microsoft attacks security researcher by Dan Lyke comments 0

Microsoft under fire for threatening security researcher with criminal investigation

On Wednesday, Microsoft published a blog post criticizing the researcher, who goes by the handle “Nightmare Eclipse,” for publicly disclosing a series of bugs, including BlueHammer, RedSun UnDefend, and YellowKey. The flaws affected products such as the Windows built-in antivirus engine Defender, and the disk-encryption tool BitLocker.

Different posts on Nightmare Eclipse's blog suggests that maybe the noted slopware vendor has been less than above board in dealing with exploit disclosure.

Entry: 2026-05-11 20:23:06.581998+02 ChatGPT coached a shooter by Dan Lyke comments 0

OpenAI sued over ChatGPT’s alleged role in guiding FSU shooter

At one point, the lawsuit alleges, ChatGPT said that it’s much more likely for a shooting to gain national attention “if children are involved, even 2-3 victims can draw more attention.” Later, on the day of the shooting, the lawsuit says, Ikner asked about what “the legal process, sentencing, and incarceration outlook” would be.

Via ‪Joshua Erlich‬ ‪@joshuaerlich.bsky.social‬:

we need a strict liability regime for AI. that’ll sort this stuff right out.

Entry: 2026-05-01 21:31:46.30386+02 Loss leader extraordinaire by Dan Lyke comments 0

nixCraft 🐧 @nixCraft@mastodon.social

When devs spend $200 on a Claude plan, they consume about $5,000 in compute. That is right. It is heavy subsidization by Anthropic. Remember Google/Amazon/Nvidia/ Microsoft & others are funding Anthropic and they are buying back cloud services and GPUs from the same vendors. On the books, it seems Google, Amazon and Nvidia are all making profits via AI, but the reality is this is just circulating money with heavy subsidization hoping to trap retail, pension funds, Govt funds via IPO route.

And nixCraft 🐧 @nixCraft@mastodon.social

Somebody is going to ask the source for $200 & $5000 numbers etc, it is here

https://www.briefs.co/news/ube...t-on-claude-code-in-four-months/

https://www.forbes.com/sites/a...-to-war-for-ai-coding-dominance/ (numbers are here [ https://archive.is/MRdRN paywal free link ] )

Entry: 2026-05-01 20:10:03.091637+02 Trying to understand how people use by Dan Lyke comments 0

Trying to understand how people use SharePoint, which leads to lots of videos about Copilot in Microsoft products, and...

There appear to be a lot of people who think that clicking "summarize and draft a response" is going to be a valuable business contribution.

[ related topics: Humor Microsoft moron ]

Entry: 2026-04-18 00:03:45.105685+02 Windows defender exploited by Dan Lyke comments 0

Oh shit. Windows Defender exploit.

Via

[ related topics: Microsoft ]

Entry: 2026-04-06 17:59:05.677405+02 Artemis IT disasters by Dan Lyke comments 0

You've probably seen the stuff from the Artemis II mission about Bluetooth pairing issues and Microsoft Outlook ... well ... there's no way to put those words together without some sort of "clusterfuck" semantics. Anyway, Becca Royal- Gordon @beccadax@soincredibly.gay

Hot take: The Artemis livestream is a damning indictment of modern computing devices. It seems like half the radio chatter is troubleshooting email delivery problems, confusing user interfaces, or devices not booting or connecting. Literal astronauts with years of training can’t make our stuff work.

‪wendy cloudberry‬ ‪@wendycloudberry.com‬

Pine would never

Numerous social media folks are also making "Thunderbird" comments... I think this is a reminder that it's time for me to get back on Claws.

Entry: 2026-04-03 19:31:05.232108+02 axios supply chain attack social engineering by Dan Lyke comments 0

Simon Willison has a link to the axios npm supply chain compromise post-mortem, including Jayson Saayman's description of how the social engineering worked.

tl;dr: extremely real looking contact with a company that eventually ended up as a Microsoft Teams meeting, that complained that some component was out of date, update process on that component was the compromise.

[ related topics: Humor Microsoft moron ]

Entry: 2026-04-01 17:41:04.683706+02 Microsoft puts the moral crumple zone in writing by Dan Lyke comments 0

Microsoft Copilot Terms of Use explicitly lay out the situation:

When you request that Copilot take Actions on your behalf, you are solely responsible for those Actions and any results or consequences.

Copilot is for entertainment purposes only. It can make mistakes, and it may not work as intended. Don’t rely on Copilot for important advice. Use Copilot at your own risk.
WITHOUT LIMITING SECTION 12 OF THE MICROSOFT SERVICES AGREEMENT IN ANY WAY, BUT FOR THE SAKE OF CLARITY, WE DO NOT MAKE ANY WARRANTY OR REPRESENTATION OF ANY KIND ABOUT COPILOT. For example, we can’t promise that any Copilot’s Responses won’t infringe someone else’s rights (like their copyrights, trademarks, or rights of privacy) or defame them. You are solely responsible if you choose to publish or share Copilot’s Responses publicly or with any other person.

Via ‪Ingrid Burrington‬ ‪@lifewinning.com‬ who also posits

Clippy popping up asking "are you not entertained?"

Edit: Tech Crunch: Copilot is ‘for entertainment purposes only,’ according to Microsoft’s terms of use. That references PC Mag: Copilot Terms Claim Microsoft's AI Is for 'Entertainment Purposes Only' which quotes this /r/BetterOffline thread and notes that:

However, the company is indicating it plans on changing the disclaimer soon. "The ‘entertainment purposes’ phrasing is legacy language from when Copilot originally launched as a search companion service in Bing," a Microsoft spokesperson told PCMag. "As the product has evolved, that language is no longer reflective of how Copilot is used today and will be altered with our next update.”

[ related topics: Humor Microsoft moron Work, productivity and environment ]

Entry: 2026-03-23 17:27:05.628773+01 AI link dump by Dan Lyke comments 0

Nadella paid $650M to recruit his AI chief. After 2 years he's quietly pushing him aside — these brutal numbers are why. Looks like it's not necessarily that people don't want AI in their Microsoft products, it's that Copilot kinda sucks.

Independent research tells a worse story. A Recon Analytics survey of more than 150,000 U.S. paid AI subscribers found that Copilot's market share fell from 18.8% in July 2025 to 11.5% by January 2026 — a 39% contraction. The most damaging finding: when workers only have access to Copilot, adoption sits at 68%. Add ChatGPT as an option and Copilot drops to 18%. Add Gemini on top of that and just 8% choose Copilot.

Via.

Frank Elavsky: Stop saying that AI is just a tool and it only matters how it is used

And tools use us by their design. This is Heidegger’s Gestell (“en- framing”): the notion that technologies shape who we are because of their design and use. A hammer isn’t just made of wood and iron, then. A hammer is a hammer because of what it does and who we become when we use it.

Via.

Jeremy Keith on adactio.com and on the Fediverse:

It feels like all my peers are experiencing Deep Blue and having to choose their future career path:

expert in a dying field

or

collaborator in a fascist project.

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: 2026-03-06 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 19:50:03.30318+01 Work conversation has me thinking about by Dan Lyke comments 0

Work conversation has me thinking about Sidekick, and DESQview, and how Windows was maybe only a foregone conclusion once WfW 3.11 started to actually get a foothold.

Kind of amazing to think that the 4.77MHz 8088 PC architecture was a viable platform and software target for over a decade.

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: 2026-02-18 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: 2026-02-12 23:58:19.670207+01 Stock Values Anticipating Golden Age by Dan Lyke comments 0

Forbes, June 15, 1929: Stock Values Anticipate Golden Age by R.W. McNeel.

In part the great advance in the industrial stocks has been due to a change in investment psychology. In years past there was a point at which a bull market should logically stop. That point arrived when prices advanced to a level where the average yield of high grade stocks was no more than the yield on high grade bonds. Since common stocks carry the risks of business it was believed they should not sell to yield less than the securities which did not carry the risks of business.

In the last few years, however, the mental outlook of investors has changed. The income return on stocks has been at a discount and prospects of future growth have occupied almost the entire attention of investors. As a result, securities which offered the investor nothing but stability of earning power with a fair income return have not been desired, but those which seem to offer possibilities of great expansion have been in demand even at prices far beyond anything justified by current earnings or income return.

Start at page 18 of the PDF...

By way of this thread that's got a whole bunch of choice bits of history...

Entry: 2026-02-12 18:16:00.945296+01 Incitement by Dan Lyke comments 0

Today in "don't start none, won't be none": Video raises questions about DHS role in Eugene riot damage. Looks like DHS broke their own windows.

[ related topics: Microsoft Current Events Video ]

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 ]

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