mcv

I often see Copilot get stuck in a nonresponsive shell after it used cat > file. It’s hilarious to watch the first time, but I’m a bit tired of it by now. Why doesn’t it just edit files like it normally does?

It already has fields for personal information, though, and they’re every bit as sensitive as your birthdate. realName, emailAddress, location, and timezone are already in there. The important part is that they’re all optional, and you don’t have to fill them in at all, or can fill them in with fake data. The system still serves you, not some outside party. But the timing of it does have a lot of people freaking out about it.

Governments and banks love this, but I’ve even seen it with phone companies with e-sims. I quickly needed a new phone subscription, so I considered an e-sim, because I figured you could activate it by scanning the QR code from the screen. But no, they will mail me a piece of plastic with the QR code on it. So I went with a regular sim instead.

Exactly. And that’s the part that worries me most: I’m seeing people investigating the guy, shaming him (he wrote a blog about using Claude to write a game in 90 minutes, so clearly he must be evil /s), and the article above is written in such a way to insinuate all sorts of nefarious goings on, but everything I see suggests this is just normal procedure. I really feat this is going to hurt the community and chase good developers away.

Exactly. There’s a massive thread on Mastodon where everybody is panicking about this, but it’s a nothing burger if ever there was one. Sure, the timing and comments suggest it’s meant for legal compliance, but if that’s what it does, it does it by keeping full control in the hands of the user, where it should be.

What it was before was still not good. Although tools like git-bash alleviated the pain a bit.

I admit I haven’t been keeping up recently. These are relatively new changes then. I remember when a transaction cost $25 and 7 minutes. (Or was it the other way around?) In any case, that wasn’t practical for anyone except organised crime, which is largely where it got that reputation. And the fact that crime is still a major user.

My company pushes it too. It’s useful for some things, but you really have to be aware of its limitations. The same is true of Claude of course, but I have less problems letting Claude touch my code. The free GPT models work better as an interactive rubber duck or an interactive encyclopedia.

Crypto, man. Bit coin’s primary use case is crime, money laundering, drugs, assassination, ransomware. For normal transactions, it’s too slow and expensive, but for crime, that’s not a problem. Also, USD is not a recent tech innovation.

I think it’s more likely the opposite.

Why are they collecting this data in the first place? You can't mishandle data you don't have. The fact that remote access to video is even possible, is very alarming.

That is exactly the problem. I understand people using AI to make things. I don't understand blindly publishing AI slop without verifying it's correct. Everybody using genAI has to understand that AI will often be wrong, and frequently ridiculous, and that it's up to you to ensure that what you deliver is correct. And because nobody likes to review other people's work (most people are terrible and sloppy reviewers), it's better to put yourself in the center: have AI propose ideas or review the result, but you make the thing. That's how you ensure everything passes through your hands.

I would suggest requiring these datacenters to also invest in sufficient green energy to power them.

Looks a lot like the BBC Micro. Cool design choice.

They’re systems trained to give plausible answers, not correct ones. Of course correct answers are usually plausible, but so do wrong answers, and on sufficiently complex topics, you need real expertise to tell when they’re wrong. I’ve been programming a lot with AI lately, and I’d say the error rate for moderately complex code is about 50%. They’re great at simple boilerplate code, and configuration and stuff that almost every project uses, but if you’re trying to do something actually new, they’re nearly useless. You can lose a lot of time going down a wrong path, if you’re not careful. Never ever trust them. Always verify.

Who cares about the money of people when they have all the money?

OpenAI’s mounting costs — set to hit $1.4 trillion Sorry, but WTF!? $1.4 Trillion in costs? How are they going to make all of that back with just AI? I think there’s only one way they can make this back: if AI gets so good they can really replace most employees. I don’t think it will happen, but either way it’s going to be an economic disaster. Either the most valuable companies in the world, offering services that the next couple of hundred companies in the world depend on, are suddenly bankrupt. Or suddenly everybody is unemployed.

I’ve been telling my employer that they should be moving away from the Microsoft cloud for a whole bunch of reasons. Someone said they’re aware of it, so with the speed stuff here is moving, we might actually move to something else in 10 years. But personally I wouldn’t lose any sleep if the whole bubble collapsed next year.

I remember when they changed the backronym for Emacs from “Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping” to Eighty. Megabytes. Or when a Netscape developer was proud to overtake that memory use. What’s the point of more RAM and faster processors if we just make applications that much less efficient?

A big problem in computer security these days is all-or-nothing security: either you can’t do anything, or you can do everything. I have no interest in agentic AI, but if I did, I would want it to have very clearly specified permission to certain folders, processes and APIs. So maybe it could wipe the project directory (which would have backup of course), but not a complete harddisk. And honestly, I want that level of granularity for everything.

This technology is wasted on smartphones. We need this on laptop screens.