They’ll never admit it

I got a Captcha on some search result a few weeks ago that initially looked legitimate then came up with this.

It had put obfuscated code on my clipboard to download and run an executable.

Yeah i write financial software now and we’re PCI compliant. Devs can’t access prod or its very limited and read only with no access to encryption keys. Those who do have prod access, don’t have write access to the code. No one has both.

All software installs on any company device are reported to ops.

I’m not saying this couldn’t happen but i think it would be way more difficult. Also, we’re a company of 15 people.

Agree with all your points but none of those reasons are we supposedly live in a democracy and the vast majority of us don’t want these data centres.

Not even just boomers anymore. I get AI slop shared with me by all ages. I just tell people now assume nothing online is real.

In UK in 2010, 10 new nuclear plants were announced. Since then 5 older plants have been shut leaving us with 5 active. 1 of the 10 new ones started construction and it’s massively over budget and delayed.

In the same time we’ve added about 20GW of solar.

My first thought. Everything is going to look the same soon isn’t it

I was looking for graphics the other day and the stock images sites I’ve used before were virtually all AI slop. Why would I pay for that?

How do you know the software running on the voting machine you’re about to vote on is the software that was audited?

You go get all the machines together, make sure all the software runs on the newest version and it’s correct and it’s configured properly with the candidates. When you’ve got to distribute them to the polling stations, they’ve got to be kept securely between audit and polling day. Your adversaries are foreign state actors who want to manipulate your elections.

And then at the end of the day you have to get the results off the machines. You have to trust that the machine gave you the correct numbers and then you have to get those numbers all together without anyone having the opportunity to manipulate them.

Usually at this point someone comes up with the idea of a paper backup so the machine prints like a receipt of who you voted for that you can put in a ballot box.

If you’re doing that and then count all of the paper ballots to verify the machine count, why even bother with the machines? Just have people vote on a paper ballot with a pencil and count them by hand. The ways to attack paper ballot just don’t scale. You might be able to manipulate a few votes in one polling station, but you’d need a massive operation to do it across the whole country.

We’re on AWS at work. I use Hetzner personally.

The main issue with switching is the services. On AWS we use KMS, SQS, DynamoDB. On hertzner we’d have to run an instance with software for that ourselves and then rewrite systems and do migrations etc. That’s the expense.

Also KMS has no alternate because it’s not just software. It’s a HSM. So where do we store the master keys on Hetzner?

Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to do it, not up to me unfortunately.

No. They handle that. You get so many credits that get used at different rates depending on the model.

You can burn through your months allowance in 10 minutes using Fable then your employer just gets billed the coverage. I think it’s based on the provider’s API pricing so just using Claude or codex directly is probably cheaper.

If you have it do the work entirely and make PRs itself then Copilot is listed as the author regardless of model. E.g. you can assign it an issue and it’ll go and do it itself. I don’t use that though because it’s bad at it.

I tend to just prompt it to write snippets as part as whatever I’m working on to save some typing.

Github copilot is a totally different product from Microsoft copilot. Github copilot is just a harness for any model. I can use openai, anthropic, google, etc. models.

I have at least 1 colleague who does this. Has a Claude subscription despite being provided with github copilot.

Unless it has local maps like mine that are now a decade out of date. It’s completely useless now but i refuse to pay several 100 for the update.

I took an existing thing and put it inside another existing thing. That’s a novel idea, right?

We could put card terminals in everything! Put card terminals in the fridge to pay for food?

I can’t think how this is any better than just using the card you already saved on the account. Even from their point of view, this is an extra step in the payment process.

That’s why all these microtransactions are in their own made-up currency.

My view is regulatory capture is as an existential requirement for them. Otherwise at some point we’ll be running open models on our phones and won’t need them.

Not for nvidia though, always going to need chips

My bank has the inverse as well. If i open the app while on a call there’s a huge banner across the top stating they are not calling me.

We get $100 a month and most never come close. Mostly use it for typing boiler plate and code reviews. It’s autocomplete to save some typing. It can’t replace your thinking or you’re going to have a bad time.

We make financial software handling millions of dollars a day. Accuracy is more important than speed. You’d think a bank would know that…

BBC posted an article today that’s literally just quoting an OpenAI blog post about how dangerous AI is.

I did a bunch around me with street complete until it started asking the width of the roads. Is that actually useful?

I started filling in all the house names because nothing here is numbered. It hasn’t improved delivery drivers finding us 🤣