It does seem like the main goal is to plunder what’s left before it all crashes hard, and to be a member of the owner class that can parse a crash for everyone else into more wealth and power for yourself.

It’s about surveillance and control. Censor what people can see, require ID so you can monitor who’s viewing what, and let people know you see what they’re doing so that they become wary of using the internet for political organization. Pedophiles and terrorists are just convenient bogeymen to scare people into assenting to this.

It’s almost funny watching the USA trying to remain a world leader while cutting its investments in absolutely everything: healthcare, education, energy generation and distribution, welfare, science, roads, electricity, railways, air traffic control, sanitation, everything that’s needed for a basic quality of life and to be even running in the same race as other countries. The USA seems to think it can get by with just the police and military. It won’t work.

From the article:

To put that in context, the new MicroSD Express cards that work with the Nintendo Switch 2 top out at a theoretical 985MB/s, less than a third the speed. And while a full-size SD Express card could theoretically beat Mini SSD at 3,940MB/s, it would be nearly twice the size of Biwin’s creation.

So: because it’s smaller.

Yes, it was a nice little machine, the first computer I used at home. I shared it with some friends because our parents couldn’t afford it unless we pooled our money. Each of us would have it for a week then take it to the next kid’s house. In those days you had the option of buying it prebuilt or (cheaper) as a kit, and I still remember how excited I was when my dad and I came out of the electronics shop with a bag full of circuit boards, chips and keys that would magically become a computer when soldered together.

The Acorn story is really amazing: a tiny hobbyist company that got a break when the BBC commissioned the BBC micro from them, that went on to invent the ARM chips that are in billions of phones and other devices now.

https://archive.is/whVMI

On the Amiga’s 40th birthday I brought the old Amiga 500 out of storage to the dinner table and we had cake. Just realized I should do the same with the Atari ST, for more cake. I think my family tolerates me because of the cake.

My age in fond memories:

I don’t have long for this world…

Connect your GitHub repo, describe what you want to build, and let your AI developer implement it and create a pull request for you.

Is that really as foolish as it sounds?

I was impressed. It really felt like I had superpowers! But then I had the idea to audit the code the LLM just produced, like I did at my $dayjob for a Vue application. Feeling that uploading files could be a source of security issues, I asked the same LLM to focus on this specific topic.

It found several dangers: directory traversal attacks, file size limits, system file overwrite, etc. I had no idea the initial code was this unsafe. I had reviewed the code, but without enough experience in backend development, how could I identify issues I didn’t know existed? And why, if it knew about all those dangers, did the LLM produced unsafe code in the first place?

When I tried to fix the security issues, I quickly realized how this whole thing was a trap. Since I didn’t wrote it, I didn’t have a good bird’s eye view of the code and what it did. I couldn’t make changes quickly, which started to frustrated me. The easiest route was asking the LLM to do the fixes for me, so I did. More code was changed and added. It worked, but again I could not tell if it was good or not.

I try to read these things sympathetically but… If it can slip that many very basic and common vulnerabilities past you without you noticing, and you have no ability to evaluate either the original code or the AI’s “fixes” to it, aren’t you just telling us you lack the skills to do the job competently in the first place? This sounds like a case of “all I know is how to bolt Vue components to one another, and outside of that I’m lost.” It tells us more about your own skill level than about how useful the AI would be to someone who understood more about programming.

If artists get a break from competing against plagiarized AI slop, that’s not petty vengeance.

If artists see generative AI companies going bust, that will be something.

But unlike media literacy, bans give the government a pretext to demand ID from everyone using the internet, and thereby increase surveillance of the population. This year is evidently the year when they’ve all decided to do it.

Developers are smart enough that they’ll find out for themselves whether and when AI can be helpful. There is really no need for these CEOs to issue absurd commands that developers use AI (in some unspecified way) or quit. This “microwave” article does a good job of showing how absurd the CEOs’ commands are. They serve no purpose except to convince investors that the appropriate bandwagons are being jumped on, and to convince CEOs that CEOs are important.

Trump is putting his loyalists in charge of all government agencies though. So any manager who doesn’t obey will end up fired and replaced by someone who will.

There’s still the risk of GPS coordinates leaking out of the social media phone, and that leading Google to be able to correlate it with the person’s main phone. Even without GPS there’s the position based on nearby wifi networks etc. So you’d have to be sure all location services were disabled. Still, someone knows which cell towers your phones connect to and could correlate their locations if they repeatedly come close to one another, though Meta probably don’t have ready access to that data. Something’s always being sold to data brokers though, and it’s very hard to prevent them from spotting patterns that reveal who you really are.

https://archive.is/8asa5

If we know about these attacks, then the bad guys know too. Even if they weren’t yet given the details they’ve been told where to look and could quickly figure them out. Why then would they wait until Wednesday to start attacking? We have to assume they’re already attacking, and 1/3 of the web has not gone down.

Besides, the author of the research says the vulnerabilities have been disclosed to CDN providers and patched already. So it’s a significant discovery but the headline is doubly silly.

Translated:

High-schoolers are even cheaper and easier to exploit than new grads, and if I don’t care if they know nothing as long as they can prop up our crappy app just long enough for me to sell the company, pocket a bunch of cash, get them all fired, and move on to my next scam entrepreneurial venture while preaching to people about being an innovator and a job creator. Maintenance is for whichever sucker ends up holding the shit bag, but who cares? I’ve got mine.

AI coding is just the latest spin on this age-old practice.

A huge loss to the world of technology. What on Earth will we do without it?