Tag: ai
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Hackers Simply Asked Meta AI to Give Them Access to High-Profile Instagram Accounts. It Worked
Meta decided to replace a lot of their tech support with a chatbot. Which meant giving that chatbot the power to manipulate data. Which meant, to the surprise of nobody whatsoever, that hackers tricked the chatbot into giving them access to other people's accounts.
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Disabling AI in WordPress 7.0
Nicholas A. Ferrell explains how to tell WordPress 7.0 to keep its AI features disabled, and I share my alternative approach: use a fork - ClassicPress - that doesn't include the AI features in the first place, and add them using a plugin if that's really what you want.
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Is AI Profitable Yet?
No surprises from this website, but it's interesting/staggering to see quite how LARGE the disparity between spending and profit is for some of these companies.
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Bloomscrolling & Agentic Intelligence
Aquarion's written about using agentic intelligence and the role of LLMs in various tasks. The conclusion's pretty solid, and I agree with it 90%+.
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Built In Obsolescence
Pagan Wanderer Lu's released a cover album of his own music, where the cover artist is... AI. Some of the songs have come out quite well, and it gives me cognitive dissonance to enjoy art while disliking what its process represents.
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Coding Is When We’re Least Productive
Jason Gorman shares a wonderful anecdote about a workday in which he wrote only three lines of code, but that he considers productive because he took the time to understand the underlying problem he was working on.
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NHS England rushes to hide software over AI hacking fears
New Scientist reports that the NHS are closed-sourcing a lot of their code, out of fear that AIs like Mythos will facilitate easier exploitation of their systems if they don't. Which is pretty-much... completely backwards thinking.
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rejecting convenience
RNotté shares a manifesto to seek out inconvenience in order to seek greater human connection and authentic experiences. And you know what their post reminds me of? The Matrix!
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Once You're Asking the Right Question, You Don't Need To Ask!
The other week, a coding LLM helped me... without me ever submitting a single prompt to it. I just typed into it all the component parts of my problem, and in doing so the solution revealed itself to me. It's rubberducking... silent AI edition!
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The machines are fine. I'm worried about us.
Minas Karamanis has produced a fantastic article about his experience of the use of LLMs for research in physics, and the concerns that he has about its use by less-experienced researchers just beginning to find their way in the field. I echo his thoughts, from my own field of software engineering, and wonder... how will we allow junior developers to gain experience in a world that may encourage them to use LLMs rather than trying and failing for themselves?
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People are not friction
Dave Rupert has thoughts on GenAI, the Gell-Mann effect, and the danger that fast, "good enough" solutions have on how we think about the humans that these systems are ultimately supposed to serve.
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Reply to: I'm OK being left behind, thanks!
A reply to Terence Eden's post about not buying in to every cryptocurrency or AI fad, but being happy to 'wait and see'.
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A Random List of Silly Things I Hate
Just a list of eleven random silly things that I hate, to various degrees.
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Non-exhaustive list of things I'm doing when I'm writing code, that don't look like "writing code":
- thinking
- researching
- contextualising
- testing
- measuring
- documenting
- communicating
- planning
- future-proofing
- educating
- learning
- expressing
- anticipating
- discovering
- inventing
- experimenting
- debugging
- analysing
- monitoring
For all its faults, an AI agent might "write code" faster than me.
But that's only a part of the process.
My typing speed is not the bottleneck.
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Subverting AI Agent Logging with a Git Post-Commit Hook
I keep hearing from developer friends who are 'expected' by their employer to demonstrate that they're using AI, even for tasks at which the AI is demonstrably a suboptimal choice. So - as a joke - I came up with a git post-commit hook that makes it look like they're doing so, even when they're not.