Comment strcpy (Score 2, Funny) 40
They took away my strncpy? No problem, I'll use strcpy instead.
Submission + - I see weâ(TM)ve brought back social engineering (404media.co)
TechnoLust writes: Itâ(TM)s been decades since I could just ASK to gain access to stuff I should not have. AI is truly making strides in technology. Now if only they were forward instead of backwards.
Journal Journal: After 19 years I have come to the conclusion that LinkedIn was a waste of time. 1
I had my suspicions, but I didn't want to jump to any conclusions. So for any of you out there wondering how this journal worked out, Web 2.0 is garbage.
https://slashdot.org/journal/161630/web-20-business-networking-is-it-useful-at-all
Comment Fakeable (Score 4, Interesting) 57
Interestingly, I was in a lab yesterday and met a PhD student whose thesis was largely about using LLMs to fake fingerprints and retinal scans.
Comment Re:How surprising. (Score 0) 279
100% this.
Comment Re:Vibe City (Score 3, Interesting) 83
This was my thought as well.
A friend of mine recently left a senior role, largely b/c of frustration with the firehose of junior AI-slop pull requests.
Submission + - How OpenAI Built a Pipeline from Silicon Valley to the Surveillance State (substack.com)
rnd() writes: ... OpenAI’s video generation model, Sora, represents a qualitative leap beyond these constraints, not because it is a surveillance tool itself, but because it is a training data factory for the next generation of surveillance tools.
Comment Fake Ads (Score 1) 54
The majority of ads I see on YouTube these days are AI-slop deepfake celebrity endorsements, obviously-fake (and dangerous) medical scams, weight-loss salts, workout plans, etc. etc. I don't see anything in the CEO statement about that.
Comment 300 this month so far (Score 5, Informative) 125
The "monthly question volume has collapsed [to] about 300" appears to be an artifact of the last category being the current month, January 2026, even though we're only in the 5th day as of this posting. (Specifically, 321 as of Jan-5 @ 10:30 AM EDT). I expect the number will be in the 2,000+ range by the end of the month, matching both recent trends and a simple extrapolation from the first few days. (Which would still be the worst full month on record.)
Comment Re:LLMs are improv actors (Score 1) 238
This is my take as well.
Comment Does anyone want to learn anything anymore? (Score 1) 24
"Maybe everyone's just practicing their language skills with ChatGPT?"
Or: Maybe no one's practicing any skills whatsoever anymore, because they expect answers will always be available on-demand via ChatGPT (et. al.)
Comment Seems suddenly common (Score 5, Informative) 85
My limited sample: I have 3 long-time engineering friends currently looking for jobs, and they've all been asked to use AI tools of some sort in all of their recent interviews.
Weirdly, most of those cases have sprung the requirement on the person by surprise midway into the interview.
Comment Re:I have a BlueSky account (Score -1, Troll) 183
You sound like one of the misinformation spigots that are cheesed you can't get traction on Bluesky.
I access Bluesky on the Firefox browser on my Android-based phone.
Comment It's True, Don't Come! (Score 1) 183
Listen to Jeff Bezos' Washington Post and Trump's Wharton School.
If you're a right-winger, it's a terrible place to be. Don't come!
Comment Not At All (Score 4, Insightful) 191
I was a senior software engineer (now a CS professor), and I never touch-typed, and it never held me back.
The work of the programmer/engineer is what, 95% mental work, 5% typing? (to be generous to the latter) That's without even getting into rapidly-changing input techniques, autocomplete in the IDE, etc.
Anecdote: When I got my first engineering job in the 90's, I vented my frustration to my father, "The guy in the next cubicle is like 100 times more productive than me" (comparing a day-1 out of college programmer to a senior codebase expert who was indeed one those x100 engineers). My father's response was, "Well, he must be a much faster typist than you are", and it was all I could do to not laugh or choke on such a ridiculous misunderstanding of the job. Consider the degree to which that's a relevant assessment.
