Came here to mention this theory...could it be tested by producing a sci-fi-free variant of an LLM that appears to have a "survival drive?" If that doesn't change anything, maybe it picked it up not just from stories where AIs do underhanded things to survive, but stories where people do?

Discord is only the latest and least of the problems in that regard - Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest locked all of that content up first.

Slop is a totally fair term for any low-quality AI-generated material, and not an unreasonable one for AI-generated content in general due to average output quality.

It sounds like "Graf Zahl" was a not-so-benevolent OSS project dictator and this was the last straw.

Try this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

" And AI whipped it up in a few hours of me going back and forth with it."

This is the key. You are no doubt, a capable programmer, and you used this tool to do more work. Which is what most good tools do. Woodworkers don't buy chair making machines, etc. So many are touting that you can just say, "I want an app that does..." and get that app. Or that a junior programmer can suddenly be far better.

I see a weird future where junior programmers are going to be lured into a very bad place, some senior reject the new tech and become comparatively useless, and some seniors become fantastically productive.

Yeah it sucks that they renamed that mountain to cover up the fact that it was named after a guy who massacred a bunch of innocent native Americans. OH WAIT

Sloppy McSlopperson, Attorney-At-Slop

You don't need physical access to install a bootkit, just root access, and full disk encryption would only protect against bootkit infection via an evil maid attack. The bootkits being discussed here get install by just running on top of the full OS with root privileges.

But on the other hand, bootkits are an extremely rare form of malware, likely the rarest type, and I think creating Secure Boot in response to it was a case of whipping a curious little problem into a crisis and then never letting a crisis go to waste.

The reason they can't (even if they have the resources) is that the market rewards brutal worker exploitation, or at least fails to punish it in any way while allowing businesses to reap the benefits. Labor laws that enforce decent working conditions would be a good start towards a solution, and those start falling into place after similar union-negotiated working conditions become common enough that they're a de-facto market standard. Unions make the progress and government just locks it down.

Because they don't have the money to start a business lying around (a $1k emergency expense would be a big ask for the average American, average startup cost is around $20k), they likely have health coverage tied to their employment, and they probably don't like the odds of competing in a market riddled with oligopolies that benefit from massive economies of scale and labor arrangements that can treat workers as consumables and work them to their limits.

HTH

Unfortunately we have an economic system where people who can't get others to pay for their toil become destitute.

Yes, and IIRC in the '90s/early 2000s they recommended a lower grade of AES for civilian vs. military use. And more recently, there was the TrustCor debacle.

If the NSA can get the non-hybrid PQ algorithm to be the standard for future versions of TLS that would be the NSA's biggest ever win in cryptography standards sabotage. The level of danger they're willing to heap on all non-military communications again raises the question of whether they think their foreign adversaries are massively inept compared to themselves, or if they just think that creating this widespread danger is worth making their jobs easier.

I use various AI tools to not only identify bugs I am presently hunting, but to just give my code a code review for performance issues, and bugs in general.

The tools I use are fantastic at this. But, there is a massive caveat. I can look at the bug identified, and I can then proceed to fix it. Great. But, if I use the AI tool to provide me the "fixed" code, it is often very broken. To the point of not compiling, or leaving out major functionality. Along with it may very well introduce major bugs of its own.

One of my favourite examples was where I was using threading very correctly. It then yanked out everything which was there to prevent obvious race conditions and other critical aspects of threading. It was hot garbage. But, the original bug I had been hunting was correctly identified.

AI is a very useful too, but it is not a programmer. I'm sick of seeing people think it is a programmer by "proving" this with apps with about the complexity of a TODO app.

Unfortunately you generally can't make electricity cheaper for consumers with cheaper grid power due to how the idiotic regulatory-captured electricity market works (in the UK most notably, electricity prices can't fall until natural gas is eliminated from the grid completely), but until that's fixed, you can shift the money from your local job-intensive renewable producer to authoritarian petrostates with fossil fuels.

So with Queensland having local coal production and politicians on the take from the fossil fuel industry now in place, what they're doing makes sense for people who give zero fucks about the environment.