indeed. this is more akin to the more abusive ideas proposed for the PATRIOT act but not implemented. In what we got, they could ask the phone companies and 'cloud' (we didn't call it that at the time) companies for all the info on a specific person without a specific warrant on the person themself. And yeah that was bad enough to be sure, especially because the company that turned over the data didn't have to tell you they did it (all part of trying to catch them without them knowing they're being caught, of course).

This 'dump' is more a case of "we can ask for EVERYTHING on your servers"...without telling anybody that their data was included.

I got a 'cold call' from what was actually a legit AI bot just a week ago (from a financial services company serving the loan for some home improvements).

stupid thing never understood "let me talk to a human" no matter how many times i tried.

it was legit, but i just gave up, hung up, called the same number back, and hitting the '0' operator, got a human who handled the situation in a matter of minutes, no frustration involved.

The key thing is the bot cold-called ME but wouldn't provide ANY verifying information that it was what it claimed to be. They have an account # for me, but they wouldn't tell ME it to confirm they were who they were and my account was what they expected to see. Not even something like "last 4 digits".

I mean, they ask US for last 4 digits of something but they won't do the same for us in return?

THIS IS A DAMN PROBLEM, because yeah, we need to have a way to trust that bot-calls from AI are who they say they are, because it is REALLY F'ING EASY to program a bot to do the psychic equiv of a 'cold read' as part of social engineering a scam.

when hiking/walking, i'd rather it stay northbound and click that compass to keep it that way.

otherwise, the pace i'm walking is so slow that the thing keeps changing up what direction it thinks i'm walking in, spins around 3 times, and throws a whole new side trek onto my route.

when i keep it northbound, it still adds that useless side-trek, but at least it isn't spinning all the time.

5000 feet (or even 1000) is deceptively tough when it is in the other direction. (I know the Rescuer knows this but saying it for the general).

Canyons and mountain routes can be deceptively difficult. Examples include the Grand Canyon, obviously, but also, say, starting a hike from a high point along the Blue Ridge Parkway or (in Shenandoah NP) Skyline drive. You head down, not up, a generally easy descent to see the landmark...and then after having been out for 2-3 hours, you have to climb back up. So the hardest part of the hike is when you're already tired...

Park rangers and most guide books will remind guests of this, but not every app (esp not google maps) will.

For biking, google maps for desktop is reasonably well at giving you a chance to see the elevation changes on the route to figure out where the toughest climbs are going to be...but I think it still presumes a steady pace rather than the "I quit, I'm getting off and walking" pace that my unconditioned 50-something legs force me to do.

I get that the ancient (32-bit) PC computers are pretty much worthless now and that's mostly all of interest in the old IBM sites (wondering what the current state of the Sloatsburg location near NY 17/17A in Orange County is like - I drive past it at least once a year).

What gets me are the schools more than the malls or offices - all this talk of teachers having to buy school supplies (and now no longer getting a tax break for it), and yet every one of these buildings we see the reels walk through are full of things that current teachers could use. Why is nobody willing to connect that dot and save their county (and teachers) money?

A service worker shouldn't just 'run' automatically without any user prompting (certainly not the hundreds I have on my box from every single news and slop page I've ever clicked which I have to go wipe out every few months).

They were for web-apps and should only be installed when the user installs the web-app or actually approves notifications. You can say "no notifications" but the service worker will still get installed. This is just a fundamental design flaw that's been there for as long as the SW feature has.

I mean, that doesn't still mean that under better installation security, SWs couldn't still exploit a flaw like this, but it would make it less automatic.

There are no 'personalities'. There are no 'feelings'. There is software looking at patterns and regurgitating text that fits that pattern, because that is what it was programmed to do.

These idiots using those words would still be fooled by Eliza.

but DO they have their audience?

or maybe this is gaming the system on two sides: the company puts out AI slop on the channels, and then creates hundreds of fake accounts and downloaders and streamers to make it seem like the thing is the bees knees, none of which have ad-blocking on , so it just rakes in the ad-view count?

This is far beyond just spotify and podcasts. The AI Slop of music has invaded YouTube on a massive scale, where common searches of semi-rare material (say, Disney Parks Background Loops) are now flooded with "Ambient" and "Jazz" and "Orchestra" loops that have nothing to do with Disney, their songs (however they are arranged) nor the parks music at all. It is just generic AI-generated junk but picking up on those keywords and including fake Disney video animation content to get the click.

Pretty sure this is going to hit other genre things, too, like if you were to search for "Star Wars Music". Maybe the "Christmas Music" AI slop might actually be recognizable Christmas/Seasonal tunes this coming season...but something tells me probably not.

seriously, he's going to lose these in the long run (he already has on several other firings), but he continues because 1) SCOTUS has never made a blanket statement he can't yet, and 2) it isn't his money, win or lose.

...doesn't this open up the ultimate in bait and switch excuses? Oh sorry, that car doesn't actually exist. The AI just made it up. We'll see if we can get our provider to fix that but for now can we show you THIS car that's only $4000 more expensive?

at the very least, doing code reviews of jr developers gives one (of age/experience) the satisfaction that the mentoring is going to produce a better developer who can take on bigger tasks, eventually start reviewing others, and the company experience continues to grow until the obligatory pointless layoffs to boost the stock price.

you can't trust an AI to truly remember anything you tried to "teach" it if it even got a look at your fixes of their crappy code, because even if it did, the next version of the bot's engine may need to be retrained from scratch as it "forgot" almost everything. Plus, it is REALLY hard to get AI to understand general code design philosophies like "3 strikes and you refactor" - it is designed to regurgitate first, not solve problems by increasing the use of shared code. I look at some AI results and all I see is tech debt that will eventually kill the product but never get fixed because nobody quite understands the original task it was trying to do when it just did 'copy and mod'.

some have suggested that's just because it has more or less illegally webscraped the entirety of stackoverflow and reddit, so you're really just doing a resource-intensive google search to find the right stack overflow question/answer page, without either of those sites getting any credit for it.

That's what it comes down to. When you start vibe-coding, you're no longer really coding, and you're not even really creating anymore.

You're just editing. All you're doing is code reviews and quick bug fixes...and those tend to be my least favorite parts of my job.

At least code-reviewing a junior developer, you're teaching, mentoring, instilling some new disciplines or expanding their horizons.

There's no satisfaction in doing that to a bot. Especially because the next time it codes something for you, it is going to come up with something completely different as if the 'experience' you tried to give it doesn't matter anymore.

Yeah, maybe it gets the job done...but I'm not in this to 'get the job done'. If this is what the job was or is going to become, then I'll quit, do my own coding on the side for open-source or other projects, and just make money as a substitute teacher... ...that is, if I didn't have to pay for health insurance, but America sucks in that regard and always will.

Again, they think they can change this crap whenever they want. Computers don't work that way. Anything that involves scheduling a future event is now a problem. If they stored it in pure UTC (just a TZ offset) or EPOC, it will be an hour off. Every single calendar event could be an hour off.