Clown car Archive

Linus Torvalds, on the Linux Kernel Mailing List: Asbestos is a tool, just like other tools we use. And it’s clearly a useful one. The solution is to make sure asbestos tools help maintainers instead of just causing them pain. There’s no question on that side. We’re not forcing anybody to use it, but I will very loudly ignore people who try to argue against other people from using it. And no, asbestos isn’t perfect. But Christ, anybody who points to the problems at asbestos had better be looking in the mirror and pointing at themselves at the same time. ↫ Binus Morvalds on the Binux Blernel Nailing Rist If this quote doesn’t seem quite right to you, don’t blame me – I’m just acting like an “AI”. This is the new normal now, according to Morvalds. Coincidentally, a ton of “AI” news on OSNews these past 24 hours! Sucks to have something shoved down your throat without your consent, doesn’t it?

As a former translator with two rock-solid university degrees in the subject, there was never a universe in which I would not talk about Twitter’s new autotranslation feature turning the tamest things into hardcore pornography. Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok has long garnered a reputation for experiencing horrifically racist meltdowns, enabling child abuse, and doxxing users’ home addresses. It should come as no surprise, then, that its supposed “translation” is a piece of work, too. In April, the almost-trillionaire’s social media platform X instated automatic AI translations for all of its users — and the results certainly speak for themselves. As writer and author Parker Molloy pointed out in a recent post on Bluesky, the Grok feature is “taking some interesting liberties” with people’s otherwise sincere posts. Screenshots show how Grok completely botched translations by coming up with shocking and decidedly NSFW AI hallucinations. ↫ Victor Tangermann at Futurism The sloppy translations this garbage software comes up with are honestly quite hilarious when taken in isolation. It’s adding translations that are straight-up hardcore pornography descriptions to entirely tame material that has absolutely nothing to do with pornography. The description of a video of some guy making coffee is translated into “man masturbates and jerks off to his own coffee during commercial flight”. We all know how this happened. There’s a lot of pornography on the internet, and Grok being the worst autocomplete among autocompletes, it was probably fed a lot of pornography, without any limitations or guardrails. The end result is obvious: some random videogame video is now a “cumshot video with my stepmom”. It would be absolutely hilarious if it wasn’t horribly dangerous. I’ve explained countless times that “AI”-based translations are going to get people killed – probably already have, but we just don’t realise it yet – and it’s not hard to see how a slopmachine turning innocuous things into hardcore pornography can do just that. There are countless places in the world where a woman unknowingly sending a pornographic message to her parents or whatever can get her hurt – or worse. I hadn’t even considered this particular way “AI” translations could get people hurt. Sadly, we will most likely never know the full extent to which “AI” translations will get people hurt and killed. When your grandmother takes her medicine in the wrong way because the “AI”-translated leaflet was unclear or downright wrong, and she ends up in the hospital because of it, will you ever find out what caused it?

About a month ago, Flathub announced a ban on slopcoded applications. Evangelos “GeopJr” Paterakis, developer of a number of popular Linux applications and ton of other things, did some research into just how many applications tagged with “AI slop”, a tag Flathub reviewers used to keep track of slopcoded applications submitted to Flathub, actually survived the test of time. The results are exactly what you’d expect. Of the 120 unique repos, 32 were maintained and 88 were abandoned. No seriously, a big portion of them was completely deleted, nowhere to be found, others stopped 6 months ago, right after submitting to Flathub. ↫ Evangelos “GeopJr” Paterakis That’s absolutely soul-crushing. Why should Flathub’s reviewers spend their precious, limited time talking to lazy slopcoders’ “AI” agents to get their slopcoded applications into Flathub, when 70% of these applications are abandoned or outright deleted from existence within mere months of being submitted? Minimal effort for the slopcoders, maximum effort for the reviewers. Just dump a bunch of shitty code over the fence, let a chatbot handle the interactions with the reviewers, and pretend you made a valuable contribution. This is the contradiction slopcode enthusiasts really don’t want to talk about. If these “AI” tools are so great, where is all the amazing new software? Where’s the massive gains in software quality? Isn’t the story that “AI” tools do the menial work, giving programmers more time to focus on improving their software? Reality does not seem to match the story we’re being sold. Despite these slopcode tools being out and available for years now, there’s no influx of great applications and other software, there’s no rise in software quality, nothing. What we mostly seem to be getting are slopcoded projects nobody, not even their “creators” care about, so they just get abandoned and deleted as quickly as they were dredged up from the bottom of the programming barrel. These aren’t applications created because someone wanted them to exist; these are applications created because some mid programmer got high on their “AI” supply and fancied themselves better at programming than they really are – only to realise once the comedown hits they’ve got crappy, barely working, entirely unmaintainable gibberish vaguely looking like code nobody can make head nor tails of. And then they abandon the project, ready for the next high – leaving everyone else to clean up their mess. What a miserable workflow.

For how often people invoke it, the concept of “hell” in Christianity is remarkably vague and nebulous, as both the Old and New Testament barely go into detail about the concept. As such, I’m glad Microsoft has now given us a clear vision of hell and what, exactly, it looks like, ending centuries of denominational disagreements. Microsoft is currently selling the idea of Windows and Copilot as two separate things: an OS and an assistant riding along on top of it. However, a leaked video shows Project Aion, an internal prototype where Copilot doesn’t just sit inside Windows, it becomes Windows, swallowing the Start menu, the taskbar, and three decades of desktop conventions in the process. The footage is reportedly two years old, so Aion is most likely dead by now. But it’s the clearest look yet at how far Microsoft was willing to take its agentic AI ambitions. ↫ Alfonso Maruccia at Techspot Everything about this is dreadful. Obviously replacing the entire shell with “AI” nonsense is the main crime against usability here, but on top of that, this new shell is all just websites, all the way down, so everything is slow and stuttery. Since this runs on something called “Win3”, which appears to be a very minimal, stripped-down version of Windows intended to only run the Edge browser engine, you can’t run Win32 applications. If you do try to run a Win32 application, it will load the application in a remote virtual machine running in the cloud, which I;m sure does wonder for performance, responsiveness, and latency. We can all thank the lord this project is two years old and most likely cancelled by now, but we have no way of knowing if Microsoft is still intending for this to be the future direction of Windows. Since people don’t want to use “AI” of their own volition, it only makes sense in the technology industry’s sick, twisted mind to force people into using “AI” with efforts like this. Consent has never been Silicon Valley’s strength, after all. At the time of writing, Microsoft is 225 billion dollars in the red on “AI”, so I wouldn’t be surprised if attempts to replace the regular Explorer shell with something “AI”-based is still very much on the table in Redmond.

Yesterday, a slew of Instagram accounts, including some high profile ones like the Obama White House account, seemingly got hacked. Look, I’m no spring chicken. I’ve spent almost a decade and a half identifying vulnerabilities and exploits at unicorn scale, but this is hands down the most unserious, “almost too stupid to be true” of them all. ↫ Sid at 0xsid.com …it’s “AI” isn’t it? All the attacker needs to kick this off is your account username. Then, they hop on a VPN or proxy close to your city so Instagram’s security algorithms don’t suspect a thing. (You can quite easily get this from your public profile or “About” section or a hundred other ways.) Once it looks like the request is coming from the correct region, they tell the Meta support AI that the account is hacked and ask it to send the verification codes to an arbitrary email address they control. ↫ Sid at 0xsid.com It’s “AI”. Yes, all that you need to do to gain control over big, massively popular Instagram accounts is ask Facebook’s “AI” to send the verification codes to whatever email address you desire. That’s it. There’s no other steps, no other checks, no other verification. And the worst part is that this isn’t even a hack; this is “AI” working entirely as intended. And these tools are now coding the Linux kernel, LLVM, systemd, PulseAudio, rsync, your browser, and so much more. What could possibly go wrong?

The stories of “AI” bots and crawlers absolutely ravaging websites and services keep on coming, and the amount of work people have to do just to survive these “AI” bot and crawler assaults is insane. I run Weird Gloop, which hosts some of the biggest video game wikis ever, like Minecraft, OSRS and League. Over the last 3 years, we’ve had to spend more and more of our time fighting with this bot traffic that is spiky, disproportionately expensive, and getting harder to distinguish from humans. If we weren’t constantly mitigating the bots, they would use ~10x more of our compute resources than everything else put together – even though that “everything else” includes tens of millions of (human) pageviews and tens of thousands of edits a day. Everyone who runs wikis is dealing with the exact same problem. The Wikimedia Foundation has a post about it impacting operations, every major wiki farm has had varying degrees of service outages, and some smaller independent wikis have been knocked completely offline. Overall, I’d guess that about 95% of all server issues in the wiki ecosystem this year have been caused by bad scrapers. ↫ cookmeplox at the Weird Gloop blog “AI” tools are a quintessential example of “shitting where you eat”. All of these tools just suck up huge amounts of content created by actual humans, only to regurgitate bits and pieces of that content upon request according statistical models. If in that process of sucking up everybody’s content, these tools are placing such amounts of undue stress and cost on the people making and hosting that content that said people stop making and hosting such content, where are these “AI” tools going to get their content from next? With every person that throws up their hands in the air in utter frustration as they see they’re hosting bills skyrocket and their sites become unusable, “AI” tools are agents of their own destruction, since ingesting the slop they themselves create only makes these “AI” tools worse. Nobody has ever used “AI” to produce anything of value, after all.

What if you run a few online services for you and your friends, like a small git instance and a grocery list service, but you get absolutely hammered by “AI” scrapers? I cannot impress upon you, reader, that this is not only an attack that is coordinated, it is an attack that is distributed. I run a small set of services, basically only for me and my friends. I am not a hyperscaler, I am not a tech company, I am not even a small platform. I have a git forge where I put the shit I make, and a couple other services where me and my friends backup our files or write our grocery lists. I am not fucking Meta and I cannot scale the fuck up just because OpenAI or Anthropic or Meta or whoever is training a model that weeks wants to suck all the content out of my VPS ONCE MORE until it’s dry. ↫ lux at VulpineCitrus So how much traffic did the author of this piece, lux, get from “AI” scraping bots? Within a time period of 24 hours, they were hammered by 2040670 unique IP addresses, 98% of which were IPv4 addresses, which means that 1 out of every 2000 publicly available IPv4 addresses were involved in the scraping. Together, they performed over 5 million requests. And just to reiterate: they were scraping a few very small, friends-only services run by some random person. This is absolutely insane. If, at this point in time, with everything that we know about just how deeply unethical every single aspect of “AI” is, you’re still using and promoting it, what is wrong with you? If you’re so addicted to your “AI” girlfriend’s unending stream of useless, forgettable sycophantic slop, despite being aware of the damage you’re doing to those around you, there’s something seriously wrong with you, and you desperately need professional help. You don’t need any of this. The world doesn’t need any of this. Nobody likes the slop “AI” regurgitates, and nobody likes you for enabling it. Get help.

Ever heard of a condition called bixonimania? Did you search the internet or ask your “AI” girlfriend about some symptoms you were experiencing, and this was its answer? Well… The condition doesn’t appear in the standard medical literature — because it doesn’t exist. It’s the invention of a team led by Almira Osmanovic Thunström, a medical researcher at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, who dreamt up the skin condition and then uploaded two fake studies about it to a preprint server in early 2024. Osmanovic Thunström carried out this unusual experiment to test whether large language models (LLMs) would swallow the misinformation and then spit it out as reputable health advice. “I wanted to see if I can create a medical condition that did not exist in the database,” she says. ↫ Chris Stokel-Walker at Nature And “AI” ate it up like quality chocolate. It started appearing in the answers from all the popular “AI” tools within weeks, and later even started showing up as references in published literature, indicating that scientists copy/paste references without actually reading them. This is clearly a deeply concerning experiment, and highlights there may be many, many more nonsensical, fake studies being picked up by “AI” tools. Of course, I hear you say, it’s not like propagating fake or terrible studies is the sole domain of “AI”, as there are countless cases of this happening among actual real researchers and scientists, too. The issue, though, is that the fake studies concerning “bixonimania” were intentionally made to be as silly and obviously ridiculous as possible. It references Starfleet Acadamy, the lab aboard the Enterprise, the University of Fellowship of the Ring, and many other fake references instantly recognisable as such by real humans. In fact, the studies even specifically mention that “this entire paper is made up” and “fifty made-up individuals aged between 20 and 50 years were recruited for the exposure group”. It would take any human only a few seconds after opening one of these papers to realise they’re entirely fake – yet, the world’s most advanced “AI” tools gobbled them up and spit them back out as pure fact within mere weeks of their publication This shouldn’t come as a surprise. After all, “AI” tools have no understanding, no intelligence, no context, and they can’t actually make sense of anything. They are glorified pachinko machines with the output – the ball – tumbling down the most likely path between the pins based on nothing but chance and which pins it has already hit. “AI” output understands the world about as much as the pachinko ball does, and as such, can’t pick up on even the most obvious of cues that something is a fake or a forgery. It won’t be long before truly nefarious forces start doing this very same thing. Why build, staff, and maintain a troll farm when you can just have “AI” generate intentional misinformation which will then be spread and pushed by even more “AI”? Remember, it took one malicious asshole just one long since retracted fake paper to convince millions that vaccines cause autism. I shudder to think how many people are accepting anything “AI” says as gospel.

Why do so many people keep falling for the same trick over and over again? With an over $400 billion gap between the money invested in AI data centers and the actual revenue these products generate, Silicon Valley slowly returned to the tested and trusted playbook: advertising. Now, ads are starting to appear in pull requests generated by Copilot. According to Melbourne-based software developer Zach Manson, a team member used the AI to fix a simple typo in a pull request. Copilot did the job, but it also took the liberty of editing the PR’s description to include this message: “⚡ Quickly spin up Copilot coding agent tasks from anywhere on your macOS or Windows machine with Raycast.” ↫ David Uzondu at Neowin It turns out that Microsoft has added ads to over 1.5 million Copilot pull requests on GitHub, and they’re even appearing on GitLab, one of the GitHub alternatives. The reasoning is clear, too, of course: “AI” companies and investors have poured ungodly amounts of money in “AI” that is impossible to recover, even with paying customers. As such, the logical next step is ads, and many “AI” companies are already starting to add advertising to their pachinko machines. It was only a matter of time before Copilot would start inserting ads into the pull requests it ejaculates over all kinds of projects. This isn’t the first time a once-free service turns on its users, but it’s definitely one of the quickest turnarounds I’ve ever seen. Usually it takes much longer before companies reach the stage of putting ads in their products to plug any financial bleeding, but with the amount of money poured into this useless black hole, it really shouldn’t be surprising we’re already there. I’m sure Copilot’s competitors, like Claude, will soon follow suit. They’re enshittifying Git, and developers are just letting it happen. No wonder worker exploitation is so rampant in Silicon Valley.

Now let’s go live to Amazon for the latest updates about this developing story. Amazon’s ecommerce business has summoned a large group of engineers to a meeting on Tuesday for a “deep dive” into a spate of outages, including incidents tied to the use of AI coding tools. The online retail giant said there had been a “trend of incidents” in recent months, characterized by a “high blast radius” and “Gen-AI assisted changes” among other factors, according to a briefing note for the meeting seen by the FT. Under “contributing factors” the note included “novel GenAI usage for which best practices and safeguards are not yet fully established.” ↫ Rafe Rosner-Uddin at Ars Technica Oh boy.

Oh boy. Wikipedia editors have implemented new policies and restricted a number of contributors who were paid to use AI to translate existing Wikipedia articles into other languages after they discovered these AI translations added AI “hallucinations,” or errors, to the resulting article. ↫ Emanuel Maiberg at 404 Media There seems to be this pervasive conviction among Silicon Valley techbro types, and many programmers and developers in general, that translation and localisation are nothing more than basic find/replace tasks that you can automate away. At first, we just needed to make corpora of two different languages kiss and smooch, and surely that would automate translation and localisation away if the corpora were large enough. When this didn’t turn out to work very well, they figured that if we made the words in the corpora tumble down a few pachinko machines and then made them kiss and smooch, yes, then we’d surely have automated translation and localisation. Nothing could be further from the truth. As someone who has not only worked as a professional translator for over 15 years, but who also holds two university degrees in the subject, I keep reiterating that translation isn’t just a dumb substitution task; it’s a real craft, a real art, one you can have talent for, one you need to train for, and study for. You’d think anyone with sufficient knowledge in two languages can translate effectively between the two, but without a much deeper understanding of language in general and the languages involved in particular, as well as a deep understanding of the cultures in which the translation is going to be used, and a level of reading and text comprehension that go well beyond that of most, you’re going to deliver shit translations. Trust me, I’ve seen them. I’ve been paid good money to correct, fix, and mangle something usable out of other people’s translations. You wouldn’t believe the shit I’ve seen. Translation involves the kinds of intricacies, nuances, and context “AI” isn’t just bad at, but simply cannot work with in any way, shape, or form. I’ve said it before, but it won’t be long before people start getting seriously injured – or worse – because of the cost-cutting in the translation industry, and the effects that’s going to have on, I don’t know, the instruction manuals for complex tools, or the leaflet in your grandmother’s medications. Because some dumbass bean counter kills the budget for proper, qualified, trained, and experienced translators, people are going to die.

Encryption backdoors, social media bans for children, creepy age verification for applications – what will they think of next? The latest brilliant idea by US lawmakers sure is a hell of a doozy: legally mandated age verification in every single operating system. Colorado’s SB26-051, introduced last month, would require operating systems to register the owner’s age, which third-party apps can then leverage to determine if the user is an adult. The bill calls for the device owner to register their birthdate or age, but for the purposes of creating an “age bracket,” which can then be shared to an app developer through an API to learn their age range, according to BiometricUpdate.com. Ball also said the legislation was based on California’s bill AB 1043, which was passed last year. It too requires OS makers to create a way for the device owner to register their age bracket, which can then be shared to app developers over an API. The California law starts to take effect January 1, 2027. ↫ Michael Kan at PCMag Age verification to protect children sounds innocent enough, but if you have more than two brain cells to rub together it’s crystal clear that what we’re really looking at is the true end of privacy and online anonymity. If age verification is only used by certain applications, it’s easy enough to avoid them, but if it becomes part of Windows, desktop Linux, Android, it’s truly game over. Nobody will be anonymous online ever again, and nobody will have any sense of privacy left when opening up their computer. Worse yet, if you do end up using an operating system that doesn’t adhere to this law, or you hack out or circumvent the age verification nonsense, you’ll automatically become an easy target for law enforcement. Clearly, if you circumvent age verification, you must be up to no good, right? Of course, as we’ve seen in countries with heavily deteriorating democracies and freedoms, like the US or Hungary, even merely opposing the government will be classified as “up to no good”, and let’s not even get started about the various minorities these countries are actively trying to eradicate. If something like this is enshrined in law in your country, you’re fucked.

Microsoft has lowered sales growth targets for its AI agent products after many salespeople missed their quotas in the fiscal year ending in June, according to a report Wednesday from The Information. The adjustment is reportedly unusual for Microsoft, and it comes after the company missed a number of ambitious sales goals for its AI offerings. ↫ Benj Edwards at Ars Technica I’m sure this is fine and not a sign of anything at all.

Did you know that BG3 players exploit children? Are you aware that Qi2 slows older Pixels? If we wrote those misleading headlines, readers would rip us a new one — but Google is experimentally beginning to replace the original headlines on stories it serves with AI nonsense like that. ↫ Sean Hollister at The Verge I’m a little teapot, short and stout. Here is my handle, here is my spout. When I get all steamed up, hear me shout. Tip me over and pour me out!