Also those companies: Wait, AI isn’t allowed to steal from us!

It’s not even their own content. Google took the search results from the sites they crawled and scraped.

Lawmakers will make exceptions to allow E2EE for their own communications and those of the very wealthy.

Remember how, before the internet, intelligence agencies by default didn’t know what anyone was saying to anyone else face to face or by mail, and had to actually work to find out? The country didn’t fall apart. Why is the standard now that everything must be handed to them on a plate? Did they just get lazy?

Well that makes more sense. Thanks for the information!

Is this named after Karl Popper? If so that’s unfortunate because Popper spent his life arguing against the validity of inductive reasoning in science. His distinctive contribution was to try to describe a scientific method that did not depend on induction.

https://philosophy.institute/logic/poppers-critique-rejection-induction/

Not just the tech industry. A huge proportion of the US economy is made up of betting on AI. Like the crash of 2008 (but worse, some predict) it will hurt everyone but the richest, who will become even richer.

In Chinese, affirmation is often compiled through negation:

没错 (méi cuò) = “not wrong” = Right

不差 (bù chà) = “not bad” = Decent

还行 (hái xíng) = “still passable” = Okay

没事 (méi shì) = “no problem” = It’s fine

In English, this feels bizarre. If something is good, you say:

Nice

Great

Perfect

Brilliant

You name the quality directly. You point at it. You own it.

In American positivity-laden, self-marketing, businessy English perhaps. But in the UK “not bad”, “could be worse”, “not wrong”, “can’t complain”, “I’ve had worse” and so on is often as positive as it gets, or at least was for a long time. American positive-speak gets on British people’s nerves; it’s perceived as boorish, boastful and unsubtle. And “no problem” is common in English all over. British people do say “brilliant” but only when they’re being unusually enthusiastic, or fake, or sarcastic.

The font was chosen in an effort to make documents easier to read for the vision impaired.

So It’s Republican policy that the government must not, even in the smallest way, make life any easier for disabled people? And the government must not do nothing and leave in place something that already makes life easier for them, but must actively intervene to make it harder? Of course it is, but what the fuck is wrong with these people that they dedicate their entire life to getting into government so they can punch down and hurt others? How have they not even accidentally stumbled into being better than the worst they can be?

Until version 8.8.7 of Notepad++, the developer used a self-signed certificate, which is available in the Github source code.

That doesn’t sound wise.

https://archive.is/uCWNB

I wouldn’t mind so much if they were giving their own arms and legs, but they seem to be giving ours.

That’s been the thinking for the last couple of decades at least. But it can’t continue if people can’t afford new hardware.

Their agenda sounds good but apparently they’ve acted a bit shadily in various ways.

https://drewdevault.com/2025/10/22/2025-10-22-Whats-up-with-FUTO.html

If there’s any silver lining to this, perhaps we can get a renewed interest in efficient open-source software designed to work well on older hardware, and less e-waste.

They’re still preparing, gathering names for the day when they have enough force:

https://truthout.org/video/journalist-reveals-fbi-is-offering-a-bounty-for-reporting-anti-trump-thought/

Even more efficient: humans do the specs and the implementation. AI has nothing to contribute to specs, and is worse at implementation than an experienced human. The process you describe, with current AIs, offers no advantages.

AI can write boilerplate code and implement simple small-scale features when given very clear and specific requests, sometimes. It’s basically an assistant to type out stuff you know exactly how to do and review. It can also make suggestions, which are sometimes informative and often wrong.

If the AI were a member of my team it would be that dodgy developer whose work you never trust without everyone else spending a lot of time holding their hand, to the point where you wish you had just done it yourself.

The hard thing about debugging other people’s code is understanding what they’re trying to do. Once you’ve figured that out it’s just like debugging your own code. But not all developers stick to good patterns, good conventions or good documentation, and that’s when you can spend a long time figuring out their intention. Until you’ve got that, you don’t know what’s a bug.

Fortified with vitamins and cancer.

Capitalism is destroying the world. We need to rise up against that. The AI bullshit is just one manifestation of the whole world being geared to serve capital and the handful of people that control it.

Isn’t that like inviting all your friends and family onto your LAN? That would seem to have its own security risks.