Friendly reminder that VSCodium exists, and nobody should be using Microslop’s spyware version anyway.

Clawdbot, OpenClaw, etc. are such a ridiculously massive security vulnerability, I can’t believe people are actually trying to use them. Unlike traditional systems, where an attacker has to probe your system to try to find an unpatched vulnerability via some barely-known memory overflow issue in the code, with these AI assistants all an attacker needs to do is ask it nicely to hand over everything, and it will.

This is like removing all of the locks on your house and protecting it instead with a golden retriever puppy that falls in love with everyone it meets.

I do the same. I start with the large task, break it into smaller chunks, and I usually end up writing most of them myself. But occasionally there will be one function that is just so cookie-cutter, insignificant to the overall function of the program, and outside of my normal area of experitise, that I’ll offload that one to an LLM.

They actually do pretty well for tasks like that, when given a targeted task with very specific inputs and outputs, and I can learn a bit by looking at what it ended up generating. I’d say it’s only about 5-10% of the code that I write that falls into the category where an LLM could realistically take it on though.

You can use their modem with your own router. Just switch the modem to bridge mode and then you don’t have to deal with it or any of its security issues.

If you ignore the election bump in Nov 2024 that had completely reset by Mar 2025, their stock is up 100% in a little over a year. Yes that counts as skyrocketing, considering sales and profit have plummeted over the same time frame.

Interesting, I haven’t seen that approach before

You can’t do that anymore, at least not with a normal Windows installation. All of the tricks of forcing it offline, clicking cancel 10 times and jumping up and down don’t work anymore, they’ve disabled them all, the only way to install Windows 11 now (using the normal Microsoft installer) is by linking it to a Microsoft account.

Or it works initially and then crashes (yes that does happen), and if it crashes mid-flash that’s a problem.

I wonder if the software you need for cars would run under Wine.

While maybe it could work, that’s not the kind of thing you want to mess around with, since if it misbehaves even a little bit it can brick your ECU and leave you with a multi-thousand dollar repair bill

Exactly. A lot of people seem to think that different = worse, or that not supporting the same software means it supports less software. I couldn’t move to Windows right now because there is a ton of stuff I use Linux for that Windows has no alternative, or the alternatives are terrible. It works both ways.

Shut off and leave your phone at home, buy a pay-as-you-go to bring with you for emergency contact/coordination

Yes, because the argument was never “we’ll have fusion in 20 years”, it’s always been “we COULD have fusion in 20 years IF research was properly funded”. It’s never been properly funded, hence it’s always 20 years away.

It’s a bit like my boss coming to ask me how long it would take to do project X. I tell him 6 months after we get funding. We don’t get funding. 6 months later he comes and asks me how long it would take to do project X. I tell him 6 months after we get funding. Queue shocked Pikachu face that the estimate is still 6 months, 6 months later.

Notifications will go a long way toward helping with that. Check all assumptions, check all exit codes, notify and stop if anything is amiss. I also have my backup script notify on success, with the time it took to back up and the size and delta size (versus the previous backup) of the resulting backup. 99% of errors get caught by the checks and I get a failure notification. But just in case something silently goes wrong, the size of the backup (too big or too small) is another obvious indicator that something went wrong.

Anyone who would sign up for a porn website using their .gov email address deserves to have it leaked

These modern app devs can pry my ncurses TUIs from my cold dead fingers

It’s happening at a lot of companies. Last year our C-suite cancelled some big IR&D projects (where we were designing real products that could actually be built and sold) in order to dump $300k/mo into renting a cloud AI infrastructure that none of the employees want or use.

Median average salary in 1947 was $36,000

Where did you get that? That’s not what your link says at all. $36k was the median salary around 20 years ago, not 80 years ago.

What are you talking about?

Depends on what you’re buying. Wiredzone and Provantage are solid for enterprise/workstation gear, and for anything storage or camera related B&H is my go-to.

Average wage index in 1999: $30,469.84

Average wage index in 2023: $66,621.80

So wages roughly doubled, while the house now costs 8x as much. Yep, sounds about right.