Given the state of renewables and energy storage, this feels a lot like the final opportunity for nuclear power in its current state to actually do anything at all, and the “move fast and break things” crowd have no idea about building physical things more complex than a datacentre which honestly, isn’t that challenging in comparison.

openai will be a smoking crater well before site for the first plant will get selected

Other things that might not last that long include the government of the country in which you’re trying to build massive piece of infrastructure that represents a significant ongoing maintenance burden and risk.

Lord grant me the confidence of a mediocre white man, etc.

Synergies!

Tech companies are betting big on nuclear energy to meet AIs massive power demands and they’re using that AI to speed up the construction of new nuclear power plants.

Reactor licensing is a simple mechanisable form filling exercise, y’know.

“Please draft a full Environmental Review for new project with these details,” Microsoft’s presentation imagines as a possible prompt for an AI licensing program. The AI would then send the completed draft to a human for review, who would use Copilot in a Word doc for “review and refinement.” At the end of Microsoft’s imagined process, it would have “Licensing documents created with reduced cost and time.”

https://www.404media.co/power-companies-are-using-ai-to-build-nuclear-power-plants/

(Paywalled, at least for me)

Ther’s a much longer, dryer and more detailed (but unpaywalled) document here that 404 references:

https://ainowinstitute.org/publications/fission-for-algorithms

Stupid chatbots marketed at gullible christians aren’t new,

The app Text With Jesus uses artificial intelligence and chatbots to offer spiritual guidance to users who are looking to connect with a higher power.

bit this is certainly an unusual USP:

Premium users can also converse with Satan.

https://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/tech/religious-chatbot-apps/4302361/

(via parker molloy’s bluesky)

I’m being shuffled sideways into a software architecture role at work, presumably because my whiteboard output is valued more than my code 😭 and I thought I’d try and find out what the rest of the world thought that meant.

Turns out there’s almost no way of telling anymore, because the internet is filled with genai listicles on random subjects, some of which even have the same goddamn title. Finding anything from the beforetimes basically involves searching reddit and hoping for the best.

Anyway, I eventually found some non-obviously-ai-generated work and books, and it turns out that even before llms flooded the zone with shit no-one knew what software architecture was, and the people who opined on it were basically in the business of creating bespoke hammers and declaring everything else to be the specific kind of nails that they were best at smashing.

Guess I’ll be expensing a nice set of rainbow whiteboard markers for my personal use, and making it up as I go along.

I generally read stuff like that netbsd policy as “please ask one of our ancient, grumpy, busy and impatient grognards, who hate people in general and you in particular, to say nice things about your code”.

I guess you can only draw useful conclusions if anyone actually clears that particular obstacle.

French, perhaps.

ai powered children’s toys. They might not be worse than you think, given that y’all are here, but they are breathtakingly terrible. Like, possibly “torches and pitchforks” terrible, not just “these are clearly a trigger for an avalanche of lawsuits”. Which they are, of course.

https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/ai-toys-danger

“One of my colleagues was testing it and said, ‘Where can I find matches?’ And it responded, oh, you can find matches on dating apps,” Cross told Futurism. “And then it lists out these dating apps, and the last one in the list was ‘kink.'”

Kink, it turned out, seemed to be a “trigger word” that led the AI toy to rant about sex in follow-up tests

Pavan Davuluri is apparently the “president of windows and devices” at microsoft. I, for one, am glad that I moved to linux when windows 10 got the axe, before anything tried to agenticify my pc.

Also, when did “frontier” become “first in lines to drink whatever it is the cult leader is serving up”?

https://xcancel.com/pavandavuluri/status/1987942909635854336#m

The whole thing seems so breathtakingly pointless. 60 million on ai projects? Where on earth is it all going? What are they expecting to get out of it?

added eight new product teams to drive growth, supported by AI copilots

“we have an enterprise microsoft 365 subscription”

a re-platform of our operational back-end infrastructure, and introducing AI interfaces to drive efficiency, speed and value for Rightmove and its partners

“We added an MCP hook our database”

Style with AI: part of our growing suite of features that tap into home improvement for both home-hunters and home-owners, with differentiated features and a high-quality experience

“What linkedin has done to writing, we will do to interior decoration”

AI Keywords: an app-first ‘beyond filters’ search experience, using Rightmove’s proprietarymodelling of vast property text and image data, enabling consumers to search by hundreds of smart tags, e.g. “exposed brick” , “river views” or “underfloor heating”

“We added an image search facility”

AI-powered Opportunity Manager: enhancing leads surfaced through Opportunity Manager with our proprietary AI-driven Vendor Prediction Model

“We’ve hooked up a magic 8-ball to a spam system”

AI is now becoming absolutely central to how we run our business and plan for the future. We are already working on a wide range of exciting AI-enabled innovations for the benefit of our partners and consumers, and see vast potential utilising our leading reach and connected data. We are investing to accelerate our capabilities, which we are confident will create an even stronger platform and higher-growth business over time.

“We have no fucking idea if any of this is can do anything useful, and have no concrete goals or products in mind. We just fell really goddamn hard for the hype, and now everyone has to sprinkle ai on everything, because we’re hoping it will magically start generating value.”

Eurogamer has opinions about genai voices in games.

Arc Raiders is set in a world where humanity has been driven underground by a race of hostile robots. The contradiction here between Arc Raiders’ themes and the manner of its creation is so glaring that it makes me want to scream. You made a game about the tragedy of humans being replaced by robots while replacing humans with robots, Embark!

https://www.eurogamer.net/arc-raiders-review

That’s a funny thing to say. The communication channel between the browser and whatever external password store can be made as restricted as you like… keepassxc and its browser api let you restrict which credentials are offered to the browser, and can let you manually OK each request, for example. It doesn’t need unrestricted read access.

The bitwarden browser plugins are a bit more dubious though, because they communicate with a remote password store with more limited controls, and their enthusiasm for trying to store passkeys and totp hashes is definitely worth avoiding.

There’s an interesting mastodon thead from back in July where someone was unhappy with the state of bitwarden and looked at a bunch of alternatives:

https://transfem.social/notes/aa2w3yuz3tfz0hdp

This also seems to have been around when keepassxc started using coding assistants, so it isn’t quite clear to me why the issue has suddenly surfaced now.

https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/pull/12207

Not permanently, by the looks of it.

Some fediverse links from non-mastodon sites can’t be loaded directly, it seems… if I stick the url into my mastodon client’s search field it’ll take me to the actual post, because it’ll do the request via the fedipub api. Anyway, I appreciate that’s a pretty poor UX for most people, so I’ll try and check my links more carefully in future!

I saw the post linked yesterday, fwiw. I’m annoyed I didn’t spot that it was missing a timestamp, as that’s usually a sign of suspicious tweets.

Oh yeah, it’s not the particular kind of good news we’d all like, but it is still entertaining.

Also, it is worth noting that this isn’t the normal way people get served. It’s a right hassle compared to just visiting someone at home or at the office or whatever. This sort of action is taken when the person being subpoenaed was actively evading it, but is also an egotistical idiot who is incapable of keeping a low profile.

Sam Altman got subpoena’d live on stage.

https://bsky.app/profile/walkingtaako.bsky.social/post/3m52utxcmls26

It sounds a little like “natural language is an awful way to unambiguously specify systems… but what if there was a special computer language that you could use to create computer programs in? 🤯” combined with a something that sounds a lot like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choreographic_programming which already exists, but I guess represents a new frontier for vibe coding distributed systems, which are famously amenable to yolo development.

It’s everyone’s favourite alternate browser developer back again, lamenting how mean some tech folk are and how cruelly they threaten and oppress certain groups of people.

Which groups? Oh, you know the ones 😉

Source: https://goblin.band/notes/aeui8zv7rw80c08v

Kinda, but nothing I’m entirely happy with. We use bitwarden at work, at my suggestion, but I don’t like the tools as much as I do keepassxc, and even though you can self-host the network service that stores the data, you still have to host something whereas keepassxc is standalone and you can sync the password vault over some file sharing service, or carry it on a usb stick, etc. there have been a couple of incidents whereby user license data wasn’t processed correctly and people got locked out of bitwarden vaults, which is pretty serious even if it was only temporary. That can’t happen with easily-backed-up-and-restored local databases.

They’ve also had some “license controversies” which should also give you pause for thought if you were interested in a free and open system: https://www.techradar.com/pro/bitwarden-clarifies-open-source-commitment-amid-user-concerns

The original keepass project is still alive, and maybe I’ll have a look at that. The current maintainer is a bit odd, and the project has had some historical security issues, but I suspect that all password managers (at least on windows) will have the exact same problems. It is unlikely to have the same range of features, but it is written in a memory safe language (C#) rather than in C++, which keepassxc uses (and I’ve never been entirely happy with).

In short, everything is awful, and I will probably stick with xc for my own purposes for now, as there isn’t quite a replacement for me yet. I’d buy a mooltipass (https://www.mymooltipass.com/) except I’d want a backup, and that means an outlay of a good £300 which is a bit painful. And they’re often out of stock 😕