julian_sark

It was a cascade of sorts.

Step 1, running my tests on Gemini. Having it argue two sides of radical social systems and realistic seeming implementation routes. Collaborative story telling into the absurd. Having it solve impossible seeming riddles (though that still leads to hallucinations).

2. Gemini explaining arcane BIOS settings to me not found anywhere on Google, mostly correctly.

3. Claude dissecting a tongue-in-cheek theory/blog post of mine, deeply analyzing it while catching flaws and catching on to irony and sarcasm.

4. Several non-coder friends building fully automated AI slob distribution and sales/BI platforms with Claude, and forking and greatly improving projects on GitHub. I did some tests with Vibe Coding myself, had Claude write a small game from one prompt. This is a bit insane, I must admit.

I'm a former skeptic who was written a lot on AI and society, published some, and held public discussions with experts.

I have since sung the praise of, especially, Claude in closed forums for hundreds of county and government digitalisation and security people in a way I'd have never expected two years ago.

Background, I'm an IT and security guy myself with 30 plus years of light coding and heavy, broad enterprise stuff. I'm on record now for saying things on AI I would have had myself hospitalized for two years ago.

Many of the people around me go "eh, just check your code for security" and "I tried coding in ChatGPT, i had it output some puny script, it's not that great".

In return I had Claude (free tier) make a PDF for them on uses, chances, risks, legal framework and integration with other AI and services for them, nicely formated, from one prompt. It seems 100 percent factually correct and Claude fixed a bug in the PDF generation code it pulled off of the web from the same prompt to complete the task.

I also explained to them why especially the library pool for Python and JavaScript enables Claude to write stuff that is rather impressive, and that while not fully scalable (yet), it might be "good enough" for 90 percent of the tasks people want done these days.

I suddenly find myself berating people on government forums, where some people from the national IT security advisory body are part of the (mostly silent) audience, to wake up in some way and consider what it means. Yet our national approach to security is mostly still "Vibe coding is a toy and a party trick, that will blow over eventually, get a code audit or follow some security check lists."

Meanwhile I believe that in two years, most of GitHub will be written by non coding hobbyists like my friends.

And having seen how insanely laissez faire some commercial software folks treat security and product service for extremely pricy products, maybe DIY vibe coded stuff does not even look bad in comparison.

While some of 1000s of people around me doing the "real world" work around me can't wait to give agency to the AI, many others here, including many people in charge, still seem blissfully ignorant. Or want to be.

Ultimately, I only know one thing for certain: Society is currently heading full yolo into this, and systemically, that might be the only way because that is the true nature of AI.

They say people don't understand the exponential function. This is true.

But most people also don't seem to understand the implications of this new approach to exponential pattern recognition and reassembly, that operates on the microsecond scale, and with an insane pool of information at its disposal. It will probably never make NEW stuff, but it will assemble old stuff so fast and complete it will still seem indistinguishable from magic.

Society is in for a wild ride.

Didn't know fences contained copper ;)

I took mine extra heavy, I love it.

If not for comforting my neuro divergeny, I also love it for staying put and not dropping off of the side, or foot, of the bed and falling on the floor.

Only caveat is getting it into the sheet covers. That is hard work lol, quite the workout. Considering skipping that part and just putting it on top of a light bedsheet.

I add a warm, thick blanket on top of the weighted one if needed, e.g. in winter.

It's important to stack it that way. Putting the weighted one on top keeps everything put, but the compression on the warm blanket negates the temperature isolation and it gets cold quick.

I'm getting so tired of Reddit's antics. Also removing content seemingly at random without any meaningful explanation, and ignoring any messages about it. Which both makes mods look bad and is a blatant violation of the Digital Services Act.

Woman with Fake Voice to do Hundreds of Tests on Single Drop of Blood:

"Arrest the witch!!"

AI to Diagnose Diabetes Based on Seconds-long Snippet of Voice:

"Uh. Interesting ...!"

Just sign up at my company. Job done!

My company used to title me: "System Architect". Yes, always singular, they're Germans and have no feel at all for English language.

Then HR bought a pricy scheme from some consultant, and now I'm suddenly an "Advanced System Engineer". And also mightily pissed off for not being a senior title.

It's like they roll dice around here. People went from being Data Analysts to being developers and vice versa. People were assigned titles that don't fit, purely so they could be outfited with certain benefits exclusively tied to those titles in a rigid scheme.

Leave it to HR to screw over any industry naming conventions and to make my future job applications great fun, when I will explain why I'm not really that thing that's actually on my CV.

Many years ago I went camping and snails entered the tent. They proceeded to eat the pages out of a book, rasping the top layer of paper off of pages while leaving the lower layers of the pages intact. It was one of those "The Reality of Dan Brown's Fiction"-style books which were all the rage back then, proving to me that snails will literally eat anything, no matter how little sustaining.

Kudos!

I cracked open (both out of curiosity and for recycling) my own 1999 Logitech QuickCam Express just a few days ago, then tossed away the parts. It was a decent webcam for the time, which was when Windows 98 was all the rage.

My desktop admittedly being a Windows system, I dabbled for a while trying to get the old drivers and software to work on Windows 11, alas, not a chance.

I liked the quirky thing especially for the physical visor that assured me nobody is watching me when the camera SHOULD be off, and saved me the masking tape (except for a single strip permanently glued to the inside of the visor, because for some odd reason, the thing was semi-translucent!)

I went out and bought a Trust webcam with Windows 11 support which astonishingly cost me less than three Euros (!!) new, at the bargain store. The Logitech, once upon a time, was more than ten times as much, not adjusted for inflation. Alas, the Logitech QuickCam had lower resolution, but still a better picture.

This was a very intreresting read, as I naively assumed that USB cameras had to follow some HID-like standard also for polling images off of it, like a scanner's TWAIN driver model back in the days. It was enlightening to read that they indeed seem to have had a unique encoding not shared with other cameras.

Bird-Roulette-as-a-service in 3 ... 2 ... 1 ...

The AI will not be happy when it hears about this ...

SoundBlaster / Cambridge SoundWorks set of subwoofer and satellite speakers with long wires did this, too. Freaked me out when I suddenly heard voices inside my apartment at night. Turned out it had suddenly started to pick up a radio talk program.

Benchmark it once on each device. Then have a user-friendly slider.

"Do you want your security to be:"

a) "It only secures pr0n from my aunt" (1s for fetching a password) b) "Not great, not terrible": (5s for fetching a password) c) "Pretty Good Protectivity": (10s for fetching a password) d) "The CIA haunts me and my name is Edward: (24 minutes for fetching a password)

Sorry, I left said shell script at a company I have now departed from.

As for the other thing, not at this time. Again, truly sorry! I'm a bit overwhelmed in my life right now, maybe some later time. But can you send me a link to the project nonetheless, if there is one?

You're absolutely right!

Man, I used to download so many no-cd patches back in the days, but lumped it all in with "real" copy protection in my mind.

+2 for the trip down memory lane. -1 because now I need to drink before noon to forget about the horrors of fiddling with CD-ROM based games and their silly schemes. So yeah, +1 :)