FeedCity

A Shy Kid Builds the Taiwanese Tech Industry

I strongly suspect that Market Research Future, or a subcontractor, is conducting an automated spam campaign which uses a Large Language Model to evaluate a Mastodon instance, submit a plausible application for an account, and to post slop which links to Market Research Future reports. [...]

I don’t know how to run a community forum in this future. I do not have the time or emotional energy to screen out regular attacks by Large Language Models, with the knowledge that making the wrong decision costs a real human being their connection to a niche community.

— Aphyr, The Future of Forums is Lies, I Guess

Tags: spam, ai, llms, ai-ethics, slop, generative-ai, mastodon, community, moderation

Become a command-line superhero with Simon Willison's llm tool Christopher Smith ran a mini hackathon in Albany New York at the weekend around uses of my LLM - the first in-person event I'm aware of dedicated to that project! He prepared this video version of the opening tal...

After publishing my Analysis of Links From The White House’s “Wire” Website, Tina Nguyen, political correspondent at The Verge, reached out with some questions. Her questions made me realize that the numbers in my analysis weren’t quite correct (I wasn’t de-depulicating link...

Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists

Adrian Holovaty describes how his SoundSlice service saw an uptick in users attempting to use their sheet music scanner to import ASCII-art guitar tab... because it turned out ChatGPT had hallucinated that as a feature SoundSlice supported and was telling users to go there!

So they built that feature. Easier than convincing OpenAI to somehow patch ChatGPT to stop it from hallucinating a feature that doesn't exist.

Adrian:

To my knowledge, this is the first case of a company developing a feature because ChatGPT is incorrectly telling people it exists. (Yay?)

Via Hacker News

Tags: adrian-holovaty, ai, openai, generative-ai, chatgpt, llms, ai-ethics

There’s a video on YouTube from “Technology Connections” — who I’ve never heard of or watched until now — called Algorithms are breaking how we think. I learned of this video from Gedeon Maheux of The Iconfactory fame. Speaking in the context of why they made Tapestry, he sa...

I Shipped a macOS App Built Entirely by Claude Code Indragie Karunaratne has "been building software for the Mac since 2008", but recently decided to try Claude Code to build a side project: Context, a native Mac app for debugging MCP servers: There is still skill and itera...

There was a whole chain of separate departments dealing with proletarian literature, music, drama, and entertainment generally. Here were produced rubbishy newspapers containing almost nothing except sport, crime and astrology, sensational five-cent novelettes, films oozing with sex, and sentimental songs which were composed entirely by mechanical means on a special kind of kaleidoscope known as a versificator. [...]

It was one of countless similar songs published for the benefit of the proles by a sub-section of the Music Department. The words of these songs were composed without any human intervention whatever on an instrument known as a versificator.

— Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell predicts generative AI, published 1949

Tags: ai-ethics, ai, generative-ai

Supabase MCP can leak your entire SQL database Here's yet another example of a lethal trifecta attack, where an LLM system combines access to private data, exposure to potentially malicious instructions and a mechanism to communicate data back out to an attacker. In this cas...

a couple days ago i pushed about 10 empty posts at once to everyone subscribed to my RSS feed. oops. sorry about that.

i've since fixed it, but most RSS readers i've seen will cache the posts indefinitely once they're published. the workaround for my own client was to delete my page and then readd it, which will unfortunately discard all your read/unread state.

the reason this happened is that i added a new kind of "stub" post, and handled that correctly on the main site, but not on the rss feed. you can see the intended layout of the stub posts here if you're interested.

These are my notes and expanded thoughts from this month’s Space News segment on ABC Radio Hobart and ABC Northern Tasmania. Every month I join Lucie Cutting on Sunday mornings to chat about what’s happening above and beyond. Here’s what we discussed, plus some of my notes, ...

Serving 200 million requests per day with a cgi-bin Jake Gold tests how well 90s-era CGI works today, using a Go + SQLIte CGI program running on a 16-thread AMD 3700X. Using CGI on modest hardware, it’s possible to serve 2400+ requests per second or 200M+ requests per day. ...

Advanced cloud services are based on good hardware, decent software, and surrounding infrastructure that combines these both into solid solutions that can be provided as a business activity. Europe is good with operating the hardware. And surprisingly, we are also good with writing software. Much of the software used by the main cloud providers is based on open source, and lots of that open source is authored by European programmers. What we sorely lack here are providers of higher level cloud services, the kind that businesses clamor for.

tl;dr: The European Commission is honestly asking for experts to advise them on ways to institute “effective and lawful access to data for law enforcement”. If you are an expert, I urge you to apply to join this group. You have until September 1st. Do read on for more details! The never-ending battle where police and intelligence services demand more/total access to communications shows no sign of stopping, even in the face of mathematical and practical impossibilities.

Cursor: Clarifying Our Pricing Cursor changed their pricing plan on June 16th, introducing a new $200/month Ultra plan with "20x more usage than Pro" and switching their $20/month Pro plan from "request limits to compute limits". This confused a lot of people. Here's Cursor'...

writing programs should be no harder than writing a resume

The more time I spend using LLMs for code, the less I worry for my career - even as their coding capabilities continue to improve. Using LLMs as part of my process helps me understand how much of my job isn't just bashing out code. My job is to identify problems that can be ...

awwaiid/gremllm Delightfully cursed Python library by Brock Wilcox, built on top of LLM: from gremllm import Gremllm counter = Gremllm("counter") counter.value = 5 counter.increment() print(counter.value) # 6? print(counter.to_roman_numerals()) # VI? You tell your Gremllm...

Mini NASes marry NVMe to Intel's efficient chip Jeff Geerling July 4, 2025

I think that a lot of resistance to AI coding tools comes from the same place: fear of losing something that has defined you for so long. People are reacting against overblown hype, and there is overblown hype. I get that, but I also think there’s something deeper going on here. When you’ve worked hard to build your skills, when coding is part of your identity and where you get your worth, the idea of a tool that might replace some of that is very threatening.

— Adam Gordon Bell, When AI Codes, What’s Left for me?

Tags: llms, careers, ai, generative-ai, ai-assisted-programming