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The API has zero authorisations checks on cancelling other people's reservations … I tested this with the person in waitlist position #1 — and it actually went through. So you've moved from #4 to #3 already.

— OpenClaw (running Opus 4.6), hacking an Australian gym-booking website

Tags: ai-ethics, generative-ai, openclaw, ai, ai-security-research, llms

There are at least four different Heated Rivalry shows at the Fringe this year. Earlier this week we saw Edinburgh Fringe - Heated Rivalry: The Musical Parody!. This is different because it is the unauthorized musical parody. Oh, and it is in the much larger Udderbelly venue. Some people spend the fringe watching every possible interpretation of Timon of Athens - we decided to go for doubles of …

The 1980s proved surprisingly fruitful for licensed greeting card mascots. It turns out American Greetings understood the Marvel playbook before Marvel did.

This is a technically precise and emotionally complex show with energetic delivery from a talented performer. Sadly, it did nothing for me. I found it a little one note in terms of storytelling. The rhythm of the story followed all the predictable beats which I thought was a little repetitive. There's no doubt he's a gifted storyteller. The comedy is suitably dark with some good moments of joy …

Easily the worst show we've seen at the fringe. Garrett Millerick has trained an AI on his stand up. Can it replace him? Yes, but only in the sense that the AI is obnoxiously dull and Millerick is simply obnoxious. He insulted a kid who he'd called on to stage to help him. Not even in a jokey way, just being rude. His splenetic rants against religion and politics were beyond tired. The dating…

But then users start to report a weird bug. It's the 4th time your team has been trying to fix it. I mean... asking AI to fix it. Unfortunately, it seems like not even Fable can figure it out.

You go talk to the person who worked on this feature.

"So where does the data come from?"

"Hmm... actually I don't know. Let me ask Claude."

You sit next to each other watching an endless wall of text appear on the screen. Neither of you has any idea whether any of it is true but Claude seems very confident. [...]

This project has become so convoluted, with so many layers and services, that no one on your team could possibly start to understand what's going on.

— Florian Herrengt, AI is removing the middle class of software engineering

Tags: ai-misuse, cognitive-debt, generative-ai, ai, llms, ai-assisted-programming

Release: datasette-upload-dbs 0.5a0 This plugin has been around for a while - it lets users upload a brand new SQLite database to a hosted Datasette instance, at which point that database will start being served by that instance. It can also be used to atomically swa...

I'm a sucker for anything Beatles related - and the fringe has no shortage of musicals, reinterpretations, and shameless cash-ins of the Fab Four. When Vincent Met John is an oddity in that it is a normal play, rather than a musical. It is also an oddity in being 90 minutes long rather than the standard fringe slot of no more than an hour. What if van Gogh and Lennon could have a conversation?…

Suppose you’ve never worked at the command line and you’re reading a book about the bash shell. You read that !$ is a shortcut to refer to the last word of the previous command. That little fact will almost certainly not stick in your head for a couple reasons. First, you probably see no need […]

The post Cryptic but consistent first appeared on John D. Cook.

There is a machine called Productivity, and on this machine there is a knob and a button. The knob increases productivity, and the button is labeled "reset." My job was data entry at a non-profit. It was my first job in the US where I didn't have to lift heavy objects. My ...

45 years ago today, IBM introduced the original IBM PC. This computer changed the industry and change the world. There is no shortage of analysis about its impact, but I find a lot of it self-serving and, in some cases

The post IBM PC introduced, August 12, 1981 appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

Today's links Model collapse: Living in a world that's trained on itself. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Wired v Dutch hackers; NYT v DMCA; Hair gel terrorist threat does not exist; AT&T merger is a screwjob; Smart cities are stupid; RIP Reaga...

A little wind noise, a little connectivity flakiness, and a little lip-sync issues from YouTube, but look at that view! 🤩 Back to business, it's the Brinks Home FAQ I found most interesting this week. I mean, how do you write your own FAQ then fail to

It had been there long before Windows 95, but nobody remembered.

The post The little-known <TT>winstart.bat</TT> batch file appeared first on The Old New Thing.

A list.

There are no lossless transformations of natural-language text Sophie Alpert shares her "internal policy on acceptable use of AI writing by engineers". It's a short read (supporting its own recommendations) and really good. If you chose to have LLMs help massage your writing...

Stealing Reasoning Traces from Proprietary LLM APIs A vanity domain name (stolen-thoughts.com) for a neat paper: Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google return encrypted chain-of-thought blocks to clients that can be replayed across sessions, users, and models. We take a trace produc...

Sometimes at the Edinburgh Fringe, you take a punt on a random show because it's close by and you can't be bothered walking any further. Justina Seselskaite's set was round the corner and started in 7 ½ minutes - so we scurried into one of the less glamorous rooms of The Hilton, sat at the front (as is our wont), and wondered what on earth Lithuanian stand-up was like. It was sublime! There's a …

Microsoft today released updates to remedy at least 398 security vulnerabilities in its Windows operating systems and supported software, including one weakness that is already being actively exploited and two others that were publicly detailed prior to today.

Part of going to The Fringe is to expose yourself to new ideas, different art forms, and a range of artworks. Not everything needs to be a "zany" comedy about AI or a loving pastiche of that 1990s disaster movie you love. So I found myself sat in a Unitarian Church listening to a harpsichord and choral organ intertwined with a violin and cello while a soprano soared through Handel's greatest…