[–] 9 points 1 day ago

It would seem so: https://www.theregister.com/security/2026/07/29/word-worm-crawls-into-copilot-spreads-chaos/5280588

It makes sense: with LLMs and agents based on them, even plain text becomes effectively executable, so any document can carry malicious instructions. It's worse with complex document formats like DOCX, ODT, or PDF, since text can be hidden from the human eye and escape detection by review. Very risky tech...

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  • [–] 9 points 1 week ago (1 child)

    Our company develops software for medical devices. Risk assessment is everything, and we currently do "You can use AI, but you are responsible that the result works and is correct" and "You can use it, but do not input any company secrets, confidential data, medical records, or things like passwords and security-relevant data".

    I guess the difference is we're too busy making things and we don't have the time to brag about AI on social media? Also we're small and don't have the reach anyway.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago (1 child)

    I think this will depend on the industry. Slow vs fast moving, regulated vs not, whether someone depends on your API or not, etc.

    But regardless, having had to deal with some legacy code written 10 years ago by someone who isn't working at the company anymore, I would take an outdated spec over none at all. At least then I know what people intended back then, what they cared about, what they had and hadn't considered. As long as the spec is written by a human, that information is surely valuable.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 month ago (3 children)

    You end up with a nice spec that you wouldn't have had otherwise? That has value even if you discard all the LLM-generated code.

    I think experienced engineers are able to go straight from a vague requirement to an implementation without that intermediate step, and that power is easy to abuse. We build an implicit spec on our head, which gets translated to code on the fly, and then gets forgotten.

    Not defending the LLM technology, but i do think this is one of the upside.

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  • [–] 5 points 4 months ago

    To me it's less about the aesthetics and more about ergonomics. I still feel at times that the UI, specifically the toolbar, is jumbled together without much cohesion. Or that the interface has been designed to allow entering inputs to someone else's tool, rather than built for me to do what I need.

    I'm sure some of it can probably be customized; I don't actually use it that much that I feel the need to tinker.

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  • [–] 6 points 5 months ago

    Have not used it for programming.

    At work, this is to some extent because we haven't decided yet whether to trust sending away our codebase to be potentially trained on.

    In general, this is because I find the agressive FOMO-inducing marketting revolting, and because it would be increasing our dependence on big tech companies where I believe we should do just the opposite.

    I did use it once or twice to get pointers on topics I wasn't familiar with (e.g., new standards or protocols, ...), mostly just to get a helicopter view and some sources to follow it up when i was in a rush at work. Would not do that on my personal time.

    I wouldn't object to using an open-source/open-training, ethically trained, self hosted model.

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  • [–] 24 points 5 months ago

    The vast majority of users don't need "more meat" in their OS. They need stability. Linux Mint works great on that front, I don't see the need to loose focus with multiple new distros. Not everyone needs to jump distro every month.

    Disclaimer: i've been using Linux Mint for over 10 years without ever hopping to something else. And I'm a software engineer, not a casual user.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago (5 children)

    As much as I dislike AI, programming is a field where there's always something for someone to hate. E.g., should we ban C++ articles because there's a lot of Rust fans that hate them?

    Your two options are not exclusive. Just create a community to discuss AI programming, cross post to the generic programming community if you think it's relevant, and let people upvote/downvote as they see fit.

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  • [–] 0 points 1 year ago

    Where to begin... I think numerous sources already discuss what is bad about Amazon, the shopping website, and its CEO. One among many other issues, which I think shows best what Amazon's values are: for all the resources they have, the Amazon website is terrible to use, and it's done on purpose. Search filters are useless, promoted products show up everywhere... The website isn't designed for you to find the things you want, it's designed for you to buy what somebody else wants to sell. This isn't a business model I care for, and if that's what the company is about, I don't want anything to do with them or any of their products, no matter how good or popular.

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  •  

    curl https://some-url/ | sh

    I see this all over the place nowadays, even in communities that, I would think, should be security conscious. How is that safe? What's stopping the downloaded script from wiping my home directory? If you use this, how can you feel comfortable?

    I understand that we have the same problems with the installed application, even if it was downloaded and installed manually. But I feel the bar for making a mistake in a shell script is much lower than in whatever language the main application is written. Don't we have something better than "sh" for this? Something with less power to do harm?

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