Specific language tells, such as: unusual punctuation, including em–dashes and semicolons; hedged, safe statements, but not always; and text that showcases certain words such as “delve”.
Here’s the kicker. If you happen to include any of these words or symbols in your post they’ll stop reading and simply comment “AI slop”. This adds even less to the conversation than the parent, who may well be using an LLM to correct their second or third language and have a valid point to make.
I find MCP beneficial too, but do be aware of token usage. With a naive implementation MCP can use significantly more input tokens (and context) than equivalent skills would. With a handful of third party MCPs I’ve seen tens of thousands of tokens used before I’ve started anything.
Here’s an article from Anthropic explaining why, but it is 5 months old so perhaps it's irrelevant ancient history at this point.
Another fun related one: If your username is Tyler and you run shutdown, instead of the usual message it will say "Oh, good morning Mr. Tyler, going down?"
Discovered this in college when I was shoulder surfing a coworker who always used the username Tyler. When he typed shutdown I called it out, and he said, "wait, it doesn't do that for you? I always assumed it said that for everyone and just replaced the username!".
(For those of you too young to know, it's a reference to an Aerosmith song)
Personally I think ubiquitous software is even more important to have Easter eggs, because they're the most widely distributed, and we want as much joy as we could possibly have, before you know.
No, proper easter eggs don't introduce security issues, they're benign almost by definition. I think what made them disappear was the introduction of all the suit-wearing people who decide what the programmers are supposed to program, with no room for autonomous work within that.
Proper code doesn't either, and yet there they are! The point is they added another attack surface, however small, and another code path that should be tested.
When people started to care about 100% test coverage, they started to disappear.
> The point is they added another attack surface, however small, and another code path that should be tested.
I dunno, "attack surface" to me means "facilitate opening/vulnerability somehow" and none of the easter egg code I've seen has done that. You have any concrete examples where a easter egg made possible a security vulnerability that wouldn't be possible otherwise?
But yes, another code path created by easter eggs that wasn't tested I've seen countless of times, but never been an issue, but maybe our easter eggs always been too small in scope for that.
Or they were removed for other reasons than security.
In Star Trek: 25th Anniversary, we had a hidden animation of Captain Kirk's toupee jumping off his head and running out of the room. It was caught before release and they made us take it out since no one wanted to piss off William Shatner.
It should make you wonder instead about the appropriateness of testing over man(1) output, I suppose unless you're actually generating the format for use as man(1) input, in which case congratulations on your functional tests doing their job!
I was about to ask if anybody had looked at what it was sending home. I’m travelling so I’m not in a position to run this through a proxy for a couple of weeks, but also I’m travelling so this could be useful!
I am genuinely curious if anybody knows of a non-trivial problem being solved on one of these forums, at least for a huge company that’s palming off customer support. It just feels like screaming in to the void, only for someone to (deliberately?) misinterpret your question and give you some generic advice.
It depends on what you call "non-trivial". I found answers on how to circumvent dumb macos bugs on Apple forums at least twice in the last 6 months. One related to displays, I was about to return a new USB-C monitor which wouldn't turn on. A silly issue, but it's a bug on my book, I wouldn't find the answer on the docs.
That counts! I suppose I’m lucky enough to know of more reliable resources (macadmins.org Slack is an excellent community), and so I turn to them after reading more than a couple of threads on the Apple Support Community. Perhaps it has improved or I never dig deep enough.
I’d be at a complete loss for any obscure Windows issue though.
I use Fastmail with my own domain and 1Password. Together they give me a “masked email” button for forms that generates a random enough email address (two common words and four digits) and records the domain it was for. You can also create them ad-hoc from Fastmail’s interface.
As well as simply attributing leaks, it’s most valuable as a phishing filter. Why would my bank ever email an address I only used to trial dog food delivery?
Yeah, Fastmail's aliases are great. I used to do things described by some other commenters, like myemail+nameofservice@ and whatnot, but this way the email is automatically generated and you don't have to put any thought into it.
Anokion (now bankrupt) also seemed to have some progress along these lines (link below).
A close family member suffers from MS and is on the more effective but less safe drugs available. They haven’t suffered a relapse since starting them four years ago, but they have been hospitalised twice as a result of side effects.
As we learn more about the relationship between the immune system and various seemingly unrelated diseases the research and understanding has massively increased over the last few years. I’m cautiously optimistic that better treatments aren’t far away. An ancestor was lobotomised for hysteria in the 1960s, before being diagnosed with MS.
I wrote a longer comment already (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47352526) but looking at the hot run performance and making big hand wavy guesses, the performance difference might not be as big as you'd expect.
I haven't tried the newer I7i and I8g instance types (the newest instances with local storage) for myself, but AWS claims "I7i instances offer up to 45TB of NVMe storage with up to 50% better real-time storage performance, up to 50% lower storage I/O latency, and up to 60% lower storage I/O latency variability compared to I4i instances."
I benchmarked I4i at ~2GB/s read, so let's say I7i gets 3GB/s. The Verge benchmarked the 256GB Neo at 1.7GB/s read, and I'd expect the 512GB SSD to be faster than that.
Of course, an application specific workload will have its own characteristics, but this has to be a win for a $700 device.
It's hard to find a comparable AWS instance, and any general comparison is meaningless because everybody is looking at different aspects of performance and convenience. The cheapest I* is $125/mo on-demand, $55/mo if you pay for three years up front, $30/mo if you can work with spot instances. i8g.large is 468GB NVMe, 16GB, 2 vCPUs (proper cores on graviton instances, Intel/AMD instance headline numbers include hyperthreading).
Apple introduced User Enrollment from iOS 13 onwards, which is the preferred way to do BYOD enrollments. This enrollment type does not support the erase capability.
What you mean is the device enrollment on non-supervised devices, however and to my knowledge, enterprises do not use this, or if they do, it is very rare. (edit: And if they do, it's apparently a grave mistake.)
Specific language tells, such as: unusual punctuation, including em–dashes and semicolons; hedged, safe statements, but not always; and text that showcases certain words such as “delve”.
Here’s the kicker. If you happen to include any of these words or symbols in your post they’ll stop reading and simply comment “AI slop”. This adds even less to the conversation than the parent, who may well be using an LLM to correct their second or third language and have a valid point to make.
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