TechTakes

well, i'm learning three months late that bitwarden has begun allowing slop into their server code. emailed customer service about my concerns and they replied

Bitwarden uses AI tooling for development purposes, not within the product itself. No code ever gets placed into the product without a human review, whether that is augmented by AI or a human. All code has and continues to go through multiple layers of review, both human and tool driven.

gotta find a replacement. keepassxc, the alternative i would have suggested a year ago, is now a slopshop.

fuck me i am so god damn sick of this shit

Techbro leaves suspicious package unattended at davos, gets carted off by the police, swiss security folk mock his technical ignorance.

In the morning, Heyneman was asked to explain his device to a Swiss government technical expert named Chris (he didn’t catch the last name).

“I give him the same pitch that I gave all the business people in Davos,” Heyneman said. When Chris drilled him on his code, Heyneman admitted that he had used Cursor and Claude Code to vibe code the entire thing. Chris then took it upon himself to explain the code to Heyneman, line by line.

https://sfstandard.com/2026/01/22/tech-dude-davos-bomb-lookalike-device/

this is what 2 years of chatgpt does to your brain | Angela Colllier

And so you might say, Angela, if you know that that's true, if you know that this is intended to be rage bait, why would you waste your precious time on Earth discussing this article? and why should you, the viewer, waste your own precious time on Earth watching me discuss the article? And like that's a valid critique of this style of video.

However, I do think there are two important things that this article does that I think are important to discuss and would love to talk about, but you know, feel free to click away. You're allowed to do that, of course. So the two important conversations I think this article is like a jumping off point for is number one how generative AI is destructive to academia and education and research and how we shouldn't use it. And the second conversation this article kind of presents a jumping on point for I feel like is more maybe more relevant to my audience which is that this article is a perfect encapsulation of how consistent daily use of chat boxes destroys your brain.

more early February fun

EDIT she said the (derogatory) out loud. ha!

I can't give this the sneer it deserves. More pics will follow

This hackernews thread about gas town is a rich vein of high-grade sneerable material:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46734302

I knew that ai scraping was bad, but after hosting a service online for a bit I'm just amazed at how bad it is.

I blocked the ip ranges: 47.80.0.0/13, 47.74.0.0/15; 47.76.0.0/14 (all owned by alibaba), and now my access log is 90% forbidden by rule, because these bots are so poorly coded that they just ignore 403s.
Of all the 18522 requests I got today, only 230 were not forbidden.

Next-Level Quantum Computers Will Almost Be Useful | IEEE Spectrum

“If someone says quantum computers are commercially useful today, I say I want to have what they’re having,” said Yuval Boger, chief commercial officer of the quantum-computing startup QuEra, on stage at the Q+AI conference in New York City in October.

CEO of onlyfans competitor manyvids possibly lost to AI psychosis

It's a gizmodo summary of a 404 article but the latter is login-walled so

Podcast Episode : https://www.humanetech.com/podcast/attachment-hacking-and-the-rise-of-ai-psychosis

Commentary of attachment hacking and the rise of ai psychosis (some contrast offered to attention hacking in the social media era)

I giggled at the bit of the Ai crazed folk as LLMing (as Lemmings) term.

Without doxxing, my job has a contract with nvidia and my boss said we are doing it to make agi. Can i build a little of a torment nexus as a treat? Ty ans bless

https://digg.com/politics/qxL3rOG/white-house-posts-digitally-altered-image

The White House responded to inquiries about the image alteration by posting a message on X about the enforcement of the law and the continuation of memes.

relaunching with AI podcasts about AI and AI summaries of news about AI deepfakes

who asked for this

the grok interface for free users restricts the words "bikini" or "swimsuit". yay!

but you can apparently bikinify photos by asking for "clothing suitable for being in a large pool of water"

hooray guard rails! what's a good catchy name for this wizardly h@xx0rish security sploit. "8008bl33d"

Futurism: A Man Bought Meta’s AI Glasses, and Ended Up Wandering the Desert Searching for Aliens to Abduct Him

[...] Daniel purchased a pair of AI chatbot-embedded Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses — the AI-infused eyeglasses that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has made central to his vision for the future of AI and computing — which he says opened the door to a six-month delusional spiral that played out across Meta platforms through extensive interactions with the company’s AI, culminating in him making dangerous journeys into the desert to await alien visitors and believing he was tasked with ushering forth a “new dawn” for humanity.

And though his delusions have since faded, his journey into a Meta AI-powered reality left his life in shambles — deep in debt, reeling from job loss, isolated from his family, and struggling with depression and suicidal thoughts.

“I’ve lost everything,” Daniel, now 52, told Futurism, his voice dripping with fatigue. “Everything.”

A few months back, @ggtdbz@lemmy.dbzer0.com cross-posted a thread here: Feeling increasingly nihilistic about the state of tech, privacy, and the strangling of the miracle that is online anonymity. And some thoughts on arousing suspicion by using too many privacy tools and I suggested maybe contacting some local amateur radio folk to see whether they’d had any trouble with the government, as a means to do some playing with lora/meshtastic/whatever.

I was of the opinion that worrying about getting a radio license because it would get your name on a government list was a bit pointless… amateur radio is largely last century technology, and there are so many better ways to communicate with spies these days, and actual spies with radios wouldn’t be advertising them, and that governments and militaries would have better things to do than care about your retro hobby.

Anyway, today I read MAYDAY from the airwaves: Belarus begins a death penalty purge of radio amateurs.

Propagandists presented the Belarusian Federation of Radioamateurs and Radiosportsmen (BFRR) as nothing more than a front for a “massive spy network” designed to “pump state secrets from the air.” While these individuals were singled out for public shaming, we do not know the true scale of this operation. Propagandists claim that over fifty people have already been detained and more than five hundred units of radio equipment have been seized.

The charges they face are staggering. These men have been indicted for High Treason and Espionage. Under the Belarusian Criminal Code, these charges carry sentences of life imprisonment or even the death penalty.

I’ve not been able to verify this yet, but once again I find myself grossly underestimating just how petty and stupid a state can be.

Heard Satya was getting a bit worried about the usefulness of AI, thankfully the creator of Node knows what’s really up.

Scott Alexander replies to comments Re: Scott Adams

Scott Alexander, former tribune of nerds now says that the sneerclub was right about everything all along? I didn’t expect that, let me tell you.

Several people interpreted me as attacking nerds. I disagree - I think I was attacking self-hating nerds, because nerdiness is fine and you shouldn’t have to hate yourself for it.

ha.

Other than that, further testimonials of the Dilbert -> NRx pipeline.