Alterslash

the unofficial Slashdot digest
 

Contents

  1. Chinese Official’s Use of ChatGPT Revealed a Global Intimidation Opperation
  2. iPhone and iPad Are First Consumer Devices Cleared for NATO Classified Data
  3. Firefox 148 Lets You Kill All AI Features in One Click
  4. Which Piece of Speculative Fiction Had the Greatest Single-Day Stock Market Impact?
  5. The Government Just Made it Harder to See What Spy Tech it Buys
  6. The AI Case Against Indian IT Ignores What Indian IT Actually Does
  7. New York Sues Valve For Enabling ‘Illegal Gambling’ With Loot Boxes
  8. Burger King Will Use AI To Check If Employees Say ‘Please’ and ‘Thank You’
  9. HBO Max’s Password-Sharing Crackdown Will Expand Globally in 2026
  10. EBay Is Laying Off About 800 Workers, 6% of Global Workforce
  11. Americans Are Leaving the US in Record Numbers
  12. Cloudflare Experiment Ports Most of Next.js API in ‘One Week’ With AI
  13. Uber Employees Have Built an AI Clone of Their CEO To Practice Presentations Before the Real Thing
  14. AI Can Find Hundreds of Software Bugs — Fixing Them Is Another Story
  15. Prediction Market Platform Kalshi Discloses First Insider Trading Enforcement Action

Alterslash picks up to the best 5 comments from each of the day’s Slashdot stories, and presents them on a single page for easy reading.

Chinese Official’s Use of ChatGPT Revealed a Global Intimidation Opperation

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
New submitter sabbede shares a report from CNN Politics:
A sprawling Chinese influence operation — accidentally revealed by a Chinese law enforcement official’s use of ChatGPT — focused on intimidating Chinese dissidents abroad, including by impersonating US immigration officials, according to a new report from ChatGPT-maker OpenAI. The Chinese law enforcement official used ChatGPT like a diary to document the alleged covert campaign of suppression, OpenAI said. In one instance, Chinese operators allegedly disguised themselves as US immigration officials to warn a US-based Chinese dissident that their public statements had supposedly broken the law, according to the ChatGPT user. In another case, they describe an effort to use forged documents from a US county court to try to get a Chinese dissident’s social media account taken down.
“This is what Chinese modern transnational repression looks like,” Ben Nimmo, principal investigator at OpenAI, told reporters ahead of the report’s release. “It’s not just digital. It’s not just about trolling. It’s industrialized. It’s about trying to hit critics of the CCP [Chinese Communist Party] with everything, everywhere, all at once.”
Michael Horowitz, a former Pentagon official focused on emerging technologies, said the report from OpenAI “clearly demonstrates the way that China is actively employing AI tools to enhance information operations. US-China AI competition is continuing to intensify. This competition is not just taking place at the frontier, but in how China’s government is planning and implementing the day-to-day of their surveillance and information apparatus.”

iPhone and iPad Are First Consumer Devices Cleared for NATO Classified Data

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
Apple’s iPhone and iPad running iOS 26 and iPadOS 26 have become the first consumer mobile devices cleared for NATO-restricted classified data. No special software or settings are required. MacRumors reports:
Apple’s devices are the first and only consumer mobile products that have reached this government certification level after security testing and evaluation by the German government. iPhones and iPads running iOS 26 and iPadOS 26 are now certified for use with classified data in all NATO nations.

In an announcement of the security clearance, Apple touted its security features: “Apple designs security into all of its products from the start, ensuring the most sophisticated protections are built in across hardware, software, and Apple silicon. This unique approach allows Apple users to benefit from industry-leading security protections such as best-in-class encryption, biometric authentication with Face ID, and groundbreaking features like Memory Integrity Enforcement. These same protections are now recognized as meeting stringent government and international security requirements, even for restricted data.”

Firefox 148 Lets You Kill All AI Features in One Click

Posted by msmash View on SlashDot Skip
Mozilla has released Firefox 148 for Windows, macOS and Linux, bringing a new AI Settings section that lets users disable all of the browser’s AI-powered features in one click and then selectively re-enable the ones they actually want, such as the local translation tool that works locally rather than in the cloud.

The update also patches more than 50 security vulnerabilities — none known to be under active exploitation — over half of which Mozilla classifies as high risk, including five sandbox escape flaws and eight use-after-free bugs in the JavaScript engine that could allow code execution.

Firefox is just an escape valve now

By xack • Score: 5, Interesting Thread
It still wastes too much “free money” from Google on useless outreach and slop features instead of catching up to web standards, I am fed up of Bugzilla reports being ignored, it’s no good pointing them out here because Mozilla would have fixed the bugs long ago if they actually read their own Bugzilla instead.

I’ve pointed out again and again that Mozilla is too dependent on ublock origin while at the same time stuffing their browser with advertising instead of using their donation budget properly. I call them Mo$illa for a reason. As soon as Ladybird and Servo are out of beta most remaining Firefox users will dump Gecko for more web tech focused engines instead.

Mozilla is due for an Xfree86/Xlibre type rebellion, and I’m not afraid to say that because much of the open source world is changing with many new devs coming in because of Microsoft ruining Windows and with legacy code being rewritten faster then ever now. Mozilla is history now, Phoenix was 24 years ago, it’s long due for another rebirth.

“Lets You Kill All AI Features” meh

By oldgraybeard • Score: 3 Thread
To bad they added them in the first place!

Already disabled

By thePsychologist • Score: 3 Thread

I only wish I could do more than disable: tear the code right out of firefox. I hate AI with a passion.

Which Piece of Speculative Fiction Had the Greatest Single-Day Stock Market Impact?

Posted by msmash View on SlashDot Skip
Speaking of the Citrini’s blog post, which imagines a near-future AI-driven economic collapse, and which ended up help triggering the S&P 500’s worst single-day drop in nearly two weeks on Monday, FT Alphaville decided to track how US stock markets have moved on the release days of notable dystopian speculative fiction throughout history. The story adds:
You may contend that this is facile. We would agree. You might contend that the comparisons make no sense because it’s possible to read a blog post during a single work shift, but it’s tricker to complete a whole novel (or sneak out to watch a movie). We would contend: do you really think traders read? Let’s begin.
The methodology — tracking S&P 500 daily moves for post-1986 releases and DJIA moves for pre-1986 ones — crowned The Matrix as the all-time leader, its March 1999 US debut coinciding with a 1.11% drop in the index. Citrini’s “The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis” came in a close second at -1.04%. On the positive end, the 2013 release of Her, a film about a man falling in love with an AI agent, coincided with the largest gain in the set at +1.66%.

Premise of the story is flawed

By shanen • Score: 3 Thread

Someone is assuming there is causation in stock prices. Just a matter of opinion without any causal connection to reality these days.

The original premise of the stock market made a certain amount of sense. So perhaps we should correlate stock market changes against historical fiction.

Go through all the genres until we find the one with the highest correlation!

The War of The Worlds

By nospam007 • Score: 4, Insightful Thread

The best candidate is almost certainly H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds — but not the novel itself.

The single biggest one-day market shock caused by speculative fiction came from the 1938 radio adaptation by Orson Welles broadcast on CBS.

On 30 October 1938, Welles presented the story as fake breaking news about a Martian invasion. Many listeners tuned in late and missed the disclaimer. Panic followed: people fled homes, jammed phone lines, and some businesses shut early.

Financial effect? Not a crash, but measurable disruption.

Newspapers and later economic analyses reported:

  trading desks received waves of calls asking if New York was under attack
  some investors attempted emergency sell orders
  retail activity briefly froze in parts of the Northeast
  next-day market commentary explicitly mentioned “radio panic”

The Dow Jones Industrial Average did not collapse, but historians consider it the clearest case where fiction directly interfered with real market behavior within hours.

Why this one stands out:

Science fiction normally influences markets slowly, by shaping expectations (AI, space travel, cyberpunk tech, etc.). The Welles broadcast instead created an instant perceived reality shock.

A strong runner-up, though less direct, is Neuromancer by William Gibson. It didn’t move markets in a day, but it helped inspire the cybersecurity and internet economy that later drove enormous tech valuations.

So the answer depends on definition:

Immediate, single-day behavioral impact War of the Worlds broadcast (1938).
Largest long-term capital impact inspired by fiction cyberpunk and AI literature reshaping entire sectors.

Speculative fiction rarely moves markets because it predicts the future. It moves them when people briefly believe the future has already arrived.

Raises hand

By fahrbot-bot • Score: 5, Funny Thread

Which Piece of Speculative Fiction Had the Greatest Single-Day Stock Market Impact?

Trump’s State of the Union speech? :-)

The Government Just Made it Harder to See What Spy Tech it Buys

Posted by msmash View on SlashDot Skip
An anonymous reader shares a report:
It might look like something from the early days of the internet, with its aggressively grey color scheme and rectangles nested inside rectangles, but FPDS.gov is one of the most important resources for keeping tabs on what powerful spying tools U.S. government agencies are buying. It includes everything from phone hacking technology, to masses of location data, to more Palantir installations.

Or rather, it was an incredible tool and the basis for countless of my own investigations and others. Because on Wednesday, the government shut it down. Its replacement, another site called SAM.gov with Uncle Sam branding, frankly sucks, and makes it demonstrably harder to reliably find out what agencies, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), are spending tax payers dollars on.

“FPDS may have been a little clunky, but its simple, old-school interface made it extremely functional and robust. Every facet of government operations touches on contracting at one point, and this was the first tool that many investigative journalists and researchers would reach for to quickly find out what the government is buying and who is selling it, and how these contracts all fit together,” Dave Maass, director of investigations at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told me.

Let’s just say it, it’s American-fascism

By jacks smirking reven • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

And I am speaking to the overly performative nature of this administration, I mean, “sam.gov” because of Uncle Sam? Like that has zero to do with anything, it’s just performative “patriotism” masking what is overall a bad action and they are expecting their supporters to just “relax guy, don’t worry about what spy tools the government uses, just feel patriotic! Uncle Sam!”

It’s the same with Trump putting his face on every agency federal building (including the DOJ) nothing ominous about that at all! Relax!

So if supports of the administration don’t want people calling them fascist maybe you need to tell the admin to stop doing fashy shit.

SAM ain’t new

By White Yeti • Score: 4, Interesting Thread

The “System for [contract] Award Management” has been around since at least 2004, and maybe usable since 2009. I’ve followed links from Slashdot that led to NASA RFI’s or RFP’s on SAM. I’m not saying it’s better than the other system (which I haven’t seen), but it’s nothing new.

Re: Let’s just say it, it’s American-fascism

By Engineer_Calvin • Score: 4, Insightful Thread

I’m in Australia. Notionally an ally of the USA. Frankly nobody trusts that any agreement signed with the USA is worth anything. Trump has burned all soft power to the ground.

Re putting heads of government or heads of state on government buildings- no chance. Maybe in a communist state. Not in a free country that the USA would prefer to be compared against.

The AI Case Against Indian IT Ignores What Indian IT Actually Does

Posted by msmash View on SlashDot Skip
A fictional memo set in June 2028, published by short seller Citrini Research, wiped roughly $10 billion off Indian IT stocks in a single trading session on February 24 and sent the Nifty IT index down as much as 5.3% — its worst single-day fall since August 2023 — on the argument that AI coding agents have collapsed the cost advantage of Indian developers to the price of electricity. The index has shed more than $68 billion in market value in February alone, its worst month since 2003.

But the core claim that India’s entire $205 billion software export industry rests on cheap labor is roughly 15 years out of date, an analysis argues, custom application maintenance alone accounts for about 35% of a typical Indian IT firm’s revenue, per HSBC, and enterprise platforms require deterministic outputs that probabilistic AI systems cannot wholesale replace. HSBC estimates gross AI-led revenue deflation for the sector at 14-16%, a measured headwind rather than an extinction event. The story adds:
24 years of software export data that has never posted a decline, $200 billion in annual revenue, partnerships with the very AI labs whose products are supposed to be the instrument of the sector’s destruction, possibly a new $1.5 trillion market category emerging at the intersection of services and software, and the largest U.S. corporates in the middle of mapping their entire workforces into process architectures that require technology partners to modernise. I think India’s IT is going to be fine.

15 years out of date?

By Puls4r • Score: 5, Insightful Thread
Why the hell do you think American companies continue to contract Indian programmers? It’s ALWAYS been about cost. Just that sentence turned me off to the whole article. Nothing has changed in that regard. What we see with our Indian contractors are a bunch of very technically proficient individuals who are utterly disconnected from the actual processes they are supposed to be considering. Oh.... and roosters crowing during meetings. Always with roosters.

Not to disparage …

By nosfucious • Score: 3 Thread

There are many great, hard working, smart and motivated Indian IT workers. More power to them. Live long and prosper.

What Indian IT firms will do it employ the most brain dead, cheapest, uneducated and unmotivated individuals and sell them as experts. And somehow, they get away with it. Distance also makes it harder to hold them to account.

Says as much about the quality of the management that I have been inflicted with, as it does about the ethics of the Indian IT firms.

Free clues: In any so-called low wage country, the good ones have already left the country. What you’re left with is “cheap”, in all senses of the word. You’ll also have to deal with major cultural clashes. You’ll have to spend a lot of time micro-managing and evaluating personnel, more-so than if you’d had outsourced locally, or had direct employees. Caveat emptor.

New York Sues Valve For Enabling ‘Illegal Gambling’ With Loot Boxes

Posted by msmash View on SlashDot Skip
New York state has filed a lawsuit against Valve alleging that randomized loot boxes in games like Counter-Strike 2, Team Fortress 2, and Dota 2 amount to a form of unregulated gambling, letting users “pay for the chance to win a rare virtual item of significant monetary value.” From a report:
While many randomized video game loot boxes have drawn attention and regulation from various government bodies in recent years, the New York suit calls out Valve’s system specifically for “enabl[ing] users to sell the virtual items they have won, either through its own virtual marketplace, the Steam Community Market, or through third-party marketplaces.”

The vast majority of Valve’s in-game loot boxes contain skins that can only be resold for a few cents, the suit notes, while the rarest skins can be worth thousands of dollars through marketplaces on and off of Steam. That fits the statutory definition of gambling as “charging an individual for a chance to win something of value based on luck alone,” according to the suit.

The Steam Wallet funds that users get through directly reselling skins “have the equivalent purchasing power on the Steam platform as cash,” the suit notes. But if a user wants to convert those Steam funds to real cash, they can do so relatively easily by purchasing a Steam Deck and reselling it to any interested party, as an investigator did while preparing the lawsuit.

Card Games

By Luthair • Score: 4, Insightful Thread
Pokemon, Magic and other cards games also use this model.

Hey! Don’t screw me out of my revenue!

By sabbede • Score: 3 Thread
Dangit NY, I’ve made almost five entire dollars selling things on Steam. Are you going to fill that gap in my income? I don’t think so! So, you can just back the heck off.

Burger King Will Use AI To Check If Employees Say ‘Please’ and ‘Thank You’

Posted by msmash View on SlashDot Skip
An anonymous reader shares a report:
Burger King is launching an AI chatbot that will live in the headsets used by employees. The voice-enabled chatbot, called “Patty,” is part of an overarching BK Assistant platform that will not only assist employees with meal preparation but also evaluate their interactions with customers for “friendliness.”

Thibault Roux, Burger King’s chief digital officer, tells The Verge that the company compiled information from franchisees and guests on how to measure friendliness, resulting in the fast food chain training its AI system to recognize certain words and phrases, such as “welcome to Burger King,” “please,” and “thank you.” Managers can then ask the AI assistant how their location is performing on friendliness. “This is all meant to be a coaching tool,” Roux says, adding that the company is “iterating” on capturing the tone of conversations as well.

Manna

By dargaud • Score: 5, Interesting Thread
Oh man, they read this here and then decided to implement the Torment Nexus… It’s well worth reading by the way.

Feel sorry for them

By liqu1d • Score: 5, Interesting Thread
Perhaps I’m in the minority but I genuinely don’t care for false pleasantries especially forced ones. I just want to give some money and get something in return. In this case a burger.

If AIs are evaluating me…

By marcle • Score: 5, Funny Thread

Customer: “Gimme a burger and a large fries.”
Me: “Please, thank you for your order. Thank you, please, a burger and a large fries, thank you please?
Customer: “Yup and I’m in a hurry.”
Me: “Please, thank you, one thank you burger and a please large fries, please, thank you.
Customer: “This place is weird. I’m outta here.” *runs out door*

Out of touch management

By weeboo0104 • Score: 3 Thread

Know why they are implementing this? They want to show the board and shareholders they are using “AI”.
If they really wanted to improve the food or overall dining experience, they would take care of their supply chain issues, food quality issues, and cleanliness issues in the stores.

I haven’t been to a Burger King in over 6 months and I have no plans on going back. I ordered 2 burgers and the buns were very stale and one of the side items I ordered was unavailable so I just ordered the burgers. I tried a different Burger King about a month after the first one and was appalled by the dirt and garbage along the walls and floor in the dining area. Against my better judgement, I ordered a Bacon King meal and was rewarded with lukewarm meat and stale buns again for the low, low price of $15-$16 dollars.

I can get a burger at my local pub or brewery for that price and the burger comes piping hot with fries or chips and a pint of beer.

Burger King needs to wake up.

Reverse centaurs Are the future

By FictionPimp • Score: 3 Thread

https://pluralistic.net/2025/1…

HBO Max’s Password-Sharing Crackdown Will Expand Globally in 2026

Posted by msmash View on SlashDot Skip
HBO Max will be cracking down on password sharing around the world. From a report:
The streamer first started cracking down on password sharing in the United States late last August. Subscribers are now able to add an additional out-of-household account for $7.99 a month. Before that August change, Warner Bros. Discovery had been testing for months to determine who may or may not be a “legitimate user,” as CEO and President for Warner Bros. Discovery Global Streaming and Games JB Perrette described the plan.

On Thursday during the company’s fourth quarter earnings call for 2025, WBD revealed that the streaming limitations would be expanding. This news came as part of an answer about which levers the company plans to pull to grow HBO Max. Password crackdowns have proven to be a lucrative way to both boost revenue and subscriptions. Netflix, for example, saw 9 million more subscribers after its first wave of password crackdowns in 2024. The caveat is that password crackdowns do not lead to consistent growth, and they often infuriate subscribers.

Do crackdowns work or not?

By Echoez • Score: 4, Interesting Thread

The article is all over the place with its analysis: On the one hand, it writes “The caveat is that password crackdowns do not lead to consistent growth, and they often infuriate subscribers”. Then immediately follows up with “There’s typically one big wave of new users who were previously sharing an account before the streamer plateaus to its new normal. Netflix, for example, saw 9 million more subscribers after its first wave of password crackdowns in 2024”.

9 million users might not be consistent on-going growth, but that represents 9 million new paying users. Do they stay users? If so, then 9M x $8 (or more) per month represents $72M per month, or $864M per year. Maybe that’s a one-time bump in user counts, but that’s a significant number.

I imagine that HBO looked at the results of Netflix and Disney+ password crackdowns and is seeing that it was successful in raising subscribers and revenue. “Infuriating users” isn’t an important metric if those users were never going to pay anyway.

EBay Is Laying Off About 800 Workers, 6% of Global Workforce

Posted by msmash View on SlashDot Skip
EBay is cutting about 800 jobs, or 6% of its full-time employees, saying the layoffs are needed to align its workforce with strategic priorities. From a report:
“We are taking steps to reinvest across our business and align our structure with our strategic priorities, which will affect certain roles across our workforce,” the San Jose, California-based company said early Thursday in a statement. “We are grateful for the contributions of the employees impacted and are committed to supporting them with care and respect.”

EBay will continue to hire in key areas. The cuts come a week after the company said it would acquire secondhand fashion marketplace Depop for about $1.2 billion in an effort to draw younger shoppers and after it reported robust quarterly results. Revenue increased 15% to $3 billion in the fourth quarter, surpassing analyst estimates.

Why do they do this?

By jenningsthecat • Score: 4, Funny Thread

We are taking steps to reinvest across our business and align our structure with our strategic priorities… We are grateful for the contributions of the employees impacted and are committed to supporting them with care and respect.

In the first place, what does “reinvest across our business” even mean? And how is it relevant in an announcement about laying people off?

Secondly, “align our structure with our strategic priorities” is patronizing windbaggery. Just say “we’re changing our business and some current jobs will no longer be required”.

Third, don’t be “committed” to supporting those laid off - just fucking well do it!

I’m sick of the disgusting, patronizing - there’s that word again - language coming out of c-suites. If you’re going to axe people, do it as kindly as possible, with as much support as possible when it comes to severance, references, job search assistance, etc. If you directed half the resources you currently expend on bloviating and virtue signalling toward helping those displaced, the world would be a better place for it. Stop embarrassing yourselves by kissing your own asses.

Americans Are Leaving the US in Record Numbers

Posted by msmash View on SlashDot Skip
An anonymous reader shares a report:
In its 250th year, is America, land of immigration, becoming a country of emigration? Last year the U.S. experienced something that hasn’t definitively occurred since the Great Depression: More people moved out than moved in. The Trump administration has hailed the exodus — negative net migration — as the fulfillment of its promise to ramp up deportations and restrict new visas. Beneath the stormy optics of that immigration crackdown, however, lies a less-noticed reversal: America’s own citizens are leaving in record numbers, replanting themselves and their families in lands they find more affordable and safe.

Since the Eisenhower administration, the U.S. hasn’t collected comprehensive statistics on the number of citizens leaving. Yet data on residence permits, foreign home purchases, student enrollments and other metrics from more than 50 countries show that Americans are voting with their feet to an unprecedented degree. A millions-strong diaspora is studying, telecommuting and retiring overseas. The new American dream, for some of its citizens, is to no longer live there.

In the cobblestoned streets of Lisbon, so many Americans are snapping up apartments that the newest arrivals complain they mostly hear their own language — not Portuguese. One of every 15 residents in Dublin’s trendy Grand Canal Dock district was born in the U.S., according to realtors, higher than the percentage of Americans born in Ireland during the 19th-century influx following the Potato Famine. In Bali, Colombia and Thailand, the strains of housing American remote workers paid in dollars have inspired locals to mount protests against a wave of gentrification. More than 100,000 young students are enrolled abroad for a more affordable university degree. In nursing homes mushrooming across the Mexican border, elderly Americans are turning up for low-cost care.

[…] The U.S. experienced net negative migration — an estimated loss of some 150,000 people — in 2025, and the outflow will likely increase in 2026, according to calculations by the Brookings Institution, a public-policy think tank. The number could be larger or smaller because official U.S. data doesn’t yet fully capture the number of people leaving, Brookings analysts noted. The total in-migration was between around 2.6 and 2.7 million in 2025, down from a peak of almost 6 million in 2023. The U.S. saw 675,000 deportations and 2.2 million “self-deportations” last year, according to data from the Department of Homeland Security. A Wall Street Journal analysis of 15 countries providing full or partial 2025 data showed that at least 180,000 Americans joined them — a number likely to be far higher when other countries report full statistics.

Re:Fuck this administration

By hey! • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

I don’t hate Trump. I pity him. No matter how much shit he slaps his name on, it won’t fill the hole is daddy left in him. But people that damaged shouldn’t be let anywhere near power.

Re:Fuck this administration

By notsouseful • Score: 5, Funny Thread
The biggest problem with the Democrat party is that they are not able to sufficiently stop the Republican party from destroying American democracy and the global world order.

Re:Fuck this administration

By fropenn • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

And we don’t have one. Or a Hitler. No matter how badly some people scream so.

I’m not screaming, but I genuinely would like to know how the following behaviors are not Trump being a king:

-Pardoning people after they make a large donation to him.
-Pardoning his friends and supporters, even when they clearly break the law, because they were breaking the law in support of him.
-Demanding public institutions give him free land on which he will build a hotel and other properties that will benefit him (and may contain some kind of “library”).
-Flaunting the law and saying rulings from the Supreme Court make no difference.
-Refusing to share evidence of criminal activities with local law enforcement officers.
-Hiding dozens and dozens of pages of materials from the Epstein files that allegedly implicate him in wrong doing.
-Receiving an airplane as a bribe - er, gift - and then rewarding that country with favorable policies.
-Saying he will name a person to be the leader of Venezuela IF she gives him the Nobel Peace Prize (which she did).

All of this - and more - he does while his sycophants bow down and worship him, lavishing praise on everything he does and never acknowledging or pointing out anything that he ever did was wrong or should be held accountable for.

So please, explain to me how this isn’t a king?

Re:Fuck this administration

By Calydor • Score: 5, Informative Thread

A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, and a king by any other name would act the same.

He ‘crowned’ himself when he posted an AI image of himself wearing a goddamned crown. His followers practically worship him as they would God or Jesus. He doesn’t need to call himself Majesty because everyone is already required to address him by a title; it’s just President instead of King or Emperor or Great Dear Supreme Leader.

Re:Fuck this administration

By TrekkieGod • Score: 5, Informative Thread

We don’t have a king, except in the minds of the TDS afflicted.

Ok. The founding fathers didn’t want the President of the United States to have ANY POWERS to make any decisions inside the country. The goal was for the President to merely be the administrative head to enforce laws Congress pass, and its only check on Congress was the veto power. The President also served as a Commander in Chief and had the power to sign treaties with foreign governments, but those powers were meant to be EXTREMELY limited, as they gave only Congress the power to declare war, and Congress was required to ratify any treaties with foreign governments.

If the President has the power to make ANY DECISIONS WHATSOEVER, instead of enforcing decisions those in congress have made, then it’s not the role the founding fathers wanted.

They also wanted the executive to be very neutral. Many of them were against the concept of political parties, but that turned out to be inevitable. However, up until the 12th amendment, the vice-president was the runner up, whoever got the second-most votes by the electoral college. So, under that system, Hillary would have been Trump’s VP his first term, and Harris would have been Trump’s VP his second term. Because they wanted to ensure a check even within the executive, with someone with different views being the one to break ties in the senate.

Cloudflare Experiment Ports Most of Next.js API in ‘One Week’ With AI

Posted by msmash View on SlashDot Skip
An anonymous reader shares a report:
A Cloudflare engineer says he has implemented 94% of the Next.js API by directing Anthropic’s Claude, spending about $1,100 on tokens. The purpose of the experimental project was not to show off AI coding, but to address an issue with Next.js, the popular React-based framework sponsored by Vercel.

According to Cloudflare engineering director Steve Faulkner, the Next.js tooling is “entirely bespoke… If you want to deploy it to Cloudflare, Netlify, or AWS Lambda, you have to take that build output and reshape it into something the target platform can actually run.”

The Next.js team is addressing this following numerous complaints that deploying the framework with full features on platforms other than Vercel is too difficult, with a feature in progress called deployment adapters. “Vercel will use the same adapter API as every other partner,” the company said when introducing the planned feature last year.

Jamstack folks, just use Deno already.

By Qbertino • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

No need for all this Next.js cruft to patch up Nodes shortcomings. Deno is the official successor to Node and has been around for quite long already. Secure by default, native TypeScript (no transpiling needed), Browser API fully supported, no context switching required or SSR stunts required … etc. I’m using Deno in my Jamstack stuff exclusively. Working with Node stuff feels like a throughback to PHP 3 now.

94%

By devslash0 • Score: 5, Funny Thread

Getting any work to 90% is easy. Well-known code, low-hanging fruit etc. It’s the last 10% that takes exponentially more time. And the last 1% takes forever because that’s where you actually test stuff, realise all the issues and fix subtle and difficult to spot bugs.

In short, 94% is as good as nothing. Anyone who brags about it, is just an AI show-off.

Uber Employees Have Built an AI Clone of Their CEO To Practice Presentations Before the Real Thing

Posted by msmash View on SlashDot Skip
An anonymous reader shares a report:
Some Uber employees have built an AI clone of CEO Dara Khosrowshahi — internally dubbed “Dara AI” — and have been using it to rehearse and fine-tune presentations before delivering them to the actual Khosrowshahi, he revealed on a recent podcast.

Khosrowshahi said a team member told him that some teams “make the presentation to the Dara AI as a prep for making a presentation to me,” and that the bot helps them adjust their slides and sharpen their delivery. Asked by the podcast host whether employees might eventually show Dara AI to the board, Khosrowshahi laughed but noted that AI models still can’t process and act on new information the way executives do. “When the models can learn in real-time, that is the point at which I’m going to think that, yeah, we are all replaceable,” he said.

Easiest Cost-Savings Ever

By KatherineTheGeek • Score: 4, Insightful Thread
They should just replace the CEO with the AI clone and brag to investors about the efficiency this move brings.

Of course “executives” aren’t replaceable

By magamiako1 • Score: 5, Insightful Thread
“but noted that AI models still can’t process and act on new information the way executives do”

Uh huh. I’d argue that the executive role is significantly more replaceable by AI than the janitor. So, time to go get yourself a mop and learn how to clean toilets, Mr. Exec.

Skynet

By fluffernutter • Score: 3 Thread

So they made an AI that literally wants to enslave people by paying them just enough pennies to stay alive. I hear a lot about Skynet but this is surely the beginning of the end.

Re:Easiest Cost-Savings Ever

By DarkOx • Score: 4, Interesting Thread

The average CEO makes something on the order of 281 times the typical employee.

I would hope as we explore genAI and the possibilities white collar work, boards of directors would take a hard look how much payroll it might save to get rid of some of these under performers.

Bad signs for Uber

By Dr. Spork • Score: 4, Interesting Thread
If this is what they put so much energy into - internal presentations! - then the company must have a pretty poor culture. The companies who will beat Uber put their effort into engineering, with CEOs smart enough to know who’s actually doing the good work by talking to employees in unstructured settings, not sitting through presentations. The whole thing has the whiff of “at Uber we work really hard at convincing our bosses that we’re being productive.”

AI Can Find Hundreds of Software Bugs — Fixing Them Is Another Story

Posted by msmash View on SlashDot Skip
Anthropic last week promoted Claude Code Security, a research preview capability that uses its Claude Opus 4.6 model to hunt for software vulnerabilities, claiming its red team had surfaced over 500 bugs in production open-source codebases — but security researchers say the real bottleneck was never discovery.

Guy Azari, a former security researcher at Microsoft and Palo Alto Networks, told The Register that only two to three of those 500 vulnerabilities have been fixed and none have received CVE assignments. The National Vulnerability Database already carried a backlog of roughly 30,000 CVE entries awaiting analysis in 2025, and nearly two-thirds of reported open-source vulnerabilities lacked an NVD severity score.

The curl project closed its bug bounty program because maintainers could no longer handle the flood of poorly crafted reports from AI tools and humans alike. Feross Aboukhadijeh, CEO of security firm Socket, said discovery is becoming dramatically cheaper but validating findings, coordinating with maintainers, and developing architecture-aligned patches remains slow, human-intensive work.

The “AI” can hallucinate anything at all

By Mr. Dollar Ton • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

Checking everything you get from it appropriately is and will remain more work than actually doing it yourself. As it gets “smarter” it will only require more work to figure out where it fails. At the expense of your environment, your quality of life and your future and the future of your kids.

just code to pass automation checks even if the UI

By Joe_Dragon • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

just code to pass automation checks even if the UI shows an clear error!

Ergh

By liqu1d • Score: 5, Interesting Thread
This is a result of shitty humans wasting money at a subject they don’t understand in the hopes of making a few dollars. AI cannot solve this in its current form nor probably any future ones in the LLM vein. It’s a huge shame curl had to do this to combat the shite. I wonder how long until a critical flaw is discovered in important systems but not fixed because maintainers don’t have to wade through all the vibing going on.

Just shows how much technical debt there is

By SubmergedInTech • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

We’ve had decades to write poorly-tested poorly-reviewed code. But that’s ok; as long as it kinda worked, we insisted on shipping it.

AI is now good enough to show what I told my managers for years: That technical debt builds up, and at some point the bill will come due.

The bill is now due.

Thanks to AI, it’s now easy to find bugs. And relatively easy to confirm they’re exploitable. But thanks to all the rest of the technical debt, much harder to fix the bugs. AI isn’t good enough to fix the bugs yet, either, at least not without creating new ones just as fast. So it’s a target-rich environment for hackers.

I’d say “I told you so”, but I got out of that rat race a few years ago.

One of those areas where AI really shines.

By Qbertino • Score: 4, Interesting Thread

Looking through thousands of codefiles and detecting errors and antipatterns is one of those things AI has really surprised me with. Especially with FOSS code and APIs it knows really well. Another one of those definite AI game-changers.

Prediction Market Platform Kalshi Discloses First Insider Trading Enforcement Action

Posted by msmash View on SlashDot
Kalshi, the prediction market platform regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, has for the first time publicly disclosed the results of an insider trading investigation, naming an editor for YouTube’s biggest creator as the offender.

The company identified Artem Kaptur, an editor for MrBeast, who it says traded around $4,000 on markets tied to the streamer and achieved “near-perfect trading success” on low-odds bets — a pattern investigators flagged as suspicious. Kalshi froze Kaptur’s account before he could withdraw any profits, fined him $20,000, suspended him for two years, and reported the case to the CFTC.

Must be rampant…

By Midnight_Falcon • Score: 4, Insightful Thread
Many of the items prediction markets allow bets on are just too easy to insider trade. Things like “Who wins the most gold medals in the Olympics,” or “who wins this election” are much harder to get a betting advantage with. Will x celebrity meet with x person or mention z thing in a podcast? Those shouldn’t even be allowed as bets, because a handful of people know the answer already, or could change scripts to manipulate the answer to the one they’ve bet on. If this is the first enforcement action, it must mean many people have gotten away with it already. I’d speculate it’s to the tune of how many people get hit with a ticket for riding a bicycle on a city sidewalk versus how many actually do it.

Insider trading markets

By TheMiddleRoad • Score: 5, Funny Thread
There are two types of people there. Inside traders and suckers.

This is gambling

By rsilvergun • Score: 3 Thread
Not all states allow gambling and to get around that they are exploiting a loophole by calling it a prediction market.

It really shows how lawless our country has become that this wasn’t immediately shut down.