Monday, June 10

Geek

Daily News Stuff 10 June 2024

Clockwork Orrery Edition

Top Story

  • How a single ChatGPT mistake cost us $10,000.  (Asim)

    The error is actually fairly subtle, but it's another one of those cases where multiple individual bad ideas* combine to create a disaster.

    In this case, the account ID for new users was not assigned when the user was created, but in each worker thread when the server was started up.

    Nobody saw this during testing because they were restarting the server all the time, and each restart generated a new pool of available user IDs.

    But the moment things were working...  They stopped working.

    * Interpreted, weakly dynamically typed languages, database definitions in generic code, and using fucking ChatGPT, for starters.


Tech News

  • Designing a Lego orrery.  (Marian)

    Just the Earth-Moon-Sun system, though there's a preliminary idea at the end of doing a simpler version for the entire solar system - just doing planetary orbits and leaving out orbital inclinations, axial tilts, and moons.

    Putting all of those features in, building it out of Lego, and keeping it accurate would make it extremely complicated.

    Also, quite large.


  • Over a thousand malicious extension to Microsoft's Visual Studio Code have been discovered with hundreds of millions of total installations worldwide.  (Bleeping Computer)

    The idea behind Visual Studio Code is that it's a useless piece of garbage but is easy for people to extend.

    Which is like selling homes that are just a frame of 2x4s vaguely nailed together, covered with tarps and some exposed drains and wiring.

    Cheap.  Easy to upgrade.  Hilariously unsafe.


  • HP shipped a bad BIOS update that bricked many of its ProBook laptops.  (Tom's Hardware)

    And of course it was an automatic update, so you'd just wake up one morning, running late for work because your alarm didn't go off, and find that your computer had committed suicide during the night.

    Or, worse - since these are business laptops - you work in corporate IT, and you have a hundred dead laptops to deal with all at once, and all that HP is offering is a motherboard replacement that costs nearly as much as a new laptop.

    Oh, and the BIOS file HP installed?  Wasn't even a BIOS file.  But the automated update tried to install it anyway.

Anime

Watching season two (the real season two, not the second half of season one which Funi tried to call season two) of Mushoku Tensei, a.k.a That Time a Slime was Reincarnated.  I rewatched the first season over the weekend and it held up well enough.  The main character starts out unlikeable but he knows it and works to improve.  Mostly.

And now we get to find out what was going on with that Cyber Sylphie we briefly glimpsed late in season one.

I tried watching a recent series called Re:Monster - that's really its name - and it was just like Re:Slime (not really its name) if that series had been written by a fourteen year old boy on a quest to tick off every unfair stereotype of fourteen year old boys.  Not recommended for everyone.  

Ignore the 4.5 stars on Crunchy and read the reviews instead, which are scathing.  The main character's progression is exactly the reverse of Rudeus from Mushoku Tensei.


Scale Model Solar Systems R Us Video of the Day



Disclaimer: Do not install James Joyce's Ulysses when the system requests a firmware update.  It has been reported that this may negatively affect your user experience.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:28 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 580 words, total size 5 kb.

1 Looks like the author of that $10K mistake article got embarrassed and deleted it, but it's still on the wayback machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20240609213809/https://asim.bearblog.dev/how-a-single-chatgpt-mistake-cost-us-10000/

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, June 10 2024 11:33 PM (BMUHC)

2 I slightly liked Re: monster way back in the day. Not familiar with Rudeus. Though the presentation is heavy handed and preachy, additional information eventually makes it very clear that Gou was a monster as a human, and as a goblin merely had a slightly different set of opportunities to be awful.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, June 11 2024 01:59 AM (rcPLc)

3 In Musoku Tensei the main character is not a nice person, and even into the second season he still has issues, but he knows it, and he's working to change.  Most of the characters are complicated, though the seventh prince of Shirone is an oxygen thief who needs to be dropped down a hole.  (And apparently later on in the manga that happens.)

In Re:Monster - at least in the anime - we don't get those signals.  Maybe you're supposed to work it out for yourself, but it since there aren't any fleshed-out characters to transfer attention to, that just leaves viewers hating the entire show.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, June 11 2024 04:56 PM (PiXy!)

4 Rick C - I don't know what happened exactly but that whole blog was giving a 404 an hour after I posted, and it seems that they still don't have it working properly again.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, June 11 2024 04:58 PM (PiXy!)

5 If you'd read my blog, I could have saved you from Re:Monster.

Posted by: Mauser at Thursday, June 13 2024 08:50 AM (nk1Z+)

Hide Comments | Add Comment




Apple pies are delicious. But never mind apple pies. What colour is a green orange?




54kb generated in CPU 0.0132, elapsed 0.1032 seconds.
58 queries taking 0.0936 seconds, 351 records returned.
Powered by Minx 1.1.6c-pink.