CIRCLE WITH A DOT

@freddy @jann

TURKISH TEAMMATE: Oh, yeah, we call this "Microsoft Turkish." The menu items are syntactically incorrect. This happens all the time

ME: FUCK

TEAMMATE: Yeah, well, welcome to our lives

@freddy @jann It is deeply, deeply offensive to me that people have to set their computers to English.

ME: Holy fuck, what if the person doesn't speak English??

PERSIAN TEAMMATE: Yeah, for those people, the internet is not very accessible

ME: FUCK

TEAMMATE: Yeah, well, welcome to our lives

@freddy @jann A bunch of years ago, I went on a giant quest to improve translation in Chrome (including getting colleagues to set Chrome to their native languages, which resulted in some 'great' bug reports). Lots of native speakers disagreeing with each other about what words mean.

One thing I discovered: Apparently, nobody on the team had ever set their locale to an RTL language. Text flying in every direction all over the place. I fixed as many of them as I could.

Yes, yes, Mastodon hates LLMs and all that — sure. I probably hate them at least as much as you.

But LLMs really are finding vulnerabilities and really are developing exploits for them.

There are ways, both by using and not by using LLMs, to make more resilient software, and we absolutely must do so. Ignoring empirical reality is not going to result in success for engineers or the people who depend on software and information services.

Korn’s 1st album came out in 1994, making it officially öld metal

@tef @joe Which is: not fully true! Defenders get to define the territory, including audit and observability. Finding a vuln, developing an exploit — way too easy. Making it operational and maintaining the capability over time: somewhat to substantially more fraught. (Still way, way too easy, of course)

@tef @joe I get you, and it's a reasonable note! But also, fuzzers do keep working (and we keep getting surprised all over again when someone makes a fuzzer that can reach a previously unreachable area).

@tef @joe They seem to avoid talking about solid defensive remedies (some of which LLMs likely will also be able to do well, such as translation and theorem proving — there are already results), for some reason. Until that strong medicine is applied, I think they'll continue producing new bugs and new kinds of bugs. Underestimating them is unwise for defenders. Keep in mind also they are military contractors.

@andrewt The mansplaining replies you’re getting also date back to the 1970s 🫠