I am the journeyer from the valley of the dead Sega consoles. With the blessings of Sega Saturn, the gaming system of destruction, I am the Scout of Silence… Sailor Saturn.

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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • A Google employee was charged with commodities fraud for using insider information to win a Polymarket bet about who the most searched for people would be in 2025 (complaint, article, polymarket account).

    So far the internet seems confused whether or not this all counts as commodities fraud at all or not and if so, how (this area of law is way too confusing which is one of the reasons I, of course, never use insider information to bet on polymarket).

    It looks like the suspicious trades were discussed on social media back in december. e.g. here for example.

    Aside: 1.2 million in profit is significant, but isn’t a life changing amount of money for most staff engineers at Google. He probably could have just rested and vested for a few extra years and avoided all this…


    Bonus:

    According to Polymarket someone else was charged with insider trading this April. This other case is especially cursed because it involved bets around the US attacking Venezuela. According to the complaint he might have asked an LLM for legal advice:

    In or about November 2025, VAN DYKE uploaded to his Google account a screenshot displaying the results of a Google Al query. The results stated, in substance and in part, that the U.S. military’s special operations divisions have “numerous classified files, records, and operational details that are not available to the public”

    It looks like this was his polymarket account.



  • I don’t think anyone here is at risk of being tricked into thinking that the pope is their friend (unlike some people on social media…)

    Under the last pope the church used similar arguments to argue that transgender people are unnatural (unsaid part: and probably shouldn’t be given healthcare). It’s hard for me to read this without thinking about that backdrop:

    Desiring a personal self-determination, as gender theory prescribes, apart from this fundamental truth that human life is a gift, amounts to a concession to the age-old temptation to make oneself God, entering into competition with the true God of love revealed to us in the Gospel.














  • The future of AI in Ubuntu

    This post has all the usual cliches, exaggerations, lies, and unfounded optimism you’d expect in a blog post about a company forcing AI down their workers and user’s throats. I’ll try to avoid sneering at every sentence.

    Delegating elements of Site Reliability Engineering to an agent does not necessarily introduce an entirely new class of risk; it should inherit the constraints of existing production systems. Well-run production environments already rely on strict access controls, audit trails, and clear separation between observation and action. […] In that sense, the challenge is less about “trusting the agents”, and more about building trust in the same guardrails we already apply to any production system.

    This might sound good to at first, but falls apart under the slightest scrutiny. There is a reason that companies don’t open their intranets to the public despite having fine-grained access controls. Or in other words, "I’m getting a lot of questions already answered by my ‘does not necessarily introduce an entire new class of risk’ T-shirt.

    Imagine being able to ask your Linux machine to troubleshoot a Wi-Fi connection issue, or to stand up an open source software forge that’s pre-configured, secured, and reachable over TLS.

    And right after arguing that LLMs are safe if you have a perfect permissions model, now he’s proposing letting one #yolo configure a git server or something? This is the sort of thing that could easily easily lead to random security issues.

    I suspect that “Troubleshoot a wi-fi connection issue” will work about as well as existing network troubleshooting wizards (e.g. terribly), and that we don’t actually need to reinvent the software wizard but less deterministic.



  • It’s bad for me too.

    I’m trying to hang in there until I get some healthcare stuff taken care of over the next year or two but it is getting increasingly difficult. Most of the the good people at my job have been driven out, quit, or been poached by other (AI) companies.

    By this point a majority of the programmers at my job (or at least the one’s most active on the mailing lists) are LLM true believers who think that the end times are near. My management chain has explicitly said that LLM programming is required, and that a subsequent increase in “productivity” is expected with it. My department got renamed to something with “AI” in the name. I constantly field questions from people who want me to read a screen full of LLM nonsense, or who push back when I tell them something claiming that the chatbot said differently.

    There’s always some frantic push to adopt “MCP” or “Skills” or whatever the next fad will be without any guidance as to how or why. If I ignore this I get nastygrams from my manager.

    And at my last doctor visit I had elevated blood pressure :)