Why would anyone rename a perfectly valid variable name to some garbage term just to please our Microsoft Newspeak overlords? That would make the code less readable and more error prone. Also everything with human data has a field for sex or gender somewhere, driver’s licenses, medical applications, biological studies and all kinds of other forms use those terms.

But nobody really needs to use copilot to code, so maybe just get rid of it or use an alternative.

I don’t care about TikTok, but this smells like expropriation of the nazi kind.

https://www.jmberlin.de/en/topic-expropriation-arianization

My take: It’s either not going to happen at all (which is what I would place my bets on tbh) or it’s going to be something that only megacorps like Google or Microsoft can offer due to the enormous requirements of such a system, which would make most of those AI companies redundant, not just their devs.

You wouldn’t even have to reach as far as malware. All software has bugs. To think that AI will produce perfect bugfree code because “it’s a computer” is laughable. So inevitably there will be a need to debug the code, across servers, filesystems, databases, APIs, you name it. In tens if not hundreds of thousands of lines of code, which might even be compiled. Surprise, an LLM can’t do that.

As a developer I always enjoy asking these clowns why anybody should buy their products when AI will soon allow consumers to build these apps themselves, which is just a logical progression if you don’t need coders to create software.

I know of course that this isn’t going to happen anytime soon. It’s wishful thinking from their part and it shows a complete lack of understanding both what LLMs can and cannot do and what it takes to design and implement anything bigger than a batch script.

Edit: I also can’t help but feel personally offended whenever some corporate drone gloats about replacing developers. It didn’t happen with low-code, it didn’t happen with no-code and it won’t happen with AI. But it hurts every time.

I just checked the original video. It works a little bit differently than plain URL replacement. They open another tab in the background and then send a manipulated URL to get the affiliate cookie set to their own. Guess it’s for the courts to decide if that is a legal practice or not. But to me it seems that the malicious extension sends a manipulated URL to the server pretending to do that on user’s behalf, without his knowledge. That is classic malware behavior.

https://youtu.be/vc4yL3YTwWk?t=281

Potato chips and chocolate. It was difficult but necessary to have them both at the same time

It’s more than that, at least from a EU perspective. Don’t know what is legal in the US, but manipulating URLs in an obviously malicious way and without the user’s explicit knowledge and consent would be highly illegal here.

I don’t know. Maybe Google is actively limiting results for Startpage. When I don’t find what I’m looking for in Startpage I switch to Google and boom, adequate search result. I refuse to permanently go back to Google though.

I’m using Startpage too, but I have a feeling that the search result quality had a massive drop lately.