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Every other company sends out cold emails to prospects outside of the company, but Oracle is the only company to send out cold emails to their own employees. Gotta give it to them...

I wonder if this has any connection with the recent string of attacks including the FBI director getting hacked. The attack surface is large, executed extremely cleanly - almost as if done by a high profile state sponsored actor, just like in Hollywood movies.

The NPM ecosystem is a joke. I don't even want anything to do with it, because my stack is fully Elixir. But, just because of this one dependency that is used in some interfaces within my codebase, I need to go back to all my apps and fix it. Sigh.

JavaScript, its entire ecosystem is just a pack of cards, I swear. What a fucking joke.


Yeah, but this was also strategically in Apple's interest to sell the iPads with nerfed up iPad OS as a separate line up. I love Steve Jobs and all, but this did NOT age well. The millions of people using Surface and Surface Pro will absolutely disagree with this take.

Yeah I have a Surface Laptop Studio. Windows 11 is generally awful to the point where I have switched to Bazzite for my desktop, but the form factor with touch support (and pen support) is great. Easel mode is great for drawing, tablet mode is pretty good for drawing as well and also for casual browsing or for displaying DND character sheet info. Even in laptop mode sometimes I find myself using it to scroll a bit on pages.

> I would like to know when someone is trying to have the tool do all of their work for them.

Absolutely spot on. Maybe I'm old school, but I never let AI touch my commit message history. That is for me - when 6 months down the line I am looking at it, retracing my steps - affirming my thought process and direction of development, I need absolute clarity. That is also because I take pride in my work.

If you let an AI commit gibberish into the history, that pollution is definitely going to cost you down the line, I will definitely be going "WTF was it doing here? Why was this even approved?" and that's a situation I never want to find myself in.

Again, old man yells at cloud and all, but hey, if you don't own the code you write, who else will?


There will always be room for craftsmen stamping their work, like the expensive Japanese bonsai scissors. Most of the world just uses whatever mass-produced scissors were created by a system of rotating people, with no clear owner/maker. There's plenty of middle ground for systems who put their mark on their product.

Fair enough.

If you architect and review everything, but someone else does the implementation, and you iterate, do you believe you did not do anything? I let AI write the commit message too, and the motivation behind the PR is the first thing in it. With my guidance, of course.

Imagine just having the copilot extension installed will be an excuse at some point for them to steal our code to train their AI models. Not sure if they already do this.

Of course they already do this.

The ToS (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-copilot/for-indivi...) says explicitly:

> Copilot may include both automated and manual (human) processing of data. You shouldn’t share any information with Copilot that you don’t want us to review.

so they're reserving the right to process whatever it looks at.

You're sending them your codebase already, as part of the prompt for generating new snippets, debugging, etc. So they have access to it.

They'd be absolute fools not to be using the results of sessions to continue to refine their models, and they already reserved the rights to look at what you send them, so yeah - they're doing it.

(Bonus comedy from the ToS:

> Copilot is for entertainment purposes only.

The lawyers know these things cannot be trusted.)


Also for some reason that site hijacks your scrolling and tries to "smooth" it, which just makes it feel more unresponsive as most browsers already have smooth scrolling?

Looks like they're using this: https://github.com/gblazex/smoothscroll-for-websites

I know it's a bit off topic but I'm just confused as to why that would be on there...


Web developers just can't help themselves from reinventing browser functionality, badly.

> Copilot is for entertainment purposes only.

Jokes on them, that's why I consider entire Microsoft for entertainment purposes only.


That's the TOS for the broader Microsoft Copilot, not for the GitHub one, which has its own TOSes (depending whether your last renewal was before or after March 5) that don't include the "entertainment" wording.

But one to file away!


"at some point"?

Why the assumption it's not already happening?


> Not sure if they already do this.

I feel like there is an even more important crisis that is being masked over here:

https://github.blog/changelog/2026-03-25-updates-to-our-priv...

    New Section J — AI features, training, and your data: We’ve added a dedicated section that brings all AI-related terms together in one place. Unless you opt out, you grant GitHub and our affiliates a license to collect and use your inputs (e.g., prompts and code context) and outputs (e.g., suggestions) to develop, train, and improve AI models.
We should not be using Copilot in the first place.

OpenAI/ChatGPT/Codex, Anthropic/Claude and Google/Gemini all do this.

> OpenAI/ChatGPT/Codex, Anthropic/Claude and Google/Gemini all do this.

1. Everyone doing this doesn't mean it's acceptable.

2. Google Gemini explicitly says right under the chat box if you are a paid subscriber (Workspace):

     Your <company name> chats aren’t used to improve our models. Gemini is AI and can make mistakes.
Not sure about the others.

I think anyone using a "Team" or enterprise plan of ChatGPT/Claude/Copilot doesn't have their data used for training, that's the same across the board.

My comment was not meant to excuse what they're doing, just to point out that it's the bad status quo for these services

Regarding Claude: As I have unticked the "Help improve Claude" checkbox, I was under the impression that Claude did not do this.

https://privacy.claude.com/en/articles/10023555-how-do-you-u...


You can opt out with all three (Codex, Claude, Copilot) except for Gemini

Last time I checked Codex didn't have that option for $20 plan

> except for Gemini

This is incorrect. If you are a paid subscriber, Gemini explicitly states it doesn't use your data to train its models.


Yeah you're right, I filed it away as no opt out for some reason

Maybe because Google "does not sell" personal information, yet almost all their revenue comes from personal information?

They sell aggregated information.

And targeted information.

> Unless you opt out

(whether or not you should have to opt in or out is a different topic)


Looks like you can disable it though:

https://github.com/settings/copilot/features

-> Privacy -> "Allow GitHub to use my data for AI model training"


Yeah, but it's a shitty move though - it should be by default opt-in, rather than opt-out. Imagine, you just continue coding normally consciously avoiding co-pilot only to find out that Github has been secretly training their models on your code, just because you forgot to toggle a setting off which was turned on without your knowledge, which they didn't even have the decency to email you about, but just posted on a blog no one reads.

I got an email about it.

Its sort of a moot point since the whole thing is for good will anyways.

They freely scraped licensed code and semi-private data across the internet and now they're pretending that they need to license anything.

If a court rules they had to license data in the first place then the whole industry would actually have to start following laws.


Depends, would you walk around recording everyone with your phone out right onto their faces without their consent?

If you're a TikToker, absolutely

I'm surprised it took this long but two weeks ago I saw my first live streamer at a flea market. He was wearing some type of camera on his head (can't tell which one) and had his phone mounted like a wristwatch to read chat notifications. It was like that old Penny Arcade's strip about Glassholes come to life [1].

He was definitely filming everyone without our consent.

[1] https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2013/06/14/glasshol



“Hey security, I think that guy was filming young girls. Please eject him.”

TikTokers aren't exactly the gold standards of society nor is being a TikToker a free card to violate people's privacy though. What's to say if someone confronts and requests the TikToker to stop recording them without their permission?

They just... don't stop. What're you gonna do, take away the camera, hit them? Then they have great content and can sue you for assault. There's millions of people out there that are filming without consent every single day, for content.

> What're you gonna do, take away the camera, hit them?

A lot of people have done this, because at that point it's consciously making a decision to be an asshole and violating someone's privacy. The laws may not be on the side of the guy who hits the TikToker - and that's what they capitalize on, but morally, the guy throwing the punch would be in the right. It also depends on where you live, I guess. TikTokers don't normally do such stuff in Asia because you can go to the cops and file assault, but when they find out you were being the douche, they will not take any action.


So smartphone cameras should be banned nationwide depending on whether I personally record people without their consent or not?

Public photography is not a crime.

* a negative is: the opportunities to enjoy oneself have sadly diminished...do one 'strange' thing in public, and you're on the web.


Public photography isn't a crime, but then again it's very nuanced. If I'm taking a portrait of a park, where people are having picnics, it seems "less targeted", if you know what I mean. Whereas walking with a phone or camera in your hand pointing directly at people's faces feels not really right.

The best way to do this would be how Google solved this with street view. Capture your public photos, blur out people's faces - better yet, respect their privacy if someone requests to not film them. Eg. Google Street view will blur out complete homes if you decide to opt out.


It’s practically impossible to take pictures of a famous monument without having other people in the frame (usually they’re posing for photos themselves). AI can remove them, with varying degrees of success.

Ironically, it would probably be easier for the AI to generate the photo of the monument without the people. I mean, for famous monuments, whatever photo you're about to take, you could find 10 better ones already on-line, taken from the same point and perspective, and uploaded to Flickr or Instagram or wherenot.

Weren’t Samsung phones doing something like this? If you tried to take a picture with the moon in it, it would just generate an image of the moon?

I believe you're talking to an LLM, just look at the comment history

WTF is "yes-men"?

Orignal title:

AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice

Dear mods, can we keep the title neutral please instead of enforcing gender bias?


> gender bias

It is funny that you originally recognized and found it necessary to call out that AI isn't human, but then made the exact same mistake yourself in the very same comment. I expect the term you are looking for is "ontological bias".



Thats a fair point on the title. I used "Yes-Men" as a colloquialism for the "sycophancy" described in the Stanford paper, but overly affirming or sycophantic is definitely more precise and neutral. I cant edit the title anymore, but I appreciate the catch.

Don’t apologize to these types of people. It will only make your problem worse as now you’re an admitted offender. Ignore them or better yet laugh at them to put their insane ideas back on the margins where they belong.

All good. I thought it was a gendered reference and learned that it isn't. My bad.

New title: "LLMs treat you like a Billionaire; you're not"

Gender bias? I could understand if you felt the title was more provocative in signaling sycophancy but what gender bias? I'm confused. Is this some kind of California thing?

Lol. How do you function in daily life?

Same as you, why is that so hard for you to grasp?

My dude, you're objecting to the use of a perfectly ordinary English idiom because it doesn't advance your personal ideology (which few other people in this world share with you.) How do you get through a day without melting down because somebody said "mailman"?

> my dude

This is the problem I'm trying to highlight. For one, I'm not "your dude". I don't even know you like that.

If you want to correct me on the idiom usage, be my guest. 2) Mailman and yes-man aren't even the same logical comparison. Mailman is a profession. Yes men is a label.

The acoustics inside your head must be incredible.


Chill bro. You've probably got undiagnosed autism. Worth getting checked out.

PCU (1994)

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