@davidgerard If you plot the frequency of these outages and crashes ostensibly due to handing over the entire IT department to 3 dogs in a trenchcoat with a claude account, given their accelerating nature, I think we should be able to extrapolate a sort of industry wide singularity when the MTBF of everything is 0.
What happens next, I don't know. Time to get into hunting and gathering again I guess.
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New #blog post: Making BenTasker.co.uk available as a #Gemini Capsule
I decided to make my content available within #gemspace, so I created a Nikola plugin to output gemtext
https://www.bentasker.co.uk/posts/blog/general/multihoming-into-a-gemini-capsule.html
The spin on this: https://www.eadt.co.uk/news/26724915.64-000-faces-scanned-suffolk-police-ai-cameras/
The Sgt who oversaw the deployment is quoted as saying:
> Thousands of people passed through the areas where the technology was in operation and, from more than 64,000 faces seen, every alert generated was accurate, with no incorrect alerts recorded.
He didn't mention how many were identified, but the story does.
They scanned 64,000 faces and made... 6 arrests.
So for every arrest they made, they had to infringe the privacy of 10666 people
"Dear Diary,
My first day at Microsoft 365 seems to be going well."
Generative AI is great y'all, Steam can't handle slop submissions, Humble slop-deleted 2FA and account settings, Microsoft is down, everything is getting hacked, open source is being strangled, search is destroyed, and the remains of the world economy are dependent on one penis. Leaps and bounds.
Happy "FENTON! FENTON! OH, JESUS CHRIST, FENTON!" day to all those who celebrate it.
15 years ago today.
@hacks4pancakes At this point they are just posting the copilots internal monologue as status updates.
@davidallengreen Every systems administrator: This shows why we need sovereign digital infrastructure so we're not dependent on a single foreign entity.
Every politician: This shows why we should be giving more money to Microsoft so we get better service provision.
RE: https://mastodon.babb.no/@km/117606036767811103
And here's a great write-up (by Kirill / @km, who runs a Norwegian law firm) of how they run their business on Free software, without a dependency on Microsoft.
In response to the Microsoft service outage today, a friend texted me to ask how many of these outages are caused by AI “vibe coding.”
I replied, “It’s kind of like asking ‘how many of these hurricanes are caused by climate change?’ The numbers are going to get a lot higher but I can’t tell you which ones specifically”
New blogpost:
"Not All Men"
Sorry, a bit of a ranty one, in the context of recent/current news in the UK.
It does mention sexual assault, but the focus is on men.
So, work asked for my opinions about AI again.
"I have lost all confidence in senior management since they started evangelising for this obvious scam."
"If any other supplier offered us stolen goods at a price lower than their cost we would not be allowed to buy from them. AI tools should be no different."
"Senior management have clearly missed their calling in timeshare sales and cult recruitment. The pressure to (a) use the tools and (b) provide some evidence, any evidence, that they improve productivity is relentless. It's not my job to destroy my profession, the economy, the climate and poor communities that have AI data centres inflicted on them in order to provide evidence that they may be of marginal utility in my work. If they were worth all the damage they inflict, the
results would be obvious."
This is worth your time to read; by Paul Moore:
HarmBlock+ World’s Safest Smartphone: Please Rotate Responsibly
https://paul.reviews/harmblock-worlds-safest-smartphone-please-rotate-responsibly/
#harmBlock #hmdFuse #safeToNetquiet now, Anthropic, the adults are talking.
https://www.vulncheck.com/blog/anthropic-glasswing-november-update
Not that anyone's reading my blog, but I've updated my screeds about AI:
- added A List to "On AI": https://www.taffer.ca/posts/2026/on-ai/
- added comments about "You'll be left behind!" and info about Violet and Pelican (static site generators) to "The AI Narrative": https://www.taffer.ca/posts/2026/narrative/
Yes it's stupid o'clock, the dogs got me up at 4AM. 🥹
I think "software can get big, complex, brittle, and hard to understand and maintain over time" is a poor argument for "let's use tools to build software that ensure there never will be a time when it's comprehensible, maintainable, or reliable." I reject the "fuck it, who gives a shit" approach.
One of the things that used to be standard practice at an old job was that when an Important Person went to Certain Countries, they got a new phone and a new laptop and both of them contained a carefully curated set of exactly and only what they needed for that trip and nothing else at all.
When they got back somebody with no sense of humor whatsoever met them at the airport, took those devices away and destroyed them off site.
That was just what the trip cost, the price of the ticket.
New blogpost:
"New UK rules for consumer subscription contracts"
One for people who run businesses who sell subscriptions to consumers in the UK.
The detail is quite complicated, even if the principles are simple enough, and it has taken me most of my day so far to get my head around this... enjoy!
https://decoded.legal/blog/2026/11/new-uk-rules-for-consumer-subscription-contracts/