I had a legal appointment recently to update my Will, Medical Directive, etc. The lawyer had gemini opened up on the left half of her screen and the legal docs on the right, which did not instill confidence. Every time she showed lack of confidence in an answer to a question of mine, I was extra paranoid, although I tried to make sure I wasn't going to discount her strictly for having the LLM open, as she didn't use it during our appointment, to my recollection. Nevertheless while I usually check and update these forms on a 5yr basis, I plan on doing the next one much sooner in because that appointment did not give me the assurance I wanted.
I'm glad it wasn't for anything pressing or in support of a lawsuit
Notepad would render .md as plain text. Now it renders .md as rich text. The complaint is that people like notepad explicitly because it doesn't support rich text.
I personally write pretty much everything in notepad for this very reason unless I am making a document I need to share with someone.
The reasoning from MS for the update is because they added copilot to notepad, another feature that upset many people. Copilot returns answers as markdown, which is completely readable, but didn't itch the happy conclusion MS wanted. So now notepad supports enough rich text to not only read .md, but render it too
I don't have a cool story about sending a letter as a kid, although I had drafted one to send to Lego, but have been on the receiving end before. My office is across the street from an elementary school that we have a relationship with, evidenced by the annual trick or treat we host for them. One day roughly every third cubicle or so had a letter at the desk from one of the kids with a cute note. It was clear that our leadership provided the names and we weren't looked up, because mine had my nickname. Anyway, even though it was clearly a class assignment, it was really neat, and I made a reply with official company letterhead and everything in hopes of making the day of the kid who wrote me. Turns out that other peers had the same idea, because when I went to leadership to ask how to return it to the kid (I didn't know his classroom or anything. Just a first name and school address), they had letters from several other employees that they were going to return to the school.
It was more likely written by a staff member who thought it would make your day, and signed by the Secretary of Defense. It is pretty neat that you got two letters though, because your letter probably got passed around and made the day of several people.
Yeah you’re right. The local news came to my house too and filmed me playing with my hot wheels volcano blowout set like i was some kind of child prodigy. So embarrassing lmao.
Almost. Both China and USA have threatened military action in Taiwan and Greenland respectively, but legally the USA and Greenland are not one; Greenland is a territory of Denmark despite having an independent government. Taiwan and Mainland China also have independent governments, but legally both consider themselves China, so it would be like North and South Korea if they had never agreed that they are separate countries now. Recently Taiwan has begun changing their identity as an independent country, and began the legal updates, however this is not internationally recognized because mainland china has resisted it, and frankly few countries want to go against china and risk sanctions or other political action from china. Even the USA doesn't recognize taiwan as separate, officially, although actions speak louder than words, and it is clear that most respect Taiwan's desire for independence and treat them as sovereign.
If you haven't seen news related to LLM generated bug reports, they are pretty disliked due to poor quality. So yes, a new LLM generated bug report era has begun, and the results so far have been moderator/developer burnout, increased time between real bugs being taken care of (as devs treat each submission as a true possible bug), and many projects no longer accepting bug reports.
I have seen a couple anecdotal incidents when someone used LLMs to generate real bugs, one guy showing off a chain he made to HN, and that was really neat. LLMs aren't unable to make reports, but scammers and vibecoders see the dollar signs that they aren't going to put real effort in trying to get, and submit every response from a prompt similar to "provide me a bug report for [XX package/app]" in hopes that one pays out.
The individuals I saw make real bug reports were already developers and were able to test out and iterate with the code the LLM provided, making connections of their own, just like any other person who uses LLMs responsibly instead of outsourcing thinking.
I think you are confusing bug bounty programs with espionage and cyber warfare. The USA definitely accepts vulnerabilities for any system (or at least target systems), paying good money for them if it is an attack chain, giving them that competitive edge you mention. They have at least one military organization over this exact thing (USCYBERCOM) and realistically other orgs to include the intelligence community.
There are no bug bounties on "any" system because bug bounties are part of programs to fix bugs, not exploit them. They therefore have bug bounties for their own systems, as those are the ones they would be interested in improving. What you described, which they definitely do, is cyber espionage, and those bugs are submitted through different channels than a bug bounty.
But that's the thing, I think they specifically need a non-IC program. If I'm a white-hat, grey-hat, or a somewhat cagey black-hat, I'm not gonna reach out to a shadowy organization with a penchant for extrajudicial surveillance, torture & killing to make $50k on a bug. Sure, you can try your hand at selling them an exploit that won't get revealed. But if only you and The Company know about the bug, and it could mean the upside in a potential war (or just a feather in an agency head's cap), why would The Company keep you alive and able to talk about it? OTOH, if the program you're reporting to doesn't have a track record of illegal activity, personally I'd feel a lot safer reporting there. And ideally their mission would be to patch the bug and not hold onto it. But we get to patch first, so it's still our advantage.
I'm glad it wasn't for anything pressing or in support of a lawsuit
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