Daily Tech News 10 June 2024

• How a single ChatGPT mistake cost us $10,000. (Asim)
  
  The error is actually fairly subtle, but it's another one of those cases where multiple individual bad ideas* combine to create a disaster.
  
  In this case, the account ID for new users was not assigned when the user was created, but in each worker thread when the server was started up.
  
  Nobody saw this during testing because they were restarting the server all the time, and each restart generated a new pool of available user IDs.
  
  But the moment things were working... They stopped working.
  
  * Interpreted, weakly typed languages, database definitions in generic code, and using fucking ChatGPT, for starters.

• Designing a Lego orrery. (Marian)
  
  Just the Earth-Moon-Sun system, though there's a preliminary idea at the end of doing a simpler version for the entire solar system - just doing planetary orbits and leaving out orbital inclinations, axial tilts, and moons.
  
  Putting all of those features in, building it out of Lego, and keeping it accurate would make it extremely complicated.
  
  Also, quite large.
  
  
  
• Over a thousand malicious extension to Microsoft's Visual Studio Code have been discovered with hundreds of millions of total installations worldwide. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  The idea behind Visual Studio Code is that it's a useless piece of garbage but is easy for people to extend.
  
  Which is like selling homes that are just a frame of 2x4s vaguely nailed together, covered with tarps and some exposed drains and wiring.
  
  Cheap. Easy to upgrade. Hilariously unsafe.
  
  
  
• HP shipped a bad BIOS update that bricked many of its ProBook laptops. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  And of course it was an automatic update, so you'd just wake up one morning, running late for work because your alarm didn't go off, and find that your computer had committed suicide during the night.
  
  Or, worse - since these are business laptops - you work in corporate IT, and you have a hundred dead laptops to deal with all at once, and all that HP is offering is a motherboard replacement that costs nearly as much as a new laptop.
  
  Oh, and the BIOS file HP installed? Wasn't even a BIOS file. But the automated update tried to install it anyway.
  
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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