Daily Tech News 14 December 2025

• Why AI makes bad systems more convincing. (Chaincoder)
  
  Because AI is not just a stochastic bullshit generator. It's a stochastic plausibility generator.
  
  AI images? They're not art, they don't have meaning; they're just close enough to make you think they have meaning.
  
  AI stories and essays? The same except that it's a lot worse at holding to a thread.
  
  AI software testing? Actually useful. It might miss some test cases you would have tried, but it will also create test cases you wouldn't have thought of, and it will do it quickly.
  
  AI software? It will be produced quickly and for any non-trivial task it won't work. But it may look like it does.

  The deeper issue is psychological. The more polished the output looks, the less likely someone is to question it. Verification feels redundant when something sounds authoritative.
  
  That is not a tooling problem. It is a human one.

  Entirely correct.
  
  
  
• AI superintelligence - or even intelligence - is not a looming reality but a fantasy. (The Register)
  
  Partly because we have run out of easy wins. The industry wouldn't be spending a trillion dollars on this if it could be done for a billion.
  
  And partly because almost nobody is working towards intelligence, just bigger and shinier automated confidence tricksters.

• HP's OmniBook 7 Aero 13 lacks the Four Essential Keys. (Notebook Check)
  
  Get out of here, HP. It had those keys when it was a Pavilion model. Put them back.
  
  
  
• Gnome's new rules forbid AI-written extensions. (Phoronix)
  
  I side with Gnome here. The rules are actually pretty sensible. Both things I am surprised to find myself saying given the nonsense Gnome has gotten up to at times.
  
  
  
• Star Wars: Fate of the Old Republic will launch before 2030. (WCCFTech)
  
  This is a sequel to a game (Knights of the Old Republic) that came out in 2003.
  
  I would wonder whether the audience still exists but apparently the original game was released for the Nintendo Switch as recently as 2021, so apparently they still do.
  
  We still do. KotOR was pretty good.
  
  
  
• Is vibe coding the new gateway to technical debt? (InfoWorld)
  
  Yes. And other kinds of debt too.
  
  
  
• Why Twilio moved back from microservices to a monolithic system. (Twilio)
  
  Think of it this way: Having three cars instead of one bus gives you a lot more flexibility. But having 140 cars means you spend all your time managing the logistics of the cars themselves rather than driving people where they need to go.
  
  
  
• Seven bags of bark chips deployed. Neighbour came over while I was working and complimented me on how good it looked. Which I think is only partly a comment on how bad it looked before - I live next to an overgrown vacant lot which looks even worse - because even I think the results were worth the effort.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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