LLM, unlikely. ML, probably

ML already has demonstrated tremendous capability increases for automated machines, starting with postal letter sorters decades ago, proceeding through ever more advanced (and still limited, occasionally flawed - like people) image recognition.

LLM puts more of a “natural language interface” on things, making phone trees into something less infuriating to use and ultimately more helpful.

LLMs, which are too costly to train and run

That’s a matter of application

inherently too unreliable for safety-critical or health-critical use

Yeah, although I can see LLMs being helpful as a front end, in addition to the traditional checklist systems used for safety regulation, medical Dx and other guidance, an LLM can (and has, for me) provided (incomplete, sometimes flawed) targeted insights into material it reviews - improving the human review process as an adjunct tool, not as a replacement for the human reviewer.

too flaky for any use requiring auditability

Definitely. Mostly I have been using LLM generated code to create deterministic processes which can be verified as correct - it’s pretty good at that, I could write the same code myself but the AI agent/LLM can write that kind of (simple) program 5x-10x faster for 10% of the “brain fatigue” and I can focus on the real problems we’re trying to solve. Having those deterministic tools again makes review and evaluation of large spreadsheets a more thorough and less labor intense process. People make mistakes, too, and when you give them (for this morning’s example) a spreadsheet with 2000 rows and 30 columns to “evaluate” - beyond people’s “context window capacity” as well… we need tools that focus on the important 50 lines and 8 columns without missing the occasional rare important datapoints…

So far, with LLMs, the game ain’t worth the candle,

The better modern models, in roughly the past 10 months or so, have turned a corner for some computer programming tasks, and over those 10 months they have improved rather significantly. It’s not the panacea revolution that a lot of breathless journalists describe, but it’s a better tool assisting in the creation of simple programs (and simple components of larger programs) than anything I have used in the previous 45 years, and over the past 10 months the level of complexity / size of programs the LLMs can effectively handle has roughly tripled, in my estimation for my applications.

even without considering the enormous environmental damage caused by their supporting infrastructure.

When it’s used for worthless garbage (as most of it seems to be today), I agree with this evaluation. Focused on good use cases? In specifically good use cases, the power / environmental impacts range from trivial to positive - in those cases where the AI agents/LLMs are saving human labor - human labor and its infrastructure has enormous environmental impact too.

And this is my point: the (super) human and the machine are both capable of infringing copyright - breaking the law. The question is: are they actually doing it?

If you sit the human down with a researcher and they write out: HP5 Goblet of Fire in its entirety 99.9%+ accurately (for the edition they are recalling) - that’s research, fair use. As was done with the AI models by some researchers. Are the AI models out there in the real world also selling copies of their training books in full, or substantial parts, to their users? I haven’t seen demonstration of that, yet.

Curious: Does Montreal allow “employment at will” like most states in the US do? If it does, I can’t imagine an UbiSoft contract not including it. The article definitely makes it sound like a termination for cause, but what’s written on his termination paperwork may be entirely different.

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Not just that, but “working with your hands” has been seen all kinds of machines automating people out of jobs for the past 200+ years, AI/LLM will only make automation more capable, and more undercutting of people’s manual labor costs.

True, but in this case it seems worth doing due to the relatively patient, selective nature of the attack - it would at least clean out a compromised Notepad++ if it had not spread to a wider system compromise yet.

It doesn’t have any significance when talking about copyright.

I agree, but that doesn’t stop journalists from recognizing a hot button topic and hyper-bashing that button as fast and hard and often as they can.

Point is: some humans can do this without a machine. If a human is assisted by a machine to do something that other humans can do but they cannot - that is illegal?

That’s what I read in the article - the “researchers” may have had other interfaces they were using. Also, since that “research” came out, I suspect the models have compensated to prevent the appearance of copying…

Just give me the prompt and model that will generate an entire Harry Potter book so I can check it out.

Start with the first line of the book (enough that it won’t be confused with other material in the training set…) the LLM will return some of the next line. Feed it that and it will return some of what comes next, rinse, lather, repeat - researchers have gotten significant chunks of novels regurgitated this way.

You may not have photographic memory, but dozens of flesh and blood humans do. Are they “illegal” to exist? They can read a book then recite it back to you.

Subpoena + publicity = uninsurable. And when you work for a low-profit endeavor, your “damages” are limited to the money you might have made were you insurable, at least that’s how the courts measure it and the lawyers decide to take the case or not. OpenAI would probably gladly lose a case and pay whatever income The Midas Project lost as a result of OpenAI’s actions - profit isn’t the point of The Midas Project, reporting what is happening in the industry is, and that mission has been effectively thwarted with the uninsurable status.

this has absolutely nothing to do with freedom.

I have often said: the courts have absolutely nothing to do with justice, at least not the kind of justice people think they do.

Odds are you weren’t on the “targeted list”.

If you don’t know, you’re probably auto updating.

If you updated or installed in 2025 after June-ish, the safe thing to do is uninstall, then download from the new (theoretically more secure) website and install the new (theoretically more secure) 8.9.1.

If you were pwned by an update during later 2025, they could disguise just about anything in your Notepad++ and its associated files - make it look perfectly normal, make it act perfectly normal, but have their own malware on your system doing… whatever it is they want it to do.

I understand one of the things they were doing is running a proxy to carry traffic through your system, so if you see a lot of unexpected network activity (under Windoze how can you tell?) you may have been compromised. But that’s not the only thing they could have done, nobody has really analyzed the attack yet and even after they do, you might have gotten a “special” payload that the analysis team didn’t see…

Bird boxes are also super-temporary in the greater scheme of things. One property owner is a bird lady with 25 boxes, she moves- next property owner doesn’t like bird boxes 25->0 overnight.

Exactly how hard would it be to place a “cork in the hole” to render the cavity unusable? If (big if) overpopulation becomes a problem, it’s pretty easy - these days - to develop and maintain a database of most of these swift cavities, survey them from a distance to see if they are corked or not, and adjust the number of corks as appropriate to address current population trends.

I get that you don’t like the approach - but it’s a solid one, which is what works best for swifts’ nests: solid structures.

That’s what they say they rolled out, after: “Within Notepad++ itself, WinGup (the updater) was enhanced in v8.8.9 to verify both the certificate and the signature of the downloaded installer”

The timeline says the attack started in June of 2025 and continued through Dec 2, 2025. If you installed, updated, or silently updated during that period you may have been targeted / compromised.

The 90s and the naughts were actually a pretty good time… we did too little to ensure that continued, in so so many ways.

at anytime a bigger war could break out.

Welcome back to the late 1970s / early 1980s I grew up in.

We just learned to live with it- maybe move to a big city for a better chance at instant vaporization.

Meanwhile in 1984: When Doves Cry you might as well Jump, and when the 99 Red Balloons Float by you’ll be sitting pretty in this dust that was a city.