I've seen this happen a bunch too, though fortunately it hasn't been _that_ common. More often is managers that don't understand things using AI tools to try to understand them, mostly failing, and then regurgitating the LLM output during a meeting. Added as a link on my blog, too, since I have a similar article.

Monthly subscriptions for software like this confuse me. The website also obscures that it's paid at all - the first option is "download for X", then the next option is a red button to "unlock". No pricing link/page, nothing. Aimed at getting you to download and use it, then fork up later.

References mentioned all going on about productivity etc. Red flags all-round.

You click on the Unlock button, and it tells you pricing for monthly, annual, or lifetime. Not exactly rocket science.

- app named Mouseless

- need to CLICK on Unlock to show pricing

(just thought it was funny)

Quite funny how they phrase this.

"We recently discovered.." then later "..The attacker attempted to blackmail us"

So, I'd wager they had no idea of the breach until the attacker tried to blackmail them.

The demo product on the 'site looks really shoddy. Untidied-up 3D printing for $65?

The design files and firmware are open source, so you hypothetically produce your own: https://github.com/ploopyco/bean-pointing-stick

VPNs aren't anonymous, no, despite people pretending they are. Nonetheless, the findings in this report do highlight some things that make user identification easier than you'd expect it to be.

I'd not throw the report out just due to what you argue here. These findings are valid nonetheless.

The price doesn't seem bad, though this case smells of some sort of greater internal shift that's, at least for me, indicative the Bitwarden is being turned into a profit-machine-at-any-cost rather than providing a good service for money.

This new CEO is a massive red flag. Literally nothing about anything relevant to the product or industry, though he's apparently good at private equity and selling orgs.

Probably worth jumping ship now before it mutates into another shitty corporate org, except this one is keeping your passwords.

They bumped prices just a few months back.

Seniors aren't layoff-proof, yeah, or anyone really.

I think the point I made in the article is more aimed at AI advancing into being able to do the jobs that people currently say they won't/can't do.

When ChatGPT appeared, not long ago, people said that it wouldn't be able to code well because it lacks the reasoning ability. Well, here we are.

Changed back or not, this demonstrates that they're either willing to make sweeping changes like this that hurt a massive number of users, or that they're incompetent to the point of not realising the impact of the first change. They'd have had to just blindly make the change, since the original PR was approved and merged within the same minute by the original author (no additional eyes, at least that we can see), or ignore user complaints and make it anyway. Both cases demonstrate terrible stewardship of VSCode.

This seems like a very stupid thing to put on the open Internet attached to your name

Isn't this illegal actually? Unsure in the US but I would bet it is in many countries. It feels deceptive/scammy.