AI Writes Code, Judges Write Burns | Tech News of the Week

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Announcer: Welcome to Tech News of the Week with your host, a casual reference to a long forgotten movie scene.

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Ned: Welcome to Tech News of the Week. This is our weekly Tech News podcast where Chris and I go over four interesting articles that we found in the news. I'll kick it off. Over 30% of Microsoft code generated by AI, maybe not really. The rest was stolen from IBM.

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Chris: Dang. Got them.

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Ned: Got them. This actually comes up in the main story this week, but you're getting a little preview. Satya Nadella was interviewed by Mark Zuckerberg at the 2025 LLawn Con, and they talked about how AI is transforming work at Microsoft. Nadella indicated that internally, Copilot in its original and now agentic form has been used heavily for both code generation and code review. He was candid in the the fact that Copilot shines when it's writing or reviewing something like Python, but it seems to struggle with the older code bases that they have in C++ and C#. Unfortunately for Microsoft, they have a very large footprint in both languages, so they are now trying to augment existing models and train new ones to achieve better results. Satya estimated that 20 to 30% of code in their repositories has been written maybe by AI. But he was pretty mealymouthed about exactly what that means. But newspapers got their headlines, so they were happy about that. One thing that he was absolutely confident about was the ability of Copilot to perform code reviews. Especially with the agentic mode on that can write and run acceptance tests for newly written code and for existing repositories.

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Ned: Thatcha was also quick to stress that while AI is helping to improve existing code perform boilerplate tasks, novel ideas and algorithms are still the domain of humans, at least for now. Sacha also pontificated on the future of applications and a possible next generation where separate office applications like Excel, PowerPoint, and Word merge together into an unholy assemblage of productivity slot, to which accountants and actuaries of the world said, No. Still, I think he was right to point out that we're in a period of transformation, and it's impossible to predict what will come in the wake of AI's changes, except for destroying our planet. That's a certainty.

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Chris: Hive Systems releases Password Crackability Index. Tldr, everything is Now More Crackable.

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Ned: Yay.

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Chris: Isn't that fun? Every year since 2020, Hive Systems has released a report showing exactly how long it would take to crack a password that was hashed and was stolen. The crackability, which is what I'm going to be calling it now because it's confusing, consistently depends on how complex your password is. Hardware is getting better year over year, so even the hard passwords are getting easier. That's a lot of air quotes. Let me explain. In 2025, if you have a password that is 18 characters long and contains numbers, upper and lowercase letters, and symbols, it would take roughly 463 quadrillion years to crack in a dictionary attack or a bulk... What's it brute force attack basis, which is almost as long as it would take for you to get a date with Jackie Smith. Burn. Burn, Ned. Dating burn, burn.

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Ned: Okay.

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Chris: Anyway, If you were to take more hardware to the task of breaking passwords, the passwords get easier to crack. But even with 10,000 Nvidia A100s, which is the same outlay of hardware utilized when they first trained ChatGPT 3, it would still take one quadrillion years to crack that impossible password. But enough time for you to maybe get Jackie a peck on the cheek? She's I'm just not that into you, man. That's what I'm saying. Okay. The report also shows that with modern tech and dictionary tech techniques, if you use common words, or, I shouldn't say or, I should actually say, especially, If you use a password that has already been broken by anyone ever, the amount of time it takes to crack even a hard password goes down to instantly, which is exactly how fast I could get Jackie's number if I wanted to. I just I just don't want to. Sure. Is the thing. Anyway, use complex passwords. Don't repeat them. Mfa everything. Use passwordless solutions if possible. Jackie, please call me.

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Ned: Judge gets judgy about Meta's judgment of fair use. In a court case where Meta is being sued by a group of authors for copyright infringement, the judge, Vince Chabria, was not convinced by either party's request for summary judgment. It's well known that Meta torrented thousands of books to train their llama model, but their argument is that whatever is produced by llama is sufficiently transformative and thus subject to fair use. Judge Chabria was not entirely convinced by this line of argument and pushed back saying, You are dramatically changing, you might even say, a obliterating the market for that person's work, and you're saying that you don't even have to pay a license to that person. I just don't understand how that can be fair use. But before you celebrate this apparent victory, the judge is equally skeptical of the plaintiff's claims. So far, the authors and lawyers have failed to show that Lama has the capability to severely harm the potential future earnings of the authors. Tarbrio was clear on that point. So clear, in fact, that he may have been providing guidance to the authors on how to craft their case once it goes to trial.

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Ned: As such, summary judgment was not granted to either party, and the trial will proceed. As reported by Wired, at the end of the hearing, the judge said, I will issue a ruling later today. Just kidding. It will take longer for me to think about it. Glad he found a way to amuse himself in what I am sure will be an arduous slog through Meta's bullshit.

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Chris: Variation on a theme. Apple gets absolutely demolished in the latest part of the Epic Games lawsuit. I almost wrote that Apple got boat raced by the judge in the Epic case, but because I am an old and I'm not allowed to talk to young people anymore, I didn't, even though I think that usage is accurate. No cap. I'm Apple, company famous for its hardware and software that once upon a time just worked, is also famous for charging exorbitant fees from developers who publish using their app store. The app store, of course, is also the only way to get apps onto an Apple handheld device without jail-breaking it, which leads to a bit of a conflict. And it makes enemies of developers. Back in 2022, Epic Games, creators of Fortnite and other important things, I'm sure, sued them because Apple charged 30 % for in-app purchases, meaning you pay X for the game. If you want to buy something in the game, you have to pay Apple again. A judge ruled that Apple was not a monopolist, but did rule that this was being anticompetitive, and they had to stop it, which, sure, why not? Apple was supposed to stop this shit, and they didn't.

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Chris: What Apple did in order to be, quote, more competitive was drop the in-app purchase fee from 30 % to 27 %. Wow, says I.

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Ned: Yes.

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Chris: Damning enough. But you are being manipulative, anticompetitive, and lying under earth, under oath even, and possibly also under earth, says the judge in the case. Furthermore, the judge continued, Apple delayed court proceedings for no other reason than to continue to protect profits. The longer this case goes on, the longer they can charge full price. Among other things, including saying that the vice President of Finance at Apple lied under oath about all of this. Staggeringly short-sighted and greedy behavior. There There are 80 pages in this document that are Apple just getting dunked on by a highly pissed off judge in a highly pissed off judgely fashion, the end result of which found Apple being held in contempt. Wow. Long quote. Apple willfully chose not to comply with this court's injunction. It did so with the express intent to create new anti-competitive barriers which would, by design and in effect, maintain a valued revenue stream, a revenue stream previously found to be anticompetitive. That it thought this court could tolerate such insubordination was a gross miscalculation. As always, the cover-up made it worse. For this court, there is no second bite at the apple.

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Ned: Well done.

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Chris: The ruling bars Apple from restricting the use of third-party payment systems, demands that it pays Epik's legal fees, and will investigating potential criminal contempt of court charges. Wow. Someone should remind Tim Apple that literally all of this was avoidable. The phrase self-own comes up. The love of money being the root of all evil and all that, just stop being so goddamn greedy, would you?

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Ned: No. Thanks, Tim. All right, that's it. We're done now. Go away. Bye..