October is upon us, and that means Mike Loukides has compiled his monthly menu of the choicest tech trends for your consumption. Here’s an appetizer.
There’s good news for punctuation-averse hackers: Researchers have found that run-on sentences in prompts can overcome an LLM’s guardrails. Another good jailbreaking gambit: using classic persuasion techniques to “psych out” the LLM. Despite these and other emerging risks, the 2025 DORA report celebrates its finding that 90% of software development professionals are using AI. Meanwhile, in social media news, scientists appear to be voting with their feet, abandoning X for Bluesky because of the “declining professional value” of the erstwhile Twitter. Lastly, the words slay, yeet, normie, and bestie figure prominently in the lexicon of a charming new Gen Z programming language called Cursed, vibe-coded into existence entirely by Claude.
