Cybersecurity: AI Dulls Our Critical Thinking and Enables Scammers to be More Effective (Microsoft Warned Us!)

The rise of "AI" (mostly Large Language Models, or LLMs, like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and so on) does enable a lot of "productivity hacks". However, Microsoft had warned us back in Jan 2025 that the most you rely on them, the more atrophied your critical thinking skills. Most "knowledge workers" who admitted to using AI tools, only use their own critical thinking skills to "fact-check" the LLMs. This suggests that the "average user" may be doing even less than that. 

This bodes ill for the average user, as they seem to regard ChatGPT and LLMs as some sort of generic "expert", when it is nothing of the sort. Indeed, merely by browsing /r/cybersecurity_help there are a number of topics where the poster openly admitted to "I checked my logs with ChatGPT..." when they lacked even the skills to fact-check the LLM they used. They suspected something, and they wanted ChatGPT to confirm their suspicions. 

But that's not the actually worrying part. Instead, Microsoft security is ringing the alarm: scammers are using LLMs to craft their latest scams to enhance their social engineering... by leveraging every sort of fakery possible, from fake website to fake job posting to fake customer service chatbots, because making them is so much easier with LLMs consolidating such knowledge. 

Be wary out there. 

App Discovery: Cobalt.tools, the video downloader that just works

One of the biggest pet peeves about Youtube is it's impossible to simply transfer your video to a different channel, when you have several. You have to download your videos, then re-upload them to the other channel, then re-enter the information. 

While for channel owners there is an option to download individual videos, there is no mass download option, so you need to click on each one individually to download each file individually, and you are now at the mercy of your browser's downloader. And every once in a while, you run into a few videos that just refuse to download. You click on download, you somehow get dumped back to the content tab, or the download simply "failed" with no error given. 

Yes, there are all sorts of shady sites and apps that claims to download Youtube videos for you, many of them want money, subscription, or more. Just search for "Youtube downloader" on Google... They all look shady for one reason or another. 

Then I found https://cobalt.tools , yes, that's the whole URL. 

No registration, no payment, no subscription. 

Simply paste in the URL of the video you want downloaded, and voila, it downloads. Even the ones previous you can't download from Youtube itself as the owner of the video. 

It has other options, like get audio only of a video, or download from other platforms (not just Youtube, but all the Chinese ones, like Bilibili, Xiaohongshu, as well as the Western ones). 

It just works. 

App Discovery: PyMacroRecord -- a completely free (no trial, no freemium, FREE!) macro recorder for Win10/11

Sometimes, you need to record a macro that will just copy data across multiple windows, move the mouse, and so on. However, when you search, you find... expensive options that has an fee... or an ANNUAL fee. 

Then you keep looking, and find PyMacroRecord. Completely free, source code in Python available on GitHub. One guy's passion project made available for all to you. 

And it works. 

I need to move some videos across my different Youtube channels. However, there is no such functionality on Youtube. The ONLY option is to re-upload. 

So I quickly whipped up a macro that copies title and description from one channel to the other. The rest, like keywords and such, can be handled by re-using an existing description. I have the videos available for re-upload (and the rest, I can download in batch). 

That's a TON of manual copy/paste saved. 30+ videos means probably closer to an hour saved. 

I am sure you have your own use case when you need such functions. Don't pay when this free tool will do. 

PC Hardware Discovery: One of the Best Mouse Bargains on Amazon -- Infinmind Mouse

Recently, I ended up buying two mice on Amazon. One I am okay with, but the other I am ecstatic with.

The latter is the Infinmind Mouse

It's a simple mouse, with 4 buttons (2 regular, 2 near the thumb), but it has a couple extra tricks. 

Instead of mouse wheel "tilting" (like Logitech) to scroll sideways, there's a separate mouse scroll roller next to the thumb. 

And the mouse wheel is METAL, and it's buttery smooth, yet has a distinctive step feedback if you scroll slowly. And it will let you spin on inertia alone so you will scroll a LONG way. It's hard to describe. 

The tracking is precise, as the built-in 4 different DPI setting, from 1000 to 3000 DPI, makes my scrolling on my triple-wide desktop (I use 3 x 24 inch monitors each at 1080p) very comfortably on a space that's barely twice as wide as my mouse. 

AND this mouse is both 2.4 Ghz wireless AND Bluetooth. In fact, it's 2 channel Bluetooth (can be paired to 2 different devices) AND available in both black and white. 

It even CAME with AA alkaline batteries, so it's ready to be used immediately. 

So what's the price of this amazing mouse? 

$18.99, and there's a 16% off coupon you can clip right now.  (As of 4/15/2025)

I daresay this is better than most Logitech mice I've used. We'll see how long it lasts. But in the meanwhile, this is one of the best mouse bargains on Amazon. 

LONG TERM UPDATE: It's now June 2025, and after 2 months of using it, it's... crap. It freezes up every few minutes, that I had to power cycle it to get it to work again. And that's USING the wireless dongle! I haven't tested Bluetooth mode yet. Will check later, but this is... not good. I had to power cycle the mouse multiple times a day. That's just... "no bueno".