KB5077181 was released about a month ago as part of the February Patch Tuesday rollout. When the update first arrived, users reported a wide range of problems, including boot loops, login errors, and installation issues.
Microsoft has now acknowledged another problem linked to the same update. Some affected users see the message “C:\ is not accessible – Access denied” when trying to open the system drive.
You’re spot on regarding how AI operates.
AI is stupid story time!
I recently helped a friend with a self-hosted VPN problem. He had been using a free trial of Gemini Pro to try to fix it himself but gave up after THREE HOURS. It never tried to help him diagnose the issue, but instead kept coming up with elaborate fixes with names that suggested they were known issues, like The MTU Traffic Jam, The Packet Collision Quandary, and, my favorite, The Alpine Ridge Controller Trap. Then it would run him through an equally elaborate “fix”. When that didn’t work, it would use the failure conditions to propose a new, very serious sounding pile of bullshit and the process would repeat.
I fixed it in about fifteen minutes, most of that time spent undoing all the unnecessary static routing, port forwarding, and driver rollbacks it had him do. The solution? He had a typo in the port number in his peer config.
I can’t deny that LLMs are full of useful knowledge. I read through its output and all of its suggestions absolutely would have quickly and efficiently fixed their accompanying issue, even the thunderbolt/pcie bridging issue, if the real problem had been any of them. They’re just garbage at applying that information.
Yeah, they don’t do analysis but can fool people because they can regurgitate someone else’s analysis from their training data.
If could just be matching a pattern like “I have a network problem with <symptoms>. Your issue is <problem> and you need to <solution>.” Where the problem and solution are related to each other but the problem isn’t related to the symptoms, because the correlation with “network problem” ends up being stronger than the correlation with the description of the symptoms.
And that specific problem could likely be solved just by adding a description of that process to the training data. But there will be endless different versions of it that won’t be fixed by that bandaid.