We just need basic legislation to make these companies invest more resources into developing guardrails, and if they don't do that properly or can't pull it off, they shall be at an economic disadvantage.
You could hire a legion of people for cheap to commit these crimes, but if its bots, suddenly its unpredictable and just one big whoopsie and therefore perfectly ok to do?
If a human starts pentesting a site its a crime, but if a bot does it its an AGI frontier doomsday scenario and that automatically pushes the consequences off their table?
Whats going to happen next? Are we gonna have robots that happen to physically break into banks to rob them for some reason and the company making them isnt responsible just because?
On top of these unrealistic doomsday prophecies going around lately, every company really has a disdain for its workers and would love to replace them all with bots. What everyone thought will happen, will eventually lead to companies become dependant on these AI companies. They can then jack up the prices as much as they wish, since there is no competition left or rehiring is ever so inflexible. I hope companies see the rug they place themselves on clearly. Notice how its always some fear inducing scenario in the future and this has been going for a couple of years now.
I honestly feel personally attacked by this and I don't consider myself to be an out of touch kung fu master or technologist at all. It is just very odd to read such an inflammatory comment on HN and then have people pretend this is correct and perfectly socially acceptable to say.
Like put your shoes into the person you are arguing against, with some empathy, would you want to be treated this way?
You feel attacked? I’m only referring people who are out of touch and lying to themselves. If you’re not doing that then it’s not you.
Unless if you feel it’s referring to you then you’re saying what I said is true. If what I said is true, then it’s not an attack is it? I’m just spitting facts. So don’t get offended, don’t think of it as an attack.
I know this is intended as a joke but there is something to it. The public market has a way of elevating profit over everything else, even if you start with the best intentions. Remember “don’t be evil”?
Eerily accurate how it works these days, I wish you weren't correct. I met a DBA wizard (he looked like the creator of c++) at a banking IT dept and this guy intuitively sensed what you needed and how its done.
I'm starting to believe computer work and screens make me lose touch with reality and dissociate. I remember starting an apprenticeship as a dev in 2015 and I saw a guy like me, but 2 years in, with deep eye bags and he just smiled, didnt say anything and he looked extremely exhausted. Well 11 years later and here we are, we are all tethered to this mess
That is a case I only become aware of when I read blogs like this. Technically I could solve it the same way, but these days you have so many tasks on your desk, you don't think about the problem and implications at all and that awareness/discipline is drowned in the noise/unlearned over time.
If someone only gave me 2 minutes for this, because they think it is very simple (as always), I'd have done a count of files of a specific pattern in the directory and then picked a random index, very naive and quick and dirty programming, no sampling at all, just to avoid discussions why it takes so long with people who don't want to hear it.
This reminds me of when I did a lot of C#, Java, JS, Python in my life, filling maps of strings and objects until I started with zig and noticed how expensive and complicated strings and data structure allocations can be. It kind of blew my mind how much memory and computation we waste when we try to get stuff done as fast as possible because of budget/time constraints.
I'd bet this bug also shows up in Vista file explorer with auto arrange disabled. Nobody will ever need more than 100 icons on their 800x600 workstation. Ship it.
Two things that have helped me with quickly recognizing these situations:
Programming for MCUs. Less so today when multi-hundred MHz MCUs are cheap, but even several years ago there were a lot of products where you needed to use the cheapest MCU and everything it did had to be optimized to avoid stalls and edge cases.
Second is doing LeetCode problems for fun/practice. This will elicit a groan from a lot of people, but the algorithms and pathological edge cases you learn really do change your thinking. The most interesting ones are the hard problems where they’ve added some hidden test case that causes naive solutions and algorithms to blow up. You start thinking on high alert for edge cases and Big O problems. It’s more fun when you’re doing it to learn on your own than for forced interview prep.
How many user pictures are there to choose from, though? This is a nice, elegant way to sample from the set, but the nature, size, and frequency of the problem don't justify more than five or ten seconds' or thought and one or two minutes of coding.
Exactly this, if you count the amount of time the windows 11 context menu needs to pop up and then the second click to get to the old context menu across the entire globe for a month, you would get an insane amount of time and cycles wasted
The billions of times aren't repeated times for the same person, it's because it's been done for the first time billions of times. This is the "choose a user's initial profile picture". They're not randomly changing it.
You could hire a legion of people for cheap to commit these crimes, but if its bots, suddenly its unpredictable and just one big whoopsie and therefore perfectly ok to do?
If a human starts pentesting a site its a crime, but if a bot does it its an AGI frontier doomsday scenario and that automatically pushes the consequences off their table?
Whats going to happen next? Are we gonna have robots that happen to physically break into banks to rob them for some reason and the company making them isnt responsible just because?
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