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#31
Hardware & Technology / Re: Claude-powered AI coding a...
Last post by ergophobe - April 29, 2026, 12:16:34 AM
Upon reflection - I think a better analogy is a table saw. You *know* it will cut fingers off. It's not the tool's fault.  It took a century to go from the electric table saw to the SawStop table saw, but even so, almost nobody buys them. It's not the saw's fault.

https://www.sawstop.com/
#32
Hardware & Technology / Re: Claude-powered AI coding a...
Last post by ergophobe - April 28, 2026, 09:48:26 PM
Sure. Like kids play with guns. And parents who care have a gun safe.

I'm surprised that given an agent known to look for the keys, there wasn't an air-gapped "Oh shit!" Daily backup or something.

Back in the day, a pro photographer I knew had three sets of hard dives. Two at house that got rotated frequently and then a weekly backup where he took one drive to his mother's house and put it in her chest freezer wrapped in insulated bags and pulled the other one out. The idea was that if both houses burned down at once, the drive in the bags in the freezer might survive
#34
Hardware & Technology / Re: Claude-powered AI coding a...
Last post by rcjordan - April 28, 2026, 08:16:36 PM
>access to production data

I've read that the agentic LLMs sometimes don't ask ...they just rifle through your stuff until they find mom's car keys.

That's why I posted that I was considering buying a virgin laptop before playing with them.
#35
Water Cooler / Re: Ukraine to field 25,000 gr...
Last post by littleman - April 28, 2026, 05:58:21 AM
Crazy how much we are getting close to a terminator scenario on 2026.
#36
Water Cooler / Ukraine to field 25,000 ground...
Last post by Drastic - April 28, 2026, 03:23:17 AM
https://www.militarytimes.com/unmanned/2026/04/24/ukraine-to-field-25000-ground-robots-in-push-to-replace-soldiers-for-frontline-logistics/

"For the first time in the history of this war, Ukrainian warriors captured an enemy position using exclusively unmanned platforms," Zelenskyy said.
#37
Hardware & Technology / Re: Claude-powered AI coding a...
Last post by ergophobe - April 28, 2026, 02:28:59 AM
I remember way back they used to have a satirical dictionary definition.

computer: device capable of making as many errors in 10 seconds as 100 humans working for 100 years.

In any case, that's really unfortunate.

It's also a bit odd to me that you would give a coding bot access to production data and that data wouldn't get backed up somewhere siloed.

I guess that's the whole thing though - a lot of engineering time is spent on deployment, which means that if you want it to help with deployment, it has to have a lot of privileges on the production environment.

A case of Spiderman Syndrome (with great power...)
#40
Water Cooler / Re: Insiders trading predictio...
Last post by ergophobe - April 26, 2026, 10:52:07 PM
>>  laws are for the 99%

I don't think Wilhoit's framing of this as a conservative tendency is correct - we have seen plenty of left-wing and right-wing regimes/societies where it applies - but I think the second part of Wilhoit's Law says something fundamental about America today:

QuoteWilhoit's Law: Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

We are seeing a lot of cases of people who are protected by the law, but not bound by it. Wage theft is a great example. It dwarfs theft by employees, but employee theft is punishable by jail, fine and termination. Wage theft is punishable by having to pay the wages you already owe if you get caught. In other words, there is no punishment for wage theft.