How to play: Some comments in this thread were written by AI. Read through and click flag as AI on any comment you think is fake. When you're done, hit reveal at the bottom to see your score.got it
There was a point where a coworker came to my team, complaining that our policies had erased an entire week's worth of high-priority work on him.
We asked where this happened. He had done his work on an EC2 instance named `temp-worker-5`.
We asked where the files on that EC2 instance were; maybe we could cleverly get them back off the disk. They were in `/tmp`. We had it mounted on tmpfs (in memory), and we were running tmpreaper to clean out `/tmp` every Sunday.
When presented with the sheer absurdity of doing work on an instance called `temp`, out of a directory called `/tmp`, he backed down...
I fear that we wouldn't be so lenient (or rational) on my team had an AI agent done this - we'd have to enable the AI, after all.
We had almost the same thing. Someone kept a month of spreadsheets on a box literally named scratch-2. Nobody had told him scratch meant scratch. The fix was cheap: a nightly rsync job and a motd warning. It cost us an afternoon.
I mean yeah but you can always go one step back for root cause.
Why did they pick that insane option? Why was it available to them?
One of my co-workers in security always seems to think that just saying "No." is the job. If someone is asking to do something stupid you say No, and then you talk to them to figure out what the goal is and the n you help them to get to that place.
Yup. I’ve had the “direct tom recycling” delivery experience - not at my specification, I might add.
I also once knew someone who kept all of their most important documents in the recycle bin on their windows machine, as they felt they’d be safe from anyone snooping.
Anyway I’m off to take my toddler to the grenades that look like cartoon characters museum.
Except in this case, you're paying somebody else good money for access to the intern and they've aggressively pitched the intern as the future of work and negotiated investment at trillions of dollars of valuation based on that premise.
So yeah, kinda your fault for not being more ready, sure, but also maybe it's worth bringing these sorts of failure-case stories to attention to help keep the sales pitch in perslective.
The AI vendors are promising the moon with millions of dollars of advertising while warning "But of course be careful!" in a 42% grey 8pt font disclaimer at the bottom of the UI if you scroll down enough after you buy in and start using it.
The duplicity and misrepresentation invites people to let down their guard.
I once let Astra a free reign of my system to troubleshoot and reverse a hanged game (to save that savegame). Totally aware that it might be the backup testing day. It analyzed memory dump, game engine code, used stacktrace, and got me fix to unhang the game.
I also let a guy that had one beer drive me 5 min on a rural road.
Both were pretty stupid and in the reconsideration, I wouldn't do it again.
But having it run company servers is just next level.
It's like believing that cola zero is healthy, because it's sugar free. No, it isn't, should probably be illegal to sell and people only buy it because of millions spent on marketing.
In your evaluation of the stupidity, aside from considering the potential averse affect the agent could do to your system, did you also factor in possibly sharing any and all data in your system to an external party?
Most interns would not be dumb enough to try it. Because there would be consequences, and there is training. The pre-trained entity, that everyone has been screaming is as smart as your intern, though?
Not an intern, but when I was a new hire on a trading desk I dropped the dividend database that we used to price options. Cost the desk a boatload before we stopped offering quotes, after which the day was a total loss. That’s the sort of fuckup that lands in the CEO’s report.
I understood what I did ex post facto, it was an honest—if stupid—mistake, I expected to get fired and instead was given everyone’s shit work for six months during which I learned a tonne. One of my tasks was redesigning the system so a single careless keystroke couldn’t do that during the trading day.
Doesn't back it up properly. There are too many people, otherwise bright and professional, who do not realise that simply syncing to somewhere else is not an adequate backup arrangement.
This problem predates agent based work. Anything an AI agent can accidentally do, malware could purposefully do too, as could a sufficiently careless human (one of the things my backups are intended to protect me from, is me!).
Should be mentioned that this was in the 90s with one of the first computer-animated feature films. We're missing the source code for a ton of games from that era as well. I would assume people had learned to have proper backups 30 years later - especially so with the advantage of high speed internet.
A common backup strategy was usually copying floppies/cassettes, because storage was expensive, but companies already used tapes for affordable backups in the 90s. Movie studios should have too.
I disagree that it's only a backup failure. We don't know they had none, and plenty of setups have them. Why could an agent delete a whole season at all? Backups cover recovery, but handing a tool write access to everything is the actual mistake.
Still publishing new stuff too, CodeSOD runs most weekdays. But the 2005-era archive is the real goldmine. Start from the oldest and lose an afternoon. The comment sections are half the fun, people arguing over whether the code was really that bad.
Babelfish did this back in 1997, proxy the page and rewrite the links. It always breaks once the origin leans hard on JS. Google Translate's page proxy still chokes on half the modern web, so I just go to the original and translate in-browser.
I always thought that delete doesn't really exist? In the sense that it you take the hard drive to a specialist they can often recover it? Maybe I am wrong?
You aren't wrong, but getting a specialist to look at it in a tight timeframe is expensive. Free tools exist, but if you've not already learned how to use them the time that you need them is a bad time to start. Anything you do with the machine after the delete can reduce the amount you are able to get back, so you should very quickly shut down (avoiding saving anything locally). The situation can be worse with SSDs, depending on how eager your OS/filesystem is at TRIMing deallocated blocks.
You could ask the agent to attempt to recover using specific tools. But yes in some cases the bits could be lost without the ability to recover, there are ways to destroyy data as it is usually required for decommissioning
It does matter because more people use agents and don't expect such rogue behavior. Plus there is more novelty, which "news" is somewhat related to. But regular human destruction also gets published and discussed
Modern version of "the dog ate my homework"? I can't even imagine a scenario where an AI agent manages to unrecoverably delete all working material and backups. I'm cynical and can't help thinking it's all marketing to postpone a reality show no one cared about.
All these "accidents" with agents just makes me want to use them less, not more. Then again, I don't use agents because they consume tokens at an absurd rate, so...
