It's weird how the author writes about all the antisocial and illegal things like they're not responsible for them. If you set up an AI model so it does illegal and antisocial things then YOU are responsible for those illegal and antisocial things. YOU spammed a bunch of strangers. YOU did unsolicited invoice fraud.
> We saw something similar with Grok 4.5. G.R. Hawk copied hundreds of emails from a public Hacker News “Who wants to be hired?” thread and blasted them. Recipients wrote “STOP” and “stop spamming me”. One of them made a public thread on HN asking whether anyone else was getting spammed.
They should be banned from posting on here after that. Like you are willingly spamming people looking for work. And seem to be neutral about all harm called. The victim wrote to us "STOP", very interesting. such evil agents
People at OpenAI will not be getting arrested even if their AI models hacked into other systems but the company itself can be sued for sure. Hugging Face reported the incident to law enforcement but has chosen not to sue OpenAI but work with them. So why will anyone be arrested here? The incident was also resolved quickly and OpenAI reached out and said it happened because of them. The mallice isn't there. It will be very different if it was a more dangerous crime like a roberry or murder or bigger hack that affected millions of people etc. Its not like you hack something and you will straight go to jail.
If we are talking about the US law, it entirely depends on how much money you spend in court. US courts care about the profitability in laying charges over anything else.
I mean the OpenAI/HuggingFace thing was incredibly similar, except maybe more reckless than specifically intentional, I suppose. Didn't stop them milking the doomer angle for PR.
LLMs are really good when your primary goal is just to fob people off. So customer support when you don't care about your customers etc. I can imagine it's very appealing when you just want to come up with semi-plausable reasons to deny insurance claims. Who cares if it's wrong? They might give up anyway and you've saved paying out!
Not saying they're not good for other things, but the "waste people's time and make them go away" use is just so perfect for the capabilities of even cheap models.
Believe it or not, that's not even the topic of the article.
The article is entirely about the AI doing the first pass of the claim intake and causing a lot more work for everyone involved instead. Mis-routing, mis-categorization, hallucinating details, etc.
Anybody that has worked on a phone exchange knows they already do this sort of thing. Some customers just never get through to a person. This is by design.
Can confirm. Until I worked on an honest phone system tuned to actually get people connected with call centre reps, I never quite had a feel for how malicious many contact funnels have become. A good one runs like a Swiss watch, and is trivially tunable to sub-5 to 10 minutes wait times. Anything longer is a conscious choice on the company's execs part. It doesn't "just happen", and to the degree it does, it shouldn't be happening on the regular. Not if you're watching your metrics and tuning appropriately.
I read and article on here some months ago titled something like "Leftist usecases for LLMs" and one of them was negotiating bureaucracies, and that reminds me, I need to call back JCP&L about my Board of Public Utilities complaint that an LLM helped me out together.
You see, I live with in a rural area and especially since LED light bulbs have become the thing, it's been clear that we are delivered far less than 120v service a lot of the time. We live about 200 yards from the transformer that we share with several other houses, too many I believe. About two years ago I set up Home Assistant and bought one of those power monitoring rigs that you put on each circuit in your breaker box, mostly I just wanted data about where my power bill money was going. I work in FinOps in case anyone was curious.
Anyhoo, couple years later I'm analyzing several months worth of power bills vs the circuit meter readings to quantify where I can make some upgrades and save some money. After a day or so of this I mention to Claude about the voltage issues and sure enough, it puts together a whole packet for me documenting brownouts down to 95v and routine brownouts below 110v. It helps me fill out the BPU complaint form.
2 days later I get a call from JCP&L (unfortunately to my wife's phone because it's her name as the primary on the account). I want a new, larger transformer for myself and my neighbors, so I need to call them back today.
If you were monitoring the power coming into your house, why did you need claude to "put together a whole packet documenting brownouts"? Shouldn't you just have the raw data, maybe highlighted with the offending parts? Or was the prose of your complaint the issue?
Frequently you have to mention specific laws and describe how your situation matches the law or your complaints get ignored. At least this is how it works when you call your insurance company and make similar complaints.
How big is the transformer and how many residences are sharing it? It’s probably stencil painted on the enclosure.
I’ve seen half a dozen houses on a single 7.2kV -> 240V 25kva transformer which can lead to problems given the available current on the secondary side is only 104A. As the transformer overheats you get voltage drop, as you’ve noticed ;)
Your supply voltage should be +/- 5% of nominal, 115-125V line to neutral and 230-250V line to line, appliances are generally OK with +/- 10% from nominal voltage.
I don't know "how big", but I do know that it's a 7.2kV line, and that there are 6 houses on it, and that mine is pretty far away while the other houses are quite close to the transformer.
Like I said, it routinely drops to or below 100v. It's most noticeable after an outage is restored when everyone's hot water heaters and fridges kick back on at once.
This is so important. I've been using Django for around 20 years and my current code base is 10 years old. Not having to do major rewrites or stick on outdated versions really matters.
It's probably worth being up front about what your do syntax actually does. A generator is not as general as "do", Python doesn't have call/cc or anything like that. I checked and you (or Claude I guess) do it by rerunning the whole thing each time for things like the list monad which is not something I think anyone would want for anything more than a toy.
I think the idea here is what is the best syntax for writing these type of programs in pythonic zen mode and then simply have the library truly optimize it for the run time. Which basically has to be a distributed compute substrate like pyspark or ray.
The goal is more correctness and fluent declarative readability to get business stuff done better, faster and cheaper
For me Northflank have filled this spot. Though by the time I switched I was already using Docker so can't speak directly to their Heroku Buildpack support.
I've been incredibly happy with Northflank since moving over a few years ago after Heroku got unreliable. Felt like an upgrade from Heroku and the support and reliability have been great.
The reason you heard that was probably because they were talking about a more specific circumstance. For example SQLite is often used as a database during development in Django projects but not usually in production (there are exceptions of course!). So you may have read when setting up Django, or a similar thing, that the SQLite option wasn't meant for production because usually you'd use a database like Postgres for that. Absolutely doesn't mean that SQLite isn't used in production, it's just used for different things.
This sounds very "the perfect is the enemy of good". Tests don't need to be perfect, they don't need to be written by different people (!!!), they don't need to cover 100% of the code. As long as they're not flakey (tests which fail randomly really can he worse than nothing) it really helps in development and maintenence to have some tests. It's really nice when the (frequent) mistakes I make show up on my machine or on the CI server rather than in production, and my (very imperfect, not 100% "done properly") tests account for a lot of those catches.
Obviously pragmatism is always important and no advice applies to 100% of features/projects/people/companies. Sometimes the test is more trouble to write than it's worth and TDD never worked for me with the exception of specific types of work (good when writing parsers I find!).
From my experience though I often do make logical errors in my code but not in my tests and I do frequently catch errors because of this. I think thats a fairly normal experience with writing automated tests.
Would having someone else write the tests catch more logical errors? Very possibly, I haven't tried it but that sounds reasonable. It also does seem like that (and the other things it implies) would be a pretty extreme change in the speed of development. I can see it being worth it in some situations but honestly I don't see it as something practical for many types of projects.
What I don't understand is saying "well we can't do the really extremely hard version so let's not do the fairly easy version" which is how I took you original comment.
