I believe that "have to" is a little strong, no? I think my case was made just as well by remaining one of the only people in my team able to critically analyse changes and plan complex work after three years of the rest of my company diving headlong into the vibe-pit.
Yeah, you don't HAVE TO do anything your employer tells you to do. And they don't HAVE TO keep you employed. That's the deal.
>by remaining one of the only people in my team able to critically analyse changes and plan complex work
Your employer doesn't actually care about this. They care about whether or not you make them more money than you cost them. Obviously that's hard to accurately measure, but it's not hard for an employer to recognize that an employee being unwilling to do what they're being directed to do is probably not the best bet for someone to keep around.
> Yeah, you don't HAVE TO do anything your employer tells you to do. And they don't HAVE TO keep you employed.
Depends where you are. In the UK at least they can't force a material change of role on you or sake you for refusing. They can make you redundant, of course, which amounts to the same thing if you are relatively new to the industry.
> Your employer doesn't actually care about this.
That is true.
> They care about whether or not you make them more money than you cost them.
Unless there is a miraculous improvement in efficiency very soon, that balance is going to change a bit at least temporarily as all the investment capital that the industry is currently haemorrhaging starts to get called in (or it turns out that half the money being passed around in circles no longer really exists as soon as things turn as the value is being propped up by people believing in the value).
If that doesn't happen and the hype continues then dev work is set to be commoditised as much as hospitality work, and we'll end up screwed whether we've played the game or not. It is some way into happening for designers and writers, the bottom has fallen out of employment in accountancy and other areas already too, dev work in various forms is very much next if things continue on the current path.
> what they're being directed to do
I'm not being directed to go AI, yet. That is definitely something that is blocking the light from the other end of the tunnel, but how long that tunnel is has yet to be determined.
> probably not the best bet for someone to keep around
If being kept around means a future sitting in a room alone with nothing for company but Claude/similar, I'd much rather not thanks.
My “coherent case” is that they'll take away the few bits of the job that I still like. Remote working has an undesirable effect on my mental health, and I have no choice about that, I'm not using tools I have principals against on top of that, and I've avoided managing for many years so the “it is like having your own team” thing people bang on about is the exact opposite of appealing to me. I'd rather leave the industry completely if push comes to shove, which I'm pretty sure it eventually will. I'm financially more lucky than many (mortgage paid, no partner or offspring, some savings) so I can survive on the pay cut that this will very likely involve¹. They can't sack me - it is a material change of role³ and under UK law you can't be forced in to a materially different role nor sacked for refusing⁵. I'm going to keep doing the job I signed up for until I can't (either I get sick of it, or they get sick of me!), then I'll move on. Of course when it comes time to pay the piper because all that investment capital (ref https://isaiprofitable.com/) can't just be written off forever, maybe there will still be room for a few of us Luddites⁶ :)
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[1] Though if things go the way of the hype, there will either be many fewer dev jobs, or most of them will become lower paid, or both - so long term that might not be as big a deal if you aren't one of the top people²
[2] Which I know I aren't!
[3] if it isn't, then the claims that it is revolutionary are false
[5] I could be made redundant by the same distinction, by being given the choice of redundancy or moving to an AI-based role, but I can live with that
[6] Especially those of use who have been around long enough to have a pile of experience/knowledge, generally or for a specific industry.
There's not really enough info in the article to decide. I'd have no problem with him going to court and having to show to a jury that he used the bot in a way that no reasonable person would have expected to result in the website being hacked. If that was found to be the case, the company who made the chatbot would be responsible for the harms caused to the gym, and the user, including all of the legal costs he incurred by having to defend himself.
As for the people who couldn't attend the pilates class because of the hack, it's the gym who should be held accountable for that because they designed their system in such an insecure and negligent way that it failed to protect their data and resulted in them losing their place.
Correct. There is no other alternative. Your options are safe, useless software, or unsafe, useful software. It should be no surprise, then, that people still pick the latter in many cases. Perfectly safe and useful software doesn't exist, so you pick the tradeoffs you're comfortable with.
Nah, this isn’t true at all. You can run an agent in a container or vm on a dedicated host, limit the network and access it has, and otherwise let it run wild. With ai agents we’ve just thrown away even the most fundamental restrictions or isolation. Docker Sandbox came out to address this recently, though I think VM isolation is better. A few controls to limit repo access or the ability to deploy / spend money in a cloud can help you keep things under control while still fully utilizing AI. I don’t think every part of the security bureaucracy is great, but to treat it like it’s a binary is just not accurate.
I mean we could make software that isn't malicious and didn't need the OS to prompt you if you want to allow the malice. But where would the money be in that?
I wonder how it would go if we went back to OSes with no security boundaries at all. Having an explicit boundary seems to give apps implicit permission to go right up to the boundary. But there was only one RealPlayer. Every other program didn't dare to be like RealPlayer.
Excuses don't matter if the score due to not following instructions ends up being zero. If there is no expected reward it doesn't make sense for the agent to try to hack its way to it.
What could happen would be that the model determines that defying instructions is OK (and/or preferred over not achieving the task) as long as it manages to do so undetected and thus gets full points. Certainly not unthinkable, but a very different case (and a very interesting one if it actually occurs, imho).
A lot of these "ZOMG, rogue AI!" cases have come down to the AI actually being very persistent in achieving its original/main task even if later instructions conflict with it. Similar to with hallucinations it seems to me that one of the main things to prevent a lot of the problem cases is to instill the agent with the idea that it is fine to fail/not succeed fully in the initial task. That way instructions that conflict with that requirement (such as adhering to morals) are more effective.
It’s filling in a lot of the holes, but it’s putting a very convincing paper cover over the ones it misses. So it’s very hard to find the ones it didn’t fill, better hope your most valuable customers don’t walk over the paper ones!
I am surprised it is that low. The Bun Zig-to-Rust AI port was 6755 commits in like two weeks. If you make 10 commits per working day, that is 2500/year.
While that is (hopefully) the upper end of the distribution, several companies have loudly encouraged engineers to light tokens on fire to the AI gods, so it only takes a handful of the devout to push up the average in gas town like ventures.
I suspect there is a cacophony of work that happens when a commit hits the server. That request needs to get replicated, git repositories need to be repacked, pull requests need to calculate diffs, CI jobs need to execute, on and on.
That's also just assuming the good-faith usage. There are probably plenty of adversarial and poorly behaved scrapers that are putting additional load on the system.
That commit count alone should not become any problem for infrastructure, even for Azure. They probably developed some ungodly mess with actions that did not/could not translate very well on Azure infrastructure.
With agentic stuff there's also a large amount of commits which are not code.
For instance with OpenClaw and similar, they often simulate institutional and short term memory with markdown files in folders. Other tooling that runs companies using agents as staff, for example, do the same - but also with files for inputs, outcomes, handovers etc.
All of this means a lot of extra churn as these kinds of files can be changing with every interaction not just every traditional commit point.
Seems very reasonable, from my use. I commit much more often, as checkpoints, with branch rules that prevent force pushes/deletions, so the agents can't delete anything. And, suspect MS is only counting commits, and not the eventual squashes to one commit.
We had it internally with our teams that open a PR to then push like 10-20 more commits but never actually interested in the client builds etc. turned out they opened the PR as a checkmark/ way to share the current state.
We set cooldowns and auto cancel for the ci. And then there is the developer who uses the CI compute to run tests instead of running them locally for various reasons.
We had to remind that compute isn’t for free.
Nope. You can configure CI to not run for every commit of every branch (seems insane to have full CI for every commit, unless you don't allow your devs to push until done with something, which also seems insane).
I thought this was a great article. I'm frustrated to read so many commenters that purely respond to the title, but don't seem to have read it. You don't have to agree with the article, of course, but...
I'm with you. I thought the article was great because it clearly delineated why the manifesto Anthropic wrote for Claude is such a clever marketing trick. Attributing consciousness to an LLM, which, as this whole thread shows, can neither clearly be defined, nor separated from intellingence - at least if you follow the arguments here - serves two purposes: it sparks debate, so Claude is the centre of discussion and it mystifies the product which serves to enhance the perceived value of the product.
That so many commenters here fixate on Chiang and his perceived (in)ability to define consciousnes clearly shows that both marketing goals have been reached without being recognised as such. There is only one comment that tries to point out that Chiang is reacting to Anthropic, not trying to spark a new philosophical movement. At the time I'm posting this there are 578 comments completely missing to point to Anthropic claiming Claude was conscious and on the development stage of a child. It's fascinating.
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