Comment by fileeditview | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fileeditview | Hacker News Reader

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While a general "crashing down" probably will not happen I could imagine some differences to other mass produced goods.

Most of our private data lives in clouds now and there are already regular security nightmares of stolen passwords, photos etc. I fear that these incidents will accumulate with more and more AI generated code that is most likely not reviewed or reviewed by another AI.

Also regardless of AI I am more and more skipping cheap products in general and instead buying higher quality things. This way I buy less but what I buy doesn't (hopefully) break after a few years (or months) of use.

I see the same for software. Already before AI we were flooded with trash. I bet we could all delete at least half of the apps on our phones and nothing would be worse than before.

I am not convinced by the rosy future of instant AI-generated software but future will reveal what is to come.

I think one major lesson of the history of the internet is that very few people actually care about privacy in a holistic, structural way. People do not want their nudes, browsing history and STD results to be seen by their boss, but that desire for privacy does not translate to guarding their information from Google, their boss, or the government. And frankly this is actually quite rational overall, because Google is in fact very unlikely to leak this information to your boss, and if they did it would more likely to result in a legal payday rather than any direct social cost.

Hacker news obviously suffers from severe selection bias in this regard, but for the general public I doubt even repeated security breaches of vibe coded apps will move the needle much on the perception of LLM coded apps, which means that they will still sell, which means that it doesn't matter. I doubt even most people will pick up the connection. And frankly, most security breaches have no major consequences anyway, in the grand scheme of things. Perhaps the public conscioussness will harden a bit when it comes to uploading nudes to "CheckYourBodyFat", but the truly disastrous stuff like bank access is mostly behind 2FA layers already.

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