SaucyWrong

The author of this blog isn’t the person this happened to FWIW, this blog appears to be a collection of horror stories from around social media.

Ah yes, my favorite hacker news retort: one is entitled to a prediction if and only if one is prepared to take a huge financial stake in that prediction.

This take has been trotted out so many times, e.g. “How many puts have you bought if you’re so certain?”

Software changes before my eyes constantly via normal releases so I don’t really care if I’m part of an experiment or not.

That’s software though—I see your point for something like content. I’m already used to seeing the title or thumbnail of a YouTube video change as the result of an experiment “winning” but the content itself…that would very jarring.

In my state (Massachusetts), the number of people who call in to the state’s gambling problem hotline doubled after online sports books became legalized. That is, by definition, a negative effect on the public good. The net number of people seeking help for gambling problems increased by 100%.

The user is nothing but a mark to Meta. If you use anything they make, they have you. Someday I hope more people realize this.

I’d love to see a similar three strikes enforcement of bogus claims. N strikes and the copyright immediately enters the public domain. Pick your battles very carefully.

Seems intuitively difficult to implement changes to the law to get this, but I can dream.

I personally don’t think we had a problem at all taking things like Rails and making extremely valuable software with them.

Like, no sort of problem that requires going all-in on tokens to solve. No problem at all, really.

But people think I’m crazy to say that.

So I think it’s a shame that DHH went in so hard on agentic engineering. They didn’t need to do it, they already were printing money.

I already know such a program, his name was Josh and he was my roommate in college.

EDIT: kidding, this looks like fun.

Bravo, the sarcasm went right over my head :)

Yeah again, you’re confusing wealth accumulation for progress.

I dismissed EA a long time ago as a way for already-wealthy people to continue accumulating wealth at any cost while avoiding paying as many taxes as possible in service of a deferred payout to rebuff problems that are intellectually possible but entirely hypothetical.

I’ll cop to not having facts to back up the perception of its software, but its status as an illegal monopoly is cemented by its successful prosecution by the DOJ.

But Facebook is extremely successful. Some crypto companies are very successful. I don’t hold any of these up as exemplars of the progress of humanity.

EDIT: My response to the GP, whose claim was that the only reason for the haters is that in each case they wanted the business to fail because they weren’t part of it, should been, no, actually there were at the time other and valid reasons detractors of those companies thought the way they did, and the same is true this time.

Microsoft is a monopolist that makes some of the most hated products on earth.

Facebook has been shown to derange young minds and has been a nonstop firehose of disinformation into global public discourse.

Crypto moved an insane amount of wealth from the poor to the rich through and uncountable number of scams and empty promises.

These? These are what you call progress? Yes, the created wealth for a few individuals, but progress? No, my friend.

A parent of your comment cited a ProPublica study that references real tax return data that showed billionaires paying an effective tax rate in the single digits. If their accumulated wealth were regarded as regular income, they should be paying 37% on most of the gains. Look it up yourself.

If you look at “net” like you want to, sure, they pay far more in tax dollars than pretty much anybody, but they are able to legally dodge paying tax on most of their wealth accumulation because if the way the IRS treats unrealized capital gains.

I’m paying top dollar for what I thought is an ad-free tier. First ad I see and that will be the end of that.

Agreed, Viable nonviolent protests are a useful signal that society has not (yet) converted to outright authoritarianism. This is their only use IMO. They cannot effect meaningful change. But their existence signifies we can still effect such a change without resorting to violence.

There is a threshold beyond which change can only come about via violence. I don’t wish to speculate how far away from that threshold we currently find ourselves. I think we’re closer now than we were 10 years ago.

“Net” is not relevant, nominal tax rate matters, and billionaires are the biggest tax dodgers by far, stop trying to blame poor people and civil servants for your weird hangups.

For $150 or less, I bet they could have hired a fiverr person to come over for two hours and letter the chalkboard.

This reads to me like a YouTube AI thumbnail. If you go to a lot of trouble to make a product and then you punt the last and probably easiest step in the process, makes me not want to engage with the product.

I'm an ex-Salesforce engineer and I can attest that very few line-level engineers are ever invited to attend Dreamforce. This would have been an ordinary day at the office for the SRE team.

I'm an ex-Salesforce, and yes, at the time I left, there was a huge change freeze surrounding Dreamforce. Unless a demo of an announced feature was coming in really at the buzzer, change velocity would have been low since a few weeks ago. I worked in a sub-cloud, so I can't even speculate as to the reason for the failure.

Something I wonder about is whether SRE responses were delayed due to having to be emergency-change-approved because Dreamforce was on. I don't recall a global outage ever occurring during a change freeze when I worked there, so /shrug.

> since it's standard practice in the industry, thus it's unnecessary to state it.

I suppose so, but with a few words it would have been totally unambiguous though. "So... we pointed Strix at .baseten.co and let it run without credentials or source code (with Baseten's prior authorization, of course)*."

We're in the know about this industry convention, but Strix's prospects may not be.

> You don't want a pentester that doesn't show this kind of reserve!

Agreed! A long while back a prospective acquirer set their red team on the B2B I worked at during due-diligence (with our knowledge). I'm ashamed to say that due to a swiss-cheese-type failure in a very obscure endpoint they eventually gained broad access and exfiltrated our tenant DB. We detected this, and patched the problem, locking them out. The game was well and truly over for us at that point, and we took the loss, but they proceeded to attempt to crack customer credentials to re-infiltrate, causing an emergency that we were then bound to notify all of our customers about--they were damaging the goods! All they had to do was show us a tenant slug list and we would have known the scope of the breach, no further penetration was necessary. The acquisition did eventually go through. Though a highly capable red team they were, I haven't worked with one so reckless since then.

The fact that they don’t seem to explicitly state this fact but do go to lengths to explain how the agent didn’t do anything malicious while confirming how alive the token was makes me doubt they asked for permission to run the agent in the first place.

As a security software engineer I value and have a lot of experience with disclosures like this. At the last two B2Bs I worked at, I would also work personally with prospect security teams that wanted to run their red team at us (with approval and rules of engagement)

This is a valuable disclosure but I wonder about two things:

a) was the decision to run Strix against a prospective vendor domain negotiated in advance?

b) if the answer to a) is “no” then it is apparent that while Strix want to ensure their customers only run it against domains they own (totally fair) they have a double standard for their own use.

I don’t know, I’m accustomed to getting disclosures from any Jane or Joe via bug bounties etc., but it feels like a courtesy notice would be nice before a prospective customer lets their agentic hacker off the leash.

EDIT: for typos.

At this point if you have something interest to say and you can’t put it in a blog then I guess I just won’t read it. I stopped using Twitter before it started calling itself X because Tech Twitter was always beefing over something stupid and the negativity was bumming me out. I never joined alternatives because I imagine folks are just beefing over there trying to farm engagement from their takes.

When I’m like 89 years old and the desire for mobility assistance outweighs my desire for privacy, maybe I’d consider getting one.

I was alive for that but had forgotten about it…wild.

My brainstorming led down a similar pathway of, "deluding powerful human actors that the systems must not be interfered with at any cost." I'm not sure I buy it though. Seems to me like if humanity were even approaching that brink, we could collectively decide to act, overthrowing the minority that--stemming from either greed, duty, or delusion--doesn't want us to act.

> while replicating wildly

Earnest question: by what mechanism that exists today would the achieve that in a way humans on top top of the situation could not curtail?

All of this runs on top of compute in meatspace that humans can disconnect.

Hmm, I wonder if, as a plaintiff that wished to file a complaint against a police department, would the records be gone by the time I got far enough through the courts to force evidence discovery. All of the Flock-lovers I talk to love to bring up the short-lived nature of the data (7 or 30 days depending on who you talk to).

I recognize your username from other comment threads and would classify you as a bun fanatic, but even so, I’d hold off on saying, “it’s working for bun,” until 1.4.0 has been out of canary for, like, more than 24 hours. Most real users haven’t onboarded to it yet.