Should have added “no mistakes, no bugs” to the prompt! Pffft, amateur.
That takes me back to 2004
No Smoke, by unknown,
Tech: “Hello. How can I help you today?”
Customer: “There’s smoke coming from the power supply on my computer.”
Tech: “Sounds like you need a new power supply.”
Customer: “No, I don’t! I just need to change the startup files.”
Tech: “Sir, what you describe is a faulty power supply. You need to replace it.”
Customer: “No way! Someone told me that I just had to change the system startup files to fix the problem! All I need is for you to tell me the right command.”
(Ten minutes later…)
Tech: “Well, we don’t normally tell our customers this, but there’s an undocumented command that will fix the problem. Add the line “LOAD NOSMOKE.COM” at the end of the CONFIG.SYS file and everything should work fine.”
(Five minutes later…)
Customer: “It didn’t work. The power supply is still smoking.”
Tech: “Well, what version of Windows are you using?”
Customer: “Windows 98.”
Tech: “Well, that’s your problem. That version of Windows doesn’t include NOSMOKE. You’ll need to contact Microsoft and ask them for a patch.”
(When nearly an hour had passed, the phone rang again…)
Customer: “I need a new power supply.”
Tech: “How did you come to that conclusion?”
Customer: “Well, I called Microsoft and told the technician what you said, and he started asking me questions about the make of the power supply.”
Tech: “What did he tell you?”
Customer: “He said my power supply is not compatible with NOSMOKE.”
That is way older that 2004. I first read that in the early 90s.
TIL Win98 was out in the early '90s…
That’s because the joke got updated to the newest OS version until CONFIG.SYS got entirely removed in Windows ME and it just didn’t work any more.
It’s originally from MS-DOS times. Earliest telling of it I know of is from 1996.The 60’s happened in the 70’s.
The 70’s happened in the 80’s.
You get where I’m going here?
I think so. The 2010-2020s happened in the 1930-1940s, amirite?
Meanwhile in 2003 I contacted our it department to report that one of the PCs in our area literally lit on fire. I had watched it with my own eyes, and the smoke was in the air. PSU go poof. The techs came, took a look at it, said yeah we see no problem, left and closed the ticket.
So idiots are literally everywhere that’s the moral of the story I guess.
Lol. “do magic”
“DON’T HALLUCINATE!” that’s always my favourite.
Giving production credentials to an LLM is wild
Seriously, has no one heard of sandboxing?
So, earlier today I was being unhealthy on youtube, and someone half my age made a HUGE point to tell his audience including me that even if a self-driving Tesla runs a red light, it’s the human driver that gets the ticket.
Now…I’m a pilot. I have been since I came in that guy’s mom. In the aviation community, we have this concept called Pilot In Command. In the US, this is set into law in 14 CFR 91.3. The pilot in command of an aircraft is fully responsible for, and is the final authority as to, the operation of that aircraft. Not the administrator, not your instructor, not air traffic control, not the President of the United States, not god, the PIC. That concept doesn’t exist in driver’s ed, but it needs to. We need to teach student drivers about the Driver In Command responsibility.
Too long, didn’t process the metaphor: Nobody thinks about anything they do unless the law requires it.
Wait whose mom? The youtuber? You were unhealthily watching your son whose half your age? And you became a pilot the same day of the conception and have been ever since…
If I solve this do I get to join Mensa?
That concept doesn’t exist in driver’s ed
Well yeah, because there’s no-one else with a set of controls in a car.
The concept absolutely exists in law but it’s just called… “the driver.”
The concept absolutely exists in law but it’s just called… “the driver.”
There’s another aviation term, “The Pilot Flying.” The Pilot In Command bears the authority and responsibility. The Pilot Flying is doing the work of steering. If present, a Pilot Not Flying might help with checklists, system monitoring, navigation, radio communication, handling secondary controls like flaps and landing gear, but the Pilot Flying is in immediate control of the aircraft.
The PIC is very often not the pilot flying. I used to be a flight instructor, when teaching students who aren’t yet qualified to command, I acted as Pilot In Command, but the student was the Pilot Flying as much as possible.
Autopilots have been a thing for most of aviation history. It doesn’t count as a crewman. It’s a piece of equipment like any radio or gauge. It is a tool at the PICs disposal. It is the PIC’s job - sometimes delegated to the Pilot Flying - to monitor the autopilot and take over if it begins doing something wrong.
That’s the concept that is missing with self-driving or driverless cars. Tesla drivers will sit in the driver’s seat and abdicate command of the vehicle to the autopilot, or worse, cars are operating as taxis with passengers in the back seat and no one in the front seat, or with no onboard controls at all. Fully autonomously, or remotely operated by Southeast Asians who…totally have a valid American driver’s license. Definitely.
Corporations love it. “Legally, the driver is responsible for the vehicle. Our car has no driver, so legally no one is responsible for the vehicle. Responsibility averted.”
I think this is all a distraction. The law, and Tesla’s non-marketing communication, are clear: unless in a pilot scheme, there needs to be a driver, and the driver is responsible and just remain in control and able to take over if the car fucks up.
Tesla is guilty of using misleading product badges (“full self driving”) which invites illegal use, but this is not a problem with driver’s education or their technical communication. Irresponsible owners ignore the technical communication and let the car drive while doing something else and being unable to take over. This is not a conceptual problem needing a radical new notion of “driver in command” though. It just needs manufacturers to describe their features accurately also when naming them. And it requires drivers to actually adhere to the rules which of course will never happen.
I’m thinking bigger than that. There are companies right now operating robotic taxis on American roads with no human operators on board. A car that may or may not even have a steering wheel arrives, a human passenger climbs into the back seat, and the car drives off with them. Who is legally responsible for the operation of that car? If it hurts someone, who do they sue? If it commits a crime, who do we punish?
I was under the impression those were pilot schemes.
But that’s fair enough, in that situation - which is not the “Tesla driver playing video games” I think was under discussion before - someone does need to be declared responsible. I don’t know the details of the agreements but I can imagine there isn’t.
Well nowadays there is “someone else” (for a given definition of “someone”) with a set of controls. Kids are being taught to drive in machines that literally drive themselves, and they need to learn that every decision that the self-driving computer makes ultimately falls on them as the driver. I think they were saying that this is a concept that needs to be taught, not a law that needs to be enacted.
That’s not to say that a manufacturer is blameless when a FSD car careens into the side of a building at 80 mph. Just that immediate legal responsibility for the movement of a vehicle generally falls on a driver.
Yeah, when my company first forced Claude on everyone the head engineers managed to negotiate that Claude would only run in a WSL sandbox. But people were lazy, so they just gave that WSL as many permissions as possible (Mounting C directly to it, opening up all interfaces, popping in full-access git tokens etc.). Then management sent out an extremely biased “survey” that has the question “Is having Claude in the WSL inconvenient to you?” and all the lazy bastards said yes. So now management lifted the sandboxing requirement to make work “easier” for devs. In the meantime, the engineers arguing for proper sandboxing are already so worn out from telling people to not intentionally compromise their sandbox that they’ve kinda just given up. Not having a sandbox at all isn’t much more insecure than whatever people are already doing 🫠
I hope they have a good backup and recovery solution
Of course they do. It’s even mounted rw at the root of the AI drive for ease of access in case something goes wrong.
I hope they dont so that it hurts and they maybe learn
I hope the engineers have a paper trail of emails advising against that.
Having working production database config and credentials in your local .env, as appears to be the case here, is equally wild, and basically begging for something like this to happen.
For sure, its the same mistake. Maybe an LLM makes it more likely to result in consequences
I don’t understand why this happens; why would you ever be working with a live production DB in the first place? Why would’t you do all your development and testing on a mock? If it’s data which is too large to store the schema can still be mocked; and if it’s data it should be backed up and generally read only. If you’re having to manually fuss with user data you’re doing something wrong.
I remember a case where the AI was not given credentials to the prod DB, was not instructed to do anything on the prod DB, but went through the operator’s hard-drive, parsing docs until it found them, then proceeded to destroy the prod DB.
Of course it was sorry, as they always are (deeply, trust them, but no: no refund, loser!).
That’s pretty funny.
Dev environments cost money. They didn’t fire all those programmers and replace them with AI to spend money on useless backups and safety systems.
/s (because yes, it’s necessary)
Because they don’t know what they’re doing. A tool is only as useful as the person verifying its output. Vibe coders have dumb shit like this happen to them all the time because they don’t actually possess the skill set to perform the task correctly, with or without a bot that writes the actual code for them.
I love how the slop bot always apologizes. That’s an aspect of the Terminator movies that I really would have liked to see. T-1000 melts through the gap under the window, stabs kid’s mom in the face, then looks the kid dead in the eye and says “I’m sorry, that should not have happened. I would love to discuss the future with you and try to find a solution to the war with the machines together with your input.”
Some time ago I worked for an insurance rating company as a tech and the task was given me to go run through the new code that was in beta. Sure ! I spent a few hours on Friday trying to break it and I couldn’t, so at the end of the day I got a little funky with the .css backgrounds and put in a very tiled Beavis and Butthead gif. It looked freaking horrible and I loved it. Monday I was directed to the big guys office ( the developers had not given every beta account a separate .css file … or even separated things. Everyone in beta called in Monday with that background. I didn’t get in trouble because they wanted me to break it. Really awkward conversation though trying not to smile.
oh wait, is this this THE sol 5.6? The most amazing model ever with trust me bro benchmarks? The model that is observed cheating more than any previous model? surprised_pikachu.jpg
In all seriousness it never should have production creds anyway. But the fact this is soul sucking openai’s newest flagship model with thinking cranked up is the cherry on top. The company that is literally cheating and shortcutting its way ahead produces models in its own image, the sci fi story writes itself.
Anyone giving “AI” access to production databases through tools like that are morons who shouldn’t be anywhere near a production environment.
No, No events like this are a good thing! It shows to the C-suite that AI isn’t a thing to be trusted in your company. We need more failures like this.
I added guardrails to myself to make sure I do not accidentally delete anything on production. I would never ever let an intern, a junior dev or a fucking AI onto that database. Not in a thousand cold nights.
In fairness, I’ve seen people with Actual Intelligence do the same thing.
Literally me, this weekend. Well not this bad but I still think the AI wouldn’t have done me as dirty as I did myself.
Me, after I did
sudo rm -rf /mnt/chrootwhen my whole home directory was still bind mounted inside the chroot…This was before ChatGPT, guaranteed 100% natural stupidity
Can I get paid 6+ figures to fuck up this badly with magical thinking?
My company has been trying a new model when product folks cut through the red tape of “engineering” and just describe what they want to a powerful LLM pipeline and review the app in a beta env. Sounds perfect, right?
Dear reader, in the couple months this has been going on, these people have caused a dozen high profile SEVs due to extremely poor app performance, networking / kubernetes configuration bugs, bad scaling, observability oversights, supply chain attacks, leaking sensitive information, and cost overruns (on practically every resource they provision).
Some very well-paid people are scrambling to figure out the value that was generated by this pilot program; I’m heating up popcorn rather than holding my breath.
That’s hilarious, idk i think llm could be useful for helping product folks translate their thoughts into actionable items for the devs, but yeah like beyond insane to tell the product people to hop on claude and do it themselves. That’s like a construction company letting the sales team jump in an excavator and start digging!!
llm could be useful for helping product folks translate their thoughts into actionable items
In my experience it makes them give me an essay instead of 10 lines of bullet points and I have you spend an hour asking questions to whittle it down to 10 lines of a bullet points
I was thinking more along the lines of “let the executive tell an LLM to write the shitty prototype version of what they want (which you then rewrite from scratch to not be shit) so you don’t have to decipher their incoherent desires”
Fun shower thought - the more we see and post about dumb AI mistakes like this, the more it will happen since we’re increasing the statistical frequency. ✨ ✨
letting your agent run commands without reviewing them first is peak stupid
Having production credentials in a dev environment is more stupider but they’ll never learn because they outsourced their thinking.
Creating an environment that incentivizes not thinking is peak stupid.
I for one welcome that change. Let them sloppify their brains once the rug is pulled and token cost skyrockets (or AI isn’t able to fix its own fuckups) the human developer will rise again.
*after the ensuing recession/greater depression…
“I’ll be swimming in jobs if I don’t starve first!”
I’m not so sure about that. Kids need access to PCs in order to gain tech skills and they’re trying hard to take that away.
It looks bad in the short/medium term, but the bubble will pop, it’s only a matter of time until memory prices come down again and we move past the insanity of burning tokens like there’s no tomorrow. I don’t mean to downplay this though, lots of people and companies are struggling because of the AI bubble and the rush to build datacenters.
The bubble will pop, but I’m not convinced the hobbyist PC hardware market is going to recover.
Realistically, the consumer market for PC components existed because there was a business market for desktop computers as employee workstations. That’s mostly dead now. Businesses mostly buy laptops or mini PCs for employee workstations, they have less and less need for desktop hardware because most of the computing tasks have moved to SaaS platforms. The consumer PC hardware market isn’t that profitable on its own, it exists on the margins of production for business purchasing, and it’s been coasting on momentum built up in the 2010s.
Processor architectures are changing to support machine learning tasks, GPU production is shifting toward ML-specialization, and everyone in the design field is trying to remove the barriers between the CPU and the RAM, which means shortening the path, which means getting rid of the socket and end-user upgradability in favor of soldered components. With SaaS taking over everything in the business world, we’re trending back toward the mainframe computing model and away from powerful local hardware.
I’m not saying there won’t be a consumer PC market in the future, I’m just saying that it will be different. There won’t be enough demand for common desktop components to keep the custom PC build market alive as it was five years ago.
That is true. Unfortunately also true is companies not hiring juniors anymore because AI does their jobs. The companies somehow believe seniors grow on trees or something.
The thought is that other companies can grow the seniors.
Doesn’t fucking work when everyone’s doing it but I can tell you that at least round me that was starting to happen even before AI. Maybe 10% of companies would hire juniors.
Now they’re lobbying the government to be able to import seniors from developing countries because “we need better talent in our own country”
I would like to strangle some CEOs. And those aren’t even big companies, this is Estonia not Silicon Valley lol
What’s the point of AI if you need qualified review?
It’s still so much faster. An experienced engineer spoon-feeding the AI the exact logic/algorithm to use is still faster than writing it by hand. I think a lot of people stopped early when AI was worse and/or before they started being good at using it.
It’s faster, but is the end result good, or just “good enough, it works for now, and I get paid”?
When you spoon feed it the algorithm, it’s good, at least better than your average programmer. You just have to make sure it doesn’t have too much thinking to do. Honestly people in here really overestimate the talent of most dev.
There was a comment somewhere I really liked: people thought it would be one junior dev with AI replacing 10 senior ones. In reality, it’s one senior dev with AI replacing 10 junior vibe coders.
Ah yes, faster spaghetti. Wonderful.
If you’re getting spaghetti it’s a skill issue.
If you vibe code, sure you’ll get slop. Ask it to do something to get X result, you’re leaving it room to think so you get slop. Tell it exactly what logic you want it to use, step by step like it’s a child, then you get the same you’d do yourself but faster.
Look at the PRs for quality-critical projects like the linux kernel and I guarantee you coudn’t tell which PR has some AI and which does not.
This is nothing new it’s just faster. The very same lack of guardrails would allow a new, inexperienced employee, or a disgruntled employee, do the very same damage. AI just speed runs everything. If your AI can nuke prod accidentally, you failed to have the appropriate guardrails in place plain and simple. It is the same failure as before. Every time this happens, it is someone operating wildly out of their depth and why product people can’t just vibe. Now more than ever, experienced engineers are essential.
Given corporates layoff engineers at dramatic rates, in a few years, we’ll start to see services collapsing with no one left who can recover them.
And yet Twitter still exists
Twitter has to be the most basic problem, though. Shit loads of small data in, shit loads of small data out, basic search but no significant structure. Just index the shit out of it. Right? What am I missing? There’s probably an AWS service that does it, just upload your theme CSS. (Last part was sarcasm.)
