There was a point where a coworker came to my team, complaining that our policies had erased an entire week's worth of high-priority work on him.
We asked where this happened. He had done his work on an EC2 instance named `temp-worker-5`.
We asked where the files on that EC2 instance were; maybe we could cleverly get them back off the disk. They were in `/tmp`. We had it mounted on tmpfs (in memory), and we were running tmpreaper to clean out `/tmp` every Sunday.
When presented with the sheer absurdity of doing work on an instance called `temp`, out of a directory called `/tmp`, he backed down...
I fear that we wouldn't be so lenient (or rational) on my team had an AI agent done this - we'd have to enable the AI, after all.
I mean yeah but you can always go one step back for root cause.
Why did they pick that insane option? Why was it available to them?
One of my co-workers in security always seems to think that just saying "No." is the job. If someone is asking to do something stupid you say No, and then you talk to them to figure out what the goal is and the n you help them to get to that place.
Clearly they had other options here and working on tmp is fine as long as you know it is, well temporary.
It makes sense to use it. As long as you don't expect what you put there, stays there.
Most interns would not be dumb enough to try it. Because there would be consequences, and there is training. The pre-trained entity, that everyone has been screaming is as smart as your intern, though?
Not an intern, but when I was a new hire on a trading desk I dropped the dividend database that we used to price options. Cost the desk a boatload before we stopped offering quotes, after which the day was a total loss. That’s the sort of fuckup that lands in the CEO’s report.
I understood what I did ex post facto, it was an honest—if stupid—mistake, I expected to get fired and instead was given everyone’s shit work for six months during which I learned a tonne. One of my tasks was redesigning the system so a single careless keystroke couldn’t do that during the trading day.
Except in this case, you're paying somebody else good money for access to the intern and they've aggressively pitched the intern as the future of work and negotiated investment at trillions of dollars of valuation based on that premise.
So yeah, kinda your fault for not being more ready, sure, but also maybe it's worth bringing these sorts of failure-case stories to attention to help keep the sales pitch in perslective.
The AI vendors are promising the moon with millions of dollars of advertising while warning "But of course be careful!" in a 42% grey 8pt font disclaimer at the bottom of the UI if you scroll down enough after you buy in and start using it.
The duplicity and misrepresentation invites people to let down their guard.
I once let Astra a free reign of my system to troubleshoot and reverse a hanged game (to save that savegame). Totally aware that it might be the backup testing day. It analyzed memory dump, game engine code, used stacktrace, and got me fix to unhang the game.
I also let a guy that had one beer drive me 5 min on a rural road.
Both were pretty stupid and in the reconsideration, I wouldn't do it again.
But having it run company servers is just next level.
It's like believing that cola zero is healthy, because it's sugar free. No, it isn't, should probably be illegal to sell and people only buy it because of millions spent on marketing.
In your evaluation of the stupidity, aside from considering the potential averse affect the agent could do to your system, did you also factor in possibly sharing any and all data in your system to an external party?
No I didn't, thanks for pointing it out. I'm only now beginning to notice how patronizing the slop machine is getting as it's getting more background on myself.
Just today I used it to get a summary of osteopat's credentials (Frank in Trondheim, guy's a treasure), because my brother asked who I'm talking about, when writing about feeling great after treatment on family chat.
It took 2 more prompts to get that summary, because the bot wouldn't stop ranting about how some osteopatic techniques are not yet medically sanctioned.
Thanks again for pointing that out. I feel childish for not seeing that issue. When I get more time I'll set it up in a VM to get more separation from my system.
I won't help any context the AI providers have already built on you, but in terms of sandboxing agents, there are many alternatives. I like one such sandbox tooling made by NAV: https://ki-utvikling.nav.no/cplt
Should be mentioned that this was in the 90s with one of the first computer-animated feature films. We're missing the source code for a ton of games from that era as well. I would assume people had learned to have proper backups 30 years later - especially so with the advantage of high speed internet.
A common backup strategy was usually copying floppies/cassettes, because storage was expensive, but companies already used tapes for affordable backups in the 90s. Movie studios should have too.
Doesn't back it up properly. There are too many people, otherwise bright and professional, who do not realise that simply syncing to somewhere else is not an adequate backup arrangement.
This problem predates agent based work. Anything an AI agent can accidentally do, malware could purposefully do too, as could a sufficiently careless human (one of the things my backups are intended to protect me from, is me!).
I always thought that delete doesn't really exist? In the sense that it you take the hard drive to a specialist they can often recover it? Maybe I am wrong?
You could ask the agent to attempt to recover using specific tools. But yes in some cases the bits could be lost without the ability to recover, there are ways to destroyy data as it is usually required for decommissioning
You aren't wrong, but getting a specialist to look at it in a tight timeframe is expensive. Free tools exist, but if you've not already learned how to use them the time that you need them is a bad time to start. Anything you do with the machine after the delete can reduce the amount you are able to get back, so you should very quickly shut down (avoiding saving anything locally). The situation can be worse with SSDs, depending on how eager your OS/filesystem is at TRIMing deallocated blocks.
Modern version of "the dog ate my homework"? I can't even imagine a scenario where an AI agent manages to unrecoverably delete all working material and backups. I'm cynical and can't help thinking it's all marketing to postpone a reality show no one cared about.
All these "accidents" with agents just makes me want to use them less, not more. Then again, I don't use agents because they consume tokens at an absurd rate, so...
It does matter because more people use agents and don't expect such rogue behavior. Plus there is more novelty, which "news" is somewhat related to. But regular human destruction also gets published and discussed
Same energy as blaming an intern for dropping your production table. If one entity can delete all your data, that’s on your systems not them
But we thought our files would be safe in the dumpster, nobody could have foreseen they would take out the trash.
There was a point where a coworker came to my team, complaining that our policies had erased an entire week's worth of high-priority work on him.
We asked where this happened. He had done his work on an EC2 instance named `temp-worker-5`.
We asked where the files on that EC2 instance were; maybe we could cleverly get them back off the disk. They were in `/tmp`. We had it mounted on tmpfs (in memory), and we were running tmpreaper to clean out `/tmp` every Sunday.
When presented with the sheer absurdity of doing work on an instance called `temp`, out of a directory called `/tmp`, he backed down...
I fear that we wouldn't be so lenient (or rational) on my team had an AI agent done this - we'd have to enable the AI, after all.
Absolutely incredible self preservation instinct from your colleague on behalf of their work. Like playing Russian roulette fully loaded lol
Some people just like running around with scissors..
I mean yeah but you can always go one step back for root cause.
Why did they pick that insane option? Why was it available to them?
One of my co-workers in security always seems to think that just saying "No." is the job. If someone is asking to do something stupid you say No, and then you talk to them to figure out what the goal is and the n you help them to get to that place.
Clearly they had other options here and working on tmp is fine as long as you know it is, well temporary. It makes sense to use it. As long as you don't expect what you put there, stays there.
People do that. I'm sure I've seen a screenshot of a delivery driver deciding that was the "safe location"...
Worse, people have had to explain to an (attempted) politician why bins cannot serve as shelters for homeless people.
I won't list the awful ways this had already wrong before this guy had this idea, but they are described at the end:
https://politicsandinsights.org/2020/02/06/meet-the-multimil...
Most interns would not be dumb enough to try it. Because there would be consequences, and there is training. The pre-trained entity, that everyone has been screaming is as smart as your intern, though?
> Most interns would not be dumb enough to try it
Not an intern, but when I was a new hire on a trading desk I dropped the dividend database that we used to price options. Cost the desk a boatload before we stopped offering quotes, after which the day was a total loss. That’s the sort of fuckup that lands in the CEO’s report.
I understood what I did ex post facto, it was an honest—if stupid—mistake, I expected to get fired and instead was given everyone’s shit work for six months during which I learned a tonne. One of my tasks was redesigning the system so a single careless keystroke couldn’t do that during the trading day.
Except in this case, you're paying somebody else good money for access to the intern and they've aggressively pitched the intern as the future of work and negotiated investment at trillions of dollars of valuation based on that premise.
So yeah, kinda your fault for not being more ready, sure, but also maybe it's worth bringing these sorts of failure-case stories to attention to help keep the sales pitch in perslective.
The AI vendors are promising the moon with millions of dollars of advertising while warning "But of course be careful!" in a 42% grey 8pt font disclaimer at the bottom of the UI if you scroll down enough after you buy in and start using it.
The duplicity and misrepresentation invites people to let down their guard.
I once let Astra a free reign of my system to troubleshoot and reverse a hanged game (to save that savegame). Totally aware that it might be the backup testing day. It analyzed memory dump, game engine code, used stacktrace, and got me fix to unhang the game.
I also let a guy that had one beer drive me 5 min on a rural road.
Both were pretty stupid and in the reconsideration, I wouldn't do it again.
But having it run company servers is just next level.
It's like believing that cola zero is healthy, because it's sugar free. No, it isn't, should probably be illegal to sell and people only buy it because of millions spent on marketing.
In your evaluation of the stupidity, aside from considering the potential averse affect the agent could do to your system, did you also factor in possibly sharing any and all data in your system to an external party?
No I didn't, thanks for pointing it out. I'm only now beginning to notice how patronizing the slop machine is getting as it's getting more background on myself.
Just today I used it to get a summary of osteopat's credentials (Frank in Trondheim, guy's a treasure), because my brother asked who I'm talking about, when writing about feeling great after treatment on family chat.
It took 2 more prompts to get that summary, because the bot wouldn't stop ranting about how some osteopatic techniques are not yet medically sanctioned.
Thanks again for pointing that out. I feel childish for not seeing that issue. When I get more time I'll set it up in a VM to get more separation from my system.
I won't help any context the AI providers have already built on you, but in terms of sandboxing agents, there are many alternatives. I like one such sandbox tooling made by NAV: https://ki-utvikling.nav.no/cplt
> No, it isn't
Source?
No matter how much you're paying for access to an intern, it is still an intern. That should be unrelated to paying for a good backup strategy.
Production company doesn't bother backing up hundreds of days of work, blames irresponsibly used AI for its own failure.
Pixar lost Toy Story 2, deleted by mistake https://www.slashgear.com/how-pixars-toy-story-2-was-deleted...
Should be mentioned that this was in the 90s with one of the first computer-animated feature films. We're missing the source code for a ton of games from that era as well. I would assume people had learned to have proper backups 30 years later - especially so with the advantage of high speed internet.
This is actually one of the goals of some retro computing enthusiasts: recovering the source code for old games through AI reverse engineering.
I know it's not the same thing because you lose comments, unused prototypes etc, but I still find it a fascinating use of the technology.
A common backup strategy was usually copying floppies/cassettes, because storage was expensive, but companies already used tapes for affordable backups in the 90s. Movie studios should have too.
Doesn't back it up properly. There are too many people, otherwise bright and professional, who do not realise that simply syncing to somewhere else is not an adequate backup arrangement.
This problem predates agent based work. Anything an AI agent can accidentally do, malware could purposefully do too, as could a sufficiently careless human (one of the things my backups are intended to protect me from, is me!).
Okay, but was it actually almost finished and ready? People can act unpredictably[1] under pressure instead of asking for help.
It very probably was, but it just reminded me of this oversight failure mode.
[1] https://thedailywtf.com/articles/the_brillant_paula_bean
Tangent, but I’m so happy this site is still around! Haven’t checked it in at least a decade, this should be a goldmine.
Its heyday was pre-LLM so a good reminder that shit code existed before LLMs, wtitten by people paid to do so.
Generally speaking, the internet’s heyday was pre-LLM, but I will never forget the article about the slowdown loop.
Shitty code can be intentional as well.
https://thedailywtf.com/articles/The-Slow-Down-Loop
I like the idea that this was something like The Producers.
Impossible to read the website let alone configure cookies.
No idea why it's linked to this weird wrapper. The original: https://www.aftonbladet.se/nojesbladet/a/31oE8A/the-challeng...
Original, google translated: https://www-aftonbladet-se.translate.goog/nojesbladet/a/31oE...
From my earlier submission here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50084941
> "No idea why it's linked to this weird wrapper."
I'm guessing that if JavaScript were enabled, it would try to translate Swedish to English clientside in the browser.
(BTW, your own HN submission was auto-flagged for not being in English. I've vouched for it; not that it matters).
Ah, that probably explains why OP did as they did here as well. Thanks for explaining.
In firefox it is Swedish on the left and English on the right.
Interview with show host: https://www.aviaduct.com/?l=og+en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.aftonb...
Wow presumably it's a cookie pop-up on mobile has thousands of pixels of empty vertical space so you have to scroll all the way down, what a mess lol
I used a wrapper site that provided translation, here's the original article! https://www.aftonbladet.se/nojesbladet/a/31oq5A/ahmed-berhan...
Oh the wrapper site conflicted with the popup on the original site
I always thought that delete doesn't really exist? In the sense that it you take the hard drive to a specialist they can often recover it? Maybe I am wrong?
You could ask the agent to attempt to recover using specific tools. But yes in some cases the bits could be lost without the ability to recover, there are ways to destroyy data as it is usually required for decommissioning
It depends on which sectors have been overwritten, really.
You aren't wrong, but getting a specialist to look at it in a tight timeframe is expensive. Free tools exist, but if you've not already learned how to use them the time that you need them is a bad time to start. Anything you do with the machine after the delete can reduce the amount you are able to get back, so you should very quickly shut down (avoiding saving anything locally). The situation can be worse with SSDs, depending on how eager your OS/filesystem is at TRIMing deallocated blocks.
In your face AI Doomers! The AI is creating more jobs!
No backup, no mercy.
How easily can files completely disappear just like that? You usually have to be very intentional about it to make even a partial recovery impossible.
Yeah, just stop writes and get someone that can use photorec of similar. It's not the end of the world unless you do something stupid.
But who knows what the agent was trying to do. It could really have decided the TV show was so bad no one should see it. There's no details.
Or it's bad and it's tax evasion.
The agent pulled out the hard drives and then stomped on them, before putting them in a bucket of magnets and acid.
It also duct taped their IT staff to their chairs and prevented them from taking any backups of their core IP.
It would just need to decide to run shred for some reason.
"It's not the end of the world unless you do something stupid."
Or intentional
Modern version of "the dog ate my homework"? I can't even imagine a scenario where an AI agent manages to unrecoverably delete all working material and backups. I'm cynical and can't help thinking it's all marketing to postpone a reality show no one cared about.
All these "accidents" with agents just makes me want to use them less, not more. Then again, I don't use agents because they consume tokens at an absurd rate, so...
This is the same as using commands like rm the wrong way. The agent didn't do it, you did it! You didn't use the agent/tool properly!
Could dang or tomhow manually decontract the title?
Doesn't sound so bad if rephrased as "AI prevents the release of yet another reality show"
If the title was "TV studio does not have backups" this would be a non-story. The fact it was deleted by agent and not human doesn't really matter.
It does matter because more people use agents and don't expect such rogue behavior. Plus there is more novelty, which "news" is somewhat related to. But regular human destruction also gets published and discussed
Yea this.
Agents doesn't cause new problems, they reveal existing weaknesses.
Proper working backups. Proper IAM setup. With agents things can go wrong so much faster, the margins for allowed systemic/tech debt are shrinking.
> Agents doesn't cause new problems, they reveal existing weaknesses.
Agents absolutely can and will cause (new) problems if they are unsupervised even with guard rails in place.
Hm, what guard rails are needed for agents that aren't needed for humans if you want to handle insider risk properly?
Except these people aren't developers, they make movies?
And if you trust "AI" marketing, it will take all our jobs and do them better than us.
You're probably a regular tech news reader and are aware of the limitations, while they aren't.
> Except these people aren't developers, they make movies?
A production company should 100% have regular backups, even moreso than the average developer.
Someone has set up that server and ssh access. It wasn’t “Steve’s” macbook.
If they were stored in S3, or a similar service, and the agents deletes them, there is no way to recover them, right?
I know google has some manual process (forms) to request "undeletion" of personal Google Drive files.
If you have bucket versioning enabled you should still be able to recover something.
smells like bs