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Comment by swatcoder | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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