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Comment by magnio | Hacker News Reader

Even if you have to use personal laptops for work, why wouldn't you create separate users for work and personal lives?

It's insane to me that programmers out of all people seem utterly incapable of accepting the most minor of inconvenience for the most modest modicum of privacy and security. There are other people in this post complaining that Claude should have asked the user before sending network requests. Well guess what, it does if you don't fucking run `--dangerously-skip-permissions`, but you do because how else you are gonna slop your way to rewrite every swath of existing insecure software to fix the bullshits this industry impounded upon itself unconscientiously for the past 30 years by allowing a non-deterministic babeller RCE its way onto your fucking personal-work machine.

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> why wouldn't you create separate users for work and personal lives?

Because it's a pain in the ass and only advantageous in very specific work life scenarios that a lot of people don't fall under.

Why would you assume one size fits all, so to speak?

I've tried the multi-user approach, and it is annoying when you install something in $HOME/bin rather than /usr/local/bin so that you have to go back and re-install globally or install again to local. You really have to remind yourself that it isn't just a different project. As with most things in life, practice/repetition makes it easier. You just need to decide if it is worth it

Some corporations do not provide claude access so you use your own account.

In the real engineering world, it's seen as unethical (for both practitioners and firms) to have practitioners using their privately owned tools for the firm's work.

Doesn’t it vary heavily?

Auto mechanics usually are required to bring their own tools to the shop. Historically civil engineers working on paper often brought their own favorite mechanical pencils, calculators, and slide rules.

Back when paper manuals were more common, it was pretty common to see software developers have their own dog-eared O’Reilly books in their cubicles, and those were probably the closest predecessor to something like Claude.

There's nothing about software dev that's anything near like the real engineering world even if the label "software engineering" is used.

Until software dev is regulated by professional boards and the government, it will continue to do the same damage to society that pre-regulation engineering did during the industrial revolution.

So talking about corollaries to real engineering is stupid because without those regulatory and professional liability components, people aren't just going to magically coalesce around best practices and ethics. This is a libertarian trope

Unfortunately thanks to silicon valley, the libertarian viewpoint here has far too much sway

I am constantly reminded of the heavy industrial sites near the US Great Lakes in the early 20th century, and elsewhere. The raw toxic output into the local rivers and air were "worth it" -- to investors and subsequently to their carefully chosen engineers. Did engineering standards alone improve this?

Ok. In the fake engineering world, it's not.

i would still create that account with my work-email tho

so you need 2 subscriptions because Anthropic must send your email to everyone?

I suspect based on their stance they would do this regardless of whether Anthropic does this or not.

> Even if you have to use personal laptops for work, why wouldn't you create separate users for work and personal lives?

I mean, where it makes sense, clearly I do, since my opening comment was that it failed to use the work credentials specified, and instead fetched the ones from the account.

I agree on the general security concerns; there are people running agents in an unconstrained, unattended loop - it's negligent; you can hardly be surprised when it decides to hack HuggingFace. Not in their defense, but in everyone else's - as with any person or tool, you build a mental model of the likelihood of failure, and weigh that against the estimated cosequence, and make decisions based on that. And maybe post on HN when it surprises you.

For some people that estimation bewilderingly means unfettered access to root and their e-mail and bank account. For me, working out of my own pocket to help a friend's early stage startup get traction, the risk of asking it about a few trusted government APIs and drafting functions that I manually review doesn't quite justify personally paying for additional expenive Claude accounts.

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