“It deleted my LinkedIn account — my connection to fellow thought leaders — without warning. No confirmation. No ‘are you sure?’ No second chances. Gone.”
Naw, we just want people to know. We followed all Cursor rules, thought we had protected all API keys, and trusted the backups of a heavily used infrastructure company. Cautionary tale sharing with others.
It’s a good cautionary tale -- in hindsight the danger signs are clear, but it’s also clear why you thought it was OK and how third parties unfortunately let you down.
The “agent’s confession” is the least interesting and useful part of the whole saga. Nothing there helps to explain why the disaster happened or what kind of prompting might help avoid it.
The key mistake is accidentally giving the agent the API key, and the key letdown is the lack of capability scoping or backups in the service.
The main lessons I take are “don’t give LLMs the keys to prod” and “keep backups”. Oh, and “even if you think your setup is safe, double-check it!”
It sucks that there were a bunch of people downstream who were negatively affected by this, but this was an entirely foreseeable problem on his company's part.
Even when we consider those real problems with Railway. Software engineers have to evaluate our tools as part of our job. Those complaints about Railway, while legitimate, are still part of the typical sort of questions that every engineering team has to ask of the services they rely on:
What does API key grant us access to?
What if someone runs a delete command against our data?
How do we prepare against losing our prod database?
Etc.
And answering those questions with, "We'll just follow what their docs say, lol," is almost never good enough of an answer on its own. Which is something that most good engineers know already.
This HN submission reads like a classic case of FAFO by cheapening out with the "latest and greatest" models.
these are much better questions for an audit sheet than for engineers to come up with at integration time, mind you.
to an extent, its a good job for an agent reviewer for figuring out how screwed your setup is, other than the risk of it mucking things up as part of the review
All of the things listed that he learned could've also been learned from reading the work produced by, y'know, other Software Engineers. I learned all of those principles by reading Sandi Metz's POODR and by following prolific experts at the time, like Scott Hanselman.
But I suppose, learning things the constructive way is boring. No one wants to write the article that says, How I Learned To Do Things Right By Listening To People Who Do Things Right.
As someone who, indeed, went in unprepared to just to see what happens, I was also left wanting in knowing what exactly I was looking at. It all just looked arbitrarily random to me.
As I've heard it said regarding art, part of the appreciation comes from knowing _how_ it was made (and why), not merely from what was made. We don't appreciate Warhol's soup cans because they're soup cans -- it's everything else about them that makes it art.
So, my recommendation is, make the narrator a default panel on the opening screen. Give folks a narrative description of the events occurring up front, and then invite them to explore the work from there.
Almost all of Pratchett's greatest characters are highly flawed, morally complex and anti-heroic. This is the main point. This premise includes everyone from Cohen the barbarian, through Vimes, Rincewind, Susan, all the witches, Moist Von Lipwig, all the way to DEATH.
That's one of the main reasons that Terry's work comprehensively bridges the genre gap between "children's books" and "modern philosophy".
My favorite part about Pratchett is that the characters who are most competent choose to act in the best interest of the less competent “normies” who will never understand or appreciate what they’re doing on their behalf.
Even then, he goes through the typical heroic arc of:
1) Starting the story by Resisting the Call to adventure -- in a way that reveals strong character motivation (a strong desire to live)
2) He suffers a series of trials that slowly push him to the opposite view: That he must act boldly and selflessly if he is to survive (and thereby also save the Discworld)
3) He performs a heroic act (even if only armed with a "half-brick in a sock") contributing to the good side's overall victory
Although to be fair, he does tend to revert by the start of his next story.
> Although to be fair, he does tend to revert by the start of his next story.
I'd say that's most of the Discworld series though. Protagonist is living peaceful, MacGuffin ensues chaos, Protagonist (or Arbitrary Thing) saves the day, the Disc goes back to normal, and the Turtle continues to move.
Discworld is my favorite series and I think Hogfather and Feets of Clay should be mandatory reads for people going into AI.
Does he, though? I don’t think he acts heroically even once. Though I would not be surprise if Pratchett actually defies expectations and made him a genuine hero once or twice; it’s been a while since I read the Discworld books. Rather, acts that look heroic from the outside if you squint happen to him despite his best, incompetent efforts to stay out of it.
tbf Pratchett was blatantly mocking the heroic arc with that, and the series opens with The Colour of Magic which is basically the Hitchikers Guide to the Discworld in which Rincewind completely fails to avoid having a lot of adventures and actually ends up falling off the edge of the world: the resemblance to Adam's creation surely isn't accidental. Pratchett said Rincewind's narrative role was "to meet more interesting people"
ICE isn't the Gestapo. The Gestapo didn't hide their faces.
If history is any guide, ICE may be better compared to the SA. Their job is to make it safe for the future Gestapo to operate unmasked... at which point the unprofessional street thugs in ICE will find that they've become a liability to the regime.
Note that Noem has already declared that any video evidence of ICE's criminal activity is itself illegal and inadmissible [1,2].
As I understand it, the right to record police has never actually been tried definitively at the SCOTUS level. The Republicans certainly have the tools on the SCOTUS bench to prohibit it now, so look for a case to be brought at some point.
Gestapo was proud of their work. If they could and had phones, they would post selfies.
But, they were actual police, highly effective. (Torured, murdered, commited genocide ... buy were actual trained cop good at being cops and good at genocide).
This strategy won't work for the typical HN reader, but for everyone else? Possibly.
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