Longtime software engineer, hardware tinkerer, and general technology enthusiast. Low skill photographer. Proponent of open and transparent systems. Helplessly pedantic (sorry).
Currently modernizing Medicare and HealthCare.gov at Ad Hoc. Previously at CrowdCompass, Sunlight Foundation, and the University of Wisconsin.
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I strongly believe there are entire companies right now under heavy AI psychosis and its impossible to have rational conversations about it with them. I can't name any specific people because they include personal friends I deeply respect, but I worry about how this plays out.
I lived through the great MTBF vs MTTR (mean-time-between-failure vs. mean-time-to-recovery) reckoning of infrastructure during the transition to cloud and cloud automation. All those arguments are rearing their ugly heads again but now its... the whole software development industry (maybe the whole world, really).
It's frightening, because the psychosis folks operate under an almost absolute "MTTR is all you need" mentality: "its fine to ship bugs because the agents will fix them so quickly and at a scale humans can't do!" We learned in infrastructure that MTTR is great but you can't yeet resilient systems entirely.
The main issue is I don't even know how to bring this up to people I know personally, because bringing this topic up leads to immediately dismissals like "no no, it has full test coverage" or "bug reports are going down" or something, which just don't paint the whole picture.
We already learned this lesson once in infrastructure: you can automate yourself into a very resilient catastrophe machine. Systems can appear healthy by local metrics while globally becoming incomprehensible. Bug reports can go down while latent risk explodes. Test coverage can rise while semantic understanding falls. Changes happens so fast that nobody notices the underlying architecture decaying.
I worry.
I can image a developer parallel to the first, too: the human still using all their skills and experience, but with the machine catching mistakes, providing context and validation and vigilance that is •orthogonal to• testing and type checking and code crafting and — the big one! — actually •thinking• about the problem.
That’s a regime I imagine developers would feel a lot better about. And I know there are people out there pursuing it! But they’re not the ones dominating the conversation.
4/
RE: https://flipboard.com/@theverge/the-verge-5hobbaa8z/-/a-RKgzzvvtTnadjMq82fXG_A%3Aa%3A43611565-%2F0
"intentional backdoor", read that again.
Don't buy "smart" appliances if you can, isolate if you must, shoot when it makes an unexpected noise.
A COMPUTER CANNOT FIND OUT
THEREFORE A COMPUTER MUST NEVER BE ALLOWED TO FUCK AROUND
Apple Fixes Bug That Let FBI Extract Deleted Signal Messages After 404 Media Coverage
The move comes directly in response to 404 Media’s coverage about how the FBI was able to recover incoming Signal messages from an iPhone because the messages were saved in the device’s notification storage.
The move comes directly in response to 404 Media’s coverage about how the FBI was able to recover incoming Signal messages from an iPhone because the messages were saved in the device’s notification storage.
Mitchell Hashimoto
Paul Cantrell
Koen Hufkens, PhD
Matthew Garrett
Mark Dominus
404 Media
Glyph