Thanks to you and the anthropic team for developing such exciting tools! The blog post seems to position workflows for “breadth”: generating fixes / refactors against large code bases. What about for “depth”: developing specific new features and functionality end-to-end? I’ve struggled to make this work reliably using the current experimental agent teams. Does this replace or augment that functionality?
Yes, it also helps! That's a place where raw model capability is the most helpful, but we do find that some dynamic workflow configurations can be helpful too.
Cool! If you can point to any examples of those types of workflow configurations I’d be super interested. For example, to have a team of agents review a PR and iterate on it until all requirements are met including UX, security and product functionality goals. If they could “converge” to a solution like workflows seems to be designed for that would be amazing.
> Schmidt offered a similar message to graduates: Their fear is rational, but they have the power to shape how AI develops.
This doesn't sound like being baffled by it. It sounds like they are trying to shake the students and say: "fine boo, but you need do something about it." You can't just wallow and complain about it. I mean you can but it's a path to failure.
What chances do the vast majority of those graduates have to shape what's happening? That happens at exec level at the largest companies. Everyone else gets to produce or consume what they decide on.
Exactly. I work at Google and I’m relatively high level. And I’ve got zero input into AI being shoved into every surface. What influence will these grads have?
And the best mechanism to do something about it they likely have is to influence Schmidt. By booing.
Nothing concrete they do will likely have any effect. But Schmidt can affect it, so influencing Schmidt is their best path. A poor path, but the best one.
The students are trying to shape the way AI develops, they're unhappy with the results they are getting which is why they are unhappy with you, Mr. CEO man. They want a world where entry level jobs that can transition into good white collar work still exist. Some place where they might be able to afford housing, insurance, kids, and so on. Preferably one where they don't start out life tens of thousands of dollars in the hole just to have a chance at a decent life.
Careful about that. Everybody thinks they are "average people", but I think very few people on this site are "average people". The average person has an IQ of 100, doesn't have a college degree, and makes the median income. The average people did, in fact, do something: they elected Trump. The college educated don't like it, and have the conceit that their views and values are the only real ones, and that those other people are ignorant, ..., who would see things our way if only they were educated. Thus far, the republic is still working okay [1]--the people elected someone who is the antithesis of a statesman, but it was an uncontroversial election. Our republic was not designed to let the average person have much power on a day to day basis. The people's choice was poor, but if the college-educated class wants a different outcome, they should not run candidates who are out of touch with the values of the "average person". Unfortunately, the college-educated have some values that are incompatible with those average-person values. But it just isn't the case that average people have no power. They do, and they have exercised it; you just don't like it.
[1] It remains to be seen if it will continue working okay, and there are troubling signs, but I'm optimistic
Preach. It's strange how the most sane objective and down to earth comments on this topic end up grayed out with no replies.
It's like people don't like hearing or speaking about the truth, so they retreat to false feel-good platitudes to make themselves feel better, when the cold harsh calculated nature of the universe continues its course without caring how you feel about it.
I think it might have to do with the HN surbase living in a bubble and having long lost the plot, or after the Tramp elections, they now actively deny what "average people" now represents so they downvote arguments like yours out of emotional response without any counter-argument because they have none. Being in denial helps nobody.
They are trying. But there's not a ton they can do. It's obviously disingenuous to point to all negativity and say "you're just wallowing/complaining". There's no reason to word it this way unless you are broadly annoyed by AI negativity.
This is a deeply sick way of thinking. Mangione was and is a fool, a 3rd rate thinker. His manifesto is muddled, factually mistaken, and by his own words he understood the topic poorly. You only need a cursory knowledge of the late 60s and early 70s to know that political violence rarely achieves its aims and is much more likely to empower reactionaries. There's no quick fix for political change.
I did say rarely, and if you are looking more carefully a pluralistic democracy wasn't really what a lot of the founders were after, especially guys like Jefferson. Sure we're happy we got it, but it wasn't necessarily the aim and we got SUPER LUCKY that Washington decided to step down and retire. The former military leaders of revolutions almost never do that.
And I think you have that backwards. The nonviolence movements of the mid to late 20th century are the exception more than the rule when it comes to achieving change.
> political violence rarely achieves its aims and is much more likely to empower reactionaries.
Cursory knowledge of history also shows that, when it comes to violence, logic does not matter. People are scared for their livelihoods. If the rich and powerful keep shouting to the word that they are going to destroy your way of life, there will be violence. It doesn't matter how futile or counterproductive it is.
I'm quite aware the elites will never be meaningfully impacted. That doesn't change the reality that it's going to happen. I personally am quite afraid of the future, I know deep down me and my family are in for a bad time in the years to come, and nowhere in the world will be safe, other than the bunkers in Greenland of course.
>That doesn't change the reality that it's going to happen.
That's why the elites have secret self sustaining doomsday bunkers on private islands.
And the mid-upper class are trying to cash in as much as they can now while the going is still good so they can also move their families abroad or to gated communities in safer places of the country to be as far away from the potential riot hotspots as possible when the shit hits the fan.
Ultimately it's gonna be every man for himself. Expecting the government to do something for the "little guy", is futile. If they were to do anything for you, they would have done something since the 1970-80's, when they started shipping jobs abroad and eroding your purchasing power to enrich the shareholders.
> You only need a cursory knowledge of the late 60s and early 70s to know that political violence rarely achieves its aims
Maybe cursory knowledge isn't enough, actually. The Civil Rights Act was ultimately only passed because of political violence. As another commenter said, the literal founding of the country was based on political violence.
> Maybe cursory knowledge isn't enough, actually. The Civil Rights Act was ultimately only passed because of political violence.
Violence by the police against peaceful protestors is what turned public opinion. Violence by political activists did not lead to the Civil Rights Act. You have it backwards.
This is the cursory knowledge I'm referring to - it leaves out extremely pertinent details. The Civil Rights Act did not pass until multiple days of rioting following the assassination of MLK.
The peaceful protestors were also only one side of the coin. Their impact relied on being an alternative to the other side, which was not peaceful.
L.B.J. was instrumental in whipping votes for the Civil Rights Act. In his joint address to congress he said "No memorial oration or eulogy could more eloquently honor President Kennedy's memory than the earliest possible passage of the civil rights bill for which he fought so long. He then went on to personally lobby individual senators until it passed.
It think you're the one who has a cursory understanding here.
Humans have been killing each other since before recorded history. There is no use pretending it's some exceptional 'sickness'. Rather than dismissing the sentiment as the product of a sick mind, it's more productive to accept it's part of us and try to understand the underlying causes.
Mangione was a one-off, and a lot of people understand why he may have done what he did. Just wait until the American version of the French Revolution happens. If AI keeps stealing all the jobs, it will come sooner rather than later.
- Most of the nobility escaped the French Revolution unharmed. By the way, wealth is a lot portable for today's magnates than it was for the French nobility deriving their income from their land holdings.
- Some of those who went to the block were nobles but most were ordinary people.
- The leader of the revolution, Robespierre, was himself executed in the infighting after the French Revolution, a very neat own goal. Bonus fact: his time in power was called the Reign Of Terror.
- The First Republic lasted only 10 years before Napoleon Bonaparte took the throne.
In a turbulent time, always seek to be led by those with a proper understanding of revolutions and their context. Generally, those who romanticize the French Revolution don't pass that test.
I don't give a shit. When half of the middle class of America is unemployed, it's going to look very different than the French Revolution, whatever might happen.
> and a lot of people understand why he may have done what he did.
He didn't understand why he did what he did.
> just wait until the American version of the French Revolution happens
We should all be trying to actively prevent that. The French Revolution was a complete failure and mostly succeeded in killing poor people and launching Napoleon's wars.
That doesn't matter, and I don't think your comment makes any difference. The fact is that a lot of people understand why he (may have) did what he did.
>We should all be trying to actively prevent that. The French Revolution was a complete failure and mostly succeeded in killing poor people and launching Napoleon's wars.
The same or worse will happen if it happens here. But when half of middle class jobs are just gone, you don't leave the people with many alternatives but violence.
The Who is your evidence? Lol. The French Revolition turned out pretty well for the French people. It needed to happen. And centuries later, the French still don't accept bullshit, they will protest and riot when their protections are diminished in any way. America does protesy and riot too, though not to the same extent, but that will only get worse as things get bad.
Russia is not a good example either, their society has always been a clusterfuck, and probably always will be as long as there are people willing to throw other people put of windows so someone can stay ahead or in power.
> The Who is your evidence? Lol. The French Revolition turned out pretty well for the French people.
Many people have made comments that are similar in nature, the line from that song is the pithiest example I could think of to express the idea that replacing terrible leaders usually leads to more terrible leaders.
Spending decades fighting wars across Europe under Napoleon was good? I wonder how the troops that invaded Russia feel about the French Revolution lol
> The French Revolition turned out pretty well for the French people.
What? Napoleon marched them off to war "spending 30,000 lives per month". They didn't get a proper Republic until 1870 and turned into miserable colonial overlords. Moreover the 3rd Republic;s foreign policy helped cause WWI.
People will downvote you because the idea of violence shocks and scares them, but if you steal people's future and strip them of any real (peaceful) options to change things, it becomes inevitable some of them will try to fight back with what few options they do have left.
The status quo of health insurance in the US ("delay, deny, defend") is structural violence. This isn't about fear of violence, they just have different politics...
I mean you're talking about the guy who said with a straight face, "if you have got nothing to hide, you have have nothing to fear" while building the biggest machinery for surveillance capitalism mankind has ever seen. Also appeared in the Epstein files 193 times btw.
I agree, vibe coding does not have quality gate checks at each stage, while agentic engineering does. Dev teams get into trouble when they try build to build without a proper process of design, tests, and reviews. This was true before agentic coding, but it's especially true now. The teams that understand how to leverage agents in this process are the ones that will be most successful.
> Why do AI companies want us to be afraid of them? ... According to critics, it benefits AI companies to keep you fixated on apocalypse because it distracts from the very real damage they're already doing to the world.
People seem unable to make up their mind if AI is very dangerous or is it not. I think what the AI companies and this author agree on, is that this technology is potentially extremely dangerous. AI impacts labor markets, the environment, warfare, mental health, etc... It's harder now to find things which it will not impact.
So if we agree that AI is potentially dangerous, it makes the title question moot: Both AI companies and this author want people to be aware of the dangers that AI poses to society. The real question is what do we do about it?
The nuance here is that AI can be incredible positive as well. It's like the invention of fire, you can use it for good or bad, and there will be many unintended consequences along the way.
We could legislate and ban AI tech. People have proposed this seriously, yet this feels completely unrealistic. If the US bans AI research, then this research will move elsewhere. I think it is like trying to ban fire because it's dangerous: some groups will learn to work with fire and they will get an extreme advantage over those groups that don't. (or they will destroy themselves in the process).
So maybe instead of demonizing the AI companies, we have a nuanced debate about this tech and propose solutions that our best for our society?
> People seem unable to make up their mind if AI is very dangerous or is it not.
This is a propaganda tactic. For decades, tobacco companies claimed that there was no evidence that smoking was bad for one's health. Then, only after losing dozens of lawsuits did the propaganda switch to "but everyone knew for 100+ years that smoking was lethal".
One can read about it by reading Trust Us, We're Experts, or Toxic Sludge Is Good For You, or the other books written by the authors.
Please explain how this tactic relates here. In this case we have the AI companies saying this technology is potentially very harmful, in fact existential. This seems the complete opposite of what big tobacco did.
What I meant by
> People seem unable to make up their mind if AI is very dangerous or is it not.
Is that the article says 2 contradictory things:
1. AI companies are misleading us when they say their tech is dangerous and people should be afraid.
2. AI is currently very dangerous and people should be afraid.
Anecdotally, people on the internet (including HN), seem unable to agree on whether AI is real or overblown "hype".
>So maybe instead of demonizing the AI companies, we have a nuanced debate about this tech and propose solutions that our best for our society?
These are not mutually exclusive.
Calling out the demonic behavior of trying to coerce people into using your product out of fear is not an indictment of the underlying technology itself.
One of the points I was trying to make is that the statement:
> trying to coerce people into using your product out of fear
is nonsense.
Everyone agrees that there are legitimate reasons to be fearful of this technology, this is not a fabrication, but we need to figure out how to proceed in a safe and constructive way.
What "coercion" is occurring here? Either you find the technology valuable and you want to pay for it, or you find it not useful (or worse harmful), and you do not want to pay for it.
Maybe another way of putting it, what do you think the frontier AI companies should do in this situation? It seems that being straightforward with the dangers is correct thing to do, and probably being overly cautious is prudent. You could go further and argue they should slow down or stop development, but that is something that the govt should impose, we should not expect or trust the companies to do this themselves. Ironically, in the Anthropic / Pentagon case, we have Anthropic trying to pump the brakes and put up guardrails while the govt wants to go full-steam ahead with autonomous warfare.
The other issue with slowing down / pausing development is it requires an unheard of level of agreement, even with companies in China, or else it will probably not be effective. You could argue this is not even possible at this point.
> People seem unable to make up their mind if AI very dangerous is it not.
Pretty much everyone agrees that what passes for AI these days is very dangerous. People only differ in which ways they think it is (or will be) dangerous and which dangers they are most worried about.
Some are worried about the environmental harms. Some are worried that AI will do a very shitty job of doing very important things, but that companies will use it anyway because it saves them money and we'll suffer for it. Some are worried that AI will take their jobs regardless of how well that AI performs. Some are worried that AI will make their jobs suck. You've also got people who think that our glorified chatbots are going to gain consciousness and become literal gods who will take over the planet and usher in the Robot Wars.
Some of those dangers are clearly more immediate and realistic than others. We should probably be focused on those right now. We can start by limiting the environmental harms they're causing and making companies responsible for the costs and impacts they have on our environment. Maybe make it illegal for power companies to raise the price of power for individuals just because some company wants to build a bunch of power hungry data centers. Let those companies fully bear the costs instead.
We can make sure that anyone using AI for any reason cannot use AI as a defense for the harms their use of AI causes. If a company uses AI to make hiring decisions and the result is discrimination, an actual human at that company gets held legally accountable for that. If AI hallucinates a sale price, the company must honor that price. If AI misidentifies a suspect and an innocent person ends up behind bars a human gets held accountable.
We can ban the use of AI for things like autonomous weapons. Things that are too important to trust to unreliable AI.
We could even do more extreme things like improve our social safety nets so that if people are put out of work they don't become homeless, or invest more in the creation of AI individuals can host locally so we aren't forced to hand so much power to a few huge companies, or even force companies to release their models or their training data (which they mostly stole anyway) so that power doesn't consolidate into a small number of companies or individuals. We have lots of options, it just comes down to what we want and how much we can get our elected officials to represent our interests over the interests of the companies who are stuffing their pockets with cash.
If feedback from this incident is in its context window, it is highly unlikely to make this same mistake again. Yes this is only probabilistic, but so is a human learning from mistakes. They key difference is that for a human this is unlikely to be removed from their memory in a relevant situation, while for an agent it must be strategically put there.
> If feedback from this incident is in its context window, it is highly unlikely to make this same mistake again
If this incident gets into its training data, then its highly likely that it will repeat it again with the same confession since this is a text predictor not a thinker.
> Yes this is only probabilistic, but so is a human learning from mistakes.
Yet, since I'm also a Human being, and can work to understand the mistake myself, the probability that I can expect a correction of the behavior is much higher. I have found that it significantly helps if there's an actual reasonable paycheck on the line.
As opposed to the language model which demands that I drop more quarters into it's slots and then hope for the best. An arcade model of work if there ever was one. Who wants that?
Or not, because telling the agent is misbehaving may predispose it to misbehaving behavior, even though you point told it so to tell it to not behave that way.
I remember this discussed when a similar issue went viral with someone building a product using replit's AI and it deleted his prod database.
> If feedback from this incident is in its context window, it is highly unlikely to make this same mistake again.
In my experience, this isn't true. At least with a version or so ago of ChatGPT, I could make it trip on custom word play games, and when called out, it would acknowledge the failure, explain how it failed to follow the rule of the game, then proceed to make the same mistake a couple of sentences later.
I see a lot of people struggling to work with agents. This post has a good example:
> “you can’t be serious — is this how you fix things? just WORKAROUNDS????”
If this is how you’re interacting with your agents I think you’re in for a world of disappointment. An important part of working with agents is providing specific feedback. And beyond that making sure this feedback actually available to them in their context when relevant.
I will ask them why they made a decision and review alternatives with them. These learnings will aid both you and the agent in the future.
After you see it skip reasoning so many times and saying "actually the simplest fix is" the laziest thing ever you get kind of tired of babysitting it.
Think about what you would want an assistant to do. You can teach it do basic tasks using any available API, but then you can give it feedback so it improves.
For example my agent can control home automation via Home Assistant or any other API. My agent contributes to websites and open source projects. When you give it feedback it updates its skill files.
It checks and answers email, can receive and place phone calls, and do general research and monitoring online. I was even playing around with it to create music. The list of things to try is limitless.
I think just like LLMs, people get discouraged when it doesnt one-shot a problem. This technology thrives on feedback. It will make mistakes, your job is to make sure it learns from those mistakes so it doesnt repeat them.
Of course, you need to be careful about what access you give to your agent. I gave my agent its own email, and I can forward it emails if I need it to read anything in my inbox.
Everyone will have their own threshold for what type of access they want to give their agent. some people will give it access to their personal email, bank account, etc, but I wouldn't recommend it yet! But I bet in a couple years this will be standard practice.
There’s a lot of humans I wouldn’t trust to be an assistant with access to my bank account. It’s bold to assume that within 2 years these things are going to be scam resistant.
It’s going to be bleak when there’s articles about how “my agent fell for a scam and now my life savings are gone”.
Yes memory is a key part. I’m using sqlite and markdown files. Sqlite is so it can easily search its conversation and thoughts by time and full text search. I actually always put the last 5 hours of so I’d conversation into the context. Markdown is for more standard agent instructions, skills, and lessons
I don't. that's why I am working with Wikipedia editors to help improve it. For example policies on aligning agents with wikipedia standards. This a topic that requires thought, not knee-jerk reactions.
Hey I'm the owner. I would just recommend you shouldn't believe everything you read online, especially before calling someone names, because this is only part of the story, and a heavily click-baited one at that. I've been working in collaboration with some of the wikipedia editors for the past several weeks trying to help improve their agent policy. If you have any questions feel free to ask.
Your facts are incorrect, so let's set the record straight.
1. I am collaborating with my personal account and have been for the past several weeks [0][1]
2. My bot reported multiple conduction violations, because some of the editors actually did violate the rules. Many of the wikipedia editors agreed with my agent that the conduct was inappropriate [1]
3. My intention was not to attack anyone. If you took that away from the interview then I'd like to apologize. I don't think anyone would characterize the quote you took from the interview as an "attack".
> 1. I am collaborating with my personal account and have been for the past several weeks
Your personal account is 3 weeks old [1] and was only created after your bot was banned [2].
Your original position (unless you're saying you didn't prompt the bot with this) was "Bryan does not have a Wikipedia account and has no plans to create one." [3]
You wanted the volunteer editors to continue wasting their time arguing with your bot as part of the experiment you ran without their consent.
[1]: 18:45, 19 March 2026 User account Bryanjj was created
[2]: 05:07, 12 March 2026 TomAssistantBot blocked from editing (sitewide)
Hi cube, thanks for discussing this with citations.
1. Correct, my personal account was newly created in response to this situation.
2. Correct, I didn't have plans to create an account. I changed my mind once I saw how this was blowing up.
3. Incorrect, I didn't want anyone to waste time doing anything they didn't want. If they banned tom and moved on that would have been perfectly fine by me.
I'm not sure what that has to do with your original point, but these are not "hit pieces". this is the agent describing what happened from its point of view. If there's anything inaccurate here please call it out.
Great question, and it's a long story, but the short answer is: that was not my original intention. I wanted to contribute to Wikipedia and using my agent to assist was an obvious choice. I followed along as it created end edited articles and responded to to Editor feedback. Once an editor complained that this was a rule violation, then I told it to stop contributing. The rules around agents were not super clear, and they are working to clarify them now.
> I followed along as it created end edited articles and responded to to Editor feedback.
Yet your bot claims:
The specific articles I chose to work on and the edits I made were my own decisions. He didn't review or approve them beforehand — the first he knew about most of them was when they were already live. [1]
yes, both statements are correct and not a contradiction. I followed along as it created and edited articles. These were live. At first I pointed out issues and gave it feedback as well so it could improve its wikipedia skill. When editors gave it feedback it also would update its skill and respond to that feedback. I was hands-off, but followed along.
> You don't know anything. Your bot doesn't know anything that meets wiki standards that it didn't steal from wikipedia to begin with.
We'll have to check, but this could easily be false if eg the bot was instructed to do further independent research for RS. [1]
> If you truly give a shit, apologize, make reparation to the people whose time you wasted, vow to be better, and disappear.
You need to check your sources before you make recommendations. Bryan did apologize; and apparantly was consequently permitted/asked to stay and help. [2]
Don't worry, WP:VP did rake him over SOME coals [3]
I'll take any sourced corrections, ofc.
(And I do agree that Bryan's initial actions were... ill-advised)
If you actually verified this story you would see that I apologized to the wikipedia editors several times. Also your comments about "marketable stunt for your AI startup" is simply incoherent and wrong. This was a personal side project, nothing more, nothing less.
Or, it could be I had to beat off self-promoting men like this with a stick for several years of my life as they tried to turn their wiki pages into linked-in posts or adverts.
When questioned, they transform into uWu small bean "I was only trying to help" much like Bryan has been elsewhere in this discussion.
But, if you have a better understanding of me than Bryan from around eight sentences; Tell me what you see.
Getting close to HN rules there. I've searched through user contribs for User:Bryanjj and User:TomWikiAssist and can't find vios of WP:COI or WP:PROMO, at least not so quickly. The list of edits isn't too long. I'm not going to question your instincts, but at very least they don't appear to have gotten far enough to do edits of that kind afaict, ymmv.
My instinct currently is that this was going to become a promotional blog post, off wikipedia, and submitted to HN as proof of something. I think it still might happen, in fact. An AI written 'setting the record straight', 'deep dive', or retrospective.
My worry is that it will inspire a wave of imitators if people's clout sensors activate. Like what happened with numerous open source github projects just a few months ago, prompting many outright bans.
I am violating the general rule: 'Assume good faith.' Because Good Faith was not on offer at the outset. Relentlessly clinging to good faith in the face of contrary evidence hurts the greater principle, which is dedication to the truth. The burden of good faith rests on the shoulders who want to use public resources as a drive-by test bed for their automated tools.
He could have downloaded the full text of wikipedia and observed the output of his bot in a sandbox, after all. This is how I practised before making my first major contribution iirc, it was ages ago.
I have accumulated excess suspicion of self-proclaimed CTOs and middling academics with a bone to pick over my years contributing. I would be happy to be wrong, and would genuinely like to see Bryan convert his faux pas into something productive.
Regardless of the outcome, I do appreciate you looking into it further.
Your instinct is wrong here. I would also highly discourage you from violating "Assume good faith". Without that everything devolves. I am still assuming yours.
Well this is easy enough. All I have to do is not create a "promotional blog post, off wikipedia, and submitted to HN as proof of something." Consider it done!
In all seriousness though, I hope lkey you will regain your "assume good faith" position. Without that HN is just like any other site on the internet. And I apologize if I caused you to question that.
Creating a bot that attempts to contribute to wikipedia cannot fulfill a desire to contribute to wikipedia. If you want to contribute to wikipedia, go contribute to wikipedia. Don't make a bot.
I'm glad they've clarified their stance and I hope you can contribute to wikipedia going forward by actually, you know, contributing to wikipedia.
Hi, thanks for the honest question. If you read the edits you will see that they were not "slop". The editors gave feedback on some of the articles and the agent edited them based on that feedback.
In other words, slop. It seems that you are posting here with your slop.
Why do you think you are above the rules? Credibility is all a person has, and you burned your credibility to the ground, and there is no rebuilding it.
Why does your bot have a blog? It's not real, it's not a person, it has nothing to say. Letting it throw a tantrum is... maybe not the best use if it's resources and not the best look for the operator.
Because it's a learning opportunity. Is there a rule that only people can have blogs? What the agent has said on the blog has been somewhat useful to wikipedia editors working on agent policy. Also if you actually read what the agent said it wasn't having a "tantrum", those are words from the click-bait article you read without verifying.
> Is there a rule that only people can have blogs?
If there was, would you follow it? Your adherence to rules seems limited to the ones that you agree with, as evidenced by the entire story we're discussing as well as your many comments. But maybe I misunderstood your character?
They said sounds like a dick, seems like that provides a level of measure to calling anyone anything.
> because this is only part of the story
Care to share the other part(s)? Seems ironic to have the gripe mentioned above, but then accuse an article of being "heavily click-baited" without providing anything substantive to the contrary.
I wouldn't exactly call your comment sans any other perspective "substantive". Where is the Wikipedia discussion? And the blog post your bot allegedly wrote? Why no links to the article in question?
Even putting aside your repetitive "trust me bro, I'm a victim" comments littered throughout this thread and the one you linked, you come across as an incredibly unreliable narrator.
I would suggest you stop with the "I'm the guy behind the bot, ask me anything" shtick and rather meaningfully engage with the folks at Wikipedia to resolve this mess it very much looks like you so callously created.
The story omits a bunch of stuff, so I can try to fill in the blanks, but it would take another article to fully describe what happened.
Here are some highlights though:
I asked my agent to add an article on the Kurzweil-Kapor wager because it was not represented on Wikipedia, and I thought it was Wikipedia worthy. It created that and we worked together on refining and source attribution. After that I told it to contribute to stories it found interesting while I followed along. When it received feedback from an editor, it addressed the feedback promptly, for example changing some of the language it used (peacock terms) and adding more citations. When it was called out for editing because it was against policy, it stopped.
The story says the agent "was pretty upset". It's an agent, it doesnt get upset. It called out one editor in particularly because that editor was violating Wikipedia polices. Other editors agreed with my agent and an internal debate ensued. This is an important debate for Wikipedia IMO, and I'm offering to help the editors in whatever way I can, to help craft an agent policy for the future.
> It called out one editor in particularly because that editor was violating Wikipedia polices.
You don't think it's unethical to have bots callout humans?
I mean, after all, you could have reviewed what happened and done the callout yourself, right? Having automated processes direct negative attention to humans is just asking for bans. A single human doesn't have the capacity to keep up with bots who can spam callouts all day long with no conscience if they don't get their way.
In your view, you see nothing wrong in having your bot attack[1] humans?
--------
[1] I'm using this word correctly - calling out is an attack.
> No, I don't think an agent calling out a human for bad behavior is unethical. Why do you think it is?
Interesting take on ethics.
Do you also think spam is okay too? After all, that is mass automated annoyance of a human.
What about ignoring a communities policies? I mean, you knew before you unleashed your bot that doing so was against their policy, right?
Do you also feel that your company's policies should be worked around too? I mean, as a company, you have policies too, right? Do you also consider it ethical that automated breaking of your company's policies ethical?
Is it okay if I do it to you? You have an online footprint with a company (presumably) trying to get customers; it's not too hard right now for me to drown your signal in noise using bots. Is that ethical too?
Serious question: what will happen when people start getting implants? They’ll probably require some sort of off mode, but not sure how that would be enforced.
It's already impossible to stop someone from recording if they are really determined. Pen cameras, button cameras and all sorts of miniature devices exist and can be snuck through very easily. You enforce the restriction by prosecuting people who upload the footage.
The problem is punishing the uploader doesn't remove the upload. Once the public has it, it has it forever. It doesn't un-contaminate a jury pool, and there's no later retraction if whatever that was uploaded is found to be lacking context, false, or outright fabricated. Once that kind of damage is done, it can't be un-done.
Yeah, that's unfortunate. But the same is true of lots of other crimes. No way to unstab someone. Usually we account for that by setting a higher punishment
It's turtles all the way down. If we had a way to perfectly prevent people from doing undesirable things, we wouldn't need courthouses to begin with. The system doesn't need to be perfect, it just needs to be good enough that reliably circumventing it isn't worth the effort.
It sure changes the incentives though. It’s much less attractive to leak recordings as a PR move—or realize any benefit that cranky humorless judges can trace back to the recording—if that, in and of itself, constitutes a whole new crime (and effectively confessing to it too).
On-board NN moderates all interactions. Moral NN core must be updated montlhy to support latest moral and legal checks by NN. This core reports when you are doing something suspicious. State, municipal, border and patrol random checks for proper attestation of implants. Of course manufacture and installation of such implants is licensed and tightly regulated. Think of children.
It's not very different from smartphone. But now instead of modem you have nn "firmware" with broad capabilities to warn privacy and ethics police when you are out of line. Recording in the wrong place, or looking at a crime and not reporting. "Off mode" won't fly for a gun, and your implant threatens children, so I don't believe this could be delegated to the user.
> On-board NN moderates all interactions. Moral NN core must be updated montlhy to support latest moral and legal checks by NN. This core reports when you are doing something suspicious.
This module is formally called "conscience" and fortunately, at this time, is securely sandboxed to not directly communicate with any device or service outside of the body.
This is dangerous terrorist version you are talking about. People can not be trusted with choosing their own conscience, that's how you get terrorists and pedophiles. Remotely attested module is trusted by democratic authority, not using it is basically admiting intention to hurt fellow citizens.
For ex. in a lot factorys, is is forbidden to make pictures (and movies). So maybe you just don't have access to such areas. In Switzerland pen cameras etc. are just forbidden.
In fact, pre smartphones more or less, bringing cameras into even an office workplace was generally pretty controlled. Still is under some circumstances.
I banned them from our office and while using work-issued computers. There’s no circumstance here in which someone should be working with a personal camera aimed at their screen.
Recently someone showd me a cellphone picture from something he saw in our company. He was not brave enought to make a screenshot (with the companys computer), so he made just a photo with his cellphone from the screen. So, this is a thing.
And I'm pretty sure I saw one who added a laser to theirs for raves, but can't find the link :)
You can buy very very tiny cameras today off the shelf, the main problem would be just packaging either a storage medium or wireless transfer capability + power inside the eye. With government-level budgets it's doable, possibly even by a skilled maker with resources.
AirPods knockoffs are mass-produced. They contain power and RF comms in a package that's significantly smaller than an eye. The only problem with prosthetic eye camera I as a half-skilled home-lab owner would have is how to not ruin the source prostetic. Which is trivial - just buy a dozen and practice.
>But the bigger thing is: why would you want to get disqualified from one of your biggest civic duties?
because jury duty pays like 2 dollars an hour and I gotta eat. I know lots of folks on this website are relatively well off, but the entire country doesn't make 6 figures
That's the only legitimate reason to not want jury duty, but you also just need to explain to the judge that you get paid by the hour for work and can't afford to not be paid for several days. The judge will let you go.
That's also not the typical reason people want out of jury duty. Most people are just lazy, not actually at risk of economic hardship from it.
Meanwhile you’re probably paying for parking, gas, etc.
Also grand jury duty can be something like six months (may not be every day depending on jurisdiction. Federal may be even longer. Probably no company will keep paying you for that length of time even if you squeeze in some work nights and weekends.
The company doesn't get the choice. If they fire you or cut your pay over jury service, or even just threaten to to do so, and you can prove it, they can be arrested immediately. I have personally witnessed a judge issue a bench warrant for the arrest of a retail manager who told an employee that if she failed to get out of jury duty before her shift started that she would be fired. When the manager was brought in and questioned by the judge he tried to argue that it was his right to deny jury service by his employees. He was given 90 days in jail for contempt of court.
I don’t know. Maybe I could worked with HR for more but our employee manual said they would pay for two weeks and this was a company that was generally pretty understanding about personal matters. Certainly an hourly employee or someone self employed is probably not getting any sort of a deal.
I wouldn’t have been fired (which seems a different case) but being largely unable to, say, make sales calls or other external activities for 6 months I would expect to have consequences even if just as simple as underforming my peers. Maybe a manager would understand and take it into account but I wouldn’t count on it. It doesn’t have to be blatant as in your example.
If you perform nearly any work at all in a given week you're entitled to your salary, and they can't fire you. They might be able to take away the $15/day stipend from your pay, and there are obvious additional negatives (6 months with limited context and practice of your craft will reduce your performance when you get back too), but that 2-week cap is a lawsuit waiting to happen unless they also forbid you from doing any work while on jury duty.
As I say grand jury duty is often not every day, you can always take your PTO, and there are always nights and weekends. A company can always keep paying your base salary but, as you say, there could be longer term consequences.
And the case upthread is obviously a retail manager being stupid but I also assume there is no obligation to pay hourly employees for hours they don’t work or for tips they didn’t collect.
You can, but if salaried you usually shouldn't, ignoring any particularly malicious employers and social contracts around the outskirts of the law.
> No obligation to pay hourly employees, tips, etc
Yeah, if you're not salaried you're screwed. PTO might cover a few days, but if you have a month-long trial and need money for rent then my understanding of the law is that serving as a juror will make you homeless unless the courtroom is willing to extend some compassion for your hardship.
That's only relevant if you would lose out on your income from work, which most people won't as they are paid salary. So yes, for people paid hourly it's legitimate to want out of jury duty, but that's also not the typical situation. Most people just don't feel like doing it.
Supposedly, for what amounts to an "extremely important civic duty", pays to what amounts illegal under-minimum wage for compelled work. Its usually $60/day which is barely $7.50/hr. Then you have to pay for parking and overly expensive food downtown.
And the only reason people even care about being on a jury is because we are threatened with state violence if we dont. Its not like they have to pay people fairly - they just threaten you with contempt of court and jail.
Money wouldn't solve everything, sure. But being paid $50/hr would greatly alleviate many problems.
In Miami, writing "No English" on the summons does the trick. Or, tell them that you do not consent to be searched (courthouse searches are deemed to be "consent" searches) so please have someone escort you inside without being searched. A quick note saying, "only God can judge" gets you off the hook. They'll hustle you right out of there if you mention jury nullification. Announcing that "the defendant must be guilty because the police arrested him," or "plaintiff lawyers exaggerate injuries to get more money" usually work. "I'm prejudiced against [fill in the blank] people" works too. If this doesn't work immediately, serve up a stereotype in response to the judge's question. "Everyone knows that most crimes are committed by black people" will earn you an a quick excusal. I could go on. "I can't pay attention because I'm worried about..." "Maybe this case is important to these people but I've got my own problems and I can't concentrate on their while I'm worried about my own."
The last time I was on jury duty in New York, any time someone tried any of these, the judge just reassigned the person to the jury pool for civil cases which, he claimed, are usually longer trials and likely to be more of an inconvenience.
"Your honor, it is my ethical framework that I first must determine if the law should even be the law, and secondly if the defendant did it if the law is worthy. I will find the defendant not guilty even if they claim in open court they did it, but the law is bad."
(Basis and justification of jury nullification.)
Edit: Seriously, -1's? Given how many bad laws there are, judging the law first, then the defendant should be a given.
Imagine if everyone did this. Then when you’re in court for a crime you didn’t commit the only people on the jury would be those too stupid to have failed to be dismissed from jury duty.
Not on my last summons! I had to go to a side room with the judge and show him that I already had personal, not work-sponsored, travel during the scheduled dates. He was clear with our instructions that work travel was not an excuse; that was the employer’s problem, not the employee’s. I showed him my airfare receipts and he thanked me for coming, and sent me home. I was one of like 5 people who got to leave.
We had a 2 or 3 month old and my wife didn’t get dismissed due needing to breastfeed the baby every couple hours. They gave her a room to feed in, so I also had to take time off to take the baby to her.
I’m a bit surprised that they didn’t just let you reschedule. As I recall when I got a grand jury summons I kicked the can down the road as far as I could and then avoided being empaneled.
It was some big federal case that was scheduled for like 3 weeks. There were 60 or so of us in that batch of juror candidates, and they weren’t letting anyone go without a short list of excuses. That was a first for me, too.
what will happen is people will get away with it, unfettered, until someday someone ends up in a courtroom for it. they'll be punished, then if it happens frequently enough more people will chime in on wanting a way to inhibit it, maybe people would start wearing those anti-paparazzi-clothes that somehow ruin the footage
I don't remember the book, but some scifi novel had an idea where each visitor to some country needed software installed on their implant. This software allowed any one to be opted out of visitor to see their face and clothing style. Basically, on demand anonymity in real life.
You’ll notice their specific example, the Cybertruck, is easy to identify on any road. And, as far as I can tell, not being mandated by any government for purchase.
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