Most interns would not be dumb enough to try it. Because there would be consequences, and there is training. The pre-trained entity, that everyone has been screaming is as smart as your intern, though?
Not an intern, but when I was a new hire on a trading desk I dropped the dividend database that we used to price options. Cost the desk a boatload before we stopped offering quotes, after which the day was a total loss. That’s the sort of fuckup that lands in the CEO’s report.
I understood what I did ex post facto, it was an honest—if stupid—mistake, I expected to get fired and instead was given everyone’s shit work for six months during which I learned a tonne. One of my tasks was redesigning the system so a single careless keystroke couldn’t do that during the trading day.
Doesn't back it up properly. There are too many people, otherwise bright and professional, who do not realise that simply syncing to somewhere else is not an adequate backup arrangement.
This problem predates agent based work. Anything an AI agent can accidentally do, malware could purposefully do too, as could a sufficiently careless human (one of the things my backups are intended to protect me from, is me!).
Should be mentioned that this was in the 90s with one of the first computer-animated feature films. We're missing the source code for a ton of games from that era as well. I would assume people had learned to have proper backups 30 years later - especially so with the advantage of high speed internet.
All these "accidents" with agents just makes me want to use them less, not more. Then again, I don't use agents because they consume tokens at an absurd rate, so...
I always thought that delete doesn't really exist? In the sense that it you take the hard drive to a specialist they can often recover it? Maybe I am wrong?
You aren't wrong, but getting a specialist to look at it in a tight timeframe is expensive. Free tools exist, but if you've not already learned how to use them the time that you need them is a bad time to start. Anything you do with the machine after the delete can reduce the amount you are able to get back, so you should very quickly shut down (avoiding saving anything locally). The situation can be worse with SSDs, depending on how eager your OS/filesystem is at TRIMing deallocated blocks.
You could ask the agent to attempt to recover using specific tools. But yes in some cases the bits could be lost without the ability to recover, there are ways to destroyy data as it is usually required for decommissioning
Modern version of "the dog ate my homework"? I can't even imagine a scenario where an AI agent manages to unrecoverably delete all working material and backups. I'm cynical and can't help thinking it's all marketing to postpone a reality show no one cared about.
It does matter because more people use agents and don't expect such rogue behavior. Plus there is more novelty, which "news" is somewhat related to. But regular human destruction also gets published and discussed
Same energy as blaming an intern for dropping your production table. If one entity can delete all your data, that’s on your systems not them
But we thought our files would be safe in the dumpster, nobody could have foreseen they would take out the trash.
Most interns would not be dumb enough to try it. Because there would be consequences, and there is training. The pre-trained entity, that everyone has been screaming is as smart as your intern, though?
> Most interns would not be dumb enough to try it
Not an intern, but when I was a new hire on a trading desk I dropped the dividend database that we used to price options. Cost the desk a boatload before we stopped offering quotes, after which the day was a total loss. That’s the sort of fuckup that lands in the CEO’s report.
I understood what I did ex post facto, it was an honest—if stupid—mistake, I expected to get fired and instead was given everyone’s shit work for six months during which I learned a tonne. One of my tasks was redesigning the system so a single careless keystroke couldn’t do that during the trading day.
Production company doesn't bother backing up hundreds of days of work, blames irresponsibly used AI for its own failure.
Doesn't back it up properly. There are too many people, otherwise bright and professional, who do not realise that simply syncing to somewhere else is not an adequate backup arrangement.
This problem predates agent based work. Anything an AI agent can accidentally do, malware could purposefully do too, as could a sufficiently careless human (one of the things my backups are intended to protect me from, is me!).
Pixar lost Toy Story 2, deleted by mistake https://www.slashgear.com/how-pixars-toy-story-2-was-deleted...
Should be mentioned that this was in the 90s with one of the first computer-animated feature films. We're missing the source code for a ton of games from that era as well. I would assume people had learned to have proper backups 30 years later - especially so with the advantage of high speed internet.
All these "accidents" with agents just makes me want to use them less, not more. Then again, I don't use agents because they consume tokens at an absurd rate, so...
I always thought that delete doesn't really exist? In the sense that it you take the hard drive to a specialist they can often recover it? Maybe I am wrong?
You aren't wrong, but getting a specialist to look at it in a tight timeframe is expensive. Free tools exist, but if you've not already learned how to use them the time that you need them is a bad time to start. Anything you do with the machine after the delete can reduce the amount you are able to get back, so you should very quickly shut down (avoiding saving anything locally). The situation can be worse with SSDs, depending on how eager your OS/filesystem is at TRIMing deallocated blocks.
You could ask the agent to attempt to recover using specific tools. But yes in some cases the bits could be lost without the ability to recover, there are ways to destroyy data as it is usually required for decommissioning
It depends on which sectors have been overwritten, really.
Impossible to read the website let alone configure cookies.
No idea why it's linked to this weird wrapper. The original: https://www.aftonbladet.se/nojesbladet/a/31oE8A/the-challeng...
Original, google translated: https://www-aftonbladet-se.translate.goog/nojesbladet/a/31oE...
From my earlier submission here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50084941
> "No idea why it's linked to this weird wrapper."
I'm guessing that if JavaScript were enabled, it would try to translate Swedish to English clientside in the browser.
(BTW, your own HN submission was auto-flagged for not being in English. I've vouched for it; not that it matters).
Ah, that probably explains why OP did as they did here as well. Thanks for explaining.
In firefox it is Swedish on the left and English on the right.
Okay, but was it actually almost finished and ready? People can act unpredictably[1] under pressure instead of asking for help.
It very probably was, but it just reminded me of this oversight failure mode.
[1] https://thedailywtf.com/articles/the_brillant_paula_bean
Tangent, but I’m so happy this site is still around! Haven’t checked it in at least a decade, this should be a goldmine.
Modern version of "the dog ate my homework"? I can't even imagine a scenario where an AI agent manages to unrecoverably delete all working material and backups. I'm cynical and can't help thinking it's all marketing to postpone a reality show no one cared about.
No backup, no mercy.
Interview with show host: https://www.aviaduct.com/?l=og+en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.aftonb...
Wow presumably it's a cookie pop-up on mobile has thousands of pixels of empty vertical space so you have to scroll all the way down, what a mess lol
How easily can files completely disappear just like that? You usually have to be very intentional about it to make even a partial recovery impossible.
Yeah, just stop writes and get someone that can use photorec of similar. It's not the end of the world unless you do something stupid.
But who knows what the agent was trying to do. It could really have decided the TV show was so bad no one should see it. There's no details.
Or it's bad and it's tax evasion.
"It's not the end of the world unless you do something stupid."
Or intentional
> It could really have decided the TV show was so bad no one should see it.
Fair play to the vendor of the agent if that were true, they've invented a model which instead of producing slop goes around erasing it. I approve!
The agent pulled out the hard drives and then stomped on them, before putting them in a bucket of magnets and acid.
It also duct taped their IT staff to their chairs and prevented them from taking any backups of their core IP.
This is the same as using commands like rm the wrong way. The agent didn't do it, you did it! You didn't use the agent/tool properly!
In your face AI Doomers! The AI is creating more jobs!
Could dang or tomhow manually decontract the title?
If the title was "TV studio does not have backups" this would be a non-story. The fact it was deleted by agent and not human doesn't really matter.
It does matter because more people use agents and don't expect such rogue behavior. Plus there is more novelty, which "news" is somewhat related to. But regular human destruction also gets published and discussed
Yea this.
Agents doesn't cause new problems, they reveal existing weaknesses.
Proper working backups. Proper IAM setup. With agents things can go wrong so much faster, the margins for allowed systemic/tech debt are shrinking.
> Agents doesn't cause new problems, they reveal existing weaknesses.
Agents absolutely can and will cause (new) problems if they are unsupervised even with guard rails in place.
Hm, what guard rails are needed for agents that aren't needed for humans if you want to handle insider risk properly?
Except these people aren't developers, they make movies?
And if you trust "AI" marketing, it will take all our jobs and do them better than us.
You're probably a regular tech news reader and are aware of the limitations, while they aren't.
> Except these people aren't developers, they make movies?
A production company should 100% have regular backups, even moreso than the average developer.
If they were stored in S3, or a similar service, and the agents deletes them, there is no way to recover them, right?
I know google has some manual process (forms) to request "undeletion" of personal Google Drive files.
If you have bucket versioning enabled you should still be able to recover something.
smells like bs