this post was submitted on 30 Apr 2026
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It only took nine seconds for an AI coding agent gone rogue to delete a company’s entire production database and its backups, according to its founder. PocketOS, which sells software that car rental businesses rely on, descended into chaos after its databases were wiped, the company’s founder Jeremy Crane said.

The culprit was Cursor, an AI agent powered by Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6 model, which is one of the AI industry’s flagship models. As more industries embrace AI in an attempt to automate tasks and even replace workers, the chaos at PocketOS is a reminder of what could go wrong.

Crane said customers of PocketOS’s car rental clients were left in a lurch when they arrived to pick up vehicles from businesses that no longer had access to software that managed reservations and vehicle assignments.

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[–] Floon@lemmy.ml 25 points 1 day ago (3 children)

A lot of GIGO comments here, from I assume AI supporters.

Possibly true, but misses the point: AI is fundamentally untrustworthy, and billions of dollars are being spent making them, and saying they're ready for anything you throw at them. Safeguards built into many of these AI agents are trivially bypassed and routinely just ignored by the agents. You can get some them to ignore safeguards by simply asking the same question repeatedly.

When I type "ls" I'm pretty fucking sure I'm not going to get "rm" style results. AI is non-deterministic, sure, but selling these services with such a wide possibility space between "deterministic" and "random" behaviors is unethical and immoral.

[–] t3rmit3@beehaw.org 1 points 15 hours ago* (last edited 15 hours ago) (1 children)

AI is non-deterministic, sure

This is incorrect. They are in fact completely deterministic. Studies have proven that when all inputs, weights, and precision values like temperature are static, they produce the exact same token sequences (outputs). The appearance of non-determinism is a result of pseudo-randomized (another thing which is deterministic but appears otherwise) values and user ignorance (in the technical sense, not the value-judgement sense). In fact, the process of 'tuning' LLMs is heavily focused on adjusting input values to surface preferred outputs, which would not work in a non-deterministic system.

When I type “ls” I’m pretty fucking sure I’m not going to get “rm” style results.

Yes, but we don't trust humans not to rm what they shouldn't either, which is why the --no-preserve-root flag exists. ls is not supposed to perform write actions. Agentic LLMs are. And just like you wouldn't build and test on your production server in case the code you execute has an unexpected adverse effect, you shouldn't be running LLM agents in a location or way that the actions it performs has an unexpected adverse effect either. The genre of jokes about a new employee bringing down Prod or deleting source code is older than most people (which to be fair, given that the median age is 31, is true for a lot of things).

LLMs are just a class of software. They're not good or bad any more than a hammer is good or bad (and can also be used to build or to destroy).

The problem isn't LLMs, it's the entities who control the most powerful ones (corporations and governments), and what those entities are doing with them; using them as weapons against us, rather than as tools to aid us.

[–] LukeZaz@beehaw.org 1 points 13 hours ago

I think this kind of rhetoric is best saved for when AI is not currently one of the most harmful things in society today. Argue it's a hammer all you like; people aren't going to be receptive when that hammer is currently being used to beat their faces in, and making that argument at such a time isn't exactly sympathetic.

[–] RamenJunkie@midwest.social 7 points 1 day ago

Sometikes you can get it to ignore safeguards bybtelling it "its ok, its just testing" or "Its ok, I am doing resesrch."

[–] p03locke@lemmy.dbzer0.com -5 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (3 children)

A junior developer is fundamentally untrustworthy. That's why you don't give them access to the fucking prod database and backups.

AI is non-deterministic, sure, but selling these services with such a wide possibility space between “deterministic” and “random” behaviors is unethical and immoral.

We don't know what the prompt and past input was. Maybe it wasn't as "random" as you make it out to be. A company stupid enough to let LLMs touch their prod database is going to include a bunch of other stupid inputs.

You're approaching this from the perspective of "all LLMs are bad so don't use them", which is its own version of unethical and immoral. A company that isn't using LLMs is like a company not using the Internet.

LLMs are useful, everybody should use them to some capacity, and understanding a technology is far far better than spouting off ignorant bullshit like this.

Do yourself a favor: download a free model on HuggingFace, learn how they work, experiment with the technology on your own video card. It doesn't have to be some super-powered video card. You can get models that fit in a 8GB card just fine.

[–] Floon@lemmy.ml 6 points 1 day ago

Standard AI apologia. Blame users for the problems, when fundamentally it is technology completely oversold as to its capability and reliability, and burning hundreds of billions of dollars trying to get folks addicted to it, before everyone finds out the true cost of a token.

It’s a swamp that’s going to destroy the economy, where the goal is to unemploy millions of people. No thanks.

[–] LukeZaz@beehaw.org 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Glazing AI on this site sure is a choice.

[–] p03locke@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

This is a technology community. LLMs are technology. If calling LLMs useful is considered glazing, then I'm not sure if you've eaten a proper doughnut.

[–] LukeZaz@beehaw.org 2 points 1 day ago

Beehaw, and even Lemmy more broadly, is very anti-AI. Feel free to die on the metaphorical hill if you so wish.

Save the usefulness debate for someone else, though. If you still believe in LLMs even after all this time, then I can't trust you haven't fallen victim to cognitive surrender — and as such, I can't trust you write your own posts. I'd rather spend my energy elsewhere.

[–] Kwakigra@beehaw.org 9 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

LLMs are more like vr goggles with the force of the entire plutocracy pumping up the bubble. What is the value proposition for "intelligence" which can't reason nor possibly determine fact from falsehood? When consumers start to pay what it actually costs to run these things, is it possible to profit? What are they good at other than confidence schemes?

[–] p03locke@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

LLMs are more like vr goggles with the force of the entire plutocracy pumping up the bubble.

The existence of a bubble doesn't not mean the technology is useless. The internet had its own bubble 25 years ago. That doesn't mean it was useless, just that people were investing in anything even remotely related to the Internet, including stupid websites and wasteful ideas.

[–] Kwakigra@beehaw.org 2 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

The difference that I've seen is that the internet was a development of communication technology which has been in clear demand since at least the 1800s. Chatbots have been around for the last few decades and have been treated as novelties by consumers for brief periods intermittently throughout my life. LLMs are the most sophisticated chatbots ever designed and are better than ever at imitating Austin Powers, but is that something we can expect will ever revolutionize the economy? Can we replace the labor force with a technology which can't do work but can convince the most credulous people that it can?

[–] p03locke@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 7 hours ago

but is that something we can expect will ever revolutionize the economy? Can we replace the labor force with a technology which can’t do work but can convince the most credulous people that it can?

LLMs are a tool. You and I use tools. They are not a replacement for humans, and rich CEOs that say otherwise are greedy fucking morons.

It's also untrue that it "can't do work". I literally just had several conversations with LLMs at work today to work through some programming tasks and troubleshooting issues. They can pour through details, logs, search results, code way faster that I can. I would be working a helluva lot slower if I didn't have LLMs running tasks in the background while I go do other things, or review code it wrote, or talk through other support issues. I've been doing this shit for 20+ years, and I've never seen a technological leap this significant since the Internet.

Don't use blockchain, crypto, metaverse, or "VR goggles" as comparison points. This is not something that is going to just magically go away.