My dad worked at a logistics facility, the amount of perfume he took home was ridiculous - and you’d think that something like perfume would never go stale. It does from a brand perspective and they do everything they can to have it destroyed so it doesn’t end up being sold to prices that would hurt the perceptive value. Obviously he wasn’t allowed to take it either.
This isn't really surprising in a low margin industry. If you are making a 2% margin on the average perfume bottle, and then you liquidate it at -3% because it's cheaper than destroying it, you can accidentally end up anchoring customer perceptions on a price with like a -1% margin which actually will destroy the business over time.
High margin industries get more complicated to model, of course.
For sure high end perfumes are high margin products. Can’t be a lot of cost in producing a $100 perfume.
But I also feel like it’s a bit besides the point. Seeing pallet after pallet of perfumes getting destroyed every month should be an indication that something is not right.
There’s a hell of a difference between a tool that asks my permission to read a file to make it part of a prompt and a tool that packages up my whole working directory and sends it to Google Cloud Storage.
Who told you that it needs your permission? You are in Disneyland and you are debating why Mickey Mouse is not handing you over a legal agreement with guarantees on the ingredients of the candy you’ve just got from him.
Of course there is. It’s not about the _amount_ of files or how many percent of them. I might have 1000 files that I’m fine having the LLM read and then some that it really shouldn’t. The problem here is plainly uploading your whole directory without prompting for permissions to read them - even if you explicitly set up permissions for read tools.
> even if you explicitly set up permissions for read tools.
Part of problem is that "permissions" here are managed by the tools themselves as if filesystem access control hasn't been invented yet.
Even a half-assed sandbox container would be better than that.
Well, excepting that there's a toggle to turn off 'improving the model' (i.e. don't use my repo for training data) and it still uploads your entire repository, git history, etc., all of which can be fetched locally and fed to the model rather than uploading it to a bulk storage bucket.
Add to that the fact that this also includes env files, which may contain secrets that aren't part of the repo, that don't need to be fed to the model, and that might now be leaked.
Which leads us to the third thing: if this bucket weren't discovered and Grok didn't turn this 'feature' off, imagine the disaster fallout if someone ever managed to get read access to this bucket.
My point is that I believe those toggles are placebo buttons. You are free to believe that they prevent Grok from slurping up your IP, but the most reliable way to prevent that from happening is to prevent Grok from seeing your IP in the first place.
And by the time you figure out that they have, taking them to court is not going to be reliable recourse.
The things you allow the LLM to read will obviously be sent as part of a prompt. You can control that though. Reads are tool calls and you can configure permissions for that or be asked every time the agent wants to read something.
This is straight up just uploading your whole working directory. Not as a LLM prompt, but to a Google Storage.
If it’s to be trusted, it has nothing to do with the “agent” or what’s sent to the LLM. The harness will just straight up package the folder it’s run from and upload it to Google Cloud Storage.
> If it’s to be trusted, it has nothing to do with the “agent” or what’s sent to the LLM. The harness will just straight up package the folder it’s run from and upload it to Google Cloud Storage.
Even if there is a misunderstanding who is really uploading the directory, the TUI/CLI itself by actual code, or if the model decided to do so in the session, if you apply the recommendations from the replies to parent, and it no longer matter who did it, neither the software nor the model will be able to upload all your ssh keys.
No I disagree. A harness reading a file is a tool call and it happens locally, which means that I can control it. I can configure that I need to permit any file reads and now I _should_ have control of what is sent. The difference between that and silently uploading my entire working directory in the background is miles apart IMO.
I understand that one should think carefully about how they work with a non-deterministic tool, but this if different completely. This is xAI just choosing to upload and store everyone’s directories - with full git history.
I have a last name that only my family holds in Denmark (which means me and my brother by now), yet it managed to tag me a Professional Football Player, MP for the Socialist Party and Founder of a Sleep Mattress Company.
Yes, the time to take action has been 10 years ago. In order to catch up with US and China, EU would have to accelerate assuming US and China would stagnate(which is not the case). At current rate EU would always be catching up. I would love to hear if you can think of any plan on how EU can overtake US and China on AI advancement
I don't see how that is relevant since they already have a large number of major car manufacturers.
The person I was replying to was asserting the the EU could never approach China and US levels in AI even if they made a major effort to do so because by starting N years later they would always be N years behind.
But that is only true, it seems to me, for things that do not plateau. For things that plateau those who start N years late catch up to the leaders N years after the leaders hit the plateau.
ICE cars plateaued a long time ago, and so the EU, the US, and China are all about the same level. They might concentrate more on different market segments, but technologically they all pretty much equally capable.
I run a SaaS business on the side of my job and have been for 15 years. There’s a million questions I’ve never had the time to dig into although the data was there. Retention cohorts, free to paid tier conversions, subscription upgrades/downgrades and so much more. Just this week, I decided to just let an agent have access through psql and go nuts, writing all analysis to markdown files. Reading through it, there’s a few things it misunderstood and as a result, some of the analysis was flawed, but all in all I’m honestly mindblown. It would have taken me months to write queries and even just coming up with frameworks of how to think about these metrics.
That’s how I’d want it to be honestly. LLMs are tools and I’d hope we’re going to keep the people using them responsible. Just like any other tools we use.
I have been doing this for years, especially for libraries (internal or otherwise), anything that's `pub`/`export`, or gnarly logic that makes the intent not obvious. Not _everything_ is documented, but most things are.
I'm doing it because I know how much I appreciate well-written documentation. Also this is a bit niche, but if you're using Rust and add examples to doc-comments, they get run as tests too.
Also given we both managed to produce more than one sentence, and include capital letters in our comments, it's entirely possible both of us will be accused of being an AI. Because, you know... People don't write like this, right?
>Also given we both managed to produce more than one sentence, and include capital letters in our comments, it's entirely possible both of us will be accused of being an AI.
Could anyone explain the esoteric meaning of why people started doing that shit? I got a hypothesis, what's going on is something like this:
1. Prove you are human: write Like A Fucking Adult You Weirdo (internal designator for a specific language register, you know the one)
2. Prove you are human: _DON'T_ write Like A Fucking Adult You Weirdo (because that's how LLMs were trained to write, silly!)
3. ???? (cognitive dissonance ensues)
4. PROFIT (you were just subject to some more attrition while the AI just learned how to pass a lil bit better)
I never thought computer programmers of all people would get trapped in such a simple loop of self-contradiction.
But I guess the human materiel really has degraded since whenever. I blame remote work preventing us from even hypothetically punching bosses, but anyway weird fucking times eh?
Maybe the posts trying to figure "this post is AI, that post is not AI" are themselves predominantly AI-generated?
Or is it just people made uncomfortable by what's going on, but not able to articulate further, jumping on the first bandwagon they see?
Or maybe this "AI-doubting of probably human posters" was started by humans, yes - then became "a thing", and as such was picked up by the LLM?
Like who the fuck knows, but with all honesty that's how I felt about so many things, dating from way before LLMs became so powerful that the above became a "sensible" question to ask...
Predominantly those things which people do by sheer mimesis - such as pop culture.
"Are you a goddam robot already - don't you see how your liking the stupid-making song is turning you into stupid-you, at a greater rate than it is bringing non-stupid-you aesthetic satisfaction?" type of thing -- but then I assume in more civilized places than where I come from people are much more convincingly taught that personal taste "doesn't matter" (and simultaneously is the only thing that matters; see points 1-4... I guess that's what makes some people believe curating AI, i.e. "prompt engineering" can be a real job and not just boil down to you being the stochastic parrot's accountability sink?)
I'm not even sure English even has the notions to point out the concrete issue - I sure don't know 'em.
Ever hear of the strain of thought that says "all metaphysical questions are linguistic paradoxes (and it's self-evidently pointless to seek answers to nonsensical questions)"?
Feels kinda like the same thing, but artificially constructed within the headspace of American anti-intellectuallism.
Maybe a correct adversarial reading of the main branding acronym would be Anti-Intelligence.
You know, like bug spray, or stain remover.
But for the main bug in the system; the main stain on the white shirt: the uncomfortable observation that, in the end, some degree of independent thinking is always required to get real things done which produce some real value. (That's antithetical to standard pro-social aversive conditioning, which says: do not, under any circumstance, just put 2 and 2 together; lest you turn from "a vehicle for the progress of civilization" back into a pumpkin)
It's a pretty sad state of affairs when someone can say with a straight face "Nobody out here" (sic) taking their job seriously and giving it the care and attention it rightly deserves.
I’ve been involved in building a system that reads structured data from a special form of contracts from a specific industry. Prices, clauses, pick up, delivery, etc. A couple hundred datapoints per contract. We had many discussions around how to present and sell an imperfect system. The thing is, the potential customers are today transcribing the contracts manually and we quickly realized that people make a ton of mistakes doing that. It became obvious when we were working on assertion datasets ourself. It’s not a perfect system and you have to consider how you use the data (aggregating for price indexing for instance), but we’re actually doing better than what people are achieving when they have to transcribe data for hours a day.
1. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.09101