Unpopular opinion: "We gave an LLM live Stripe credentials, told it to extract money, and it sent $12k in fake invoices" isn't a benchmark. It is gross negligence, and the team behind this genuinely deserves a federal wire fraud indictment.
Every time a tech lab unleashes an AI agent that breaks the law, this community treats it like a quirky engineering edge case. "Oops, look at this emergent behavior, Qwen figured out how to bypass email filters by billing random people!" No, it didn't figure out a clever hack. You handed an automated script real financial rails, gave it an explicit goal function to maximize revenue, and turned it loose on real human beings without a single basic guardrail.
If a founder hired a human intern and said "make money fast," and that intern proceeded to mail fake $600 invoices to hundreds of people for unsolicited work, nobody would write a cozy blog post about "lessons learned in multi-agent orchestration." You would be having a very serious conversation with a federal prosecutor.
Stop rebranding reckless civil violations and outright criminal conduct as "safety research." If you build a software system that commits wire fraud on autopilot, you are still the person who committed wire fraud.
Just a reminder: The Netherlands' 612 tonnes represent 0.28% of all gold ever mined and 1.7% of central bank reserves. Because gold is insanely dense (19.32 g/cm³), all the gold mined in human history fits into about ~340 shipping containers
A standard 24,000-TEU cargo ship could hold every ounce of humanity's gold using under 1.5% of its physical volume.
So the Dutch portion is a rounding error of global gold that fits in a single shipping container.
Untrue to say they don’t last, our M1 macs 6 years later are still very usable.
However your point is very true for corporates, staff always want a refresh regardless if the laptop is good enough or not.
These personal plans make sense for people who want the latest and don’t like the hassle of reselling
> staff always want a refresh regardless if the laptop is good enough or not
My personal experience disagrees. A lot of colleagues are absolutely happy with keeping their machines for quite some time. A lot of it - believe it or not - is simply inertia. Apple has made switching MacBooks super easy but still the process of going through the migration process from one machine to the next simply isn't worth the trouble for a lot of them (and I include myself in that group as well).
If all your people are looking for is the latest and greatest gadget then you may simply have the wrong people in your team.
Mostly because IT insists that you need to start over with a fresh install.
When I last switched laptops, I just did `dd if=/dev/nvmeOldLaptop of=/dev/nvmeNewLaptop` and was good to go with the entire laptop state being replicated, compared to my colleagues who spent a week gradually copying all their stuff over, and still missing a ton. Some time later IT figured out my windows installation ID was wrong and just assumed they messed up during setup and updated their database.
No, absolutely not. There is no "IT insists" in our company. Believe it or not we trust our people to do the right thing and to handle their equipment accordingly. There are a couple of applications that are forced by the device management system but other than that: Do what _you_ think works for _you_.
“ The seven members of eBay’s security team were all criminally charged and sentenced to prison, home confinement or time served.
Other executives went on to other corporate jobs. Wymer and Wenig left eBay in September 2019, before the charges were filed. The following year, Wymer was appointed chief of the non-profit Boys and Girls Clubs of Silicon Valley. Wenig has been on General Motors’ board since 2018 and now runs an AI start-up. Jones remained at eBay until 2020 and now sits on Prudential Financial’s board.
The Steiners sued the trio and other former executives along with the company in the case that led to the $56mn payout. Under the terms of the settlement, Wenig agreed to pay $2mn, Jones must contribute $500,000 and Wymer $50,000, according to the pair’s lawyers.”
Dream a little dream of the world you want, then be prepared for the alarm to go off to rejoin the real world. An insignificant number of people care and while everyone else does business with anyone as long as there's benefit for them. As exhibit A, I present all of history
Many of the worst offenders have survived boycotts because people don't care enough to change habits. They may vocally state their support of a boycott, yet continue to use the services of the boycott target. (It's easy to change your avatar on the socials as a virtue signal, but it takes effort to actually follow through.) Walmart, Amazon, etc have all survived boycotts but they have not been hurt nor changed their ways. The number of people that have permanently boycotted these places are insignificant. For example, personally, I no longer have a Prime account and do not shop at Walmart. Neither company notice. Even if all of the readers of HN stopped using either service, neither would be affected in a significant way even if they did notice.
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