I got a call from someone I don't know.
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Ai Receptionist: Ciao, I'm your friendly AI voice receptionist. How can I help you?
Customer: Eh, ciao... Our LLM botched our FreeBSD server upgrade, didn't take backups, and we already spent a lot of tokens and it's still trying... Can you help?
AI Receptionist: You were absolutely right to reach out. I assure you I can help. You want me to support your AI Agent in further botching your upgrade and spend more tokens on the task. It's good there's no backup in the way, so we both won't be running out of disk space.
Hang on while I make contact with your bankaccount for more tokens, and access to your network to team up with your AI. Thanks for calling. -
I got a call from someone I don't know.
"Hi. We have a FreeBSD server. It's been working perfectly for years, but it hasn't been updated since then. We asked AI to update it, but now it won't boot anymore. It didn't even make a backup before starting. The AI keeps trying things, everything is down, and we've already spent over €500 in tokens. Can you help us?"
"Sure. €500, plus the time it'll take me to try to fix it. Assuming it can still be fixed and nothing important has been deleted."
"That much?"
Some silence.
"Well, I hope AI takes your job away!" And he hung up.
Believing that autopilot automatically makes you an invulnerable professional pilot will ruin far more people than job losses will.
I don't know if AI will take my job away, but it's already cost them €500 and, probably, their server.
@stefano Good thing they didn't hire you to get blamed for the whole thing.
We've had a similar thing (alas without AI, just lack of maintenance because they didn't pay their only admin) to a medium sized hosting company in Poland in 2016 (Adweb/2be.pl).
An IT company offered to help in incident response mode, after everything got fixed the hosting company said they won't pay the high fees for the response, IT company restored old snapshots, then got blamed for all kinds of made up issues.
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@stefano I recently had someone ask me to set up WordPress for them. I agreed and they asked if I would be using AI to do the work. I assured them no, it is a simple (for me) task which takes just a few minutes.
They then clarified they were asking me to use AI to do the install. They thought using AI would somehow make the vanilla WordPress setup better. They were fine with it taking longer, even, if I somehow involved AI in the process they had already offloaded to me.
It is truly wild that this idea that things are more trustworthy if they're said by a computer somehow took hold among so many people.
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I got a call from someone I don't know.
"Hi. We have a FreeBSD server. It's been working perfectly for years, but it hasn't been updated since then. We asked AI to update it, but now it won't boot anymore. It didn't even make a backup before starting. The AI keeps trying things, everything is down, and we've already spent over €500 in tokens. Can you help us?"
"Sure. €500, plus the time it'll take me to try to fix it. Assuming it can still be fixed and nothing important has been deleted."
"That much?"
Some silence.
"Well, I hope AI takes your job away!" And he hung up.
Believing that autopilot automatically makes you an invulnerable professional pilot will ruin far more people than job losses will.
I don't know if AI will take my job away, but it's already cost them €500 and, probably, their server.
@stefano There`s some of a wisdom called "Скупой платит дважды". Well, in their case they will most likely pay three times
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I got a call from someone I don't know.
"Hi. We have a FreeBSD server. It's been working perfectly for years, but it hasn't been updated since then. We asked AI to update it, but now it won't boot anymore. It didn't even make a backup before starting. The AI keeps trying things, everything is down, and we've already spent over €500 in tokens. Can you help us?"
"Sure. €500, plus the time it'll take me to try to fix it. Assuming it can still be fixed and nothing important has been deleted."
"That much?"
Some silence.
"Well, I hope AI takes your job away!" And he hung up.
Believing that autopilot automatically makes you an invulnerable professional pilot will ruin far more people than job losses will.
I don't know if AI will take my job away, but it's already cost them €500 and, probably, their server.
@stefano Reminds me of this
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@stefano I almost think this story is unbelievable, except I know you well enough to be certain the tale, sadly, is true.
Sorry for their loss.
As the Monty Python troupe would say/yell: "run away!"@stefano @jspath55 I definitely believe it. You'd be surprised how many company directors think you can cut corners on IT staff, yet will throw 5 figure sums on "services" to solve a problem. I had a boss like that once. I think he just liked shouting at companies, and got in the way of people trying to doing their job.
Some bosses are massive toddlers. -
I got a call from someone I don't know.
"Hi. We have a FreeBSD server. It's been working perfectly for years, but it hasn't been updated since then. We asked AI to update it, but now it won't boot anymore. It didn't even make a backup before starting. The AI keeps trying things, everything is down, and we've already spent over €500 in tokens. Can you help us?"
"Sure. €500, plus the time it'll take me to try to fix it. Assuming it can still be fixed and nothing important has been deleted."
"That much?"
Some silence.
"Well, I hope AI takes your job away!" And he hung up.
Believing that autopilot automatically makes you an invulnerable professional pilot will ruin far more people than job losses will.
I don't know if AI will take my job away, but it's already cost them €500 and, probably, their server.
@stefano people are generally insane now. I'm sorry this asshole found you.
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@spacehobo @stefano Weird, it worked for Fleetwood Mac.
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I got a call from someone I don't know.
"Hi. We have a FreeBSD server. It's been working perfectly for years, but it hasn't been updated since then. We asked AI to update it, but now it won't boot anymore. It didn't even make a backup before starting. The AI keeps trying things, everything is down, and we've already spent over €500 in tokens. Can you help us?"
"Sure. €500, plus the time it'll take me to try to fix it. Assuming it can still be fixed and nothing important has been deleted."
"That much?"
Some silence.
"Well, I hope AI takes your job away!" And he hung up.
Believing that autopilot automatically makes you an invulnerable professional pilot will ruin far more people than job losses will.
I don't know if AI will take my job away, but it's already cost them €500 and, probably, their server.
@stefano When karma meets AI and human stupidity
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I got a call from someone I don't know.
"Hi. We have a FreeBSD server. It's been working perfectly for years, but it hasn't been updated since then. We asked AI to update it, but now it won't boot anymore. It didn't even make a backup before starting. The AI keeps trying things, everything is down, and we've already spent over €500 in tokens. Can you help us?"
"Sure. €500, plus the time it'll take me to try to fix it. Assuming it can still be fixed and nothing important has been deleted."
"That much?"
Some silence.
"Well, I hope AI takes your job away!" And he hung up.
Believing that autopilot automatically makes you an invulnerable professional pilot will ruin far more people than job losses will.
I don't know if AI will take my job away, but it's already cost them €500 and, probably, their server.
@stefano Meh, just meh, this reminds me of all the thanks I didn't get when I saved the City of London prop trading desk I was contracting for by doing a live ext4 Linux filesystem recovery on an HP MSA based SAN.
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@stefano @jspath55 I definitely believe it. You'd be surprised how many company directors think you can cut corners on IT staff, yet will throw 5 figure sums on "services" to solve a problem. I had a boss like that once. I think he just liked shouting at companies, and got in the way of people trying to doing their job.
Some bosses are massive toddlers.@latelesley I would not be surprised given a few decades of #SAP and #ASUG community networking and corporate "life" of any behavior. The folks who #volunteer to manage groups and give talks gives me hope.
cc: @gregorw et al -
@stefano Remember it's €5,000 when they call back in a week
@duncan_bayne @stefano
️this. A block of time plus any time over /hr to establish what the chatbot broke then get it back to a functional baseline. Then the upgrade on top of that
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I got a call from someone I don't know.
"Hi. We have a FreeBSD server. It's been working perfectly for years, but it hasn't been updated since then. We asked AI to update it, but now it won't boot anymore. It didn't even make a backup before starting. The AI keeps trying things, everything is down, and we've already spent over €500 in tokens. Can you help us?"
"Sure. €500, plus the time it'll take me to try to fix it. Assuming it can still be fixed and nothing important has been deleted."
"That much?"
Some silence.
"Well, I hope AI takes your job away!" And he hung up.
Believing that autopilot automatically makes you an invulnerable professional pilot will ruin far more people than job losses will.
I don't know if AI will take my job away, but it's already cost them €500 and, probably, their server.
@stefano Almost my entire income is unfucking bad AI nonsense, much of it starts like this story.
And it almost always comes with a phase in the negotiations where they beg me to reduce my rates because they have already spent so much money on AI.
But that isn't my fault, nor my problem.
Never been told off like this though.
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@stefano 🤯 it's amazing (by which I mean worrying) how many people seem to think they can absolve themselves of any responsibility by using AI.
I don't understand why anyone would just let AI loose on a production system like that, and even blame AI for not taking backups. Although why was it not being backed up anyway?
I wonder how much more money they will waste in tokens rather than pay a professional to fix the mess.
@teapot_ben @stefano Capabilities based security models (CBSMs) won't fix this. Nothing can, except a return to healthier attitudes -- valuing humans, not the flavour of the month. I think of CBSMs as more like a set of software bulkheads for CWEs to not turn into CVEs in cybersecurity terms. That they could be applied to constrain the state space for "rogue" "AI" "agents to wreck the place is but a side benefit, but I guess I need to phrase it that way when "selling" the work. CBSMs can be applied to oppress as much as liberate, though, without heed to means of understanding such as Zooko's Triangle.
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I got a call from someone I don't know.
"Hi. We have a FreeBSD server. It's been working perfectly for years, but it hasn't been updated since then. We asked AI to update it, but now it won't boot anymore. It didn't even make a backup before starting. The AI keeps trying things, everything is down, and we've already spent over €500 in tokens. Can you help us?"
"Sure. €500, plus the time it'll take me to try to fix it. Assuming it can still be fixed and nothing important has been deleted."
"That much?"
Some silence.
"Well, I hope AI takes your job away!" And he hung up.
Believing that autopilot automatically makes you an invulnerable professional pilot will ruin far more people than job losses will.
I don't know if AI will take my job away, but it's already cost them €500 and, probably, their server.
@stefano Apparently it's not really important to them.
And it sounds like a customer noone wants to have. -
@stefano 🤯 it's amazing (by which I mean worrying) how many people seem to think they can absolve themselves of any responsibility by using AI.
I don't understand why anyone would just let AI loose on a production system like that, and even blame AI for not taking backups. Although why was it not being backed up anyway?
I wonder how much more money they will waste in tokens rather than pay a professional to fix the mess.
@teapot_ben @stefano the abrogation responsibility seems the main selling point imho -
@82mhz Maybe I should
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@stefano Almost my entire income is unfucking bad AI nonsense, much of it starts like this story.
And it almost always comes with a phase in the negotiations where they beg me to reduce my rates because they have already spent so much money on AI.
But that isn't my fault, nor my problem.
Never been told off like this though.
This AI crap is almost enough to make me consider going back into consulting.
The power in any negotiation goes to the person most willing to walk away. Companies trashed by AI cannot walk away.
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@subnetspider @slothrop @stefano I've been pkg(8) all the way in the modern era for prod, but not for dev. It is a bit of a garden rake to go to pkgbase generation when hacking src/ so I side-step it with traditional buildworld/installworld. Doing an intermediate pkgbase build is a significant time and disk space commitment otherwise so it's only worth doing when about to stage a release.
