The problem with this argument, from the shop's point of view, is that the UK is in the middle of a shoplifting epidemic. The policing resources simply aren't there to deal with small scale (or even flagrant and much larger scale) shoplifting. It now seems to be rare for police officers to attend reports of shoplifting at all. And so effectively shoplifting becomes legalised, which is obviously hurting the big chain stores financially and potentially devastating for smaller shops.

Shops are trying to find some way to respond to this to protect themselves. They typically tell staff, even security staff, not to get physical with shoplifters as they walk out, not least because the risk of something worse happening and the business becoming liable for it is significant. But then the shoplifters know this and some of them will just walk in and openly empty a shelf into a bag and walk out again without paying because they know no-one will try to stop them.

Shops also know that our court system is completely overwhelmed at the moment and there is little chance of bringing any successful civil action to recover damages from shoplifters who aren't even being arrested by the police and put through the criminal justice system.

So what do they have left? Basically, they're trying to spot the "usual suspects" and refuse them entry in the first place, which is a less risky proposition in terms of potential for physical violence and quite effective because a lot of shoplifting is done by the same people, or they're trying to make it more physically difficult to steal goods, for example by using locking systems or keeping high value items behind counters where customers can't just pick them up. But these systems aren't perfect, far from it, and what we're discussing here today is one of the significant problems.

Obviously this kind of technology can have very bad consequences, as we see here. I don't think it should be used if it's not highly reliable, given the potential harm done in cases where it gets something wrong. But I do have some sympathy with the shops who are looking for something -- anything -- to reduce the threat they're facing because the rule of law has failed in retail settings.

That's a good point. Yes, it could be Anthropic simply making sure that they can't be blamed if someone doesn't disclose AI usage. Now they can say: "We did everything we could to make sure AI usage is visible".

Though I doubt it'll hold up in court unless the watermark is obvious. Because, again, the law requires disclosure. I don't think a hard-to-detect watermark would satisfy that demand.

Too simple.

The problem is that the lathe doesn't pretend to be a human, nor was it designed to look like a human. But AI bots are.

AI is here to stay. At least until the Butlerian Jihad. The problem most people have with AI pretending to be human.

And it's not required by the EU AI Act. They require disclosure. That doesn't mean watermark. It can be a note attached to an image, it can be a statement on the website where you post that image, etc. - Anthropic is overreacting, because as I read the law, the fact that you are inside Claude doing stuff would already suffice.

The thing the law goes against is people connecting you to an AI chatbot in customer support while pretending that you're talking to a human. Or AI bots posting to social media without revealing that they are AI bots.

On the contrary, I think most of your comment is as relevant as ever. A carefully designed UI is still better for almost any specific task than what "agents" will produce. It will probably be more efficient to describe what you want precisely enough to get it right. It will not be undermined by problems like non-repeatability, non-determinism and hallucinations that are inherent in LLM-backed agents.

Agents can be quite effective at getting something that seems about right, as long as you don't care too much about the details. And of course they get there much quicker than doing it manually as a human. This is useful for some tasks, and why they have become popular.

Unfortunately, it turns out that for many of the things we really care about, "about right" doesn't cut it. Right now, today, the software industry is already being overwhelmed by AI slop. It's hard to believe, but it's still only been a few months since agentic development processes arrived on the scene. And yet after just those few months of management trying to replace real developers with agents, we can see the slow-motion train wreck happening right before our eyes. And in return, where are the new applications that radically improve on what we had before thanks to all this added "productivity"? If this tech is going to change the world as the AI tech bros and the sycophantic CxOs kneeling at their feet would have us believe, where's my flying car?

Imagine a Beowulf cluster of AI-generated cybersecurity nightmares...

My university did the opposite, and to this day I think it was good.

At the end of the first semester, you were given a test in the three most important subjects for your field. If you failed, you could re-take it after the summer break, before next semester starts. If you failed it again, you could repeat the first semester and try a third and final time. Fail that, you're out.

It was hard, too. In my class, we were just over a hundred when we started. We were 28 in the 2nd semester. But of those 28, almost everyone made it to the end. Everyone who would've failed somewhere along the way had already been weeded out.

It was brutal, it was stressful - but IMHO it was the best way to do it and be respectful of both student time and university resources.

We had that in 1st grade. Not university, school. So students starting university have now regressed to the level of 6-year-olds ?

I get that it's stressful. I don't get how "managing stress" has vanished from the requirements of getting a degree.

That "reality" bubble. You should check it out sometime.

Source: Guy who lives in and around immigrants and actually knows what he's talking about in real life.

It is. The fact that our dominant desktop operating systems are still using security models from last century is probably the #2 disaster of modern tech security, coming in just behind so much software with potential security implications still being written in languages like C and C++ at #1. And the understandable yet still deeply regrettable reason for both disasters is the same: momentum.

I normally connect to all online conference calls via their web UIs. At least then it takes both a screw-up in the communications system and a screw-up in a browser security sandbox that is independently developed to allow something like an RCE or data leakage vulnerability to be exploited.

People have called me crazy for not wanting to install native apps from the likes of Microsoft, Google and Zoom in the modern era of remote working, but every now and then, there's another story like this one that reminds me why I am extremely careful about what native software I install on anything these days.

What, specifically, do you mean by "personal Windows installations"?

Are you suggesting that any business of any size should only ever use Enterprise editions of Windows?

You didn't get it. This is speeding tickets issued by fully automated systems. No court has ever seen this.

The solution is to stop treating it as a money-printing system. Punish people who speed in front of kindergardens, and leave people alone who at the city edge in the industrial zone on a Sunday evening didn't decelerate quite fast enough coming in from the highway.

I literally have no clue why you're saying that or who you think you're talking to.

Not at all. Because COMFORT is the key word here, not processing.

Which is often intentional.

We live in 2026. You can order an artillery or drone strike in Ukraine from a tablet and it'll be delivered within minutes. Data processing speeds are essentially instant for data sets not on LLM sizes. We have automation everywhere when it suits the right people. e.g. that speeding ticket you received for going 12 km/h over the limit? No human ever so much as saw that. Full automated process. Takes 6-12 weeks. Why? Because otherwise you might still remember how fast you were actually going or that you weren't even in that street on that day, and fight it. Same principle here: The slower the bureaucracy, the more people will just give up and go away. It's a self-regulating system to reduce the number of inquiries to the amount that the public servants can comfortably process.