These are all the reasons those of us who live in suburbs give when we're asked why we don't live in the downtown core of cities.

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 fine, and I use Claude for software development. I check what it creates, and my goal is just to create the lines of code that I would have created, but faster. It can watermark those lines of code if it wants. My employer knows I use the AI coding assistant, pays the monthly fee, and wants me to make use of it to produce the same code faster.

But I suppose this is mostly about kids using it to do their homework, or people using it to try to defraud others. 100% good idea.

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...

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?

No, I read the details explicitly quoted at the start of the discussion and responded to them.

Are you saying that this episode has not in fact resulted in (a) unplanned software being installed on end devices that will (b) automatically read data that is stored on those devices without the proper approvals? Either of those things alone can easily become a compliance problem if you operate in a regulated environment, whether or not things ultimately go any further on this occasion.

It was obnoxious enough when Microsoft started pushing this kind of unwanted "feature" on home users, then small businesses and professionals on Pro editions. There are real legal and regulatory concerns over this kind of change that businesses have to take seriously. If they've screwed up so badly that even their large corporate customers have been hit by the same thing and there isn't even a good way to undo the damage at the moment, this could lead to meaningful lawsuits from their customers and/or interventions by regulators.

No, who's Meta?

The stock price was inflated to start with, due to speculation. Elon was just taking advantage of the situation. "Oh, you want to buy a tiny fraction of my company at way more than it's worth? Sure. I can use an infusion of liquidity." What's bonkers is that if you sell 1% of your company for $20 billion, the talking heads then pretend the whole company is worth two trillion. Who would actually buy SpaceX for two trillion dollars if Elon wanted to sell it? But they call him a trillionaire. He's only worth the net present (discounted) value of all future earnings of his companies. Yes, that's a lot of money, but look at how much these companies make and do the math.

You are correct. What's kind of crazy is that a lot of the training data is probably GPL code. So if LLM-generated code retains GPL copyright, that's going to provide a lot of work for lawyering companies over the next few decades. And before any lawyers start cheering, there's no guarantee that the lawyering companies will need to hire any lawyers. LLMs can do most of their work already.

Civilian infrastructure is a pretty squishy target in wartime, even without "cyber" attack vectors. If the bullets ever really start flying, expect everyone's standard of living to plummet. Look at the civilian infrastructure that's been hit in the Ukraine war, and now in the Iran war, even in neighboring countries. It's fragile and takes a long time to rebuild. We need to make it clear to our leaders that we want a large alliance network and open but fair trade agreements with other countries, because that's what has traditionally provided peace, growth, and prosperity. Countries don't generally bomb the people who buy all the shit their factories produce.

It must be the preliminary moves in a surprise strike by our mortal forever enemy, Canada. "Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia." - 1984