noitpmeder (u/noitpmeder)

noitpmeder commented on Waymo robotaxi hits a child near an elementary school in Santa Monica techcrunch.com/2026/01/29... · Posted by u/voxadam

dzhiurgis · 11 days ago

> You, Sir, cite two companies that are diametrically opposite on the safety spectrum

Cringe. Stop it. Simping for google has stopped being cool nearly 2 decades ago.

noitpmeder · 9 days ago

I think it's less simping for good and more (rightfully) dunking on Tesla

noitpmeder commented on Benchmarking OpenTelemetry: Can AI trace your failed login? quesma.com/blog/introduci... · Posted by u/stared

ambicapter · 11 days ago

> "Use standard OTEL patterns" ... that's about as useful as saying "go write some code".

People say to say things like "Use best practices" in your prompts all the time, and chide people who don't.

noitpmeder · 11 days ago

I hate that it's true, but things like this make outputs night-and-day for me. This is the difference e.g. of a model writing appropriate test harnesses, or pushing back on requirements, vs writing the most absolute horrible code and test/dependency injection I've ever seen in pursuit of the listed goals.

Similar to adjacent commentors I've tried to be better at enumerating what I consider to be best practice, but I couldn't argue in good faith that instructions like these produce no noticible improvment.

(As with all things AI, it could all be percepion on my end, so YMMV, wish there was a better way to concretely evaluate effects on outcomes of different rule sets / instructions / ...)

noitpmeder commented on The Hallucination Defense niyikiza.com/posts/halluc... · Posted by u/niyikiza

ceejayoz · 11 days ago

More than one person/organization can be liable at once.

noitpmeder · 11 days ago

The point of signing contracts is you explicitly set expectations for service, and explicitly assign liability. You can't just reverse that and try to pass the blame.

Sure, if someone from GCP shows up at your business and breaks your leg or burns down your building, you can go after them, as it's outside the reasonable expectation of the business agreement you signed.

But you better believe they will never be legally responsible for damages caused by outages of their service beyond what is reasonable, and you better believe "reasonable outage" in this case is explicitly enumerated in the contact you or your company explicitly agreed to.

Sure they might give you free credits for the outage, but that's just to stop you from switching to a competitor, not any explicit acknowledgement they are on the hook for your lost business opportunity.

noitpmeder commented on The Hallucination Defense niyikiza.com/posts/halluc... · Posted by u/niyikiza

ceejayoz · 11 days ago

T&Cs aren't ironclad.

One in which you sell yourself into slavery, for example, would be illegal in the US.

All those "we take no responsibility for the [valet parking|rocks falling off our truck|exploding bottles]" disclaimers are largely attempts to dissuade people from trying.

As an example, NY bans liability waivers at paid pools, gyms, etc. The gym will still have you sign one! But they have no enforcement teeth beyond people assuming they're valid. https://codes.findlaw.com/ny/general-obligations-law/gob-sec...

noitpmeder · 11 days ago

So I can pass on contact breaches due to bugs in software I maintain due to hallucinations by the AI that I used to write the software?? Absolutely no way.

"But the AI wrote the bug."

Who cares? It could be you, your relative, your boss, your underling, your counterpart in India, ... Your company provided some reasonable guarantee of service (whether explitly enumerated in a contact or not) and you cannot just blindly pass the buck.

Sure, after you've settled your claim with the user, maybe TRY to go after the upstream provider, but good luck.

(Extreme example) -- If your company produces a pacemaker dependent on AWS/GCP/... and everyone dies as soon as cloudflare has a routing outage that cascades to your provider, oh boy YOU are fucked, not cloudflare or your hosting provider.

noitpmeder commented on The Hallucination Defense niyikiza.com/posts/halluc... · Posted by u/niyikiza

noitpmeder · 11 days ago

This is some absolute BS. In the current day and age you are 1000% responsible for the externalities of your use of AI.

Read the terms and conditions of your model provider. The document you signed, regardless if you read or considered it, explicitly removes any negative consequences being passed to the AI provider.

Unless you have something equally as explicit, e.g. "we do not guarantee any particular outcome from the use of our service" (probably needs to be significantly more explicitly than that, IANAL) all responsibility ends up with the entity who itself, or it's agents, foists unreliable AI decisions on downstream users.

Remember, you SIGNED THE AGGREMENT with the AI company the explicitly says it's outputs are unreliable!!

And if you DO have some watertight T&C that absolves you of any responsibility of your AI-backed-service, then I hope either a) your users explicitly realize what they are signing up for, or b) once a user is significantly burned by your service, and you try to hide behind this excuse, you lose all your business

noitpmeder commented on County pays $600k to pentesters it arrested for assessing courthouse security arstechnica.com/security/... · Posted by u/MBCook

simonw · 11 days ago

That thing where law enforcement officers can be elected is such a weird American oddity.

Most countries appoint law enforcement officers who are qualified for the job.

We had a problem last year here in San Mateo County, California where our sheriff was corrupt but we had to pass a ballot measure because we couldn't just fire them: https://calmatters.org/justice/2025/10/san-mateo-sheriff-rem...

noitpmeder · 11 days ago

Appointments are a whole other issue (see the extreme turnover in the American executive branch every 4 years). Id rather the head of my local police dept be significantly supported by the populating instead of an appointment from a governor, mayor, ... whose entire schtick can change on a dime.

Independent elections are a good thing. Bundling offices together under a single election that appoints the rest of the world is terrible and only leans further into the two party see-saw that exists in the USA.

I really wish for proportional representation. Not that it really applies to your local police force, but we need to break apart the complete A-or-B nature of American politics. Form coalitions, not monoliths that trade off earning 51% of the electorate every cycle that the completely repoints the entirety of the govt for the next 4 years.

noitpmeder commented on County pays $600k to pentesters it arrested for assessing courthouse security arstechnica.com/security/... · Posted by u/MBCook

petcat · 11 days ago

I might be mistaken, but it sounds like these guys showed up at a facility and did the classical "breaking and entering" thing. The onsite (terrified) staff called 911, the police showed up and arrested them. The perps said that they were hired to do this (they were), but nobody told the Sheriffs office or the staff about it.

So yeah, it sucks for these guys' reputations and criminal histories, but... what? The onsite staff didn't know what was going on, the Sheriffs didn't know what was going on.

The county basically said: "We want you to go try to break into this government building. We aren't going to tell the staff or the local police about it. Tell us what you find."

noitpmeder · 11 days ago

Did you even read the article or review the story? The police showed up, reviewed and even verified their documents (called the numbers on the form to confirm their authorization) and we're seemingly satisfied all was in order.

Only once the sheriff himself arrived on scene did he order the arrest that caused all the issues. If that didn't happen it wouldn't have been a story other than "security professionals doing their authorized job".

noitpmeder commented on Apple to soon take up to 30% cut from all Patreon creators in iOS app macrumors.com/2026/01/28/... · Posted by u/pier25

hahahahhaah · 11 days ago

Or add a 45% apple tax afyer they click buy. E.g. costs $100, price comes up as.$100 with added apple tax as line item. total $145.

Click here to avoid apple tax takes you to web page if allowed.

noitpmeder · 11 days ago

I could be wrong but seem to remember this being explicitly disallowed by Apples terms

noitpmeder commented on Pandas 3.0 pandas.pydata.org/communi... · Posted by u/jonbaer

pelasaco · 12 days ago

are many of the mentioned issues not just some vibe-code sessions away from done?

noitpmeder · 12 days ago

Give it a shot and report back when you get them merged

noitpmeder commented on TikTok settles just before social media addiction trial to begin bbc.com/news/articles/c24... · Posted by u/ourmandave

Andr2Andr · 13 days ago

It is a bellwether trial, a test of sorts combining hundreds of similar cases. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bellwether_trial

noitpmeder · 12 days ago

So wouldn't the fact that settlements are pouring in literally prove other can do it too?