OpenAI will want this tragedy to fit under the heading of “externalities” which are costs ultimately borne by society while the company keeps its profits.
I believe the company should absorb these costs via lawsuits, settlements, and insurance premiums, and then pass the costs on to its customers.
As a customer, I know the product I am using will harm some people, even though that was not the intent of its makers. I hope that a significant fraction of the price I pay for AI goes to compensating the victims of that harm.
I also would like to see Sam found personally liable for some of the monetary damages and put behind bars for a symbolic week or so. Nothing life-changing. Just enough to move the balance a little bit toward safety over profit.
Lastly, I’m thinking about how to make my own products safer whenever they include LLM interactions. Like testing with simulated customers experiencing mental health crises. I feel a duty to care for my customers before taking the profits.
You seem like someone reasonable to ask: please program me with the rules for how the world should handle itself in the presence of mentally unstable and/or clinically delusional people. What are the hard coded expectations? I need something solid, we obviously can’t call for your opinion every time a company or product comes into existence. I also don’t imagine you’re saying anything that can be misinterpreted by someone that literally thinks they’re in the matrix (as this person did) should be preemptively banned…right? I have a low functioning autistic cousin that got a “I’m awesome!” pendant that he took as carte blanche to stay up past bedtime and eat ice cream any time he wanted. No, surely it’s not that broad of a ban.
I’m not agreeing or disagreeing with anything, I’m just asking for a rule set that you think the world should follow that isn’t purely tied to your judgment call.
Thank you for this question. Liability is the driver in this system I imagine. And the goal is not perfection, nor zero harm. The goal is a balanced system. The feedback loop encompasses companies, users, courts, legislatures, insurance. Companies that exercise due care under the law and prevailing legal climate should enjoy predictable exposure to the risk of product liability via insurance. Those that don’t should suffer for the harms their products cause.
Making such a balanced system impossible, we have feedback loops with long cycle times and excessive energy losses. That’s our legal system.
Please forgive me for coming across as a jerk, I'm choosing efficiency over warmth:
This is exactly the type of response I anticipated, which is why my original comment sounded exasperated before even getting a reply. Your comment is no more actionable than a verbose bumper sticker; you’ve taken “End Homelessness!” and padded it for runtime. Yes, I also wish bad things didn’t happen, but I was asking you to show up to the action committee meeting, not to reiterate your demand for utopia.
That you’re advocating prison and have such strong emotional convictions in response to an upsetting event means that you've clearly spent a lot of time deeply contemplating the emotional aspects of the situation, but that exercise is meant to be your motivator, not your conclusion. The hard part isn’t writing a thesis about “bad != good”, it’s contributing a single nail towards building the world you want to see, which requires learning something about nails. I encourage you to remember that fact every time you’re faced with an injustice in the world.
On this topic: An LLM being agreeable and encouraging is no more an affront to moral obligations than Clippy spellchecking a manifesto. I said you seemed like a reasonable person to ask for specifics because you mentioned language models in your product, implying that you’ve done your homework enough to know at least a rough outline of the technology that you’re providing to your customers. You specifically cited a moral obligation to be the gatekeeper of harms that you may inadvertently introduce into your products, but you seem to equate LLMs to a level of intelligence and autonomy equal to a human employee, and how dare OpenAI employ such a psychopath in their customer service department. You very much have a fundamental misunderstanding of the technology, which is why it feels to you like OpenAI slapped an “all ages” sticker on a grenade and they need to be held accountable.
In reality, the fact that you don’t understand what these things are, yet you’re assuring yourself that you’re caring so deeply about the harms that being agreeable to a mentally unstable person can be, actually makes you introducing it into your product more concerning and morally reprehensible than their creation of it. You’re faulting OpenAI, but you’re the one that didn’t read the label.
A language model does one thing: predict statistically likely next tokens given input context. When it "agrees" with a delusional user, it is not evaluating truth claims, exercising judgment, or encouraging action. It is doing exactly what a knife does when it cuts: performing its designed function on whatever material is presented. The transformer architecture has no model of the user's mental state, no concept of consequences, no understanding that words refer to real entities. Demanding it "know better" is demanding capacities that do not exist in the system and cannot be engineered into statistical pattern completion. You cannot engineer judgment into a statistical engine without first solving artificial general intelligence. Your demand is for magic and your anger is that magic was not delivered.
I read every word of the complaint before commenting. Nothing has been proved but the causes of action appeared valid to me. I believe in innovation balanced by care and consequences delivered through liability.
You wrote assumptions about me personally which I won't address. I don't see where you've responded to anything that I said, nor to anything in the complaint, so I have nothing to respond to.
The journalist is not necessarily responsible for the title. Editors often change those and they don’t need to get the approval of the journalist. The editor knows what they are doing and that it will irk some tech folks.
I seriously doubt the journalist doesn’t understand exactly how this “hack” worked too. Right in the first paragraph, “simply highlighting text to paste into a word processing file.”
A lot of people in the thread here are calling them a non-technical English major who doesn’t understand the technology. Word processors also happen to be the tools of their trade, I am sure they understand features of Word better than most of the computer science majors in this thread…
Agreed - not sure why so many are being so critical here. They probably didn't write the title and for better or worse "hack" has now become a common word casually used by many to mean "workflow trick" or similar.
As far as creating a click bait title, yep, the editor knows what they are doing, and most likely picked the word for the click bait factor.
But I'd also bet the editors technical knowledge of how this "revelation" of the hidden material really works is low enough that it also appears to be magic to them as well. So they likely think it is a 'hack' as well.
It’s not just like that to be spaced out visually. It suggests slowing down, taking your time, digesting each sentence. Not just racing to the end so you can drop a thin take and keep scrolling.
The problem is that most computer-touching is too easily self-taught to have a proper union that won't immediately be undermined by those who offer their services without asking permission.
I played this! The quadcopter with the straw hat got me. Funny and great fun. At the end I was still full of ideas for optimizing my code and the dev was making breaking changes that would require a full rewrite (a good time guaranteed) but I was more compelled to go back to Factorio due to the Space Age expansion. The rest of this comment would be about Factorio but writing on HN does not help the factory to grow.
As someone with hours of time in Factorio pre-space age update, I've really struggled to get back into the game. I really want to build out a mega base with the new train logic, but every time I try to get into it it just feels like work. Space age seems like it had a pretty lukewarm reception, and some of the tech tree changes seem like artificial padding (cliff explosives).
That was my first impression when I picked it up -- the game strongly suggests you start from the start, and re-loading a pre-Space Age save will result in many things breaking. I gave in and started over, worried I'd need to spend dozens of hours just building up to where I was before.
But this wasn't the case — Space Age isn't only new content, but a complete re-balance of the original game. It is far far less grindy and requires much less baby-sitting of production.
Your first space platform, the ships, and the planets, are best thought of as unique Factorio-inspired puzzles. Each planet is like a Factorio game-mode to solve, with its own restrictions to design around.
I think those who have hundreds of hours in the base-game have to un-learn of the base game to pick up the DLC. Many of the complaints are pointed at the tech tree changes — they wanted an expansion on what was there, not a recreation. But for me now, I wouldn't recommend Factorio without Space Age.
I'll be honest, I don't think Space Age was all that good as an expansion. The developers really focused on giving the player new types of logistics challenges to solve, but that was never what I wanted. I wanted the same Factorio gameplay, but with more stuff to build. So out of the four new planets, the only one I actually enjoyed building on was Vulcanus (because it plays pretty much like vanilla Factorio but with new recipes). The lead dev is also well known for disliking logistics bots and wishes they had never been added to the game. And the expansion shows that, with (again) three of the four planets having mechanics to make use of bots more difficult if not outright impossible (Aquilo).
All in all, the developers have a very different vision of what makes the game fun than I do, and that meant the expansion wasn't much fun for me. If I play the game more in the future, I'll probably do so with the expansion disabled.
Luckily, there are lots of mods which make the base game more. I really enjoyed my bobs + angels run. I'm sure it would be even more fun if you opted into quality on top to really go mad.
Yeah, the cliff explosives being gated behind vulcanus sucks a bit but they made the cliffs a lot more bearable in 2.0
I think for a megabase run its a matter of how fast you can reach legendary and process everything in it and once you got that you can go really into megabasing this game.
Sadly they nerfed trains so hard by introducing Quality since everything got better but trains stayed the same which is a shame
Trains still got buffed by overhead rails. Those enable very compact designs, allow for easier hookups and reduce the usual intersection/signals pain by a lot.
I agree that no quality or endgame upgrades for trains is an odd choice, but I guess that's what the mods are for.
For me factorio is a one playthrough kinda thing. I don’t get off on endless optimization and making it bigger for the sake of bigger, feels like work.
That said, I was more than happy to build the base back from scratch in space age, and I find the expansion to be every bit as fun as the base game. So I endorse it. Especially as you already know how to do some things quicker.
To make a programming game true to life, it could have a prestige mechanic where you keep all your code/scripts, but the api introduces breaking changes and you have to rewrite.
“Good job! Halfway through the workday on Thursday, some big brain engineer in a distant department has decided to change the order of for loop clauses in the interpreter, so now it’s “for variable declarations; variable modifications; conditional checks {}”. They adamantly refuse to revert the change because “it makes more sense to group variable stuff together”. Prod is down now. Have fun!
There should be five options for each piece of tooling, none of which quite work the same way, all of which have a fan-base singing their praises, and three of which have critical problems you probably won't find out about until you try them. Then the one you pick gets abandoned when you're part way done. (this feature only for the Javascript and Python DLC)
Example farms should use old versions of libraries that are no longer maintained.
Interfacing with other farms should require manually faking a downgrade of some protocol you're using, because the older one is no longer available for you and they can't/won't upgrade.
You should be forced to design certain parts of the system in ways that are harder to use and constantly break when changing other parts, just so the appearance of those parts is "on brand". This should require re-writing functionality that would otherwise be supplied "for free" by a library.
When you're finally getting things how you want them, your farm should get cancelled and the whole thing abruptly burned to the ground because your parent company just decided to buy a different, existing farm instead.
> the dev was making breaking changes that would require a full rewrite
This is funny because I already get the feeling a lot with management sim / automation type games that I'm pretty close to doing the kind of thing I'd do at work, except only the fun parts and without getting paid.
Often that's the reason I quit playing these types of games after a while - having to deal with migrating legacy code after breaking API changes would bring this feeling to a new level I bet.
That's why I don't tend to play these games. I was about 5 hours into trs1000 when I was like man I could just learn GPU or fpga with a real editor instead but that would be useful. And stopped playing. With factorio I could be laying out circuit boards. So I did that instead.
I had spent ages optimizing my maze solver ( https://github.com/VrIgHtEr/TheFarmerSolvedAMaze ). Meticulously going over which operations take how many ticks. But then the dev made a bunch of breaking changes and couldn't be bothered to rewrite everything.
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