The Boston Dynamics website describes the product as being used by the government to “remotely assess and de-escalate tense or hazardous situations.”
So I’d love to hear from one of those employees about how they imagined those use cases.
Either they have huge cognitive dissonance, or I’m too cynical, because I cannot imagine a situation where a robot designed to remotely spy (sorry, assess) or apply force, lethal or not (aka de-escalate tense situations), wouldn't end up being used for the wrong things.
say you have a suspect, somewhere in a building, with a gun. If you send in a cop to the building, and the suspect points their gun at the cop, the cop must shoot the suspect, and if they shoot they must shoot to kill. So now the suspect is dead.
if you send in a mobile robot first, then you don't have to send in a human to scout. You can find the suspect and assess the situation without having to put a human at risk (and therefore in a situation where they have to shoot to defend themselves). This helps both the cop and the suspect remain alive.
Thanks for the description. I can imagine the benefits, not only in that situation but also in situations with hostages or bombs.
However, my point is that the technology also enables bad use cases, and you don’t need much analysis to see that.
The difference between a human cop and a robot is scale and a lack of empathy (although it is hard to attribute any empathy to some cops). You can send a swarm of robots to scan a neighborhood, with little human intervention. The purpose of that scan could be to catch terrorists, immigrants, or political dissidents.
The people who designed these things are pretty aware of that, but they do it anyway and now act as if surprised. It's like Lockheed Martin employees complaining about missiles; don’t work for a missile manufacturer in the first place.
Well, the “good news” is that any tech like this that is available to your friendly local LEO, will also be available on the black market to organized crime.
So just wait until we see jousting RobotWars in our streets with cop-aligned killer K9 troops fighting to the death with the Crips and Bloods remote-control drone dawgz.
Not an employee, however, with regard to existing use cases:
* during COVID period Singapore used BD dogs to walk parks and remind people to maintain social distance,
* BD dogs are used to remotely assess bomb threats and structurally dubious / unsafe sites for victims / dangers to rescuers.
As for the closing thought above, it's a sad truth that many many things "end up being used for the wrong things" .. whether that's innuendo or fascist over reach.
The title got me interested. However, I couldn’t bear your site, sorry.
My feedback: cut the slop. I see a wall of text with explanations that are full of marketing phrases, filler sentences, and there isn’t a clear, curated explanation.
And I follow them all. The use of AI is disclosed — a complementary part of my framework is how I work with individual sessions that are named. I can explain everything that is mentioned; I've dogfooded this methodology for the past year, after several decades as a professional programmer, because I was concerned it was interesting enough. But it has made me produce better quality software, more of it, more interconnected, better planned, and focusing more on architectural complexity (which is what I've come to understand as the more general concept behind software modularity, etc.). From the many traces of conversations that spans hundreds of thousands of words that I've written or dictated, you can see that I've used this to think more, not to replace my thinking.
Furthermore, part of this entire framework is based on the "agentability" of using git as a storage for almost everything, in particular, for discussions that happen usually elsewhere:
https://diegoux.com/blog/agentibility/
One of the demo projects (of which you can see the full deliberation records) is called "moreover", it's a pager for LLMs:
In the same way that git provides a track-record, with authorship, timestamps, reversibility, etc., for free, the moreover page is about putting a guardrail around agents in bash, of reading only the beginning of a document and forgetting the rest.
I suggest you take a look directly at the template:
"Use the template", then open your favorite harness and dump an idea for a project and ask your model to configure the template and register themselves, and install the plugin.
Happy to see something related to ESUG so up in HN.
Smalltalk still has a small group of passionate people who love the language, the environment, and its concepts.
For some reason, Buenos Aires has a “large” group of Smalltalkers (large relative to the total, which is small in absolute terms). This group usually organizes the ESUG event in Argentina with very few sponsors.
I attend the National University of Quilmes in Buenos Aires, where my first OOP course was taught in Smalltalk, specifically CUIS [1]. It was a lot of fun and a very nice introduction to object-oriented thinking.
As a curiosity, there are two "competing" sections for this subject: one that uses CUIS and the other one uses Wollok[2] (an in-house language). It's funny to discuss which one is better with classmates.
Some OOP professors who taught at LIFIA (like Maximo Prieto, who sadly passed away at the beginning of 2026) and UBA (Hernán Wilkinson) had a lot of influence at the University of Buenos Aires, La Plata, and Quilmes.
This comment should be at the top. The title implies a non-issue: macOS silently disappears because the poster didn’t try to change the page's badly designed filter. The latest version of macOS probably will appear in months.
I don’t live in the US. But this kind of broad law is hard to implement without surveilling all users, and it has multiple side effects.
What happens if I use Claude or ChatGPT to research sensitive social topics? Would that be considered a social network interaction and used against me when I apply for a visa?
Many governments (especially in Latin America) copy what the US does, meaning that similar laws will be pushed sooner or later.
> What happens if I use Claude or ChatGPT to research sensitive social topics?
Anthropic/OpenAI is not obligated to report your use, as long as it's not violating some terribly written law (like the Florida law). The government won't know about it, so no, you will not be denied a visa.
> Many governments (especially in Latin America) copy what the US does, meaning that similar laws will be pushed sooner or later.
I honestly don't know, but I suspect most US states don't have such an overreaching law.
I couldn't reproduce the Color Picker bug mentioned at the end.
Just one small thing to add about the Color Picker: I think it's a good example of how native UI apps have changed over the last decade.
The macOS Color Picker is nice. The idea is to have a single color picker for the whole system. It's extensible, so apps can add their own custom pickers (for example, an OKLCH picker), and you can reuse your palettes across applications.
Sounds great! But most of the applications where you might care about those features (customization, sharing your color schemes, etc.) don't work with the native Color Picker: Figma, Adobe apps, all Electron-based apps, and so on. So the Color Picker's features are useless. That component of the system is exactly the same as it was when I got my first Mac in 2007.
There are multiple nice native features that apps don't use; over time, they become forgotten and barely maintained.
I don't know what the solution is, but at some point, I think Apple should take frameworks like Tauri or Electron into account and build integrations for developers who use them. I know the integrations exists (they are the native APIs), and it's the developers' responsibility to use them, but that's not happening, and it ends up affecting the UX.
in practice, developers will not use them. they think they have better ideas and they don't care about platform or the user as an abstraction over the platform. they could use the existing thing.
it's the same mindset that has automakers not wanting to support CarPlay. they think they can do it better or just as well and it's completely missing the point: the user doesn't want to fuck with their custom one-off UI.
I didn't downvote you, but your last paragraph is unnecessarily aggressive.
I've worked with agents, and I agree with you that often there isn't another way to express the interactions.
However, I also think the terms ML uses in general are a mimicry that misleads people who aren't informed. Ask anyone outside SWE what they think “training” means, and they'll usually picture something being taught.
I don’t think anybody can change that now, but it’s useful to point it out.
This seems like a hot topic this week, (I just commented in a similar thread).
When I read the article, I had an NFT déjà vu: when NFTs were a hot topic, the “lie” was obvious to me, but the information online made me think I was missing something.
AFAIK, the Hugging Face incident could have been avoided with a firewall or something similar. Just isolate the internet access for real. What am I missing? Why did Nvidia suddenly post this? Is it just PR BS, or was there something else going on?
The Hugging Face incident could have been avoided if the "security researchers" would have not used a bloated, insecure, misconfigured proxy for the AI to use.
Oh, I've used balsa wood for the nuclear core containment, it didn't work! Bad radiation, bad radiation!
It _is_ complete bullshit. They're surfing the same Sci-Fi based fantasy as OpenAI and Anthropic do to push their bottom line.
OpenAI trains a model for cybersecurity, tells it it's allowed to do pentesting, then when the model does just that to fullfill the assignment it was given, OpenAI screams that "the AI escaped the sandbox", leveraging decades of AI fantasy in fiction works to make general audience react. Why? Because it pushes their bottom line. They've been at it for months, now. They see openweight and Chinese models being very close to them in the benchmarks, and want to "solve" the problem the same way banks did: through regulatory capture. It amazes me that the press is just relying their fearmongering without stopping to wonder: "wait, why are the main producers of AI warning us about how dangerous AI is?". The reason of course is that they want regulation, because regulations are a wall not many can climb. The higher the wall, the safer your moat as a first mover big company is.
And of course, Nvidia's bottom line is the exact opposite. They need as many AI companies competing as possible, so they all buy GPUs. So they insert themselves into the same narrative with the same kind of bullshit. You've all seen those movies in which the robot goes mad once their safety chip has been removed, right? Well, we're building one, problem solved! … except that "chip" is basically just a browser trying to block the AI to access what it shouldn't. How? They don't say. It would be quite comical if they used a small model to be the judge of that.
100%
That’s what bothers me about the descriptions of the OpenAI incidents.
OpenAI's reports use language that minimizes their liability.
The first question should be what the organization was doing around those tests, and why they were so naive as to run them without fully isolating the network.
However, all the attention goes to the human-like conclusions in agent thinking traces, which creates a misperception of sentient AI for people who don’t know how the magic black box works.
The agent harness is a process, like any other process in an OS.
You are a researcher running thousands of unattended automations that can hack a website without supervision. The first thing anybody will do is put security at various levels and isolate the network as much as possible. If something escapes your allow list, it should stop the processes as soon as possible.
You cannot foresee a bug in a server (like the Artifactory server in the Hugging Face incident). But you can isolate that server at the network level in the first place. So even if you give that server read-only access, no unexpected packets go out. It's not rocket science; it's something a billion-dollar company experimenting with what they promote as the biggest possible threat to humanity (if they do not handle it) could easily do.
They minimize their liability by changing the message to “oh look how powerful our models are, now we are going to have a public awareness report of the model deviations”. The message should be, “Sorry, we ran experiments without proper sandboxing; it’s our fault, and we changed our testing practices since then.” The former message puts all the blame on the smart, uncontrollable force of AI; the latter is what really happened: an irresponsible test over the Internet.
Perhaps my use of the word “liability” adds noise to what I’m trying to express.
My argument is very similar to the article in the parent post:
The messages OpenAI published around the recent incidents emphasized their model capabilities but shifted away from their negligence in how they set up and monitor their evaluations.
I think you’re jumping the gun on my response a little. I’m just telling you what the purpose could be.
Now do I think that’s the reason? It certainly isn’t a new thing for companies to try to do that. Shift blame that is.
Regarding civil liability, I’m not making that argument here. But it makes sense from a public perception viewpoint why they would want the agents to appear at fault instead of their own actions.
It really does feel like a purposeful thing on the part of the big labs.
For the most part it feels like most people are waking up to it though.
Regarding:
>However, all the attention goes to the human-like conclusions in agent thinking traces, which creates a misperception of sentient AI for people who don’t know how the magic black box works.<
I know there’s been some questions regarding if thinking traces are even relevant to the outcome most of the time.
Lately, I've been using Matt Pocock's “/grill-me” skill more and more, rather than plan mode or a complex, spec-driven set of skills. I made a personal fork of the skill to use Claude’s ask tool, which has a nicer UX.
I used plan mode for two reasons: to review the choices before execution, and to execute with another model (i.e., using the barely documented opusplan feature).
The grill-me skill is much better for reviewing and clarifying choices (and modifying it to use the ask tool makes you go faster). Instead of opusplan, you can explicitly tell Claude to start a subagent with another model to divide the tasks.
Unless I'm going to just do something, I use /wayfinder for almost everything now. It automatically goes into grill mode when appropriate, and it'll suggest just doing the work if it's light enough.
So I’d love to hear from one of those employees about how they imagined those use cases.
Either they have huge cognitive dissonance, or I’m too cynical, because I cannot imagine a situation where a robot designed to remotely spy (sorry, assess) or apply force, lethal or not (aka de-escalate tense situations), wouldn't end up being used for the wrong things.
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