8 ms·
Really don’t understand why sane developers who for decades have been advocating for best practices when it comes to security and privacy seem to be completely
by darth_avocado 8mo ago
Really don’t understand why sane developers who for decades have been advocating for best practices when it comes to security and privacy seem to be completely abandoning all of them simply because it’s AI. Why would you ever let a non deterministic program god level access to everything? What could possibly go wrong?
- co_king_5 8mo ago[dead]
- observationist 8mo agoThey're getting replaced by AI anyway, these bleeding edge agents are just surfboards for the wave. Learn fast or die trying, lol.
- autoexec 8mo agoTo the extent that anyone can be replaced they will be replaced and nothing they do now will save them. The good news is that so far I haven't seen companies having much success outright replacing workers with AI chatbots.
- skeeter2020 8mo agoit's not successfully replacing them with AI that is the problem; it's firing them to then replace them with AI which, when it doesn't work is either too late or at best incredibly disruptive for the people impacted.
- autoexec 8mo agoThat's certain true. Lots of letting workers go only to hire new ones at much lower pay
- jacquesm 8mo agoThey don't have the successes but they do replace them. I've seen a couple of examples of that in the last couple of months, there is just no way to avoid these abominations any more.
- monksy 8mo agoThey aren't. They're the ones who are resisting the all in thing on AI stuff. What you're seeing is over reactive trend followers.
- autoexec 8mo agoAnd likely massive amounts of marketing spending pushing for people to bend over and accept AI anything anywhere.
- bubblewand 8mo agoSame as the “MongoDB is webscale” crowd.
- throw10920 8mo agoWho are these developers that have both been "advocating for best practices" and also "seem to be completely abandoning all of them simply because it’s AI"? Can you point to a dozen blogs/Twitter profiles, or are you just inventing a fictitious "other" to attack?
- Macha 8mo agoThe person being quoted for one, who is apparently focused on safety and alignment at meta. Safety being handing over your email credentials to the shiny new thing, apparently
- LudwigNagasena 8mo agoAre they even a developer? “Safety and alignment” as AI buzzwords are quite different from “security and privacy”. In any case, I wouldn’t take a random person with a sinecure job as exemplary of anything.
- cwillu 8mo agoSo, not sane.
- fmajid 8mo agoThe AI ate my email is the new, plausible deniality version of "my dog ate my homework"
- otabdeveloper4 8mo ago> Who are these developers that have both been "advocating for best practices" and also "seem to be completely abandoning all of them simply because it’s AI"? All of them. Apparently uploading all your codez to some cloud provider that doesn't even have a figleaf of a EULA is okay now, because "AI".
- throw10920 8mo ago> All of them. An insane claim with zero evidence provided. You're just making it up. Found the tribalistic propagandist unconcerned with reality or truth.
- ekjhgkejhgk 8mo agoThose people aren't the same. Those are two ideas that you heard from the internet, and you're imagining it's the same person talking.
- HeliumHydride 8mo agoThere's a name for this: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Goomba_fallacy https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Goomba_fallacy
- chrysoprace 8mo agoI'm glad that a term for this exists. It's always seemed so silly to me that someone would think that a group of people would all conform to the same opinion.
- CoastalCoder 8mo agoThank you!!! I've been looking for a term for this concept for years!
- jacquesm 8mo agoSome of them are the same. It's a Venn diagram: there are two camps and there is no doubt some overlap because the number of people involved. GP was obviously talking about the overlap, not literally equating this with two specific people or two groups that are 100% overlapping.
- 8mo ago
- cromka 8mo agoIt's greed.
- j45 8mo agoDevelopers with and without devops experience.
- dylan604 8mo agoThis isn't any different than pre-Claude. We've always had people that wrote code, but had no clue about systems. Not everyone is a CS major. I've seen people do the strangest things that you would think a sane person would never do, yet, their the strangeness is happening by someone you would otherwise consider sane/smart. Not everyone is a sysadmin banging perl to automate things.
- j45 8mo agoI would agree that it doesn't have anything to do with Claude. I didn't meant to imply CS majors knew this either. Understanding the impact of letting software run permission and operationally free within or against direct access to other software is a pretty basic thing. Neither deterministic nor non-deterministic software performs as expected without getting it right. We are new to non-deterministic software, let alone how it operates between different layers. DevOps, hosting, security, etc, is all in a way software, and software configuration. The more it's understood, the more it can inform software development, and in the case of openclaw, integrating systems.
- xantronix 8mo agoYou must not say his name. If you say it, you will summon him.
- resonious 8mo agoI agree with a lot of the siblings that it's probably not the same people. But for the overlap that probably does exists, I don't think "because it's AI" is their reasoning. If I were to guess, I'd say it's something closer to "exploring the potential of this new thing is worth the risk to me".
- andai 8mo agoWas building a claw clone the other day when for debugging I added a bash shell. So I type arbitrary text into a Telegram bot and then it runs it as bash commands on my laptop. Naturally I was horrified by what I had created. But suddenly I realized, wait a minute... strictly this is less bad than what I had before, which is the same thing except piped through a LLM! Funny how that works, subjectively... (I have it, and all coding agents, running as my "agent" user, which can't touch my files. But I appear to be in the minority, especially on the discord, where it's popular to run it as the main admin user on Windows.) As for what could go wrong, that is an interesting question. RCE aside, the agentic thing is its own weird security situation. Like people will run it sandboxed in Docker, but then hook it up to all their cloud accounts. Or let it remote control their browser for hours unattended... https://xkcd.com/1200/ https://xkcd.com/1200/
- frenchtoast8 8mo agoThe security team at my company announced recently that OpenClaw was banned on any company device and could not be used with any company login. Later in an unrelated meeting a non technical executive said they were excited about their new Mac Mini they just bought for OpenClaw. When they were told it was banned they sort of laughed and said that obviously doesn't apply to them. No one said anything back. Why would they? This is an executive team that literally instructed the security team to weaken policies so it could be more accommodating of "this new world we live in."
- trehalose 8mo agoI hope the security team talked to the legal team about that. There is potential for OpenClaw to commit crimes on behalf of the company.
- ropetin 8mo agoSimilar thing at my company. Someone /very/ high up in the org chart recently said to the entire company that OpenClaw is the future of computing, and specifically called out Moltbook as something amazing and ground breaking. There is literally no way security would ever let OpenClaw in the same room as company systems, never mind actually be installed anywhere with access to our data. It should be noted that this exec also mentioned we should try "all the AIs", without offering up their credit card to cover the costs. I guess when your base salary is more than most people make in a life time, a few hundred bucks a month to test something doesn't even register.
- xmcp123 8mo agoMoltBook is vibe coded. It passed its own API key via client side JS, and in doing so exposed full read/write access to it’s supabase db, complete with over a million API keys. That is groundbreaking for a product held in such high esteem, just not in a good way. I lack the words to explain my frustration at this timeline.
- DANmode 8mo ago> exposed full read/write access to it’s supabase db, complete with over a million API keys. When was this lol; I knew it didn’t drop out of the news that fast by inertia alone.
- tptacek 8mo agoI'm enthusiastic about AI (it's gone from the 2nd most important thing to happen in my career to tied for first, with the Internet) and I am baffled by OpenClaw.
- eucyclos 8mo agoI thought Ben Goertzel had a good take on it: "someone made hands for a brain that doesn't exist yet"
- neya 8mo ago> why sane developers who for decades have been advocating for best practices when it comes to security and privacy seem to be completely abandoning all of them I'm a sane developer. I do not trust AI at all. I built my own personal OpenClaw clone (long before it was even a thing) and ran controlled experiments inside a sandbox. My stack is Elixir, so this is pretty much easy. If an agent didn't actually respect your requirements, it's just as easy as running an iex command to kill that particular task. In my experience, AI, be it any model - consistently disobeys direct commands. And worse, it consistently tried to cover up its tracks. For example, I will ask it to create a task within my backend. It will tell me it did - for no reason at all, even share me a task ID that never existed. And when asked why it lied, it would actually spin the task up and accuse me of not trusting it. It doesn't matter which vendor, which model. This behaviour is repeatable across models and vendors. Now, why would I give something like this access to my entire personal and professional life? To group me and others like me with the clowns doing this is an insult to me and others who have accumulated decades of experience and security best practices and who had nothing to do with OpenClaw.
- almosthere 8mo ago"ever" is the key word. Like driving, we as humans will cede control, at some point, to AI.
- hugs 8mo agoopenclaw is the napster of itunes. people who have been around long enough know that we're currently in the wild west of networked agentic systems. it's an exciting time to build and explore. (just like napster and early digital music.) eventually some big company will come along and pave the cow paths and make everything safe and secure. but the people who will actually deliver that are likely playing with openclaw (and openclaw-like systems) now.
- mountainriver 8mo agoHonestly it’s been a breath of fresh air to have most of the gatekeeping in software be removed. Seems that it was by and large just people wanting to feel important, and holding onto their positions. Apps need great security, but security can also get out of control. Apps need good abstractions and code hygiene but that too can get out of control. I’ve fallen in love with programming all of again now that I’m not so tied down by perceived perfection.
- cosmic_cheese 8mo agoLots of developers have been flippant for a long time when it comes to the security of the systems they use and violate best practices on a regular basis, often for convenience. Developer ≠ sensible with personal security.
- petterroea 8mo agoThe bar for working security at Meta doesn't seem that high
- cl0zedmind 8mo ago[dead]
- miki123211 8mo agoBecause security isn't the be-and-end-all, it has to serve the goals of the business and its customers. Customers say that they want security with their mouths, but they say that they want features with their wallets. The best improvement to computer security you can make is turning the computer off, but this is clearly not what your (non-HN) customers want you to do. AI has serious security risks (E.G. prompt injection), but it lets you deliver customer value a lot faster. Security doesn't matter if the competitors' technology is so much better that nobody is buying yours.
- antisol 8mo ago> Security doesn't matter if the competitors' technology is so much better that nobody is buying yours. This is true right up until the moment their entire database is available as a torrent.
- freehorse 8mo agoWhich companies collapsed or had to face important consequences because their database leaked?
- antisol 8mo agoThe first one which immediately springs to mind: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-08-08/optus-sued-by-privacy-regulator-alleged-failures-22-cyber-attack/105628586 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-08-08/optus-sued-by-privacy... I'm sure a search engine could help you find other examples.
- overfeed 8mo ago> Really don’t understand why sane developers who for decades have been advocating for best practices when it comes to security and privacy seem to be completely abandoning all of them simply because it’s AI The deep irony is that the email deletion victim is an "AI alignment specialist" at Meta, and she didn't consider this failure mode.
- rk06 8mo agoThis is The difference between technical and nontechnical audience Relevant xkcd https://xkcd.com/2030/ https://xkcd.com/2030/
- trymas 8mo agoSame "sane developers advocating for best practices" preached to the moon: - Alexa (and other voice assistants) spy microphones in their homes; - Internet connected: - locks; - door, bedroom, living room cameras; - lights, appliances and whatnot; Giving full and unfettered control to their personal computer with all its accounts, apps, etc does not surprise me at all. I wonder what anthropologists will write about us these days 100 years in the future. What is super creepy and super illegal to do for a physical individual, but is given a blank check from society to be done by tech corporations at unimaginable scale. EDIT: also corporations (from my social bubble) are giving (almost) unfiltered access to their data from LLMs (and probably soon a control of that data through "Claw" trend), that would be instantly fireable offence for any employee. Imagine giving enterprise access to some Joe-Claw from the street and allowing him to press any buttons he wants..
- JumpCrisscross 8mo ago> developers who for decades have been advocating for best practices when it comes to security and privacy seem to be completely abandoning all of them simply because it’s AI Risk and reward. That balance, currently, seems tipped to favour risk taking. (Which in turn encompasses both boldness and recklessness.)
- cedws 8mo agoThere’s still sane people out there, I’m one of them, watching this gigantic trash heap ready to go up in flames. It’s not just OpenClaw either, it’s everything. Nobody is paying any attention and when it goes wrong it’s going to be an absolute catastrophe.
- mhitza 8mo agoAre you sure these are the same people and not new people that got hooked on hype?
- tempodox 8mo agoObviouly the assumption of sanity was premature.
- lofaszvanitt 8mo agoOpenClaw has now weeded out the shills, leaving only the real pros :D.