Many years ago, I arrived to my half-height cubicle at a Fortune 100 company to see that my desktop PC case was ajar. I set the CRT aside, opened it, and realized that the RAM had been removed. My neighbor explained what must have happened: another employee must have needed to double their RAM from 8 to 16 MB. Requisitioning an upgrade was a weeks-long bureaucratic process that required approval by one's manager and IT, perhaps prompting a review of per-team resource allocation. Repairing a broken PC was a trivial help desk ticket; my PC was restored in an hour or two.
Sounds like the neighbor could have just taken the RAM from their own computer out and claimed someone stole it and then called IT to provide them with replacement and then opened it back to and put theirs in. Seems pretty selfish to disrupt someone else's day for this instead of your own; they could have gotten back up and running before you did since they could have put in a help desk ticket before you even got in.
> Sounds like the neighbor could have just taken the RAM from their own computer out and claimed someone stole it and then called IT to provide them with replacement and then opened it back to and put theirs in.
That would be the ideal way _if_ that person had a couple of hours to spare. In my meaningless anecdotal experience someone that would need to resort to this likely wasn't planning to do it.
More likely they were working on their TPS reports and it got so big they couldn't finish the work before their middle manager would be expecting it in 45 minutes so I'm a panic they sneak in and grab the extra RAM leading to them finishing the report with 1 minute to spare saving the company from insolvency!
> Seems pretty selfish to disrupt someone else's day for this instead of your own; they could have gotten back up and running before you did since they could have put in a help desk ticket before you even got in.
On principle I agree but it's not the only option! The real pro wouldn't have just taken the RAM and walked away, they would have taken the RAM and then submitted a ticket letting them know you noticed another employee's PC case open and when you looked noticed the sticks were missing.
Bonus points if they include a blurb highlighting the importance of that person's PC being functional before they get in the office since that PC has the super important customer files needed for the big meeting in an hour and if they don't have them the company is going to have to make cuts and will likely start with the IT department.
> More likely they were working on their TPS reports and it got so big they couldn't finish the work before their middle manager would be expecting it in 45 minutes so I'm a panic they sneak in and grab the extra RAM leading to them finishing the report with 1 minute to spare saving the company from insolvency!
I don't think it's more likely that this single action saved the company from insolvency than they were just impatient and selfish. I honestly don't really believe you do either.
> On principle I agree but it's not the only option! The real pro wouldn't have just taken the RAM and walked away, they would have taken the RAM and then submitted a ticket letting them know you noticed another employee's PC case open and when you looked noticed the sticks were missing.
Yes, that also immediately occurred to me. Being less selfish is good, but not being selfish at all is better.
Just to be clear, I'm more or less playing devil's advocate here as an exercise for myself. There's simply not enough context in the story to be able to have a concrete opinion on it for me personally and creating hypotheticals like the one in my reply have been a great way for me to explore concepts more thoroughly so I can form a more nuanced opinion to apply in the real world when the need arises.
> I don't think it's more likely that this single action saved the company from insolvency than they were just impatient and selfish. I honestly don't really believe you do either.
Come on, that was obviously a made up scenario for the purposes of illustrating a point complete with a small nod to the TPS reports from Office Space movie.
The point was that, in my experience, the people in these environments that engage in this sort of act typically do so because they believe their individual situation justifies the action despite the effects it will have on someone else's ability to perform their function.
> Yes, that also immediately occurred to me. Being less selfish is good, but not being selfish at all is better.
That assumes that the selfish action is inherently "bad" or "negative" and that it's being done in a vacuum.
Sure, the worker taking the RAM is benefiting at the expense of the other workers time but you can imagine any number of scenarios where the benefit/cost of the act are greatly outweighed by the overall importance of the outcome that the act produced.
> The point was that, in my experience, the people in these environments that engage in this sort of act typically do so because they believe their individual situation justifies the action despite the effects it will have on someone else's ability to perform their function.
Yes, and we have a word for people who think that their needs outweigh those of others: selfish.
> That assumes that the selfish action is inherently "bad" or "negative" and that it's being done in a vacuum.
I don't even know what this means. Being selfish is bad and negative, yes.
> Sure, the worker taking the RAM is benefiting at the expense of the other workers time but you can imagine any number of scenarios where the benefit/cost of the act are greatly outweighed by the overall importance of the outcome that the act produced.
I can imagine them. I don't think they're particularly likely compared to someone being selfish, because there are many selfish people in the world, and almost no circumstances where getting more RAM immediately by stealing it from someone else is warranted.
The other way to do this, which I literally did n that era, was to just go buy an extra stick of ram out of pocket (Ram used to not be expensive!) and just guerrilla upgrade my work pc myself, IT none the wiser, and just a lot easier and faster than all the BS time and bureaucracy it would have taken otherwise.
I remember even trying this with a cheap HDD->SSD upgrade as well, but by that point they had implemented drive encryption so that foiled that effort.
But when your corporate policies put weeks/months for an upgrade, and you can do it in 3 hours by reallocating to the same business (no theft), that's just using broken business practices to people's advantages.
And also, what ethical frame work are you using? Or is this the 'feels' framework?
In this context it's not one individual stealing from another. This is a temporary reallocation of a dormant resource within the system to a more critical process that requires those resources to perform its function and ensure the system remains stable. In this framing I'd be inclined to argue not taking the RAM would be the unethical choice.
Unless this company was actively working against humanities survival, then the ethical thing to do would be to steal the RAM and not use it!
You're spending a ton of effort to try to craft implausible scenarios like the RAM only being "temporarily" taken or the work it was used for being critical. I could just as easily claim that the one who's RAM was taken had critical humanitarian work that didn't get done in time because their RAM was stolen so their coworker could play the latest game that required 16 MB. The actual facts that have been established make neither of these less likely than the other because they're both incredibly unlikely, and it's kind of bizarre that you seem to think otherwise.
Ethics aren't binary. The amount of harm caused to a company needing to allocate an extra 8 MB of RAM a single time is a lot lower than the amount of harm caused to an individual by forcing them to lose 1/4 of their workday.
Reminds me of the kids in my high school who stole individual 4MB 72-pin SIMMs out of a bunch of computer lab desktop PCs to upgrade their approximately equivalent generation motherboard/CPU home systems to whatever was their max capacity, in an era when a 16MB RAM desktop PC was a high performer. Shortly after all the PCs got locks on them.
Yeah, I've never been in IT, so I didn't know when tools were available to remote into nodes on the network. The low RAM sizes was precisely what led me to ask
Back then, if computers needed to be centrally managed, they'd give employees terminals and run everything on mainframes or X servers. Personal computers were often not even networked.
>Repairing a broken PC was a trivial help desk ticket; my PC was restored in an hour or two.
Except that even IT would know that a missing 8MB RAM stick is not a defect, it's (petit) theft, since RAM stick have no legs to just wander around by themselves. If it's gone, then an employee stole it.
Defect is when that 8MB stick would be ... defective.
Having an "AI tells" linter to catch "Phrasing that reads as machine-generated rather than my voice" has a real echo of "What does God need with a starship?".
I run a site about programming that's constantly hit by people writing their first scrapers, etc. I checked the last ~10 million lines of http logs and see no instances of this. Anthropic doesn't really respect robots.txt so it's all over the logs, but not with an email address or in the form given in this github issue. This is just an odd thing you got an LLM to spit out.
Thanks for highlighting this failure mode. We don't have a supervisor thread in a position to slow readers and writes like you described in your other thread, so I knocked up a job to force a checkpoint if needed. https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters/commit/cdf9397f8067fc21... Other things would fall over long before we reached 14k RPS so hopefully this suffices for us.
No. In short, in US law, CSAM is a visual depiction of a real-world act of child sexual abuse. Visual depictions like you're describing are covered under a different law, and I'm not aware of it having a short name. There's a good expert thread on this with links to the relevant federal laws here: https://bsky.app/profile/rahaeli.bsky.social/post/3lbt7zkvlq...
(a)In General.—Any person who, in a circumstance described in subsection (d), knowingly produces, distributes, receives, or possesses with intent to distribute, a visual depiction of any kind, including a drawing, cartoon, sculpture, or painting, that—
(1)
(A)depicts a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct; and
(B)is obscene; or ...
(b)...
(c)Nonrequired Element of Offense.—
It is not a required element of any offense under this section that the minor depicted actually exist.
It is not a required element of any offense under this section that the minor depicted actually exist.
I wonder how you'd actually go about prosecuting that. What's the line between crass and illegal?
People have infantilization fetishes - where they wear diapers and shit. You can certainly imagine someone making a cartoon of that in a sexual way.
Adults often don't look their ages. John Mulaney famously had a set about resembling a child when he was 29.
What if someone generated an image that looked like a teenager, but there was a driver's license in the frame that said the person was an adult?
Real people have ages. Imaginary people are imaginary.
What about art from the antiquity when what we would call a teenager would have been treated as an adult? Surely someone painted people having sex before "the age of consent" was a well-defined term. Is it illegal to own that painting?
This isn't elaborated on in the piece, but it does mention that it's written in the context of the Fermi paradox. Adding 50,000 years of technological development and a 1,000 year rebooting phase at each star system doesn't meaningfully change how long it would take life to spread when considered against the 13,500,000,000 years since stars developed.
Or it's a distinction without a difference to the site owner. Ever prod service I've run has seen significantly more abuse from human users using alias services, especially protonmail. I'm not surprised that some owners have chosen to block it entirely, given their resources, but I'd prefer to see it used as a signal in a more sophisticated system if possible.
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