If I read the whole thing correctly, people on the IRC channel didn't instruct the agent to set up the bloated AWS infrastructure, the agent did, and its operator clearly didn't review any of it.
That was the root cause for the costs, not actions by people on the IRC channel.
If it's a one off and needs no or minimal maintenance work afterwords, sure.
If it's intended to be actively maintained, then you probably should understand how things work, unless you want to wipe everything and start from scratch when the LLM creates such a mess that it can't be sorted out.
For every Apple, there are 100 mom-and-pop companies who have nothing.
Even more so in the future when a software company can be launched by a farm of AI Agents with a founder at helm with no clue about computing or security.
What's debateable is how many of those companies actually need irontight security, because they are never realistically going to be targets of criminals and/or they have nothing valuable to steal/corrupt in the first place (other than the owner's pride).
I'm not seeing any of this, and I've have been using the same email address that forwards to gmail for decades at this point, and it's in every major email data breach.
I get, maybe, one actual spam email per year through gmail's spam filters.
I get more actual spam at my work email, which is not hosted by gmail, even though the email volume of emails sent from outside of my employer's network is orders of magnitude smaller than my personal email volume.
Meta cancels the contract with the outsourcing company they contracted to classify smart glasses content after employees at the company whistleblow about serious privacy issues with the content they were paid to classify.
Even if so, it doesn't matter, because 4 - 8 years later it'll be reversed again. And because it takes longer to rebuild than dismantle, it will never be the same.
This is the cycle now. 180 degree turns in policy every 4 or 8 years. There's no long term planning.
When I worked at a company that was using Palantir's software about 15 years ago the average age of a Palantir employee was in the early 20s in my experience.
It was almost certainly everyone's first job.
It's not too hard to think of ways you can get a bunch of young folks do your bidding without them questioning the motives or what kind of moral challenges the job has.
Last year this podcast said that nobody wants to solve this because solving it is going to eliminate (IIRC) hundreds of thousands of jobs. Which is a point to consider.
Yet we're ok with spending trillions on AI to eliminate jobs everywhere, including healthcare.
I don't think that's the reason.
Personally I'm of the opinion the reason it isn't being solved, is because the people whose job it would be to solve it get to keep their jobs due to donations from pharma and insurance companies.
On the other hand, it'd be absolutely hilarious if they succeeded with this argument. VPN vendors would not find that as hilarious I bet.
And on another the hypocrisy is mindboggling. I guess you can't blame the lawyers from going after every angle, but this is quite creative.
But really I do just want to find out if money continues to buy justice.
I sincerely hope Facebook loses and is found to have knowingly infringed on copyright of all the books in the lawsuit. At $150K per violation, I'd almost feel bad for the poor shareholders. Zuck would probably take full responsibility and fire tens of thousand of workers.
There's nothing surprising about it given US history.
The US administration has always labeled any resistance against it as terrorism at least ever since 9/11. You might remember the justification of killing young Afghani males, who were posthumously labelled as terrorists. They drone strike an apartment complex and report 25 dead terrorists, conveniently omitting to report on dead children or women, because there were 25 males between the age of 15 - 25 among the dead. No evidence of terrorist activity required.
The only change is that the same justification is now being used within the US borders.
The dead are still, however, The Other, which is how it's being justified now as it was when the dead were foreigners in a war zone.
This right here exposes the bullshittery about the reasons behind preventing sideloading on Android phones.
For Google everything is about protecting revenue, even when doing so exposes their users to real harm, and that's why they will not address the issue of copycat apps, poor practices on play store security or anything else that lowers the number of downloads on apps on play store. But, heaven forbid, I want to download an app that doesn't create revenue for them onto a phone I OWN, Google spends money lavishly.
The Internet cranks are right. Google is run by bean counters and all the invective the cranks heap on the Google leadership is entirely earned.