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TokenSpiracy: How AI Providers Are Picking Our Pockets

Your context is contaminated and you probably have no idea what you’re asking

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A two panel cartoon. In the first panel is the presented face of a powerful genie wearing a graduation cap projected onto a curtain. In the second panel, we see that behind the curtain is a bunch of gremlins wreaking havoc.
Image generated with Gemini

The blackout in the code factory

A few years back, observability was all the rage — if you had workloads in production, you wanted every trace, log and metric at your fingertips to ensure that your operation was working and you knew when something was on fire.

Now, with the advent of AI, we’ve allowed ourselves to be plunged into an age almost as dark as those computing was originally born out of, wherein we ask a magic black box to do things on our behalf; we neither see the real input, nor do we have the bandwidth to investigate the overwhelming volumes of its output. So we set up more black boxes and put them in charge of ensuring that the original black boxes did what we asked, and then we send the results out into the world and… hope for the best?

Our entire industry right now:

The Drake meme, saying no to software engineering (a man’s hands typing on a keyboard) but yes to software roulette (a man’s finger pressing a button labelled “AI FEEL LUCKY”)
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Adam Fisher / fisher king (@therightstuff)
Adam Fisher / fisher king (@therightstuff)

Written by Adam Fisher / fisher king (@therightstuff)

Software developer and writer of words, currently producing a graphic novel adaptation of Shakespeare's Sonnets! See http://therightstuff.bio.link for details.