• red_tomato@lemmy.world
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    22 hours ago

    The global economy is probably already dependent on some Claude code instance updating an Excel spreadsheet on someone’s laptop with a note ”don’t close the lid!” attached to it

    • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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      20 hours ago

      When I was a teenager I used to work at an airport and they had critical infrastructure running on things like Basic and Assembly, to transfer data between the computers and modern systems you have to use floppy disks because the computers that they ran on didn’t have drivers to support USB and we couldn’t upgrade the computers because the software wouldn’t work on any other hardware.

      So the AI laptop will be at home amongst all the ancient but supercritical junk that seems to be necessary to run our world.

      • dubs@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        15 hours ago

        At a previous job, I had to build laptops that would multi-boot DOS, Win95, Win98, and XP, all on one laptop. Our field-tech’s software had to have those specific versions of windows for the machines that they serviced, because of how the software interacted with USB and embeded floppy drives.

        If you want to scare yourself:

        spoiler

        They serviced Medical devices: X-rays, MRIs, CT-Scanners, etc.

      • SorryQuick@lemmy.ca
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        17 hours ago

        That’s dumb. The “work” in maintaining this excel file was the prompting and overall agent logic. In reality you’d be using something like openrouter and the instant claude “dies” for whatever reason you swap to whatever the freshest AI is. This never becomes ancient, it keeps up with the times.

        • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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          3 hours ago

          I don’t know about that the entirety of European airspace was closed early in the year because of a pilot inputed some malformed data and it crashed both the primary and backup system. The backup system just fed the primary systems inputs into it, so that was inevitable.

    • whoisearth@lemmy.ca
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      19 hours ago

      Reminds me of some stupid company maybe a few months ago that had their PRs failing due to copilot being down the dumbasses didn’t build an “if no AI” failsafe into their workflow. And no one knew how to recover it

    • chisel@piefed.social
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      19 hours ago

      I know my work already has reports built by running data through Claude and having it spit out an xls. Though, it’s not quite as integral as the all-important closet laptop.