My gut reaction was that it does look like a PR stunt. But indeed it might also be a blunder caused by all of their other PR stunts. "Our new stuff is soooo dangerous!!", followed by "The US government believed us and acted accordingly".
No, and it's an important detail. We stand to learn from some developments in politics in recent years because they map pretty much exactly to this threat vector.
As AI develops, it's able to pursue intentions given to it without having to be spoonfed every little decision by a human operator. This matters, and it means the operator has to extend the leash and allow for a little more chaos… or, if the operator's gone all in on the strategy, a LOT of chaos, and trusting that the agent's seemingly amok actions will serve the grand purpose.
This is kind of daring, but there's a lot of evidence that it works, at least in certain respects. And you see 'running amok' and have to ask, what is the actual purpose? What is the prompt being followed by the AI that seems to be acting in a destructive way?
If the prompt is 'ruin this project', well, that's pretty direct. It may not be, but such a thing could exist. If the prompt is 'develop a rival project that is greater than anybody else's project', that's more indirect, but if that's the goal then it's very human to see it as a direct competition and if the rules don't prohibit kneecapping the other guy, 'greater than anyone else's project' gets easier.
Either way, the operator does not have to be in full control, which is an important detail. As AI develops sophistication you can give it much more general instructions and dump in a whole lot of power and water and get basically what human thought might do if it was sort of blindered and didn't talk to its neighbors.
In a sense this is an argument for AI dysalignment. It's based on human thought being reconnected, and where you get useful things like commonly accepted web development (regardless of how janky the systems are, if there are best practices it'll find them), you also get other distillations.
If the prompt is 'wreck this project's stuff' and it holds, you don't need to be in full control of the agent, you need to run a LOT of agents and trust that they'll erode what you're trying to destroy. If the prompt is 'be unequivocally the best at X', you best be thinking in terms of anti-kneecapping rules… knowing that this weakens your prompt and there will always be a tension between what you told the AI to do, and what you thought you meant. It's a paperclip maximizer reprocessing human thought. Did you mean 'the best' or didn't you?
I do a similar thing where the agent runs in a Docker container and I talk to it with Telegram. It has GitHub CLI access but only with a very restricted PAT. No bind mounts. Jira is pretty clever, though I'm not feeling enough pain with just Telegram to want to try switching at this point.
I have multiple relatively well-established Jira projects I've been able to add agents to, and also clone/use as a template for new agent-only projects which give me another kanban to manage, pretty comfortably ..
The big thing about my Jira use besides the fact that its a historical tool into which I've integrated agents, is that managing agents through Jira's custom workflows is really, really cool. You can actually do any of the old workflows with agents - they'll just do it. Finally, effective waterfall! ;) *Just kidding, I've always been able to do waterfall properly...
If "ledger on card" interests you, then you might enjoy Japan's FeliCa cards. They store balance locally on the card so you can pay very quickly, no network required.
As I understand it, these cards work basically the same way as transit card systems in other countries, like the SF Bay Area's "Clipper" cards.
The overall model is similar to tap-to-pay debit cards. They're only used for consumer-to-business payments. When you tap the card, the card sends over an account number / signature / etc, which the merchant sends to a central clearinghouse to finalize the transactions.
The main difference is that the card itself keeps a running balance of how much money the customer has available to spend. In many cases, this gives the merchant enough confidence to e.g. let you through the train turnstile without actually waiting for the central clearinghouse to confirm the transaction. (I think in practice they usually send all the transactions in batches, daily or weekly or something.)
The readers do some trusted-computing/secure-enclave type stuff but are not especially hard to obtain; I think there have even been cases where companies like Nintendo have built them into consumer products, so that you could e.g. tap your card to your Nintendo 3DS to buy a video game.
I imagine there's a bit more security on the machines that let you load money on the cards, but it's probably not completely impossible to make a fake card. But the low value limit (usually a couple hundred dollars, depending on the card provider), the inability to get cash out of the system (often you can't even buy things like postage stamps), and the fact that you'll get caught relatively quickly (once the central clearinghouse notices the transactions don't match up) make it unattractive to do it in practice.
It won't get you days off because you (rather, your employer) will fall behind those who didn't opt to take days off.
You'd only get days off if it was only you who got a 10x increase. But it's everybody. So it's status quo: technology advances, and you have to keep up if you want to stay in the industry.
Yes I remember having a hard time finding other kids who wanted to actually play the pokemon card game. And even when I could find someone, they didn't care about the rules/energy costs. This was in elementary school though to be fair.
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