> but in fairness to the people doing stupid things, they're being encouraged by the likes of Google, ChatGPT, Anthropic etc, to think of letting a indeterminate program run free on your hard drive as "not a stupid thing".
> The amount of stupid things I've done, especially early on in programming, because tech-companies, thought-leaders etc suggested they where not stupid, is much large than I'd admit.
That absolutely happens, and it still amazes me that anyone today would take at face value anything stated by a company about its own products. I can give young people a pass, and then something like this will happen to them and hopefully they'll learn their lesson about trusting what companies say and being skeptical.
Right here. And I think you're not quite getting it if you have to refer to "go on the internet and tell lies"...
Sure plenty of people might be on "social media" and have some idea that people fib, but they aren't necessarily generally "surfing the internet".
To them, saying "the internet tells lies" is comparable to saying "well sometimes, at the grocery store, you buy poison instead of food", and yes, it can happen, but they aren't expecting to need a mass spectrometer and a full lab team to test for food safety... to you know, separate the snake oil grocers from the "good" food vendors.
> The amount of stupid things I've done, especially early on in programming, because tech-companies, thought-leaders etc suggested they where not stupid, is much large than I'd admit.
That absolutely happens, and it still amazes me that anyone today would take at face value anything stated by a company about its own products. I can give young people a pass, and then something like this will happen to them and hopefully they'll learn their lesson about trusting what companies say and being skeptical.