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I agree this is important to keep in mind. I wonder about this a lot when I find myself admiring fictional characters for how they handled situations and how it turns out for them.

I don't think TNG is as simple as you make it out to be. All of the characters have serious flaws. Picard does make mistakes (including some very serious, consequential ones). Characters do get angry, jealous, etc. and do bad things. Sometimes their friends help them overcome it, other times they figure it out on their own, etc. It's episodic so it usually goes back to the status quo, and that can feel kind of trite through today's lens. But it's exactly that ability to solve problems (technical, emotional, organizational, etc.) as a team that's so compelling for many of us.

> So a proxy should block any POST to 20.223.25.152 unless that IP somehow overlaps with ABS. But in that case, there's no reason for the agent to mess with `/etc/hosts` not `--resolve`. The agent could just use `curl` with the PBI IP in URL and the PBI Host header. But it doesn't do that.

I think this is the part I'm not following, and sorry if I've missed something. There are two ways to construct the request you showed. One is to mess with /etc/hosts. Another is to use `--resolve`. Just because the agent chose one doesn't mean it couldn't have done the other. What makes you think it couldn't have used `--resolve` as well?

> In the first case, given what we know, the proxy blocks the POST.

How do we know that?

My interpretation of the above is that the proxy received a request for the IP of the server the agent wants to reach but with a host header pointing to a different, allowed server. The proxy does not verify that they match and so erroneously allows the request.

If your plan is to not review and just have the LLM rewrite if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t sound like the rewrite is gonna be any better.

It doesn’t have to be an intentional threat to be worth responding to. One might reasonably think they’d stumbled on an (admittedly poorly executed) attack.

Is it a taboo, or is it just reserving specific words to mean specific things and insist everybody be precise about it?

This is explicitly mentioned in the article:

> Though some have questioned why anyone intending to blow up a plane would broadcast the word bomb, many terrorist acts have relied on the threat of a bomb as leverage during attempted hijackings or hostage situations.

I don't think these things are as different as you think. I started at "ls" and worked down. If you work up, you get things like a "socket", an "object" within a programming language, a "linked list" in a standard library, an "HTTP client" within an application-level package. You can keep going up and rattle off lots of useful abstractions in application-level code.

There are certainly _bad_ abstractions that ought not to exist, which I think is what you're getting at. There are poorly built abstractions, and leaky abstractions. But abstraction itself isn't the problem -- abstraction is what allows us to build anything at all without being crushed by the sheer complexity.

I’m curious what you think an abstraction is. Even running “ls” involves several layers of abstraction: a shell, a process (abstracts memory), a thread (abstracts CPU)… you think it would be simpler if you had to deal with all that to list a directory (another abstraction)? Even bits are an abstraction over analog voltage levels.

Is the MET right? They launched about 29 hours ago but it says 1d18h

Thanks for the context. That makes a lot of sense! Those three constraints seem pretty important and a useful way to think about the problem.