+Just as he was about to come, he was interrupted by an instant messenger notification. It was from someone named Ada Sheffield, saying she'd like to discuss an issue in the Multigen codebase at his convenience.
+
+_Tranny or real?_ Chad wondered, clicking on her profie.
+
+The profile text indicated that Ada was on the newly formed capability risk evaluations team. Chad groaned. _Yuddites._ Fears of artificial intelligence destroying humanity had been trending on social and traditional media lately. Magma had commissioned a team with the purpose to monitor and audit the company's AI projects for the emergence of unforeseen and potentially dangerous capabilities, although the exact scope of their power was unclear and probably subject to the outcome of future intra-company political struggles.
+
+Chad took a dim view of the AI risk crowd. Given what deep learning could do nowadays, it didn't feel quite right to dismiss their doomsday stories as science fiction, exactly, but Chad maintained it was the _wrong subgenre_ of science fiction. His team was building the computer from _Star Trek_, not _A Fire Upon the Deep_: tools, not creatures. Despite the brain-inspired name, "neural networks" were ultimately just a technique for fitting a piecewise linear function to training data. If it was counterintuitive how much you could get done with a piecewise linear function fitted to _the entire internet_, previous generations must have found it equally counterintuitive to how how much you could get done with millions of arithmetic operations per second. It was a new era of technology, not a new era of life.
+
+It was perhaps because of his skepticism rather than in spite of it that he had volunteered to be the Multigen team's designated contact person for the risk evals team (which was no doubt why Ada had messaged him). No one else had volunteered at the meeting when it came up, and Chad had been slightly curious what "capability risk evaluations" would even entail.
+
+Well, now he would find out. He washed his hands and messaged Ada back, offering to hop on a quick video call.
+
+_Definitely a tranny_, thought Chad, as Ada's face appeared on screen.
+
+"I hope I'm not interrupting anything important," she said.
+
+"No, nothing important," he said smoothly. "What was it you wanted to discuss?"
+
+"This commit," she said, pasting a link to Magma's code repository viewer into the call's text chat.
+
+Chad's blood ran cold. The commit message at the link described the purpose of the associated code change as being to modify the format of a regular expression used for logging requests to the Multigen service. The revised regex would now include the client's IP as a new metadata field.
+
+That much was true. What the commit message didn't explain, but which a careful review of the code might have noticed as odd, was that the revised regular expression started with `^[^\a]`—matching strings that didn't start with the ASCII bell character 0x07. The bell character was a historical artifact from the early days of computing. No sane request would start with a bell, and so the odd start to the regex would do no harm ... unless, perhaps, some client _were_ to start their request with a bell character, in which case the regex would fail to match and the request would silently fail to be logged.
+
+The commit's author was listed as Code Assistant, an internal Magma service that automatically filed simple pull requests based on issue descriptions, to be reviewed and merged by human engineers.
+
+That part was mostly true. Code Assistant had created the logging change. Chad had added in the bell character backdoor and attributed it to Code Assistant (`git commit --amend --author`; `git push --force-with-lease`), gambling that whichever of his coworkers got around to reviewing Code Assistant's most recent PRs would rubber-stamp them without noticing the bug. (Who reads regexes that carefully, anyway?) If they did notice, they would blame Code Assistant. (Language models hallucinate weird things sometimes; who knows what it was "thinking"?) Thus, by carefully prefixing his requests with the bell character, Chad could make all the custom videos he wanted, with no need to worry about explaining himself if someone happened to read the logs. It was the perfect crime—not a crime, really. A precaution.
+
+But now his precaution had been discovered! So much for his career at Magma. But only at Magma, right? The industry gossip network wouldn't prevent his employment, right?
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff