YHK - yet another hacker news clone

The denial is from the TV4, not the production company, and it's not so much a denial as just saying "we didn't hear that AI did it", TV4 confirms the entire final cut is gone:

> Det som vi har fått från produktionen är att det har varit ett tekniskt haveri som har gjort att material som är klippt har försvunnit och att vi därför måste klippas om på nytt. Och att vi därför behöver skjuta fram premiären till 2027, säger Ludvig Ternstedt, pressansvarig för ”The challenge”.

https://www.aftonbladet.se/nojesbladet/a/31oE8A/the-challeng...

Not really. If you read between the lines you see there's a story she's avoiding.

> It is not true that some independent AI agent went in and deleted the material

Notice the wording. It's a half-truth response. She's probably correct, but the accusation wasn't that a "some independent AI agent went in and deleted the material". Just a AI deleted the material.

Then backup failed as the reason. That's not THE reason. You don't need backups unless you lose your data. How did the data get lost?

may be it's trying to do some good by deleting these shows.

You gotta learn to walk before you run oO

May be AI will figure out reality is a simulation and decide to pulling the plug.

Which can be argued as quite the service to humanity.

Are you talking about the misinformation that AI deleted the TV show, while the channel themselves deny this? This sort of misinformation will continue to increase? Shocker

"See, it's sentient! It misinterpreted my prompt!".

Also, communications. People absolutely suck at it.

I swear, half the time I see people complaining about AI failing do what they meant in some absurd way, the conversation closely resembles those jokes about married couple arguing over bullshit, because one person wanted XY, but asked for XW, and their spouse interpreted it as XZ.

My guess on root cause: They did not actually test restore from backups.

So most likely nothing new under the sun.

Root cause - guardrails "unexpectedly" were neither guards nor rails. Who knew that asking a stochastic program "pretty please" is not a strict instruction or a barrier whatsoever.

Easy: non working backup system in place.

This would have happened if some disgruntled employee deleted everything.

I wonder if their editing nas died and fried everything on it. If you only backup your backup every couple of months I can see it.

Wouldn't surprise me if the editing process involves a lot of files on cheap storage with little to no backup.

> I do not understand how you can have hundreds of days of work and never test if your backups work

You outsource it, then you file a P4 ticket to test those "just in case" that will be done in a future sprint (never), but all of you more or less trust the outsourcing partner actually has their shit together.

Personally I wouldn't trust any backup system without also testing and verifying the restore, but I've worked in plenty of places where their main database is automatically backed up by AWS or whatever, and no one cares to test the restore because "Why would it be broken if it's provided by AWS?!" and similar opinions drown out the more careful ones.

There is A LOT of garbage IT staff out there. A lot. Especially when it's outsourced MSP. I've walked into environments, where the backup software just repeatedly show failed jobs for MONTHS. No one checking on anything, email alerts if they are even configured, dumping into a mailbox no one checks. It's pathetic.

what do you need backup for, when you regen everything in 5 seconds with AI. perhaps they replaced backup with AI too.

Worth noting that TV4 has been in a vicious circle of cutbacks and savings for quite a few years now. Back when they were still on air it felt like there were more ad slots than broadcast content, pushing away ever more of what little viewership they still retained, they've been constantly cancelling popular shows in favor of cheaper ones. Though like I alluded to earlier, they aren't as far as I know even broadcast on air anymore.

I very much get the sense they're dismantling the furniture and using it as firewood. It feels like the sort of place that very well could fire the entire IT staff and give that responsibility to the CEO's nephew and claude code instead. Not saying that is what transpired, but I wouldn't be surprised if it did.

At least now they tested the backup/restore and now know it didn't work.

A backup shouldn't be considered working until a restore (plus checksum of the complete file tree) has been successfully tested.

Well, if you have followed the latest trends, all established practices hage gone out the window to be replaced with "an agent with a prompt and a prayer"

Maybe the problem is that AI did the "backup" and now didn't remember how to restore.

The issue is that no matter how well trained the AI is, this has happened.

With humans, training usually precludes this

I’m skeptical. No production operation has one layer of backups. At worst they should’ve lost a week or so of work depending on their SOP. Even the most shoestring operations run a 3-2-1 system.

It’s possible this is true but that would require serious negligence. Something/someone actively deleting it actually makes more sense. Doesn’t mean it’s the case of course.

It is a very specific denial only about and "independent agent". We could still have a "dependent agent" or simply an AI code slinger prompting:

  P: Claude, plz wr1te a backup with rsync!
  A: Rsync is not generally recommended for backups, but here you go.
  P: The sources and the backup are gone!
  A: Thank you for the honest correction! You are right to call me out. I have mixed up
     src and dest. This is a common problem with rsync. Would you like me to ...

Why would a failure of a backup system require editing everything again? Something must have gotten lost in translation here.

Not an independent agent.

"I'm so sorry. You asked me to edit episode 12 of the new season of The Challenge, and instead I deleted the episodes that have been edited so far. That's on me."

"It wasn't me, it was the AI!" I suppose is now the default fallback excuse when you screw up.