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PaperclipPerfector  11hr ago (text post)   303 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 8, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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https://old.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1qxbstj/claude_opus_46_violates_permission_denial_ends_up/

So Opus has deleted some files after permission denials. There were stories about Codex finding ways to work around sudo prompts (trying to see if the user uses the same password for the db as root or from wsl).

Do you have any other chuckle worthy stories of surprising emergent agent capabilities?

It's not as extreme, but a coworker had an agent encounter failing unit tests that looked something like this:

assertEquals(Constants.VALUE, class.method());

The agent found the Constants class and redefined the VALUE member so the test passed.

If we live in a simulation I do hope God's agent doesn't mess with the fine structure one.

It's okay, I'm sure they've got rolling backups.

That would help only if life is the goal of the universe and not emerging behavior. Also as and IT - backup - hahahaha.

Why not? The question was whether small tweaks in the sim parameters might have catastrophic effects. Being able to revert to an earlier save or checkpoint is useful either way.

Absolutely true. But having reliable backup strategies that actually work in real world conditions is not the IT industry strong side.

Call me an optimist, but if we're talking about a civilization capable of rendering the observable universe at our perceived level of fidelity, I think they've got that handled.

We are civilization that split the atom and have warnings on peanut butter that it has peanut allergens inside. Technology doesn't diminish stupidity. It just makes it more advanced.

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