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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   12123 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 7, 2026

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I'd say that #2 on their interpretation is functionally impossible. Software that has read-only permission CANNOT write. This is a hard binary restriction.

If I had a penny every time I saw someone who should know better say something like this, I'd have two cents (the first time was Moldbug, lol).

There's no such thing "hard binary restricted read-only permission" for Internet access. If you want to interact with anything over the net, you send packets. That's a write operation. The program doing it is affecting the world outside.

The only way you could try to have read-only net access is by hoping that all the servers out there follow some kind of convention on how they'll respond to packets. HTTP GET requests aren't supposed to result in a state mutating operation, but there's no HTTP police that shuts down every server not complying with that.

There's no such thing "hard binary restricted read-only permission" for Internet access. If you want to interact with anything over the net, you send packets. That's a write operation. The program doing it is affecting the world outside.

I think that's kind of my point. You're pointing out the "why" on the packet/server layer. I think its impossible for anything that can access the internet to be restricted to read-only. Their interpretation is nonsensical for the specific reason you pointed out. Not sure if this repos a penny from you. I will say a charitable interpretation is that the agentic harness directly has a toggle for read/write and specifically prohibits them from writing what the LLM provides. But that gets tricky because plenty of what the LLM provides is to be repasted into that LLMs prompt, context, other LLMs. I'm sure there is a schema for how to set it up but its likely not as simple as they envision.

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