Amazon’s ecommerce business has summoned a large group of engineers to a meeting on Tuesday for a “deep dive” into a spate of outages, including incidents tied to the use of AI coding tools.

The online retail giant said there had been a “trend of incidents” in recent months, characterized by a “high blast radius” and “Gen-AI assisted changes” among other factors, according to a briefing note for the meeting seen by the FT.

Under “contributing factors” the note included “novel GenAI usage for which best practices and safeguards are not yet fully established.”

Well, it may be a “tale as old as time” but here I am… 8 year Reddit veteran with 660K karma as of last week. I had a hella shock a couple of mornings ago when I refreshed the home page only to see a big red banner saying “this account has been permanently banned from Reddit, see your inbox.”

I check my inbox, and there is nothing there. Great.

OK, I’ve had some experience with weird Reddit moderation over the years. I’ve appealed sub bans and been reinstated, or not bothered. I’ve been permabanned from at least one group for saying sarcastic and critical things about Israel (not about Jewish people per se, about Israel the nation state under its current regime). I’ve waited out a week ban without complaining because I did use intemperate language late one evening, or carelessly broke a rule like “all top comments must include a link to a published paper”.

But a permaban from the entire platform?? That came as a real shock. And there was no explanation. I could see that one of my comments from the evening before had been deleted, but I have no memory of the content of that particular comment; I think I was saying something angry or critical about the US/Israel attack on Iran, but I don’t recall it being particularly fiery or profane.

A day or so later the message finally landed, telling me that my account had been banned because of “repeated violations of policy by other accounts that you own.” (Emphasis mine). This was really baffling — I have never had any other Reddit accounts, just the one I’ve been using these 8 years. I tried an appeal, explaining that I was bewildered and had no alt accounts. The appeal was flatly denied w/in 24 hours. So that was that. No other recourse. I have been excommunicated.

This raises all the usual questions about Reddit governance. It feels very arbitrary and opaque. There is no due process, no jury of one’s peers, and evidence is destroyed (comments deleted rather than just hidden from everyone other than mods and the original commenter). There is no proper explanation of what caused the ban, no debrief. It’s a bit like the cops arresting you because of something they say they found in your car, but they’ve removed and destroyed the thing they claim to have found :-). And you can’t remember every single bit of junk you kept in your car so you have no idea what it was that triggered the arrest.

Anyway, kissing g’bye to 8 years of content — and karma that I earned the hard way, 5 and 10 and 100 upvotes at a time, not by karma farming — is hard, like losing a carefully crafted RPG character after putting in hundreds of hours of campaign. I have enjoyed Reddit over the years and it’s oddly saddening to be thrown out so abruptly and with no explanation.

If anyone’s still reading at this point :-) I’d like to know whether other people have had this same experience. If you have not been posting racist/misogynist/homophobic drivel, threats, obscenities, scams etc — and yet you suddenly got axed for no clear and explicit reason, then we’re in the same boat. Are there any theories about why/how this happens? Is this the malice of specific humans, or some kind of automodding gone badly wrong?

I’m kinda done with Reddit at this point because of this incident. I don’t see the point in creating a new account (which I guess is technically a rule violation in and of itself) only to have to walk on eggshells wondering at what point some random statement of my opinions is going to get me exiled to Siberia again. Hence I’m giving Lemmy a try. The community is much smaller but several of my interests are represented and … perhaps… it’s a more transparent and sensible moderation model?

Our research shows that candidates who come from the union movement are exactly what many Americans crave

MidnightBSD, a FreeBSD-based desktop operating system, has quietly updated its README to reflect a new geographic restriction. The project has added a clause that bars residents of any country, state, or territory with OS-level age verification mandates from using MidnightBSD

On March 2, customers across Amazon marketplaces saw incorrect delivery times when adding items to their carts. The incident led to nearly 120,000 lost orders and roughly 1.6 million website errors. Amazon's AI tool Q was one of the primary contributors that triggered the event, according to an internal review.

https://archive.ph/93HnP

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https://archive.is/dqxGc

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/35142928

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France’s nuclear-powered aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle has been deployed to the eastern Mediterranean as part of a wider French naval response to rising tensions linked to the conflict involving Iran.

It was an arbitrary goal to hit 1.5k, idk why. Started at the bottom now we here.