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I almost got hacked by a 'job interview'

blog.daviddodda.com

321–330 of 534 posts

Re: I almost got hacked by a 'job interview'

#321

This article is so interesting, but I can’t shake the feeling it was written by AI. The writing style has that feel for me. Maybe that shouldn’t bother me? Like, maybe the author would never have had time to write this otherwise, and I would never have learned about his experience. But I can't help wishing he'd just written about it himself. Maybe that's unreasonable--I shouldn't expect people to do extra work for fr…

The first paragraph feels like a parody of one of the LinkedIn marketing professional that receives a valuable insight from a toddler when their pet goldfish was run over by a car.

Re: I almost got hacked by a 'job interview'

#322
Was thinking about how to address this generally, since exploits are likely to proliferate. (Wasn't there a recent exploit against many pip packages? Maybe this one - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45179939)

You basically can't trust anything, unfortunately.

Solutions? Consider https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44283454

Re: I almost got hacked by a 'job interview'

#323
post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Next time maybe just post the base write up and the prompt? What value does the llm transformation add, other than wasting every reader's time (while saving yours)?

People are often unconfident about their own writing. But if you can feed it to a LLM and have the LLM output something that looks coherent, your writing is good enough to publish.

Indeed, the LLM is not going to add (real) information; I'd say, publish both what you wrote and what the LLM spat, if you think someone would prefer the latter

Re: I almost got hacked by a 'job interview'

#325
post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bad idea. Competent candidates might also disqualify you as employer right there. Plus you'll be part of normalizing hazardous behavior.

strong disagree. it's very similar to anti-phishing training/tests. also, being tagged as a company that cares that its potential new hires are not lazy programmers that just copy&paste because someone told them too would more than likely be taken as a positive not a negative.

anti phishing tests are stupid in a similar manner, clicking a link should not fail you

Re: I almost got hacked by a 'job interview'

#326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I often ask for ai to give only grammar and spelling corrections, and then only a change set I apply manually. In other words the same functionality as every word processor since…y2k?

Why not just use one of those word processors, then? It seems like you'd expend less effort (unless there's an advantage of your approach that I'm missing), since the proof-reading systems built into a Word processor have a built-in queue UI with integrated accept / reject functionality that won't randomly tweak other parts of the paragraph behind your back.

Far better at catching some types of mistakes. Word only has this many hardcoded rules past the basic grammar. LLMs operate on semantics, and pick up on errors like "the sentence is grammatically correct, but uses an obviously wrong term, given the context".

Re: I almost got hacked by a 'job interview'

#327

This article is so interesting, but I can’t shake the feeling it was written by AI. The writing style has that feel for me. Maybe that shouldn’t bother me? Like, maybe the author would never have had time to write this otherwise, and I would never have learned about his experience. But I can't help wishing he'd just written about it himself. Maybe that's unreasonable--I shouldn't expect people to do extra work for fr…

Your comment was so validating, I was getting such weird vibes and felt it was so dumbly written given the contention was actually good advice. Consequently, the author tarnished his reputation for me personally from the very beginning.

Re: I almost got hacked by a 'job interview'

#328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not just use one of those word processors, then? It seems like you'd expend less effort (unless there's an advantage of your approach that I'm missing), since the proof-reading systems built into a Word processor have a built-in queue UI with integrated accept / reject functionality that won't randomly tweak other parts of the paragraph behind your back.

Far better at catching some types of mistakes. Word only has this many hardcoded rules past the basic grammar. LLMs operate on semantics, and pick up on errors like "the sentence is grammatically correct, but uses an obviously wrong term, given the context".

That's not the kind of thing I'd trust to a language model: I'd expect it to persuade me to change something correct to something incorrect more often than it catches a genuine error. But ymmv, I suppose.

Re: I almost got hacked by a 'job interview'

#329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I stopped reading a few paragraphs in. I get the point of the article. Be careful running other people's code on your machine. After understanding that, there's no point to continue to read when a human barely even touched the article.

I found the details of how the attack was constructed to be interesting.

Yes, it's an informative and important article. I think the complaints here are absurd. Hopefully the people not reading it for silly reasons won't become the victims of similar social engineering.

Re: I almost got hacked by a 'job interview'

#330
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Seasoned accounts are a positive heuristic in many domains, not just LinkedIn. Yep. This is how the 3 major credit bureaus is the United States to verify your identity. Your residence history and your presences on the distributed Internet is the HARDES to fake.

sucks to be young I guess.

Sure, but nobody expects a 23 year old to have a two decade old LinkedIn account or work history.

(Except maybe the sorts of idiots who write job descriptions requiring 10+years of experience with some tech that's only 2 years old, and the recruiters who blindly publish those job openings. "Mandatory requirements: 10+ years experience using ChatGPT. 5+ years experience deploying MCP servers.")

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