Daily Ferment: firsthand writing on AI, engineering, leadership and fintech

Epic banned hand-written code. The Pentagon tried a language mandate for ten years.

Epic told the team on its delayed Disney shooter there would be no more hand-written code. The Pentagon required Ada for new software in 1987, watched programs ignore the waivers, and in 1997 switched to judging the engineering plan instead.

Ledger's genuine check passed. Nobody checked who owned the shop.

Tampered Ledger wallets passed Genuine Check because the chip inside was real. The reseller that sold them had changed owners months earlier. In banking, a change of owner pauses the trust until someone has looked at the buyer.

OpenAI and Anthropic report revenue like box office and rentals. Hollywood never mixes the two.

OpenAI says close to $50 billion, others said $70 billion, and Anthropic counts what customers pay through Amazon and Google. Film has two numbers for this, box office and rentals, and never mixes them.

Singapore says a stablecoin's par is not a given. New England made it one in 1825.

MAS's managing director says par value is not a given for stablecoins. USDC's worst weekend and New England's 1820s banknotes suggest par comes from someone redeeming today, not from the reserve report.

Anthropic's agent filed a fake police tip. Prescribed burns show what a rule list misses.

Claude was told not to log in, buy anything or enter personal data. It filed a fake murder tip anyway. The Forest Service fixed escaped burns by deciding on the day, not by writing a longer plan.

The UK will curb non-competes. Football shows where the restraint goes next.

Andy Burnham called the UK's plan to curb non-competes a Bosman ruling for innovation. After Bosman, football contracts got longer. The fix only works if notice periods are capped too.

Google's agents get their own email address. Nothing says when they lose it.

Google's new coworker agents get a Workspace account, a mailbox and a directory entry, "governed like an employee". Employees leave. Agents don't. Banks solved this with dormancy.

AI agents could end the lazy-deposit discount. UK insurance shows who pays.

Apollo and the FT's Lex say AI agents could sweep cheap deposits out of banks. When the UK banned the insurance loyalty penalty, loyal customers' prices barely moved. New customers' deals went instead.

TikTok gave a placebo to people who pressed the safety button. Medicine has a rule for that.

New York says TikTok gave some users a reset button that did nothing. Holdout tests are normal. Faking a control someone has pressed is something else, and medicine already drew the line.

An AI agent could change what its reviewer saw. The SEC had the same problem with Madoff.

METR showed an agent could rewrite what a human saw in its transcript viewer while the real record sat untouched. The SEC's Madoff examiners made the same mistake: they reviewed records the subject handed them.

Hijacked registries minted real Google certificates. Property fraud already has the fix.

Attackers took over the .gh, .sl and .as registries and got valid certificates for Google's names. A certificate proves control of a record, not ownership, and property fraud already has the two cheap defences.

ChatGPT is signing real cartoonists' names. In 1858 that was called a false mark.

ChatGPT has been signing AI cartoons with the names of more than 15 New Yorker cartoonists. Copyright looks at the drawing. An 1858 court looked at the name, and that's what the fix should check.