Furthermore, as an interviewer, my job is to be a candidate. Why should this person choose my team/company to work at? It's a privilege that anyone show up to join, and I ought to be as prepared to give answers as they are.

That said, any "feedback" I would give would be arbitrary. I am not this person's mentor and I shouldn't—after only 40 minutes—assume I know enough to give them feedback. Saying that I have concerns about not getting enough information, and that somehow being their "feedback," is bad framing. Try:

  Before moving on, I really want to make sure I get a full picture of your time at Acme working with the Foobar team. Would you say that you led project X? Who ultimately decided when it shipped and set deadlines? Was that part of your responsibilities?

I know TFA mentioned similar things about also being a candidate and that the "feedback" is to spur discussion, but the framing of giving "highly opinionated" thoughts about someone's capabilities as a way to ask questions is unnecessarily adversarial is an already power-imbalanced situation. I think it's better to try to tilt the power imbalance in the other direction—giving the candidate a feeling that you, the interviewer, are also auditioning for them. Doing that shows humility and, in my experience, gives a better opportunity to get to honest answers about being a good fit for each other.

What a time to be alive – rouge AI agents attack RubyGems.org (tenderlovemaking.com) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49695876 - Sept 2026 (123 comments)

But anyway, these scenarios assume the agent's actions are accurately observable and logged. Something I wouldn't put much faith in based on what we've been seeing so far.

That said, I can't completely hold onto the belief that extinction is completely off the table. That feels too much like hubris, and the step from collapse to extinction doesn't feel as if it costs much. Though it does make my arguments weaker, I am more interested in protecting civilization as it's the most recognizable form of humanity to me.

In either case, the cost-effective safety argument is compelling. Whether to save civilization or humanity, the wealth incentive is powerful enough to threaten life as we know it.

The delineation is to highlight that the underlying issues: human incentives, power, and institutional failure, existed prior to and without LLMs or computers. LLMs are not inherently harmful, they have to be deployed (unwittingly or otherwise) to make them so. This is the same as saying that the internet is not inherently harmful, and yet it does facilitate harm.

I also mean to say that "LLMs" carry no inherent harm to humans. To make an LLM dangerous, humans must make it so. Is that the goal? This has implications for how to read TFA.

   ...people to move to the poles/into caves/beneath the ocean/whatever