There’s something almost comically ironic about my current predicament. Here I am, a DevOps engineer who spends his days wrestling with code, infrastructure, and the endless march of technological progress, and I’ve stumbled across a question that’s been gnawing at me for weeks now.

It started with a post on Reddit that made me pause mid-scroll. Someone was asking whether the Go programming language itself could be a privacy concern, simply because Google created it. At first glance, it sounds almost absurd – worrying about the privacy implications of a programming language is like being suspicious of the pencil because you don’t trust the company that made the graphite. But the more I thought about it, the more I realised this question touches on something much deeper about our relationship with technology in 2024.

There’s something beautifully human about the collective panic that ensues when technology does exactly what we programmed it to do – just perhaps a bit too enthusiastically. I stumbled across a discussion recently about someone testing what they claimed was a “tester version of the open-weight OpenAI model” with a supposedly lean inference engine. The post itself was clearly tongue-in-cheek (complete with disclaimers about “silkposting”), but the responses were absolutely golden and got me thinking about our relationship with AI development.