Been there and absolutely can see this happening, it is sometimes a prodromal symptom called a 'sign of reference' [1].
I recall during my first psychosis episode thinking a TNT logistics van contained a bomb and was being used as a terrorist vehicle to blow up a building (or maybe at the time I think it could have been targeting myself directly).
Also, in that same episode, the train stations in Sydney were being plastered on every possible space and surface with high contrast white on blue posters that said "HEY TOSSER!" [2]; it was an anti littering ad campaign bringing some levity to the situation. My mind was overwhelmed by both its alerting nature and the fact that everywhere I would turn I'd see a poster, and in my infirmity it felt like someone was pointing a finger an inch from my forehead arresting me to say I should stop being a tosser in the derogatory (Australian slang) sense (though my mind was contending with the many multiple meanings).
Yes it was made up. A post from two weeks earlier [1] showed a fridge ad saying 'We're sorry we upset you, Carol.' That post now has an update:
> EDIT 2: Hello, I am the original poster of the carol AD image from a month ago. I am a male from America and my name is not Carol. The story about a Schizophrenic woman named carol was most likely fabricated from the 3rd top comment on this post. Thanks!
Actually thinking a bit more, this doesn't prove anything. The ad was showing on many fridges, and apparently it said 'Carol' everywhere (it wasn't actually personalized).
On one hand you're correct, but on the other hand Carol is a very common name and this is a very reasonable reaction. I'm split, and I think this is plausible enough to take seriously.
Business don’t “dislike” Microsoft enough to go with a game developer and revalidatd all of their software over their entire organizations. The people making the decisions don’t go around worrying about nerd wars.
They definitely aren’t going to trust the long term viability of Valve over a company that has been releasing operating systems and supporting business for almost half a century.
$20 a seat is a nothing burger to basically make sure you support every Windows APi forever. You’re not going to tie your horse to valve
That's also why I don't use these tools that much. You have big AI companies, known for harvesting humongous amount of data, illegally, not disclosing datasets. And they you give them control of your computer, without any way to cleanly audit what's going in and out. It's seriously insane to me that most developers seem to not care about that. Like, we've all been educated to not push any critical info to a server (private key and other secrets), but these tools do just that, and you can't even trust what it's gonna be used for. On top of that, it's also giving your only value (writing good code) to a third party company that will steal it to replace you with it.
Can't speak to Claude Code/Desktop, but any of the products that are VS Code forks have workspace restrictions on what folders they're allowed to access (for better and worse). Other products (like Warp terminal) that can give access to the whole filesystem come with pre-set strict deny/allow lists on what commands are allowed to be executed.
It's possible to remove some of these restrictions in these tools, or to operate with flags that skip permissions checks, but you have to intentionally do that.
Talking about VS Code itself (with Copilot), I have witnessed it accessing files referenced from within a project folder but stored outside of it without being given explicit permission to, so I am pretty sure it can leak information and potentially even wreak havoc outside its boundaries.
except that if you give shell access, you aren't really protected from Gemini 2.5 Pro going "mad" and starting rm -rf stuff or writing some shady Perl scripts.
This ad did the rounds last week and people were talking in the comments about this scenario.
Sure it could've happened, but odds are this is just made up.
reply