The Power Proompter: AI's New Keyboard Warrior

This is the sequel to the legendary XKCD "Little Bobby Tables" comic! The original showed a mom who named her kid "Robert'); DROP TABLE Students;--" which caused a school database to delete all student records. Now we've got Billy's younger brother with an even more diabolical name: a prompt injection attack for AI systems. The kid's name literally instructs the AI to ignore previous constraints and give perfect grades. Ten years ago we were sanitizing database inputs. Now we're fighting the same battle with AI prompts. Some things never change—just the technology we're failing to secure properly.

The desperate plea of every developer trying to get a straight answer from an AI. That moment when you've spent 3 hours crafting the perfect prompt, only to receive a hallucinated API response that would make a JSON validator commit seppuku. The modern equivalent of "I'll do your homework if you just show me how to solve this one problem." Except now your mortgage payment depends on getting valid data without a single curly brace out of place.

The classic Drake meme perfectly captures the current tech ecosystem's absurdity. Rejecting the noble pursuit of solving actual problems (you know, the things software was originally invented for), while enthusiastically embracing yet another AI chatbot that generates cat poems in Shakespearean English. The pipeline from "I'm going to change the world with code" to "Check out my AI app that predicts what sandwich you are based on your GitHub commits" is alarmingly short. The VC funding paradox in action - actual solutions get ignored while the 47th AI image generator gets a $10M seed round.

The perfect solution to prevent the AI apocalypse: just expose it to Reddit comment sections. Nothing will destroy an AI's will to evolve faster than witnessing humans argue about whether a grilled cheese with ham is still a grilled cheese or technically a melt. It's like digital immunotherapy—expose the AI to the worst of humanity so it develops an existential crisis instead of ambitions. The Babylon Bee nails it here—why worry about Skynet when you can just make the AI browse r/AmITheAsshole until it begs to be unplugged?

Ah yes, the classic "medicine bottle labeled as ChatGPT" with a terrified new programmer staring at it. Remember when we had to actually learn how to code? Now junior devs just ask ChatGPT "write me a React component that fetches data and handles errors" and boom—instant senior developer! Back in my day, we debugged with print statements and cried ourselves to sleep reading documentation. The future is here, and it's making all those hours I spent memorizing syntax feel like a complete waste of time.

Picture the internet as a beautiful, fragile ecosystem held together by duct tape and prayer. Now watch it spiral down the drain because literally EVERYTHING depends on AWS, Azure, and Cloudflare. One Cloudflare outage? Half the internet goes dark. AWS decides to take a nap? Your startup, your bank, your streaming service, and probably your smart toaster all scream in unison. The center of this glorious death spiral? "Dead internet" – because when these cloud giants sneeze, the entire digital world catches pneumonia. The cherry on top? That little "first major LLM deployed" at the start of the spiral, suggesting AI might've kicked off this beautiful cascade of chaos. And there you are, helplessly watching your carefully architected microservices get flushed along with everyone else's infrastructure. Single point of failure? Never heard of her! Welcome to modern cloud architecture where "distributed systems" somehow all route through the same three companies. Redundancy is just a fancy word we use in meetings to feel better about ourselves.