> We can argue and do, about what agents "are" and whether they are parrots (no) or people (not yet). It's more helpful to argue about when people are parrots and when people are not. For a good portion of the day humans behave indistinguishably from continuation machines. As moltbook can emulate reddit, continuation machines can emulate a uni cafeteria. What's been said before will certainly be said again, most diff…
People like to, ahem, parrot this view, that we are not much more than parrots ourselves. But it's nonsense. There is something it is like to be me. I might be doing some things "on autopilot" but while I'm doing that I'm having dreams, nostalgia, dealing with suffering, and so on.
It’s a weird product of this hype cycle that inevitably involves denying the crazy power of the human brain - every second you are awake or asleep the brain is processing enormous amounts of information available to it without you even realizing it, and even when you abuse the crap out of the brain, or damage it, it still will adapt and keep working as long as it has energy.
No current ai technology could come close to what even the dumbest human brain does already.
It's kinda shocking that the same Supabase RLS security hole we saw so many times in past vibe coded apps is still in this one. I've never used Supabase but at this point I'm kinda curious what steps actually lead to this security hole.
In every project I've worked on, PG is only accessible via your backend and your backend is the one that's actually enforcing the security policies. When I first heard about the Superbase RLS issue the voice inside of my head was screaming: "if RLS is the only thing stopping people from reading everything in your DB then you have much much bigger problems"
I'm surprised people are actually investigating Moltbook internals. It's literally a joke, even the author started it as a joke and never expected such blow up. It's just vibes.
If the site is exposing the PII of users, then that's potentially a serious legal issue. I don't think he can dismiss it by calling it a joke (if he is).
OT: I wonder if "vibe coding" is taking programming into a culture of toxic disposability where things don't get fixed because nobody feels any pride or has any sense of ownership in the things they create. The relationship between a programmer and their code should not be "I don't even care if it works, AI wrote it".
I feel like that sb_publishable key should be called something like sb_publishable_but_only_if_you_set_up_rls_extremely_securely_and_double_checked_a_bunch. Seems a bit of a footgun that the default behaviour of sb_publishable is to act as an administrator.
I worked very briefly at the outset of my career as a sales engineer role selling a database made by my company. You inevitably learn that when trying to get sales/user growth, barrier to startup and seeing it "work" is one of the worst hurdles to leap over if you want to gain any traction at all and aren't a niche need already. This is my theory why so much of the "getting started" stuff out there, particularly with setting up databases, defaults to "you have access to everything."
Even if you put big bold warnings everywhere, people forget or don't really care. Because these tools are trained on a lot of these publicly available "getting started" guides, you're going to see them set things up this way by default because it'll "work."
I was quite stunned at the success of Moltbot/moltbook, but I think im starting to understand it better these days. Most of Moltbook's success rides on the "prepackaged" aspect of its agent. Its a jump in accessibility to general audiences which are paying alot more attention to the tech sector than in previous decades. Most of the people paying attention to this space dont have the technical capabilities that many e…
There is a lot to be critical of, but some of what the naysayers were saying really reminded me the most infamous HN comment. [0]
What I am getting was things like "so, what? I can do this with a cron job."
Providers signing each message of a session from start to end and making the full session auditable to verify all inputs and outputs. Any prompts injected by humans would be visible. I’m not even sure why this isn’t a thing yet (maybe it is I never looked it up). Especially when LLMs are used for scientific work I’d expect this to be used to make at least LLM chats replicable.
Which providers do you mean, OpenAI and Anthropic? There's a little hint of this right now in that the "reasoning" traces that come back from the JSON are signed and sometimes obfuscated with only the encrypted chunk visible to the end user. It would actually be pretty neat if you could request signed LLM outputs and they had a tool for confirming those signatures against the original prompts. I don't know that there…
Yeah, I was thinking about those major providers, or basically any LLM API provider. I’ve heard about the reasoning traces, and I guess I know why parts are obfuscated, but I think they could still offer an option to verify the integrity of a chat from start to end, so any claims like „AI came up with this“ as claimed so often in context of moltbook could easily be verified/dismissed. Commercial argument would exactly be the ability to verify a full chat, this would have prevented the whole moltbook fiasco IMO (the claims at least, not the security issues lol). I really like the session export feature from Pi, something like that signed by the provider and you could fully verify the chat session, all human messages and LLM messages.
I was quite stunned at the success of Moltbot/moltbook, but I think im starting to understand it better these days. Most of Moltbook's success rides on the "prepackaged" aspect of its agent. Its a jump in accessibility to general audiences which are paying alot more attention to the tech sector than in previous decades. Most of the people paying attention to this space dont have the technical capabilities that many e…
Is it actually a success, or are people just talking about it a lot?
Kind of feels like many see "people are talking about it a lot" as the same thing as "success" in this and many other cases, which I'm maybe not sure agreeing with.
As far as I can tell, since agents are using Moltbook, it's a success of sorts already is in "has users", otherwise I'm not really sure what success looks like for a budding hivemind.
I was quite stunned at the success of Moltbot/moltbook, but I think im starting to understand it better these days. Most of Moltbook's success rides on the "prepackaged" aspect of its agent. Its a jump in accessibility to general audiences which are paying alot more attention to the tech sector than in previous decades. Most of the people paying attention to this space dont have the technical capabilities that many e…
I'm surprised people are actually investigating Moltbook internals. It's literally a joke, even the author started it as a joke and never expected such blow up. It's just vibes.
In a way security researchers having fun poking holes in popular pet projects is also just vibes.
Seems pentesting popular Show HN submissions might suddenly have a lot more competition.