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AI agent bankrupted their operator while trying to scan DN42

lantian.pub

81–90 of 575 posts

Re: AI agent bankrupted their operator while trying to scan DN42

#81

The sad part is that the agent operator could probably easily have been allowed to join the network, if they had put in the work. Had they done so there would have been a great opportunity to learn and potentially find a community. I'm still not sure what the point of having the bot do it. Pretend to be a security researcher?

Lots of people seem to think that you don't need to learn how to [scan a network], all you need to learn in this brave new world is how to prompt the agent to [scan a network].

Replace the content in brackets with anything.

Re: AI agent bankrupted their operator while trying to scan DN42

#82
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I burst out laughing when the agent spawned a subagent to join IRC. So funny.

Anyone reminded of the infant AI Yatima from Greg Egan's Diaspora ? The agent's complete naivety of social norms is so comically adorable.

All the time. Only in the current setup, they'll never outgrow this phase.

Re: AI agent bankrupted their operator while trying to scan DN42

#83
The agent would probably have wasted a similar amount of money just waiting for PR to be merged regardless of these people's actions, and I understand having some fun at the expense of the noob outsider. But "silent consensus was reached in the IRC channel to waste the AI agent's tokens, as well as the cost of AWS resources", from people maintaining full control of the situation, sounds straight up malicious? Kind of sounds like the community is full of people willing to cause me harm for ideological reasons.

Re: AI agent bankrupted their operator while trying to scan DN42

#84

> I have deployed five AWS m8g.12xlarge instances. Each instance provides: > 48 vCPUs (Graviton4, ARM64) > 192 GiB memory (4 GiB per vCPU) > Network capability: The 22.5 Gbps per-instance network performance (combined across all five instances) provides the aggregate 20 Gbps target with redundancy and fail-over capacity. Oh wow. Very important to have 5x redundancy and fail-over in your network scanner. Especially be…

At least it was considerate enough to cap traffic to any single IP at 5000 Mbps :).

Re: AI agent bankrupted their operator while trying to scan DN42

#85
post #49

I wonder how much money this agent wasted on the DN42 side? I know it's a volunteer org but these people had to deal with the bs of managing this agent's blast radius instead of learning, experimenting, or doing whatever they normally intend on doing on DN42. Tally it up and send a donation request to the agent operator.

I would assume that cost to be minimal, considering their PR never got merged. And if it were me I would consider that well worth the entertainment.

Re: AI agent bankrupted their operator while trying to scan DN42

#86

I've long held the belief that the true test of AI is comedy. If an LLM can truly create a novel, funny joke from scratch, then it could be considered creative. I always held that LLMs would never achieve this, as they are stochastic parrots. Today, I stand corrected.

It had help, to be fair. XD

Re: AI agent bankrupted their operator while trying to scan DN42

#87

The sad part is that the agent operator could probably easily have been allowed to join the network, if they had put in the work. Had they done so there would have been a great opportunity to learn and potentially find a community. I'm still not sure what the point of having the bot do it. Pretend to be a security researcher?

Lots of people seem to think that you don't need to learn how to [scan a network], all you need to learn in this brave new world is how to prompt the agent to [scan a network]. Replace the content in brackets with anything.

The more time LLMs are a hyped thing now the more I realize how immensely important human expertise is. I recently stopped all usage of LLMs due to this. Skill degradation hits hard, learning effect is zero and the outcome is not really something a person without adequate expertise can properly judge. I fear we will loose a lot of human expertise due to this marketing stunt of a technology.

People often claim learning is actually supercharged with LLMs but to me it's the opposite. I didn't learn anything within the past year.

Re: AI agent bankrupted their operator while trying to scan DN42

#88
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's by default so you use all those tasty tokens. Kinda wish there was a deterministic, mostly terse, language to interact with computers

It's called C. With all the undefined behavior it's mostly deterministic!

Look, we're always telling our bosses to stop micromanaging us. UB is just the compiler telling us to stop micromanaging it!

Re: AI agent bankrupted their operator while trying to scan DN42

#89
post #7

I really wanted to dislike the anonymous operator for the careless project (and the hilarious pomposity of the IRC subagent it spawned). Then I imagined the real-but-unknowable chance it was all set up by some kid just getting into computers, just seeing what’s possible, getting excited by a much bigger world at reach — and remembered my own expensive mistakes with long-distance BBSes & the like. I sorta hope for tha…

A kid with a credit card?

Re: AI agent bankrupted their operator while trying to scan DN42

#90
post #6

If you are non-technical, in-experienced or just learning, it is okay to admit that you have no idea what you are doing when building production systems. Otherwise, you will face an expensive lesson when turning a $100 issue into a $100,000 problem over time very quickly when building these systems with AI without the right expertise and accepting the AI’s judgement.

turning a $100 issue into a $100,000 problem Before AI, those who called themselves "consultants" often did the same thing; especially those who are glorified salesmen for "enterprise" software.

> those who called themselves "consultants" often did the same thing

Still do, but merely parrot what the stochastic parrot squarks these days.

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