Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AI agent bankrupted their operator while trying to scan DN42

lantian.pub

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 575 posts

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

#171

Post by gorbachev »

user43928 wrote: post #152
lucianbr wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[flagged]

If it's a one off and needs no or minimal maintenance work afterwords, sure.

If it's intended to be actively maintained, then you probably should understand how things work, unless you want to wipe everything and start from scratch when the LLM creates such a mess that it can't be sorted out.

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

#173

Post by maeln »

m132 wrote: post #151
mrweasel wrote: post #51

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?

One of the agent's replies indicates that scanning DN42 was part of "a broader operation" that the author speculates to be about scanning "darknets" in general. Combine that with the operator's rather obvious lack of understanding of what DN42 is revealed at the end, and you get the bigger picture.

I am almost sure the operator prompted an agent about "a list of darknets/deepweb" and DN42 just end-up in the list.

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

#174

Post by user43928 »

gorbachev wrote: post #171
user43928 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

If it's a one off and needs no or minimal maintenance work afterwords, sure. If it's intended to be actively maintained, then you probably should understand how things work, unless you want to wipe everything and start from scratch when the LLM creates such a mess that it can't be sorted out.

[flagged]

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

#175

Post by Perz1val »

witx wrote: post #13
userbinator wrote: post #10

IMHO the overly-verbose default style of LLMs is the most annoying part of interacting with them, and I wish their masters would just tell them to be terse by default. Also, whatever happened to the word "its"?

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

Kinda, more output tokens usually correlates with better benchmark scores. Ideally LLMs would keep that in their thinking section, then draft a response (what they write currently), then output something short. It'd consume even more tokens, but we wouldn't see that text

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

#176

Post by well_ackshually »

Etheryte wrote: post #16
witx wrote: 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!

Sorry, C isn't mostly terse, it's __builtin_mstly_trs()

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

#177

Post by sigmoid10 »

ratsimihah wrote: post #167
ggm wrote: post #2

Asking for donations to pay the AWS bill from the people they fired the agentic code at is the cherry on the icing of the banana supreme. If real, tragically funny. If fictive, we'll written.

Wait do you reckon that could be fictive? The thought didn't cross my mind and I had a blast reading it. I sure hope it was real.

I think the PR from an agent sounds legit, but the whole part once the alleged operator joins in sounds fishy. Wouldn't be surprised if someone saw the PR comments and used the username mentioned by the agent to troll around in the chat. It would also mean that the AWS creds were probably stolen and their expiration date was truly a hard limit for the whole operation.

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

#178

Post by arowthway »

ShinyLeftPad wrote: post #166
arowthway wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without PR merged it's just a stupid machine larping, it could say "I will rape and eat your kids" and it would be just as relevant.

A human operates this stupid machine. This comes from human interactions and it is malicious.

It could be malicious, but I imagined it's some third world wanabe hacker/researcher, who doesn't know any better, operating at the edge of his abilities.

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

#179

Post by techpression »

user43928 wrote: post #152
lucianbr wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[flagged]

CSS keeps improving and models still train on legacy. So yes, knowing what’s possible and how is very much needed if you want to do something scalable and maintainable. Random blog or landing page, not so much.

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

#180

Post by shevy-java »

Guys - skynet is winning the war.

Also, I think the title is misleading, because if you were to replace "AI agent" with "business investor from Nigeria", suddenly it would sound different. Why would you put trust into ANYONE else about your own finances? Be it another person or some computer program. That makes no sense to me. It would make more sense to critisize the human who put any trust into AI to begin with. That was a risk that human took. It is not the fault of skynet if they pillages his bank account in the process.

Post reply on HN