501–510 of 575 posts
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.
If you've ever been part of an organization that participated in something like Google Summer of Code, you know this isn't fiction. People really do behave like this.
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?
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Why would AWS refund 100Gbps on egress since the account actively used that bandwidth? AWS would not know if this is legitimate traffic, a (D)DoS or whatever... At most I think you could negotiate CloudFront rates, but even then, the sob story would be if you had been DDoSed and got hit with this traffic and AWS failed to protect you from this attack. Actively creating the outbound traffic is something that I don't s…
I mean if this story is to be believed, AWS reduced the bill from 6500 to 1800. I think developers accidentally racking up unexpected thousands in costs on their first AWS project is a pretty common phenomenon that their support has standard rules for handling.
The developer said the agent deployed multiple CloudFormation templates, I'd bet that AWS waived the charges for the unused resources - like EC2 instances that were idle most of the time, very high margin SKUs, etc.
Now, for 100 Gbps of egress (which didn't actually happen) - and this is grounded speculation - I don't think that AWS would give a discount that is greater than CloudFront rates.
100 Gbps is A LOT of data.
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
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Maybe I’m just groggy with Friday Brain going on, but I’m having trouble understanding what you’re suggesting. Do you think this was a scam attempt to extract money in the form of reparation donations?
I've seen some other suggestions of that idea in the full HN conversation, which I'm reacting to. On the one hand I find it a bizarre approach to running a scam. On the other hand I'm having a hard time coming up with any theory of mind on my end as to why this person would solicit $5000+ from the people they just harassed. Sheer cluelessness does fit the facts, though.
Calling a 6k bill "bankrupting" is a bit of a stretch. e: Still a good read tho, not mad about being clickbaited
Great story, bad title. > After the AI agent indicated its malicious intent, a silent consensus was reached in the IRC channel to waste the AI agent's tokens, as well as the cost of AWS resources.
Somebody explain to me how one reaches a silent consensus over IRC? Or is this a joke/reference I don't know... or is this a subtle clue that the whole thing is made up?
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Because an LLM is not a person, it cannot suffer.
The operator is a person and can and did suffer
You're allowed to block bad actors and have fun while doing it.