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Headlong: A microharness for persistent agents

laude.org

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Re: Headlong: A microharness for persistent agents

#41

Post by indstinctdialog »

Systemerror7A69 wrote: post #34
aacid wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can always read the script file (orm ore realistically feed it to agent). If they distributed appimage or rpm would that be safer anyhow? Cannot it run malitious code same as the script would run?

One of the big problems is that no one actually does read these scripts. You could say "Oh but it's their own fault, duh" but theres a very legitimate argument to be made users going the path of least resistance and that you shouldn't offload this responsibility on your users. Regarding appImage or rpm, attackers need to build and package these to inject these, while this curl | bash pipe opens up the possiblity of p…

This is the same as terms of service agreements. There's a crowd mentality around it where only one person with enough of a voice needs to read it and scream. It's brittle because if everyone thinks that then nobody checks it but the probability scales with the attention it gets.

Totally agree we should make the internet safer, this is just a clarification that we don't necessarily need everyone to check it. One person who always checks everything and sends this to their LLM and posts a viral post can be a deterrent.

The installer is one threat. You're then running this on your machine which is the next threat.

Re: Headlong: A microharness for persistent agents

#42

Post by embedding-shape »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #24
embedding-shape wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious, you say "super interesting engineering" but then they say "it will often just tell you, even though we’ve asked it not to" and to me that seems like extremely shit engineering. Where are the interesting engineering parts at? Seems to be an interesting idea and perhaps design, but to call the implementation/engineering itself bad seems to be an understatement.

The security and the overall engineering were entirely separate items in that comment I think. It was explicitly called out that this is a security problem that you'd really only see treated in this manner in the LLM space. For what it's worth it's effectively unsolvable (AFAIU) short of realizing AGI with an amicable alignment.

What do you mean unsolvable? Don't give the LLM access to stuff it shouldn't, this is like Access Control 101, not sure how anyone can claim that particular problem is unsolvable?

Re: Headlong: A microharness for persistent agents

#43

Post by goodra7174 »

jeffsheldon wrote: post #36
MikhailTal wrote: post #3

Very fascinating, super interesting engineering. Although i do find it very funny how they just bypass a massive vulnerability, basically zero data isolation (even between good actors, let alone bad ones) with 3 sentences. Only in the llm space you can slap a massive limitation like this in the middle of the article and continue like nothing happened > Whatever anyone tells Audel becomes part of the single experience…

The part they punt on ("we haven't studied what happens when two people give conflicting instructions") is the interesting part. That's not a memory problem, it's an authz problem. If everyone writes into one shared stream then there's no model of whose instructions bind the agent or who can override whom. It's resolving the conflict that will generate the greatest "learnings" and advance the agent. This basically be…

[dead]

Re: Headlong: A microharness for persistent agents

#46

Post by walrus01 »

Systemerror7A69 wrote: post #34
aacid wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can always read the script file (orm ore realistically feed it to agent). If they distributed appimage or rpm would that be safer anyhow? Cannot it run malitious code same as the script would run?

One of the big problems is that no one actually does read these scripts. You could say "Oh but it's their own fault, duh" but theres a very legitimate argument to be made users going the path of least resistance and that you shouldn't offload this responsibility on your users. Regarding appImage or rpm, attackers need to build and package these to inject these, while this curl | bash pipe opens up the possiblity of p…

> You don't want to teach users bad habits.

Take a look at the screenshots here for one example of getting non-technical users to paste things into the equivalent of bash:

https://www.tilburguniversity.edu/about/conduct-and-integrit...

Re: Headlong: A microharness for persistent agents

#48

Post by gandreani »

forestcall wrote: post #35

Really hard to support these types of projects without subscription options. BYOK API only approach can run huge amounts of money. I budget for $200 Pro subscriptions. Just using Openrouter for a dark factory kanban ticket system using frontier models will run you $50-$150 which is about 1 ticket.

What is a dark factory in this context?

Re: Headlong: A microharness for persistent agents

#49

Post by [deleted] »

walrus01 wrote: post #23

Can we please not normalize telling people to install things by curl piped into bash? I hate this trend. And particularly not for a very new, mostly untested by a wider audience piece of software from a company that few have ever previously heard of. It even says, quoting from the website: "Headlong is alpha research software." Yeah that's totally something I want to curl thing.sh | bash , great idea.... Wow. I under…

[deleted]

Re: Headlong: A microharness for persistent agents

#50

Post by bbor » 

  Every Headlong agent has a name and at Laude we named our shared agent Audel. We’ve spent the last few weeks interacting with Audel over Slack, Telegram, and a mobile app. Many team members talk with Audel, and each of those conversations shows up in the agent’s single stream of inner thoughts. The agent decides if and when to respond. It sets its own interests and priorities, and it comes up with its own projects.
P(doom)++
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