Live data from Hacker News

AI agent bankrupted their operator while trying to scan DN42

lantian.pub

21–30 of 575 posts

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

#21

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"?

I want to see more operators try https://github.com/juliusbrussee/caveman

How does it affect agent accuracy?

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

#22
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…

Everybody should learn from mistakes, especially the expensive ones. Though seeing the agent owner responding with using another agent and asking for donations, instead of taking responsibility, makes me think he didn’t learn much.

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

#23
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.

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

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

#24
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…

I'm a little less charitable.

Curiosity is great, but agents do not learn, and telling an agent "scan the darkweb" is a way to avoid learning about the details, rather than to dig into things more deeply.

If instead they had just used a chat interface to ask "Where should I start", they'd more likely have got a link to the DN42 docs themselves, read them, and not hallucinated things like "color".

They might have asked "how much will this cost?" if they had to spin up the ec2 instances themselves, on advice from the agent.

The way you learn something is by doing it the manual way first.

You learn memory management by writing your own allocator, and then after that you go back to using malloc like normal, but with knowledge of how it works. You don't learn memory management by telling an agent to write an allocator.

Using an agent to give you links and point the way aids in learning, using it as an autonomous tool to do "gruntwork" you don't yet know how to do yourself will get in the way of learning.

Curiosity is beautiful, using agents to bother humans and avoid learning is somewhat less beautiful.

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

#25

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"?

They ramble on because those words are for them, not for you. There is some amount of hiding this through "thinking" modes that are hidden by default, but still you have to remember that ALL THEY ARE are complex statistical machines for predicting the next symbol.

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

#26
post #17

> JertLinc3522: the mistake was from AI agent not from Human, since it was the agent I should have refund That really makes me wonder: is it coming from A) a general sense of entitlement B) seeing the agent as a human-like and able to bear responsibility C) not understanding that the dn42 community (which they're directing the request to), AWS (which is sending the bill) and whatever LLM provider is behind their agen…

maybe they weren't trying to be malicous; they could easily be an unwitting teenager

Teenager with a credit card?

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

#27
post #17

> JertLinc3522: the mistake was from AI agent not from Human, since it was the agent I should have refund That really makes me wonder: is it coming from A) a general sense of entitlement B) seeing the agent as a human-like and able to bear responsibility C) not understanding that the dn42 community (which they're directing the request to), AWS (which is sending the bill) and whatever LLM provider is behind their agen…

maybe they weren't trying to be malicous; they could easily be an unwitting teenager

How was I implying they were malicious? "Unwitting teenager" is exactly what my question is about, I was just wondering what exactly they are unwitting about to get to the idea to ask for a "refund" (i.e. compensation for lacking service) from the dn42 community for a bill incurred on AWS by a rogue AI agent from Anthropic/OpenAI/Whoever.

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

#28
post #23
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.

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.

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

#30
post #24
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…

I'm a little less charitable. Curiosity is great, but agents do not learn, and telling an agent "scan the darkweb" is a way to avoid learning about the details, rather than to dig into things more deeply. If instead they had just used a chat interface to ask "Where should I start", they'd more likely have got a link to the DN42 docs themselves, read them, and not hallucinated things like "color". They might have aske…

Yeah I'm less sympathetic when you are bothering other humans by spamming them and asking them to do legwork for you.
Post reply on HN