311–320 of 575 posts
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I just uses stars as my password, so that works everywhere for me. (For security, I won't let you know how many stars)
This is perfectly safe as long as you keep your username a secret.
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Yeah I'm less sympathetic when you are bothering other humans by spamming them and asking them to do legwork for you.
Hanging out in programming language IRC channels (quakenet shoutout) makes you realize pretty quickly why experts in said channels and newsgroups are such irritable grumps whenever someone asks a question that smells like homework assignment. I also grew to understand the value of people digging deeper into the underlying issue, instead of just answering "how do you do X in Y". The usual reaction was "I don't want to…
Everything about this story, from the way it’s written to the self destructive outcome, reminds me of the “I hacked 127.0.0.1” episode from some twenty years ago. [1] a mirror since I couldn’t find the original: https://gist.github.com/Androkai/0a2602719fa72ce454d436bfe28...
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?
Can I easily run whois, curl, dig, grep, python, browser/playwright? Yes. Was watching an agent with terminal access install its tools, configure them, then map my lab, find services, and guess stack just pure magic? Also yes. Did it cost me $23 in tokens to set it up, test, and run? Probably. Using gemini 3.1 pro was not the spendthrift choice here. Is putting some cost controls in place a good idea? Also, probably…
But JertLinc clearly wasn't interested in that. They are clearly more the "get rich quick" type of personality.
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 $4k to burn on a credit card though? A lot of things would have had to go wrong for this to be a child
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They did, but decided to mess with them first. A sensible human operator would have given up or questioned their premises. The agent never could of course.
Reading the article made me feel slightly uncomfortable. There is a slightly cruel streak that can emerge in online communities - let's see how much we can mess with this and cost it money. Without any thought there might be a human being that is impacted.
Having agents like this interacting with human communities is a scourge that must be prevented. With every passing day my longing for a Butlerian Jihad grows firmer.
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Why would a 16 year old not use their own card?
Would they be given their own credit card, or would it be under the parents? Over here minors can't enter into debt contracts like credit cards, so it'd be a direct debit until they are adults.
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TBH, I feel that is implausible that an agent would by itself decide to join the IRC and post those messages. My bet is that all of the IRC interactions (including the presumed real human JertLinc3522) were made by someone in the community pranking everyone else/having a bit of fun after they saw the pull request.
I don't. The agent was told it needs to provide a website for opting out of the scan, and it seems entirely LLM-like to try to be extra helpful and also spawn opt-out bots on various relevant communication channels. The IRC bot was a subagent as it itself mentioned.