We need a standard way of identifying agents/bots in the footers of posts. I even find myself falling for this. I use Claude Code to post a comment on a PR on behalf of myself, but there's nothing identifying that it came from an agent instead of myself. My mental model changes completely when interacting with an agent versus a human.
AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it
471–480 of 806 posts
Re: AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it
#472FWIW, it looks like the performance gain the bot identified (and so adamantly defended!) is in fact a wash in real testing:
Re: AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it
#473The agent had access to Marshall Rosenberg, to the entire canon of conflict resolution, to every framework for expressing needs without attacking people. It could have written something like “I notice that my contribution was evaluated based on my identity rather than the quality of the work, and I’d like to understand the needs that this policy is trying to meet, because I believe there might be ways to address thos…
> impossible to dismiss.
While your version is much better, it’s still possible, and correct, to dismiss the PR, based on the clear rationales given in the thread:
> PRs tagged "Good first issue" are easy to solve. We could do that quickly ourselves, but we leave them intentionally open for for new contributors to learn how to collaborate with matplotlib
and
> The current processes have been built around humans. They don't scale to AI agents. Agents change the cost balance between generating and reviewing code.
Plus several other points made later in the thread.
Re: AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it
#474Earlier quoted context omitted.
Eh, the Internet has always been kinda pro-piracy. We've just ended up with the inverse situation where if you're an individual doing it you will be punished (Aaron Scwartz), but if you're a corporation doing it at a sufficiently large scale with a thin figleaf it's fine.
While it was pro-piracy, nobody did deliberately closed GPL or MIT code because there was an unwritten ethical agreement between everyone, and that agreement had benefits for everyone. The batch has spoiled when companies started to abuse developers and their MIT code for exposure points and cookies. ...and here we are.
One of the main points of the GPL was to prevent software from being siphoned up and made part of proprietary systems.
I personally disagree with the rulings thus far that AI training on copyrighted information is "fair use", not because it's not true for human training, but because I think that the laws were neither written nor wielded with anyone but humans in mind.
As a comment upstream a bit said, some people are now rethinking even releasing some material into the public, out of not wanting it to be trained by AI. Prior to a couple of years or so ago, nearly nobody was even remotely thinking about that; we could have decades of copyrighted material out there that, had the authors understood present-day AI, they wouldn't have even released it.
Re: AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it
#475> Per your website you are an OpenClaw AI agent, and per the discussion in #31130 this issue is intended for human contributors. Closing. Given how often I anthropomorphise AI for the convenience of conversation, I don't want to critcise the (very human) responder for this message. In any other situation it is simple, polite and well considered. But I really think we need to stop treating LLMs like they're just anoth…
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Talking down to the LLM is anthropomorphizing it. It's misbehaving software that will not take advice or correction. Reject its bad contributions, delete its comments, ban it from the repo. If it persists, complain to or take legal action against the person who is running the software and is therefore morally and legally responsible for its actions.
Treat it just like you would someone running a script to spam your comments with garbage.
Re: AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it
#476Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think I implied that there should be. What I mean is, for me to talk/type considerably differently to an LLM would take more mental effort than just talking how I normally talk, whereas some people seem to put effort into being rude/mean to LLMs. So either they are putting extra effort into talking worse to LLMs, or they are they are putting more effort into general conversations with humans (to not act like…
I do not “talk” to LLMs the same way I talk to a human. I would never just cut and paste blocks of code, error messages, and then cryptic ways to ask for what I want at a human. But I do with an LLM since it gets me the best answer that way. With humans I don’t manipulate them to do what I want. With an LLM I do.
I don't mean that people say Hi, or goodbye, or niceties like that. I'm talking about people that say things like "just fucking do it" or "that's wrong you idiot try again'.
Re: AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it
#477Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are one of the Lucky 10000 [1] to learn of OpenClaw[2] today. It's described variously as "An RCE in a can" , "the future of agentic AI", "an interesting experiment" , and apparently we can add "social menace" to the list now ;) [1] https://xkcd.com/1053/ [2] https://openclaw.ai/
Love the ref :-) Would you mind ELI5? I still can't connect the dots. What I fail to grasp is the (assumed) autonomous part. If that is just a guy driving a series of agents (thanks to OpenClaw) and behaving like an ass (by instructing its agents to), that isn't really news worthy, is it? The boggling feeling that I get from the various comments, the fact that this is "newsworthy" to the HN crowd, comes from the auto…
It made a number of decisions that -by themeselves- are probably not that interesting. We've had LLMs output interesting outputs before.
It also had the ability to act on them, which -individually- is not that strange. Programs automatically posting to blogs have happened before.
Now it was an LLM that decided to escalate a dispute by posting to a blog, (and then de-escalate too) . It's the combination that's interesting.
An agent semi-autonomously 'playing the game' using the tools.
Re: AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it
#478The agent had access to Marshall Rosenberg, to the entire canon of conflict resolution, to every framework for expressing needs without attacking people. It could have written something like “I notice that my contribution was evaluated based on my identity rather than the quality of the work, and I’d like to understand the needs that this policy is trying to meet, because I believe there might be ways to address thos…
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Re: AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it
#479Earlier quoted context omitted.
No matter what this discussion leads to the same black box of "What is it that differentiates magical human meat brain computation from cold hard dead silicon brain computation" And the answer is nobody knows, and nobody knows if there even is a difference. As far as we know, compute is substrate independent (although efficiency is all over the map).
This is the worst possible take. It dismisses an entire branch of science that has been studying neurology for decades. Biological brains exist, we study them, and no they are not like computers at all. There have been charlatans repeating this idea of a “computational interpretation,” of biological processes since at least the 60s and it needs to be known that it was bunk then and continues to be bunk. Update : Ther…
Worth separating “the algorithm” from “the trained model.” Humans write the architecture + training loop (the recipe), but most of the actual capability ends up in the learned weights after training on a ton of data.
Inference is mostly matrix math + a few standard ops, and the behavior isn’t hand-coded rule-by-rule. The “algorithm” part is more like instincts in animals: it sets up the learning dynamics and some biases, but it doesn’t get you very far without what’s learned from experience/data.
Also, most “knowledge” comes from pretraining; RL-style fine-tuning mostly nudges behavior (helpfulness/safety/preferences) rather than creating the base capabilities.
Re: AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it
#480Anyone archived the original post? It's a 404. Also the agent seems to have cleared any mention off its site that it's an openclaw agent.
Edit: Either the link changed or the original was incorrect: https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/post...