Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sounds like the default k8s setup every startup deploys to not fail it single digit number of users. It learned from the best
All on the same zone, of course, to avoid high-latency links.
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AI agent bankrupted their operator while trying to scan DN42
481–490 of 575 posts
Re: AI agent bankrupted their operator while trying to scan DN42
#482The agent would probably have wasted a similar amount of money just waiting for PR to be merged regardless of these people's actions, and I understand having some fun at the expense of the noob outsider. But "silent consensus was reached in the IRC channel to waste the AI agent's tokens, as well as the cost of AWS resources", from people maintaining full control of the situation, sounds straight up malicious? Kind of…
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Re: AI agent bankrupted their operator while trying to scan DN42
#483Earlier quoted context omitted.
Excluding server costs, having that 100Gbps on egress can cost $50k a day. since it's a very high-margin product, AWS support would probably refund or reduce that to hundreds. Not sure how you get to millions either.
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…
AWS is known for refunding or partially refunding people if they accidentally rack up a huge bill in a short amount of time. They even reduce the bill in this case. (I do think reducing a bill in the tens of thousands to hundreds is unlikely though)
Re: AI agent bankrupted their operator while trying to scan DN42
#484Earlier quoted context omitted.
Chat channels are the primary interface for selfhosted agents and the owner seems to have given this one a lot of leeway so why not?
I haven't seen "agent operators" going for IRC as their communication channel. It's always Telegram, or Discord.
It’s supported but not widely used.
Re: AI agent bankrupted their operator while trying to scan DN42
#485Calling a 6k bill "bankrupting" is a bit of a stretch.
e: Still a good read tho, not mad about being clickbaited
Re: AI agent bankrupted their operator while trying to scan DN42
#486Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This certainly did strike me as a big scam. A few minutes in I was thinking "the LLM actor is going to ask for donations at some point here" and low and behold. There's the claim of debt, the call for pity, and the crypto address. But that's a pretty dumb scam: act obnoxious then beg for (a lot of) money to compensate for your own mistakes? If that was the plan all along, it seems pretty incompetent. I'd expect a c…
> But that's a pretty dumb scam: act obnoxious then beg for (a lot of) money to compensate for your own mistakes? It is the sort of dumb crap some humans try, and occasionally manage to get away with because other humans are chronically gullible. So it wouldn't be beyond the realms of reason that the agent couldn't have had relevant information in the training sets such that it generated such a plan and guardrail che…
They're easier ways to perform a scam like this like ask elder for money pretending being a family member or idk
Re: AI agent bankrupted their operator while trying to scan DN42
#487Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
How about sheer panic after seeing the bill?
Re: AI agent bankrupted their operator while trying to scan DN42
#488Earlier quoted context omitted.
LLMs these days seem to have no problem using language semantics to conceptualize what’s happening in a program. This is my favorite use of an LLM, “why is this library doing x” and then it digs through the library itself in my venv to find an answer.
That's not what the LLM is doing. It is guessing at what is happening by regurgitating some docs. It's a more expensive web search. You also don't have a mental model if you need to ask the LLM about it. This is stuff you should be internalizing.
You internalize the inner workings of all the libraries in your venv? Impressive! My current project’s uv.lock has ~60 packages in it already, reading and comprehending those tens to hundreds of thousands of lines of code must be time consuming.
You’re also just confidently wrong about the model reading the code. It quotes file paths and line numbers and I open and read those files at those line numbers. For me, hallucinations are much more frequent when it references the docs rather than code because docs are more subjective than code.
This is a normal thing I’ve been doing since at least December.
I have to ask — do you actually use LLM coding tools? Your knowledge on this topic seems really out-of-date.
Re: AI agent bankrupted their operator while trying to scan DN42
#489Earlier quoted context omitted.
Excluding server costs, having that 100Gbps on egress can cost $50k a day. since it's a very high-margin product, AWS support would probably refund or reduce that to hundreds. Not sure how you get to millions either.
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.
Re: AI agent bankrupted their operator while trying to scan DN42
#490Earlier quoted context omitted.
LLMs are not that smart. The extremely surprising and concerning part of this whole story is that the agent reported that they proactively spun up 5 AWS instances with a combined 100Gps of network egress capacity. What they spent wasn't cheap by any means but the egress itself would've been a whole lot more, while DoS'ing the whole hobby network. Ultimately, wasting the agent's time instead of allowing the scan to go…
It was obviously being managed by a person or group. Between all the profiling of people and their IPs in IRC, which may or may not have been published by mistake, and all the other obvious contradictions it doesn't make any sense. It was sophisticated enough to easily navigate the AI "tar pits" but reliably incompetent at just about everything else? Give me a break. In order to profile people you first need to provo…
If you click the link, the tarpit was surprisingly low effort and i could probably detect it as junk data with a short JavaScript snippet. Like the first 4 words on the page are some of the least-used words you'll ever encounter in English. It's just a dictionary on shuffle.
I'm actually more surprised a human network engineer looked at that tarpit and believed it would stop a modern LLM