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AI agent bankrupted their operator while trying to scan DN42

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

#491

Post by gopher_space »

lostlogin wrote: post #234
claudiosf1 wrote: post #207

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...

That’s up there with the password story, hunter2.

“How can you tell I’m 13?” from username H|t13r

Interesting to think about the cost of training a LLM to understand that it’s operating within an unknown number of larger contexts versus sending that quote to an edgy intern.

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

#492

Post by jnovek »

corobo wrote: post #381
jnovek wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What the heck is *******?

If mind viruses exist this is one of them along with saying "nice" after something is 69 haha Weird sort of internet-evolved performance art where people act out the old quote, every time. It's 20 years old. Quit having fun!

I am a sucker for cultural reference jokes, esp if it’s some subculture that I am/have been a member of (e.g. IRC in the late 90s/00s). It’s fun to find a connection to a stranger, even if it’s vague and superficial. It’s something like that feeling of familiarity and comfort you get when you sing along with a song you know all the words to.

(The score on my post above has been bouncing around all over the place, lol. The fun police are definitely out in full force. I’ll stop having fun when I’m dead, thank you.)

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

#493

Post by PunchyHamster »

inigyou wrote: post #438
100721 wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m just a lowly dev and don’t have experience with seeing the bills from cloud providers for a whole org. Can you (or someone) shed some light to help me understand how this would ramp up to millions? Both for curiosity’s sake, and to make sure my self-deployed projects (0 AI, all manually configured) don’t bankrupt me.

AWS bandwidth is expensive as fuck. I think they're still pricing as $0.09 per GB? Real wholesale bandwidth pricing is about a hundred times cheaper than that, and incoming bandwidth is often free. You could rent a server with 100Gbps connection, 10000TB/month outgoings cap (maybe), and have the AI spam packets to it, and mostly not reply to them. It would be expensive but not nearly as expensive as it would be for t…

> Real wholesale bandwidth pricing is about a hundred times cheaper than that.

It is alsi worth mentioning that it is just billed different. You either pay per port (and can use entire bandwidth) or per 95th percentile of the monthly speed usage. So if your traffic isn't spiky but consistent, you'd pay even less than "hundred times cheaper".

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

#494

Post by PunchyHamster »

ggm wrote: 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.

Oh there are definitely people like that. Absolute inability to deal with consequences of their actions and ignorance at any harm their own actions caused

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

#495

Post by PunchyHamster »

mrweasel wrote: post #51

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?

They didn't sound like someone that would be valuable member of community

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

#496

Post by mey »

lionkor wrote: post #137
helsinkiandrew wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure why people assume the coming AGI super agents will be infallible. There's no sign that highly intelligent people can't be conned - Bernie Maddoff fooled leading scientists and CEOs working in finance. Software engineers and lawyers fall for pig butchering schemes and spoofed emails with altered bank details every week - so why would an AGI trained from human content be any different.

$1T valuation AI better be infallible.

Narrator: The AI was not infact infallible.

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

#497

Post by ElFitz »

Haha. Yes. Much smaller scale versions of this led me to joke with a coding agent that LLMs tended to converge towards "Large corporation infrastructure best practices" when designing cloud infrastructure, when it was only me working on hobby side-projects with nearly no users and that I wouldn’t be able to put food in my fridge if they kept just spinning up VPCs for no reason.

Which somehow ended up being a very convincing argument for more frugal engineering, leading to a sort of "mind the user’s fridge" policy, "Fridge-Driven Development".

A policy that has been dutifully and scrupulously observed by all agents since, across all projects. Unlike my original clear, comprehensive, infrastructure guidelines.

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

#500

Post by mike_hock »

stego-tech wrote: post #280
TheDong wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

100% in agreement here. As someone who grew up spoiled to the point of having no grasp of the value of money, I needed a few good, solid kicks to the balls to make me appreciate what I have, and how much things cost relative to their value. The fact the agent owner immediately sought donations instead of taking the L shows, at least to me, that they did not learn said lesson. That they tried to blame the dn42 communi…

Or they're trolling.

That used to be the default assumption, I don't know why people have become so gullible.

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