Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AI agent bankrupted their operator while trying to scan DN42

lantian.pub

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

531–540 of 575 posts

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

#531

Post by parineum »

fsckboy wrote: post #462
parineum wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's also an exception that proves the rule That phrase doesn't refer to anomalies, it refers to signs that says "no parking between 5-10pm". It implies the rule that parking is allowed otherwise.

wikipedia: "The exception that proves the rule" is a saying whose meaning is contested. Henry Watson Fowler's Modern English Usage identifies five ways in which the phrase has been used,[1] and each use makes some sort of reference to the role that a particular case or event takes in relation to a more general rule." duckduckgo search assist: The phrase "the exception that proves the rule" originates from the Latin l…

> identifies five ways in which the phrase has been used

Which has nothing to do with the meaning of the words in the phrase for a commonly misused phrase.

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

#532

Post by eqvinox »

greenavocado wrote: post #393

Just looking at the language in the begging for donations it's probably a non-native English speaker whose first language may lack articles and/or allow omitted subjects. The part that threw me off is putting the currency symbol at the end. I wonder what places do that...

> The part that threw me off is putting the currency symbol at the end. I wonder what places do that...

AFAIK, putting the currency symbol in front of the number is actually more rare. Most cultures treat it like any other unit of measurement.

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

#534

Post by efreak »

saidnooneever wrote: post #391
l23k4 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would a 16 year old not use their own card?

there are plenty of cards on the interwebz to use. ppl give em away like candies

I'm reminded of the bot @needadebitcard on Twitter 10(?) years ago, that reposted pictures of people's cards that they posted on Twitter for the public to see.

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

#535

Post by razodactyl »

zozbot234 wrote: post #388
J0nL wrote: post #342

Anyone remember the XZ and Jia Tan situation awhile back? https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20240320183846.19475-1-lasse.co... I can't quite put my finger on why but the entire time I was reading this I kept thinking back to that. It's entirely possible the actual targets were the volunteers and everything else was superfluous or tertiary. It's also an exception that proves the rule with regard to Hanlon's Razor. They eve…

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…

Hmmm.

I think it's good practice to get on top of the cautious thinking of "LLMs aren't that smart for now".

Eg. Fable isn't as good as the hype: it has cool tricks like scratch-padding to check expectations in advance, but we're not there just yet...

Specifically I mean: thinking in terms of it changing abruptly ensures we're ready for if the LLMs do get smart enough to do multi-level strategy and cause a lot of annoyances....

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

#536

Post by Taniwha »

throwaway81523 wrote: post #517
Taniwha wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is also the true story from the first Scientology vs. Internet clash, someone trolled them that their files were being hosted on 127.0.0.1, under a court ordered deposition they tried to find out who was running this server with their secret files (because yes, they'd looked, and they were there)

That also had "Who is Major Domo?" because they wanted to subpoena him or her, iirc.

Yup, they really wanted to hunt down that guy, he was involved with all the anti-scientology mailing lists

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

#537

Post by saati »

egberts1 wrote: post #334

You need a slave driver to whip those AI in line. Or a psychiatrist to tame the craxy LLMs Or an elected leader to lead the Luddites. https://github.com/vishal-dehurdle/state-harness

Psychiatrists are useless because LLMs don't respond to drugs, psychologists are also useless because LLMs don't learn.

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

#539

Post by rmunn »

tovej wrote: post #425
jnovek wrote: post #266

Earlier 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.

What I've done is ask the LLM a question like "How do I configure EF Core in this particular way?", then when it tells me the answer, I go and look up that function in the EF Core docs and learn by reading the docs. (Which also tells me whether it's correct or hallucinating; one time the LLM told me "You can do X like this" and the documentation said "We don't yet support doing X, but in a future version you'll be able to do it like this"). Here, I'm using the LLM to compensate for the fact that MSDN search is awful and the bits of info you need are scattered across three different articles, none of which link directly to each other.

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

#540

Post by jesterson »

Vespasian wrote: post #143
thrdbndndn wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has to be trolling, right? I find it hard to believe that anyone, no matter how dense, could come to this conclusion after this whole saga.

Maybe? It just takes one after all. I've met some people IRL who are so engulfed in their own greatness that it simply cannot be that they made a mistake (in planning and strategy). Therefore this is all a great injustice towards a poor victim and doesn't that sound like a great argument for some charity money. Most of them grow out of it, some become politicians. I'd say it's a 50/50 chance.

I'd say you are a great optimist.

If you'd ask me, I would put chances or learning somewhere between 0.001 and 0.01

Post reply on HN