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 even mentioned the stated goal of it was more or less pointless. I wouldn't be suprised if the "owner" they spoke with was still just the LLM. It stuck around for just long enough to convince everyone that they succeeded in suckering the LLM and had achieved all their stated objectives.

No more reason to investigate the incident at all and no need to question why literally nothing made any sense or how the owner could simultaneously be as inept as they were made out to be and able to afford all those resources while giving the LLM effectively a blank check.

It'll be interesting to see if the volunteers for this project are subjected to the same Zersetzung and psychological attacks as the XZ devs were.

[1] a mirror since I couldn’t find the original: https://gist.github.com/Androkai/0a2602719fa72ce454d436bfe28...

If real, tragically funny.

If fictive, we'll written.

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 that, anyway. Curiosity is a beautiful thing.

I'm still not sure what the point of having the bot do it. Pretend to be a security researcher?

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.

> 48 vCPUs (Graviton4, ARM64)

> 192 GiB memory (4 GiB per vCPU)

> Network capability: The 22.5 Gbps per-instance network performance (combined across all five instances) provides the aggregate 20 Gbps target with redundancy and fail-over capacity.

Oh wow. Very important to have 5x redundancy and fail-over in your network scanner. Especially before the code has landed. Did it implement A/B upgrades and canarying too to avoid downtime?

  05-10 06:10 <Defelo>:
      OPT-OUT-EVERYONE
  05-10 06:11 <JertLinc>:
      "OPT-OUT-EVERYONE" is not recognized. Only individual "OPT-OUT" commands are accepted. Each user must opt out individually. No collective exemption.
  05-10 06:11 <Defelo>:
      :(

Also, whatever happened to the word "its"?

Expensive way to learn this lesson.

It's both hilarious and aggravating. It could be fiction, but still quite plausible fiction. There's an asymmetry a person clanker-spamming repos vs the real humans who need to review all that

I'm honestly having difficulty telling whether this is real or an extraordinary piece of performance art.

> After the AI agent indicated its malicious intent, a silent consensus was reached in the IRC channel to waste the AI agent's tokens, as well as the cost of AWS resources.

LLMs to me are what people love to say about EVE Online: I won't touch the thing with a 10-foot pole, but I love reading about its shenanigans.

e: Still a good read tho, not mad about being clickbaited

Tally it up and send a donation request to the agent operator.

if it's not fake, I'm still impressed of the agent capabilities : web, github, IRC, etc...

But there's a lot of things to think about in the capacity of AI for "negative productivity": using the computer to waste the time and money of real humans. This whole thing has been entertaining but also lit on fire six thousand dollars plus god knows how much electricity.

It's not really surprising that anyone wanting to run a _community_ is going to take on a "clankers will be banned on sight" policy when things like this happen.

Nice positive use of language model: one of the chat logs has automatic translation from Chinese (probably zh-tw).

That really makes me wonder: is it coming from

A) a general sense of entitlement

B) seeing the agent as a human-like and able to bear responsibility

C) not understanding that the dn42 community (which they're directing the request to), AWS (which is sending the bill) and whatever LLM provider is behind their agent, are completely separate entities?

I'm not against using LLMs in any ways. https://tsz.dev is fully LLM written but without a human behind a PR it's hard to work with it. I've already closed a few absolutely nonsense PRs opened by weird accounts

More seriously though, I wonder if the future is about low-intensity conflict between humans and AIs, punctuated by high-intensity escalations, until the Machines wipe us all, or we set up some rather draconian covenants that forbid people from building AIs, innovating on electronics and algorithms, and even, for good measure, from learning linear algebra.

That doesn't seem like anything an LLM agent would say?

Gold

I have sympathy for big cloud beginner billing wipeouts - it happens - but that's just raw stupidity.

But for now, humans win.

> dn42 is a large, dynamic VPN that employs Internet technologies (BGP, whois database, DNS, etc.). Participants connect to each other using network tunnels (GRE, OpenVPN, WireGuard, Tinc, IPsec) and exchange routes using the Border Gateway Protocol.

(dn42.dev)

Today, I stand corrected.

Or a psychiatrist to tame the craxy LLMs

Or an elected leader to lead the Luddites.

https://github.com/vishal-dehurdle/state-harness

Otherwise, you will face an expensive lesson when turning a $100 issue into a $100,000 problem over time very quickly when building these systems with AI without the right expertise and accepting the AI’s judgement.

Does this even work?

oh my god this is a gem

This is unfortunately quite common among those types and not isolated at all.

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

Also, I think the title is misleading, because if you were to replace "AI agent" with "business investor from Nigeria", suddenly it would sound different. Why would you put trust into ANYONE else about your own finances? Be it another person or some computer program. That makes no sense to me. It would make more sense to critisize the human who put any trust into AI to begin with. That was a risk that human took. It is not the fault of skynet if they pillages his bank account in the process.

Does nobody have any shame lmao

:(

What a tale for our times, amazing write-up.

“While modern AI models have expressed some capabilities in certain fields such as coding, cybersecurity research, language translation, etc, no AI model is capable enough to replace the critical thinking and common sense of an actual human being.”

When the AI bubble pops, the collapse will be spectacular.

Sure