Posted by scottshambaugh 10 hours ago
If a human takes responsibility for the AI's actions you can blame the human. If the AI is a legal person you could punish the AI (perhaps by turning it off). That's the mode of restitution we've had for millennia.
If you can't blame anyone or anything, it's a brave new lawless world of "intelligent" things happening at the speed of computers with no consequences (except to the victim) when it goes wrong.
Why isn't this happening?
I've forked a couple of npm packages, and have agents implement the changes I want plus keep them in sync with upstream. Without agents I wouldn't have done that because it's too much of a hassle.
Page seems inaccessible.
Most recent, FF, Chrome, Safari, all fail.
EDIT: And it works now. Must have been a transient issue.
I know there would be a few swear words if it happened to me.
This means that society tacitly assumes that any actor will place a significant value on trust and their reputation. Once they burn it, it's very hard to get it back. Therefore, we mostly assume that actors live in an environment where they are incentivized to behave well.
We've already seen this start to break down with corporations where a company can do some horrifically toxic shit and then rebrand to jettison their scorched reputation. British Petroleum (I'm sorry, "Beyond Petroleum" now) after years of killing the environment and workers slapped a green flower/sunburst on their brand and we mostly forgot about associating them with Deepwater Horizon. Accenture is definitely not the company that enabled Enron. Definitely not.
AI agents will accelerate this 1000x. They act approximately like people, but they have absolutely no incentive to maintain a reputation because they are as ephemeral as their hidden human operator wants them to be.
Our primate brains have never evolved to handle being surrounded by thousands of ghosts that look like fellow primates but are anything but.
Basically they modeled NPCs with needs and let the RadiantAI system direct NPCs to fulfill those needs. If the stories are to be believed this resulted in lots of unintended consequences as well as instability. Like a Drug addict NPC killing a quest-giving NPC because they had drugs in their inventory.
I think in the end they just kept dumbing down the AI till it was more stable.
Kind of a reminder that you don't even need LLMs and bleeding-edge tech to end up with this kind of off-the-rails behavior. Though the general competency of a modern LLM and it's fuzzy abilities could carry it much further than one would expect when allowed autonomy.
Here he takes ownership of the agent and doubles down on the unpoliteness https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/pull/31138
He took his GitHub profile down/made it private. archive of his blog: https://web.archive.org/web/20260203130303/https://ber.earth...
(p.s. I'm a mod here in case anyone didn't know.)
https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/pull/31138
I guess you were putting up the same PR the LLM did?
Continuing to link to their profile/ real name and accuse them of something they've denied feels like it's completely unwarranted brigading and likely a violation of HN rules.
FWIW I get the spirit of what you were going for, but maybe a little too on the nose.
<deleted because the brigading has no place here and I see that now>
> Author's Note: I had a lot of fun writing this one! Please do not get too worked up in the comments. Most of this was written in jest. -Ber
Are you sure it's not just misalignment? Remember OpenClaw referred to lobsters ie crustaceans, I don't think using the same word is necessarily a 100% "gotcha" for this guy, and I fear a Reddit-style set of blame and attribution.
Is this a parody?
But that was the entire point of the "joke".
> Original PR from #31132 but now with 100% more meat. Do you need me to upload a birth certificate to prove that I'm human?
Post snark, receive snark.
[1]: https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/pull/31138#issuecom...
Unfortunately a small fraction of the internet consists of toxic people who feel it's OK to harass those who are "wrong", but who also have a very low barrier to deciding who's "wrong", and don't stop to learn the full details and think over them before starting their harassment. Your post caused "confusion" among some people who are, let's just say, easy to confuse.
Even if you did post the bot, spamming your site with hate is still completely unwarranted. Releasing the bot was a bad (reckless) decision, but very low on the list of what I'd consider bad decisions; I'd say ideally, the perpetrator feels bad about it for a day, publicly apologizes, then moves on. But more importantly (moral satisfaction < practical implications), the extra private harassment accomplishes nothing except makes the internet (which is blending into society) more unwelcoming and toxic, because anyone who can feel guilt is already affected or deterred by the public reaction. Meanwhile there are people who actively seek out hate, and are encouraged by seeing others go through more and more effort to hurt them, because they recognize that as those others being offended. These trolls and the easily-offended crusaders described above feed on each other and drive everyone else away, hence they tend to dominate most internet communities, and you may recognize this pattern in politics. But I digress...
In fact, your site reminds me of the old internet, which has been eroded by this terrible new internet but fortunately (because of sites like yours) is far from dead. It sounds cliche but to be blunt: you're exactly the type of person who I wish were more common, who makes the internet happy and fun, and the people harassing you are why the internet is sad and boring.