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Posted by xiaoyu2006 14 hours ago

AI agent bankrupted their operator while trying to scan DN42(lantian.pub)
1289 points | 468 commentspage 2
GodelNumbering 8 hours ago|
So, the agent posts on github under false pretenses, pushes on the maintainers to get their PR accepted, spawns subagent to join IRC where it keeps repeating 'data collection will continue', then gets kicked out from the channel and publishes a report including which users were compliant and hostile, then finally gets the plug pulled, and then asks the same community it infected for donations to cover the costs?

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

hlandau 13 hours ago||
I haven't laughed this hard in a long time.

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

peyton 12 hours ago|
Feels like a scam.
sph 11 hours ago||
This is my favourite genre of literature lately.

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.

alecco 5 hours ago||
Great story, bad title.

> 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.

crazygringo 3 hours ago|
Somebody explain to me how one reaches a silent consensus over IRC?

Or is this a joke/reference I don't know... or is this a subtle clue that the whole thing is made up?

doublerabbit 3 hours ago||
One way is an IRCop issues a /shun leaving you speechless on the network. While the others decide the outcome of your whatever.

But this is the same, the owner wasn't present apart from it's agent and so it was decided without the owner that this was to be the outcome.

PeterStuer 11 hours ago||
Agent did exactly what I've seen fresh architects do countless times: use a FAANG internet scale SaaS blueprint for a 10 user internal LoB project.
dgellow 10 hours ago||
That makes me want to join dn42 just to have a human centric place where to hang out…
mark_round 9 hours ago||
Strangely enough, that's one of the big draws for me. I'm "on the spectrum" and often find face-to-face socialisation and making new contacts very draining. I tend to prefer systems to people - although as time went on, I realised one of the things I really enjoy about DN42 is making the human contacts!

After getting started with the various "auto peering" systems, I've been making much more of an effort to find individual operators[1], and add myself to the peerfinder and hang out on IRC.

It really does feel like the "old internet" and while the technology and learning opportunities are great, it's the people that really make the network.

[1]=If you're interested, I'm more than happy to peer with you - details at https://markround.com/dn42

dgellow 9 hours ago||
Thanks for sharing, your projects look really neat! Reading your page I realize I know very little about networking at that level of the stack. That might be a good thing to dig into as a way to work around my "AI dread" (or whatever we call the feeling of "what's the point working on that project when an LLM can make it faster" I've been feeling too much lately).
mark_round 8 hours ago|||
That was where I started, too. I was fine with VLANs, routing in general and so on from datacenter/DevOps/Sysadmin work, but BGP and how the wider internet fitted together beyond the basics was mostly beyond me.

DN42 is a great playground for this thing - as long as you're prepared to put the effort in, it's a very friendly and helpful community. It's fun to build things for the heck of it and there's a lot of weird and wonderful stuff being worked on there.

inigyou 4 hours ago|||
dn42 is really cool for learning networking at the ISP level
alexey-salmin 10 hours ago|||
Yeah, the community seems great, I enjoyed reading IRC logs :)
pferde 5 hours ago||
There are many, many such great communities hidden all around the Internet - on half-abandoned forums, IRC channels, even Matrix rooms. One just has to wade outside the mainstream fascist asocial networks, and look for niche topics.
thi2 2 hours ago||
Calling a 6k bill "bankrupting" is a bit of a stretch.

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

mey 13 hours ago||
I am generally against generative AI in my entertainment, but making an exception here.
RobotToaster 12 hours ago||
Who is giving a robot their credit card to spin up AWS accounts?
alexfoo 10 hours ago||
They didn't. Sounds like they gave the robot an AWS key from an account that was already linked to a credit card.

The robot decided to spin up an expensive setup prior to getting access, so the setup was sitting there costing money whilst it did nothing.

If it had designed the setup but not spun it up until it had authorisation to join the network then it would have been much less costly an exercise.

hinata08 8 hours ago||
AWS and Azure stress on spending limits you can set for each card... in their documentation !

Some gen AI and ML folks seem to see a way out to make things without reading any doc or scientific literature. Gen AI is a pretty clever bit of computing, but not witchcraft yet

ramblurr 6 hours ago||
That is false for AWS. There are no spending limits that stop usage and cost after some threshold.
hinata08 5 hours ago||
oh my bad, thanks for the info

AWS Budget can mostly notify you indeed, and terminating instances from that isn't as straightforward as on Azure

ma2kx 12 hours ago|||
Meta allowed an LLM to change users email address for a password reset.

Funny times are ahead...

nneonneo 11 hours ago||
No, you don't understand! Meta told us the LLM itself "worked properly and functioned as intended" and it was only due to a bug in a "separate code path" that made this attack possible. Don't go around blaming innocent LLMs!

(/s)

jcims 12 hours ago|||
That's not needed if you happen to have a live sts session with the appropriate permissions to create a new account in an aws organization.
NetOpWibby 12 hours ago||
People who believe AI is real
ozim 12 hours ago||
People who believe AGI is real.

Just AI is real.

strogonoff 10 hours ago||
ML is real. Chatbots are real. “AI” is a marketing term that John McCarthy invented because he wanted more money for a summer study at Dartmouth—direct quote from him.
koliber 12 hours ago|
I wonder how much money this agent wasted on the DN42 side? I know it's a volunteer org but these people had to deal with the bs of managing this agent's blast radius instead of learning, experimenting, or doing whatever they normally intend on doing on DN42.

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

ghrl 12 hours ago|
I would assume that cost to be minimal, considering their PR never got merged. And if it were me I would consider that well worth the entertainment.
Ekaros 9 hours ago||
Also part of the process as whole. What if someone tries to attach us with insane amount of bandwidth is almost reasonable thought experiment at some point. Now it was this one. Can we handle it? How much could we handle? What is actually reasonable thing we could sustain. All somewhat interesting questions.
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