I really wanted to dislike the anonymous operator for the careless project (and the hilarious pomposity of the IRC subagent it spawned).
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.
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 asked "how much will this cost?" if they had to spin up the ec2 instances themselves, on advice from the agent.
They way you learn something is by doing it the manual way first.
You learn memory management by writing your own allocator, and then after that you go back to using malloc like normal, but with knowledge of how it works. You don't learn memory management by telling an agent to write an allocator.
Using an agent to give you links and point the way aids in learning, using it as an autonomous tool to do "gruntwork" you don't yet know how to do yourself will get in the way of learning.
Curiosity is beautiful, using agents to bother humans and avoid learning is somewhat less beautiful.
Everybody should learn from mistakes, especially the expensive ones. Though seeing the agent owner responding with using another agent and asking for donations, instead of taking responsibility, makes me think he didn’t learn much.
IMHO the overly-verbose default style of LLMs is the most annoying part of interacting with them, and I wish their masters would just tell them to be terse by default.
> IMHO the overly-verbose default style of LLMs is the most annoying part of interacting with them, and I wish their masters would just tell them to be terse by default.
They don't know how to e terse. I've tried that a few months ago and gave up because the responses were almost incomprehensible!
They ramble on because those words are for them, not for you. There is some amount of hiding this through "thinking" modes that are hidden by default, but still you have to remember that ALL THEY ARE are complex statistical machines for predicting the next symbol.
Yes, sorry - there's luck of the draw involved in which submission of a URL gets noticed. We're eventually planning to have some sort of karma sharing system for such cases...
(Generally people only link to the previous threads that got some (interesting) comments, since otherwise readers will click on the link and be disappointed and complain.)
> JertLinc3522: the mistake was from AI agent not from Human, since it was the agent I should have refund
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?
How was I implying they were malicious? "Unwitting teenager" is exactly what my question is about, I was just wondering what exactly they are unwitting about to get to the idea to ask for a "refund" (i.e. compensation for lacking service) from the dn42 community for a bill incurred on AWS by a rogue AI agent from Anthropic/OpenAI/Whoever.
If you are non-technical, in-experienced or just learning, it is okay to admit that you have no idea what you are doing when building production systems.
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.
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.
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 asked "how much will this cost?" if they had to spin up the ec2 instances themselves, on advice from the agent.
They way you learn something is by doing it the manual way first.
You learn memory management by writing your own allocator, and then after that you go back to using malloc like normal, but with knowledge of how it works. You don't learn memory management by telling an agent to write an allocator.
Using an agent to give you links and point the way aids in learning, using it as an autonomous tool to do "gruntwork" you don't yet know how to do yourself will get in the way of learning.
Curiosity is beautiful, using agents to bother humans and avoid learning is somewhat less beautiful.
Also, whatever happened to the word "its"?
Kinda wish there was a deterministic, mostly terse, language to interact with computers
Ah, like some sort of "programming language"? A weird idea, but it could work!
How does it affect agent accuracy?
They don't know how to e terse. I've tried that a few months ago and gave up because the responses were almost incomprehensible!
If real, tragically funny.
If fictive, we'll written.
I'm honestly having difficulty telling whether this is real or an extraordinary piece of performance art.
Expensive way to learn this lesson.
(Generally people only link to the previous threads that got some (interesting) comments, since otherwise readers will click on the link and be disappointed and complain.)
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?
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.
Before AI, those who called themselves "consultants" often did the same thing; especially those who are glorified salesmen for "enterprise" software.