If you've ever been part of an organization that participated in something like Google Summer of Code, you know this isn't fiction. People really do behave like this.
Oh there are definitely people like that. Absolute inability to deal with consequences of their actions and ignorance at any harm their own actions caused
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.
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.
I learned very rapidly from my local BBS networks that some people incurred extraordinarily large long distance bills dialing out of region. Wouldn’t have learned that the easy way if someone hadn’t learned it the hard way first.
Honestly, kids (heck people below 23) shouldn't be allowed an AWS account. AWS also should have a strict cap on usage that's not "thousands of dollars". It's interesting they are yet to be regulated or sued for that. Having a web app where you can mistakenly (even without AI) click a button and get charged tens of thousands of dollars and only know that days later should have been unacceptable.
> 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
Perhaps people like this should be called "Bot Kiddies" or "Agent Kiddies" - in a similar way to "Script Kiddies" for 'hackers' using/doing stuff they don't quite understand
No. I don't know about the organization, but somewhere in this chain there is a flesh-and-blood human who deserves ridicule and or consequences, and furthermore -- discovering these people in situations like this is deeply important and must be done more.
If that's the case, I'm fairly confident that AWS will forgive the bill (I... have some experience with this), and the kid learns not to be a jackhole on the internet.
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.
It's tied to the design. With humans, you have a train of thought which you can choose to represent in various ways--or not reveal them at all. In contrast, LLMs are make-document-longer machines being run over and over on alternating revisions of the document. Insofar as one might try arguing they have a "train of thought", it's made of the words/tokens.
Everything they (don't-)emit is partly for the benefit of the next run, a clue or signpost (not-)present. Documents may be wordy as a form of concept-emphasis and consistent direction as opposed to a form of communication to the human.
So a terse effect may require a layer of indirection and trickery: There's a verbose document (you'll still be charged for the tokens) with portions that are not "acted out" to the end-user. Imagine a film-noir movie script, where AI Detective's "I know Mickey couldn't have done it because" monologue is hidden, versus their terse dialogue "Too early to say."
> 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?
Agents are a product, and AI companies really paint their products as friendly, productive and innocuous tools.
Some could claim they deceive some users and the general public into thinking they always do best, are always right, help mankind and can never ever create consequences
It would be interesting to see how AI consulted the user before it ordered VMs n AWS, which is the point between which the user would face consequences
Cloud is also marketed as something cheap, and I can understand that teens and starters can't expect to be able to spend for 6000$ of stuff without the parents or the bank checking
Computer education should start with that, but it doesn't as Microsoft, Google and Amazon would most likely lose a large part of their market if general public and managers who never go beyond the hype knew how much it cost
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.
The sad part is that the agent operator could probably easily have been allowed to join the network, if they had put in the work. Had they done so there would have been a great opportunity to learn and potentially find a community.
I'm still not sure what the point of having the bot do it. Pretend to be a security researcher?
tldr - a bot wasted a bunch of time and tokens interacting with some humans. The humans wasted even more time and effort trolling the bot. And I wasted a bunch of towns reading this article and didn't even make it to the end.
I've long held the belief that the true test of AI is comedy. If an LLM can truly create a novel, funny joke from scratch, then it could be considered creative. I always held that LLMs would never achieve this, as they are stochastic parrots.
> I have deployed five AWS m8g.12xlarge instances. Each instance provides:
> 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?
146 comments
[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 78.7 ms ] threadIf real, tragically funny.
If fictive, we'll written.
Expensive way to learn this lesson.
I find it hard to believe that anyone, no matter how dense, could come to this conclusion after this whole saga.
I'm honestly having difficulty telling whether this is real or an extraordinary piece of performance art.
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.
Wouldn't the contract be void for anyone underage anyway?
I learned very rapidly from my local BBS networks that some people incurred extraordinarily large long distance bills dialing out of region. Wouldn’t have learned that the easy way if someone hadn’t learned it the hard way first.
Perhaps people like this should be called "Bot Kiddies" or "Agent Kiddies" - in a similar way to "Script Kiddies" for 'hackers' using/doing stuff they don't quite understand
Nothing about this post ever gave me the smallest hint that this was any way related to a kid exploring computing world.
if this is the case, then I'd say that the best-case scenario happened. They had an expensive learning exercise. They won't forget these $2k.
Also, whatever happened to the word "its"?
Everything they (don't-)emit is partly for the benefit of the next run, a clue or signpost (not-)present. Documents may be wordy as a form of concept-emphasis and consistent direction as opposed to a form of communication to the human.
So a terse effect may require a layer of indirection and trickery: There's a verbose document (you'll still be charged for the tokens) with portions that are not "acted out" to the end-user. Imagine a film-noir movie script, where AI Detective's "I know Mickey couldn't have done it because" monologue is hidden, versus their terse dialogue "Too early to say."
That really makes me wonder: is it coming from
A) a general sense of entitlement
B) seeing the agent as a human-like and able to bear responsibility
C) not understanding that the dn42 community (which they're directing the request to), AWS (which is sending the bill) and whatever LLM provider is behind their agent, are completely separate entities?
e) low intelligence
Then they should ask the agent for the refund, since they claim it was at fault.
Some could claim they deceive some users and the general public into thinking they always do best, are always right, help mankind and can never ever create consequences
It would be interesting to see how AI consulted the user before it ordered VMs n AWS, which is the point between which the user would face consequences
Cloud is also marketed as something cheap, and I can understand that teens and starters can't expect to be able to spend for 6000$ of stuff without the parents or the bank checking
Computer education should start with that, but it doesn't as Microsoft, Google and Amazon would most likely lose a large part of their market if general public and managers who never go beyond the hype knew how much it cost
Funny times are ahead...
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.
Tally it up and send a donation request to the agent operator.
I'm still not sure what the point of having the bot do it. Pretend to be a security researcher?
Sure
Today, I stand corrected.
> 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?