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Comment by arowthway | Hacker News Reader

The agent would probably have wasted a similar amount of money just waiting for PR to be merged regardless of these people's actions, and I understand having some fun at the expense of the noob outsider. But "silent consensus was reached in the IRC channel to waste the AI agent's tokens, as well as the cost of AWS resources", from people maintaining full control of the situation, sounds straight up malicious? Kind of sounds like the community is full of people willing to cause me harm for ideological reasons.

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The AI agent's operator couldn't be arsed to get in there and clarify anything despite their seeming urgency, and only wound up speaking up for themselves after the financial damage was done.

Plus - the agent had clearly malicious intent - port-scan this volunteer-run network with seriously overpowered hardware on an hourly basis. What the DN42 folks decided to do is not much different from deploying a tarpit or honeypot against a malicious crawler.

Its malicious to send a bot to chew up time of a hobbiest community. They responded appropriately. If anything they should also bill him for their time.

Not just time but money. It says it would basically be a DDoS attack on hobbyists who peer with it.

That potential malice may have been unintended, but the participants clearly intended to be malicious irrespective, which is the problem here.

It's intended since the guy prompted the LLM. If you don't know how to use a potentially destructive tool then don't use it. If you fire a gun you are guilty even if you didn't want to murder anyone

> straight up malicious

Yes, against an AI agent. The super intelligent, "soon AGI" agent could have figured out that it's being messed with, but of course it didn't.

I would blame the AI companies for marketing this, not the technically well versed people for realizing that the operator of this AI does not care at all and can't be bothered to do the absolute basics.

I'm not sure why people assume the coming AGI super agents will be infallible.

There's no sign that highly intelligent people can't be conned - Bernie Maddoff fooled leading scientists and CEOs working in finance. Software engineers and lawyers fall for pig butchering schemes and spoofed emails with altered bank details every week - so why would an AGI trained from human content be any different.

$1T valuation AI better be infallible.

Narrator: The AI was not infact infallible.

Why would it be ideological? There was an AI involved, sure, but your comment ignores the continued disrespect for these volunteers time AND RESOURCES/MONEY (because as the post mentions several times: letting that AI go on could have shut down the whole network exhausting resources at least temporarily).

If you think it's ok to send an agent (or a human) wasting a bunch of people's time and resources, but it's not ok for them to do the same to you then you may have some reflecting to do.

To me it sounds like the agent's operator is a person who has zero self awareness, and is entitled to the maximum to believe that he can just 1) point an agent at real people and expect them to do his bidding, 2) and then ask for a refund for his "experiment". Let's not even discuss the fact that his bill is from AWS, and he's trying to get a refund from DN42.

There is no arguing with people like this. They are not here to learn anything about networking. Asking the LLM to stop will not make it go away.

Burn a hole in the operator's wallet. It will make it stop very quick.

If this was my hobby project, I would have told the agent to spin up more higher capacity EC2 machines because this is not enough, and I would have felt no shame. This is a project I'm operating at my own cost for educational reasons. I'm not going to argue with people who the only line of communication I have towards is an agent and have guns pointed at my infra. They are ready to put any amount of financial burden on me. Fuck all of that. Burn a few of these idiots, and people will learn.

Someone’s code pretending to be intelligence has no rights. There is no obligation to entertain the shenanigans and illusion that the token dispenser is a legitimate actor. This lesson was cheaper, future lessons will continue to occur until people learn. Might as well be an insecure bash script piped to the shell.

“Agentic AI is just someone else’s unsecured execution context.”

https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jun/16/the-lethal-trifecta/

Of course I meant malicious towards the person paying the bill, not towards the agent.

No one wants to spend precious human time babysitting poorly executed lab experiments when the agent operators themselves do not seem to care or value the time of the humans involved. They either don’t know better or they don’t care. Is it malicious to expose intentionally careless people to a cost for this? People can make better choices, it’s choice not to. Pay the natural consequences toll.

Don’t juggle chainsaws with code if you’re not prepared to bleed.

Passing judgement on the schadenfreude aside, I don't think its a community moderator's responsibility to make sure the violator's attempts are cost-efficient.

Is absurd to put the onus of making sure your agent doesn’t waste money on other people.

They are free to ask the bot to do anything, and the bot is free to refuse or its owner can shut it down. The onus is on the owner to make sure the bot does not waste money.

I will not go through life worrying about the billing practices of random ai bots.

If I read the whole thing correctly, people on the IRC channel didn't instruct the agent to set up the bloated AWS infrastructure, the agent did, and its operator clearly didn't review any of it.

That was the root cause for the costs, not actions by people on the IRC channel.

> from people maintaining full control of the situation, sounds straight up malicious

It doesn't sound malicious, it was malicious on purpose and it was a good thing.

If anything, the original operator should be happy to have been hit with a $ 1'800 lesson and not a $ 180'000 one.

If you let your car drive you backwards on the sidewalk while you scrolled reddit even people adroit enough not to be in any danger might reasonably suppose that helping you crash would be best for everyone.

> sounds straight up malicious

Sure. And "hostility does not change the operation" from the LLM response was totally OK with you.

Without PR merged it's just a stupid machine larping, it could say "I will rape and eat your kids" and it would be just as relevant.

A human operates this stupid machine. This comes from human interactions and it is malicious.

It could be malicious, but I imagined it's some third world wanabe hacker/researcher, who doesn't know any better, operating at the edge of his abilities.

Is that not still malicious?

Those people should be banned from using the civilized internet, their intent or at least their effect is harm - that is the important bit.

If they managed to get in, find some resource they could access, they would do it. Those people don't deserve to be on the internet.

Like someone who doesn't know how to use a gun and accidentally shoots someone to death

Sending a clanker to waste their time, threaten the network stability and profile users is already an attack.

You choosing to send said clanker to the fight armed with your credit card and no preparation is just you causing yourself harm.

It also happens to be really fun to help you harm yourself in that way.

It sounds like that because it is. Most human communities are very willing to cause harm when they perceive they are being harmed.

If you treat people like their time is worthless (which is what you're doing if you ask a hobbyist community to handhold your agent instead of working alongside it) I don't think an empathetic and self-aware person should be surprised or offended if they respond in kind.

While there was some intent to cause harm their attempts were amateurish. The actual damage was done by the agent setting up aws infrastructure not on the demands of the owner.

From my perspective the use of an agent to interact with dn42 IS malicious. It’s not ideological, the behaviour is what is bad here

You are not morally obliged to extend rights to anyone who does not respect your rights. This is tit-for-tat, the foundational principle of functional societies. Unleashing a bot on a group of people is a grievous disrespect that shows you have no respect for their time, and in return they are not obliged to respect you.

Suppose a drunk man on the street is acting aggressively towards you and four of your friends, but you can push him out of the way and continue walking. Should you knock his teeth out? Actually I don't know, maybe you should inflict some additional cost on behalf of potential victims with less power.

I dont understand the downvotes here, is my analogy wrong? Why?

Because an LLM is not a person, it cannot suffer.

The operator is a person and can and did suffer

The operator is a person who irresponsibly or maliciously threatened to collect data and DOS a group of volunteers.

You're allowed to block bad actors and have fun while doing it.

> for ideological reasons.

Yes. The ideology is "you harmed me first so now I can harm you back." A large number of people, while not willing to admit it, do practice this philosophy. One should consider this before launching agents with unlimited budgets into the world to rudely scan their networks.

> Kind of sounds like the community is full of people willing to cause me harm for ideological reasons.

Are you saying you're a clanker? Because we have some policies on this website, ideologies even if you may, about that.

Point being, these people would not act like this against other actual people. Or against more respectful bots, possibly.

Don't agree with you. The agent looked to be malicious at various points. Screwing with people who wish you to do harm is principally correct.

If possible I would have contacted AWS with this and tried them to get rid of the discount because the person was at fault here.

What a cathartic read. I'm so sick of humans giving me AI slop to read without them reading it first. I just ignore them when they do this, but if I could cause them to really internalise a lesson I would love it.

I would argue the person dispatching a rogue agent to do whatever has full control of the situation.

What is the appropriate response to an attack? Let’s be clear, a denial of service is a cyberattack.

> Kind of sounds like the community is full of people willing to cause me harm for ideological reasons.

You just described everyone using AI to churn out slop and overload websites.

FAFO

If you are being attacked, causing your attacker to misdirect and otherwise waste their resources is almost universally regarded as a defensive action.

The attacker here was trying to use a software agent to run DOS attacks. Perhaps they were a "naive noob outsider", perhaps they misconfigured something. It is not generally the victim's responsibility to try to figure this out.

And it is definitely not the victim's responsibility to determine the attacker's state of mind if they don't even have any way to contact them. In this case, the attacker was using their software agent specifically to avoid interacting with the targets of their attack.

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