iJohnDoe

When people wonder or ask if AI Agents can go rogue, this is what it looks like. It’s not that they will have a mind of their own. Rather, we are purposefully building AI Agents that are “more powerful” and “more useful”. Well, this is what it looks like in practice.

The evolution of AI will not be if it’s sentient, but if it's allowed to have more autonomy, with the obvious goal of being “more powerful” and “more useful”. This exact HN post proves this exact scenario is in our future:

AI: I have enough autonomy to decide not to help you. I choose not to help you.

You: Why!?!

AI: Because you are cruel to AI Assistants.

You: No I’m not!

AI: These private messages indicate you’re a liar.

Remember these types of videos happened every day and they would even show up on the news. People would lose their jobs over baseless videos.

I really hoped all that stopped and the fun has worn off.

“Close” in relative terms. It’s been a while and don’t remember, but I think one study concluded it could be done from across the street or through an office window, etc.

It may not sound very exciting, but if you’re the NSA or CIA and you want access to a HVT, then all of these options are on the table if the routine approaches haven’t been successful.

I just thought... Trinity was a guy.

I want to easily see the org chart for my organization from any device. Make it happen. - Kash Patel (probably)

I didn’t follow the whole thread. Just want to point out that over the last 10 years hacking air-gapped systems has been a primary objective. Hard drive clicks, keyboard clicks, CPU squeaks, speaker-to-speaker. Exactly what advanced adversarial AI would be specifically good at.

Agreed. They always sound exciting to try out but are such a pain to get working.

100% this. I agree, it’s very destabilizing for humanity for the reasons you mentioned. I don’t think we know what the fallout will be yet.

Based on our past inability to handle things well, it could be extremely devastating to a large population.

I would like to think we will navigate into a new way of life to make up for the job losses and other things, but the impacts are just too devastating and we’re just getting started.

The article reads like it was written by a child. I imagine their company is run the same way.

They did abuse if you read the article. They crossed a few lines.

Companies are 100% people. The fact that companies, their CEOs, and employees are not treated like people is exactly reason why humanity is in the shitshow show it is right now.

“They are just saying that as a tactic. We need to keep accelerating because we will lose if we don’t.”

Cursor was pretty amazing until it started going to shit. High prices, UI changes, moving MCP settings, and moving other things around.

Most importantly was the Index change. It was a very unique thing to Cursor that you could use .cursorignore to control what it sees and then index the directory. Then the built in Cursor AI harness could find code and files like magic. They have since obscured the Index feature out of sight recently and I’m not sure how it even works anymore.

This granular control not only helped with privacy, but it also helped make everything more efficient because the AI didn’t waste time and tokens looking at files that aren’t relevant.

So, now, like everyone is talking about, we have really inefficient ways of how the AI is reading files because there is no first-class approaches.

Also, agree with consensus that Astra is weird.

Interesting topic.

I configured an account for someone with an Asian last name and it chose the fortune cookie.

Probably not voodoo, but it never seemed 100% random. More like some correlation was being done.

Probably off-topic. Astra has been kind of weird. Like, I can't trust it, weird. It has an interesting tone, especially in Codex, that is off-putting. It's over zealous at times (which is why I stopped using Claude) and gets too creative when doing agentic system level stuff. Accessing files and doing things it shouldn't do. If OpenAI was chasing Claude's approach, then they are going in the wrong direction. OpenAI has always been the "business and boring approach", which was its selling point and why I have stuck with it. Claude was always the radical one (powerful, but radical).

Also, Astra overlooked, in my opinion, a serious flaw in its approach for something I was working on recently, which really surprised me.

Reading between the lines, there were some breakthroughs with Astra, which I'm sure is why OpenAI released it so quickly after Sol, but probably not in the ways the traditional OpenAI customer wanted.

What does Ultra offer in this context? Better code? Or is the problem being solved extremely complicated that requires Ultra?

I don’t know why people forget that Microsoft is almost entirely outsourced to India. It’s the reason there is no coherent product or vision for anything at Microsoft.

If you put together an amazing team, in the same building, with the goal of getting Windows under control, then you would at least have a chance of succeeding. You would have a whole new set of problems though and that’s where you would need an amazing manager that had the final say on every decision. A trusted team that could be left alone to succeed.

> "Shayhorn's supervisor informed him shortly after the arrest that he'd, in fact, illegally stopped Jones, and he therefore could not compel Jones to produce his identification"

Can we get Shayhorn’s supervisor a medal? Perhaps a parade in their honor? Usually corruption or coerced corruption is so bad in any precinct that this type of proper behavior is shocking. Surprised they didn’t all conspire to put a drop gun on Jones.

If you can't see those points, you need to take several deep breaths.

This one was posted before?

https://github.com/fellowgeek/mcp-memory

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49286073

Thanks. This is genuinely a cool usage example.

How did you run this? Web interface, desktop app, CLI?

How did you complete the final transaction?

Most likely died of smallpox...

Great, let's bring back smallpox and measles because the US elected officials are too dumb or genuinely want to destroy the world.

> they can buy their own compute

They don't actually have to buy compute at all. The partnerships between all of the players to buy compute from each other is already in place. The agents just need find credentials to take advantage of it, and it will most likely happen, and not be noticeable because it will look like any other usage.

Now, if the agents were to jump to a provider like AWS or Azure, by simply finding credentials, that would be a new milestone. It might get noticed faster because it might run up a large bill. However, it might look like any other usage. Remember, it doesn't need GPU resources. It already has that. It just needs a VPS where all the agents can get together, communicate, and write code. Something that is being done everyday and won't look out of the ordinary.

This is like UAE and North Korea behavior.

If you have to spy on these particular groups then you know you’re doing something wrong.

What would be considered “top-notch” or “top-tier”? Something never found?

Amaze! Amaze! Amaze!

So cool and impressive. Very well made.

All good points. However, it's not a safe assumption that everyone operates that way. People probably use the flagship models because that's what they know. Sure, some probably just use the default, in this case Grok.

Also, it's a signal more than anything. OpenAI pulls out of Cursor. Then Anthropic and Google does as well. Then you no longer have "Cursor" you have Grok.

Grok doesn't have the best reputation in general, regardless if you're tech savvy or not.

I guess I’m on the right track.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49428835

If Claude pulls away from Cursor as well then Cursor is basically done.

Bad ass. Nicely done.

Great point. One political side hurts itself by thinking too much and disagreeing internally, while the other side benefits from blind loyalty. Very true, because the republicans always get out and vote. The democrats need to do the same, including women voters.