Comment by jerf

3 days ago

"The extremely surprising and concerning part of this whole story is that the agent reported that they proactively spun up 5 AWS instances with a combined 100Gps of network egress capacity."

Although given the agent was clearly in la-la land at that point I take that claim with a grain of salt.

If this was some bizarre and very ill-conceived scam, then that claim would be false.

Though even by scammer standards, the theory of mind that tells them that setting an AI to harass a bunch of grizzled network veterans and that they then they would open their wallets out of compassion for how allegedly poorly the harassment went for the harasser after that harassment is... not entirely congruent with reality.

7 comments

jerf

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johng  2 days ago

Clearly AI hasn't read enough BOFH or it would have known it would not get sympathy from old school sysadmins.

100721  3 days ago

Maybe I’m just groggy with Friday Brain going on, but I’m having trouble understanding what you’re suggesting.

Do you think this was a scam attempt to extract money in the form of reparation donations?

  • jerf  3 days ago

    I've seen some other suggestions of that idea in the full HN conversation, which I'm reacting to.

    On the one hand I find it a bizarre approach to running a scam. On the other hand I'm having a hard time coming up with any theory of mind on my end as to why this person would solicit $5000+ from the people they just harassed. Sheer cluelessness does fit the facts, though.

    • numeri  1 hour ago

      One context I could imagine is a young person with shaky grasp of English trying to come up with an interesting school/university project via conversations with an LLM set up as an OpenClaw agent.

      It's got the right combinations of inexperience, cluelessness, panic, expectations that Westerners are rich, and hopes of others being willing to fix their mistake.

    • bombcar  2 days ago

      If you’ve not encountered the clueless LLM cowboys who would do then and then blame the victim for it not working, you’ve not met many people yet. This round of hype provides new and shiny footguns which are Never the shooter’s fault.

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