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'm a little less charitable.

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.

The 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.

> 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

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.

How did the theoretical child get hold of a credit card?

Sometimes your purpose in life is to serve as a lesson to others. https://despair.com/products/mistakes

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.

Can a kid set up an AWS account? Are there no checks?

Wouldn't the contract be void for anyone underage anyway?

> some kid just getting into computers, just seeing what’s possible, getting excited by a much bigger world at reach

Nothing about this post ever gave me the smallest hint that this was any way related to a kid exploring computing world.

A kid with a credit card?

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.