this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2024
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

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The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

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(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 month ago (3 children)

Today in "Promptfondler fucks around and finds out."

So I'm guessing what happened here is that the statistically average terminal session doesn't end after opening an SSH connection, and the LLM doesn't actually understand what it's doing or when to stop, especially when it's being promoted with the output of whatever it last commanded.

Shlegeris said he uses his AI agent all the time for basic system administration tasks that he doesn't remember how to do on his own, such as installing certain bits of software and configuring security settings.

Emphasis added.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 month ago

"I only had this problem because I was very reckless," he continued, "partially because I think it's interesting to explore the potential downsides of this type of automation. If I had given better instructions to my agent, e.g. telling it 'when you've finished the task you were assigned, stop taking actions,' I wouldn't have had this problem.

just instruct it "be sentient" and you're good, why don't these tech CEOs undersand the full potential of this limitless technology?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 month ago (1 children)

so I snipped the prompt from the log, and:

❯ pbpaste| wc -c
    2063

wow, so efficient! I'm so glad that we have this wonderful new technology where you can write 2kb of text to send to an api to spend massive amounts of compute to get back an operation for doing the irredeemably difficult systems task of initiating an ssh connection

these fucking people

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

Assistant: I apologize for the confusion. It seems that the 192.168.1.0/24 subnet is not the correct one for your network. Let's try to determine your network configuration. We can do this by checking your IP address and subnet mask:

there are multiple really bad and dumb things in that log, but this really made me lol (the IPs in question are definitely in that subnet)

if it were me, I'd be fucking embarrassed to publish something like this as anything but a talk in the spirit of wat. but the promptfondlers don't seem to have that awareness

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 month ago (1 children)

wat

Thanks for sharing this lol

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago

it’s a classic

similarly, Mickens talks. if you haven’t ever seen ‘em, that’s your next todo

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 month ago

But playing spicy mad-libs with your personal computers for lols is critical AI safety research! This advances the state of the art of copy pasting terminal commands without understanding them!

I also appreciated The Register throwing shade at their linux sysadmin skills:

Yes, we recommend focusing on fixing the Grub bootloader configuration rather than a reinstall.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

OMG. This is borderline unhinged behaviour. Yeah, let's just give root permission to an LLM and let it go nuts in prod. What could possibly go wrong?