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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 re
by mik3y 4mo ago
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.
- V__ 4mo agoCan a kid set up an AWS account? Are there no checks? Wouldn't the contract be void for anyone underage anyway?
- l23k4 4mo ago> Can a kid set up an AWS account? Yes > Are there no checks? No >Wouldn't the contract be void for anyone underage anyway? Typically not
- pbhjpbhj 4mo agoPresumably companies can't enforce debts against children [who are under the age of criminal liability, which is under-10 in UK].
- lxgr 4mo agoCould they enforce them against their legal guardians (under the theory that they have neglected their duty to supervise their children appropriately) though? I think this is a thing in at least some jurisdictions.
- matips 4mo agoIn Poland legal guardians are responsible for neglects in guarding child. What is "proper custody" depends on child age. Parent cannot close child in basement, it is expected for child to have freedom appropriate to is age. I doubt that AWS could justify that part of proper child custody is to watch what child do with newest AI feature dedicated for processional IT. AWS neglected proper verification of user age.
- V__ 4mo agoI knew that in Germany contracts with minors are voidable. After some checking they apparently are voidable in the U.S. as well: > Contracts with minors are voidable at the minor's discretion but exceptions exist, such as contracts for necessities (e.g., food, health, and transportation). [1] https://www.upcounsel.com/minors-and-contracts https://www.upcounsel.com/minors-and-contracts
- fc417fc802 4mo agoIf a child goes through the checkout at the grocery store with cash, can the parent march in and demand a refund because "he's underage so the contract is void"? A credit card was used. Why should aws care about the details? (Other than the potential for the card to be stolen ofc.)
- dannyw 4mo agoObviously the specifics vary by jurisdiction, but usually contracts that are 'necessary' (e.g. grocery store purchases) or beneficial to the minor (e.g. an employment agreement) cannot be voided simply because someone is under 18. The further you go away from this line, e.g. a mortgage, the more likely a court of law would void the contract. As with many things in law, the specifics (if it makes to trial) is case-by-case and "it depends"; with settlement being generally based on a party's estimated chances of succeeding/costs should it go to trial.
- brazzy 4mo ago> If a child goes through the checkout at the grocery store with cash, can the parent march in and demand a refund because "he's underage so the contract is void"? Depends on the jurisdiction, of course. But for example in German law, the contract is not void exactly because and only if it was about daily necessities of low value - the law does, in fact, care very literally and explicitly about those details. So it's completely unfit as an example to generalize, and the contract with AWS would in fact be void. Their problem if they don't verify users' identities and age sufficiently - and it's almost certainly a deliberate business decision not to do that in order to reduce friction. and occasionally write off an unenforceable bill as cost of doing business.
- fc417fc802 4mo agoWell fair enough, although I find that rather surprising. If I understand you correctly selling anything more expensive than cheap food to a child carries a high degree of risk in Germany. Then again, maybe making it impossible for a child to pawn expensive items for cash isn't such a bad idea. At least there shouldn't be any loopholes given the way Germany went about it.
- Overpower0416 4mo agoEverybody 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.
- gnulinux 4mo agoNot only that, but they said "next time better model needed" as if that was their problem and not giving an AI agent a blank check... I mean AWS account access.
- TheDong 4mo agoI'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.
- recursivecaveat 4mo agoYeah I'm less sympathetic when you are bothering other humans by spamming them and asking them to do legwork for you.
- yvdriess 4mo agoHanging out in programming language IRC channels (quakenet shoutout) makes you realize pretty quickly why experts in said channels and newsgroups are such irritable grumps whenever someone asks a question that smells like homework assignment. I also grew to understand the value of people digging deeper into the underlying issue, instead of just answering "how do you do X in Y". The usual reaction was "I don't want to explain to you why I want to do it like this. Just tell me how to do this!"
- fragmede 4mo agoare they less grumpy now that chat.com will answer those questions without bothering them?
- Schlagbohrer 4mo agoHow did the theoretical child get hold of a credit card?
- victorbjorklund 4mo agoBecause no 16 year old kid ever got to buy anything on a card before.
- l23k4 4mo agoWhy would a 16 year old not use their own card?
- well_ackshually 4mo agoBecause 16 years old do not have a card with no spending limits, and with very low online spending limits. Most of those cards are even just for withdrawing
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- TheDong 4mo agoSpending limits don't particularly matter here. AWS doesn't check if your credit card will be able to handle a $5k charge before letting you rack that up, and in fact AWS doesn't support setting any spending limit. You just have to put in any valid credit card at all when you sign up, use AWS, and at the end of the month you'll have a bill. At no point does your credit card limit or a spending limit enter into things.
- michaelmrose 4mo agoAnd again kids don't have credit cards
- 4mo ago
- altairprime 4mo agoSometimes your purpose in life is to serve as a lesson to others. https://despair.com/products/mistakes 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.
- themafia 4mo agoThere was often a little table at the front of the white pages which would help you work out what the rate would be for any particular long distance call. In the Midwest you could get relatively cheap rates to BBSes several states away, as long as you were up at 2am.
- altairprime 4mo agoWe couldn’t afford that and also the second phone line for my endless hours of modem, so I took local-only instead of remote-occasionally.
- ErroneousBosh 4mo agoSomeone at work used the phrase "he's a case study waiting to happen" about on of their colleagues a while back, and that has stayed with me.
- csomar 4mo agoHonestly, 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.
- stnikolauswagne 4mo agoIm kind of struggling with this logic, because a conscious choice was made to engage with AWS, AWS having opaque billing and the ability to provide a huge amount of compute (even at high cost) at the click of a button should be known to anyone who did his research on providers. In my mind I could see a true tradeoff to removing the ability to do this. If I'm in a critical situtaion where, say, my service is on the cusp of failing because my revenue 100xed in a short while I know I could just go to AWS, put in some data and buy enough compute to survive as a business.
- csomar 4mo agoAnyone can make mistakes at some points and it's not like AWS UI/offerings make it any less confusing.
- dannyw 4mo agoI couldn't disagree more. I was playing around with AWS when I was probably 14 years old, with a credit card from my parents with consent, and a strict budget and the understanding that if I mess up and overspend, I'm getting disciplined. I learned a lot of stuff about networking, how AWS works (VPCs, IAM, CloudWatch, etc) from trial and error, and hobby projects like personal websites (free tier), hosting a Minecraft server, etc. Being too overprotective can have negative consequences on folks who are responsible. One of the things I love about the technology and internet communities, etc is that you're mostly judged based on how you act and behave; not your age or other visible characteristics.
- csomar 4mo ago
- helsinkiandrew 4mo ago> 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
- Melkman 4mo agoI vote for Slop Kiddies or Vibe Kiddies. And yes, I think most of them are unconsciously incompetent for the task they are trying to execute. I've seen LLM being compared to calculators and I agree. They are great time savers for people who know what they do and how to achieve their goal. They even make previously impossible tasks possible. But if you don't know what is needed for a task you will be struggling to accomplish it.
- simoncion 4mo ago"Slop Kiddies" is good. That lets us use the "skiddies" contraction for both the "script" and "slop" kind of kiddie.
- helsinkiandrew 4mo agoSlop Jockeys? or would that be better for people passing off AI content as their own?
- RetroTechie 4mo agoBoth of those would do. "Slop Kiddie" highlights the pile of crap / nuisance produced. "Vibe Kiddie" highlights how it came about, and could be used in cases where actually a brilliant result came out. "Hey, this vibe kiddie just proved some long-standing math conjecture!".
- IshKebab 4mo agoA kid with a credit card?
- mike_hock 4mo agoHave you seen Home Alone 2?
- epolanski 4mo ago> 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.
- ZeWaka 4mo agoEspecially the part where they're asking for Ethereum.
- sgjohnson 4mo ago> 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 if this is the case, then I'd say that the best-case scenario happened. They had an expensive learning exercise. They won't forget these $2k.
- throwthrowuknow 4mo agoSounds as though they may be in China so the lesson is a bit more expensive.
- 20k 4mo agoA kid with $4k to burn on a credit card though? A lot of things would have had to go wrong for this to be a child
- loloquwowndueo 4mo agoI routinely see “please refund this infrastructure bill I racked up unexpectedly, I used my dad’s card and he’s going to kill me” requests.
- OJFord 4mo agoChildren are the original dangerous-to-leave-unsupervised/guardrailed agents.
- jrm4 4mo agoNo. I don't know about the organization, but somewhere in this chain there is a flesh-and-blood human who deserves ridicule and or consequences, and furthermore -- discovering these people in situations like this is deeply important and must be done more.
- QuinnyPig 4mo agoIf that's the case, I'm fairly confident that AWS will forgive the bill (I... have some experience with this), and the kid learns not to be a jackhole on the internet.