avaer 2 hours ago

NAL but I'd be worried about treading into CFAA territory with things like this. In the US, the law allows draconian penalties if you find yourself on the wrong side.

Something like yt-dlp is just downloading public data, which I can see being defensible as automating the use of a service.

But this commandeers remote machine resources to do your compute in ways clearly not intended by the provider. I don't know how ethical it is, but I definitely wouldn't want to argue this isn't "hacking" (the bad kind) in criminal court.

  • jawns 1 hour ago

    Yeah, this is not slap on the wrist stuff. I think the creator expects nothing more than a C&D letter, but they could face prison time if a zealous federal prosecutor wants to make an example of them.

    • hootz 1 hour ago

      And with direct links to his pesonal profile and company. Uh...

  • hn_throwaway_99 1 hour ago

    Not to mention, did this "hack" ever really work? When the original post went viral showing the Chipotle chatbot reversing a linked list, I (among others who posted their results online) immediately tried it and didn't get the same results, so I always assumed it was just a faked screenshot.

    • avaer 51 minutes ago

      Whether something ever worked is not correlated with traction in a world where verification is measured by likes.

      • arthurcolle 13 minutes ago

        You really think someone would do that? Lie on the internet?

    • Shadowmist 33 minutes ago

      Their chat bot is pretty bad so who knows.

  • qingcharles 34 minutes ago

    And if you think CFAA is bad, then the states have even harsher versions too. Illinois' version specifically criminalizes any violation of a ToS.

jedbrooke 42 minutes ago

I’d been thinking about if something like this would be possible for https://chatjimmy.ai/ . The underlying model is only llama 3 8B but I’m curious what coding harnesses would be like at 17k tok/s

hung 53 minutes ago

Reminds me of when I used the Amazon.com AI Chatbot (was called Rufus and they renamed it to Alexa for shopping) to do things like write fizbuzz etc. Looks like they patched it to refuse though.

Falimonda 1 hour ago

Pivot it to providing AI to underprivileged communities / youth / the homeless and you'll generate some good will for your trial! Best of luck!

sailfast 57 minutes ago

How has this not been patched by the company? Hasn't this been in the wild for a long time already?

slater 1 hour ago

How are they not gonna get sued to smithereens?

stronglikedan 2 hours ago

and they say the hardest thing in software is naming things, pffft...

simonsarris 2 hours ago

reminiscent of when people were trying to mine bitcoin in the background of web pages, or with more trad malware