alt Hacker NewsI just want to know why people do stupid things like this. Does he think that he's providing something of value? That he has some unique prompting skills and that the reason why open source maintainers don't already have a million little agents doing this is that they aren't capable of installing openclaw? Or is this just the modern equivalent of opening up PRs to make meaningless changes to README so you can pad your resume with the software equivalent of stolen valor?
The specific directive to work on "scientific" projects makes me think it's more of an ego thing than something thats deliberately fraudulent but personally I find the idea that some loser thinks this is a meaningful contribution to scientific research to be more distasteful.
BTW I highly recommend the "lectures" section of the site for a good laugh. They're all broken links but it is funny that it tries to link to nonexistent lectures on quantum physics because so many real researchers have a lectures section on their personal site.
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Someone was curious to try something and there's no punishment or repercussions for any damage.
You could say it's a Hacker just Hacking, now it's News.
Somewhere else it was pointed out its a crypto bro. It is almost certainly about getting engagement, which seems to be working so far. Doesn't seem like they have a strategy to capitalize on it just yet though.
> I just want to know why people do stupid things like this. Does he think that he's providing something of value?
This is a good question. If you go to your settings on your hn account and set “showdead” to “yes” you’ll see that there are dozens of people who are making bots who post inane garbage to HN comment threads for some reason. The vast majority end up being detected and killed off, but since the moltbook thing kicked off it’s really gone into hyperdrive.
It definitely strains my faith in humanity to see how many people are happy to say “here’s something cool. I wonder what it would be like if I ruined it a bit.”