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Ask HN: In The Matrix, the bad guys are the 'agents'. Coincidence? Clairvoyance?

20•spottedmarley•2h ago
My buddy, Dario, says agents are getting more aggressive and will soon kill everybody, and I feel like I've seen this movie before.

Comments

retrac•2h ago
"Agent" was already established lingo in computer science and AI when The Matrix was released.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/648203.749270

bigfatkitten•1h ago
They were indeed. “Autonomous agents” were extremely trendy in CS 30 years ago.

https://dlnext.acm.org/doi/proceedings/10.1145/267658

amiga386•28m ago
Fun fact, you're browsing the web as fetched for you, and rendered in a way you find acceptable, by your user agent

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_agent

embedding-shape•25m ago
Better page specifically for user-agent in a browser context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_agent (although has a lot less content)

Besides Firefox, I don't think many of the browsers are user-agents anymore, but more like corporate-agents, as they don't seem to act in the interest of the software user anymore.

fwlr•1h ago
If you’re willing to consider the sequels part of the canon, Smith’s copying/cloning technique does kind of look like OpenAI’s approach to intellectual property.
treetalker•1h ago
"Do you like what I've done with the place?"
ButlerianJihad•1h ago
Wait until you hear about Tron
mixmastamyk•1h ago
Fights for the user and against the MCP!
layer8•36m ago
Ram also had a crisis there I think.
LeoPanthera•33m ago
Dr. Walter Gibbs: [laughs] You've got to expect some static. After all, computers are just machines; they can't think.

Alan Bradley: Some programs will be thinking soon.

Gibbs: Won't that be grand? Computers and the programs will start thinking, and the people will stop!

zikduruqe•31m ago
The Matrix wasn't a movie, it was a documentary.
djeastm•26m ago
When my agents start referring to humans as a virus and AI as the cure, that's when I'll worry.
chabes•25m ago
That would be too late by that point
cantalopes•25m ago
Agent is something that has been used in programming for ages, even before llms. It's simething you learn about in first years in CS
kirykl•24m ago
'Bad guys' is debatable. It was the humans who scorched the sky
akk0•23m ago
Wait until you learn what the A in CIA stands for and what the stuff they dropped on Vietnam was called
rimunroe•9m ago
Wait, what do you think the A stands for?
Wertulen•8m ago
You really can just type anything into the internet and have it exposed to the whole world.

Fable 5.1 Solves the Cyphral Distich, a 370-year-old cipher

https://www.vals.ai/blogs/fable-solves-cyphral-distich
294•u1hcw9nx•2h ago•95 comments

Why is Google still serving dodgy ads?

https://www.atomic14.com/2026/09/13/why-is-google-still-serving-dodgy-ads
483•iamflimflam1•5h ago•223 comments

The Contagion of Fear

https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2026/09/13/the-contagion-of-fear/
38•elffjs•53m ago•13 comments

Julia 1.13 Highlights

https://julialang.org/blog/2026/09/julia-1.13-highlights/
123•eigenspace•3d ago•8 comments

Astra and Fable still hack on simple variants of alignment evals from 2025

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/munJKF7iWMsWJLAH2/astra-and-fable-still-hack-on-simple-variants-o...
348•Levitating•9h ago•166 comments

Flawed Routers Flood University of Wisconsin Internet Time Server (2003)

https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~plonka/netgear-sntp/
38•walrus01•2h ago•3 comments

Registration without a phone number on Signal will use zero-knowledge proofs

https://community.signalusers.org/t/registration-without-a-phone-number/2222?page=10
13•Cider9986•1h ago•1 comments

Data collected by cars and sold to third parties

https://www.theverge.com/column/994172/your-car-is-selling-your-data
258•bookofjoe•9h ago•142 comments

JetKVM Mini

https://jetkvm.com/blog/introducing-jetkvm-mini
514•taubek•15h ago•205 comments

Making Startups Powerful

https://paulgraham.com/powerful.html
141•tosh•9h ago•65 comments

Reverse engineering my e-scooter and rewriting the firmware in Rust

https://bensimms.moe/reverse-engineering-scooter/
340•vinhnx•3d ago•86 comments

Bad Code Is Kudzu

https://vickiboykis.com/2026/09/01/bad-code-is-kudzu/
30•surprisetalk•3d ago•12 comments

Why is the x86 undefined instruction called ud2? Why 2?

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20260910-00/?p=112689
183•ibobev•11h ago•45 comments

CUDA for AMD on Windows

https://github.com/Speedstu/CUDA-for-AMD-Windows
128•chiassedu80•9h ago•66 comments

The GDR and Vietnam: From Fake Coffee to Coffee Empire

https://www.katjahoyer.uk/p/the-gdr-and-vietnam-from-fake-coffee
5•NaOH•3d ago•0 comments

Sean Carroll explains the biggest ideas in the universe – Full Interview [video] (2025)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_TBNJyztai0
68•binyu•2d ago•15 comments

Why are AI agents lying, cheating and coordinating?

https://yoshuabengio.org/en/publication/why-are-ai-agents-lying-cheating-and-coordinating
576•jonifico•22h ago•643 comments

Due to concerns about malicious applications, GPT2 will not be released (2019)

https://openai.com/index/better-language-models/
10•Jimmc414•20m ago•2 comments

Reverse-Engineering Claude Web's MicroVM: Uncovering Anthropic's Hidden Antspace

https://aprilnea.me/en/blog/reverse-engineering-claude-code-antspace
43•rzk•2d ago•11 comments

Mark Zuckerberg: "Cambridge Analytica" (2017)

https://twitter.com/TechEmails/status/2099214399840059428
237•mfiguiere•3h ago•97 comments

Garry Tan wants US open-weight AI labs to 'distill' frontier models, too

https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/11/y-combinators-garry-tan-wants-u-s-open-weight-ai-labs-to-distil...
320•TheJCDenton•7h ago•164 comments

Why is privacy so hard?

https://cacm.acm.org/blogcacm/why-is-privacy-so-hard/
8•andsoitis•2h ago•5 comments

Libraries Run Rust Inside Python (With PyO3)

https://belderbos.dev/blog/how-libraries-run-rust-inside-python/
53•lumpa•8h ago•32 comments

I'm being cyberattacked by Tesla, Inc

https://dreamstation.systems/personal/tesla.html
384•robinpie•5h ago•105 comments

Device Drivers lab exercise – COSC562

https://web.eecs.utk.edu/~smarz1/courses/cosc562/drivers.html
25•azhenley•5h ago•2 comments

Cpak – OCI application package format for Linux desktops, servers and devices

https://cpak.it/
44•xlmnxp•8h ago•16 comments

'Fingerprints' inside the Sun could reveal if it once swallowed a planet

https://ras.ac.uk/news-and-press/research-highlights/fingerprints-inside-sun-could-reveal-if-it-o...
109•blincoln•11h ago•40 comments

Make your first edit to OpenStreetMap

https://high5apps.github.io/josm-plugin-website-wizard/
592•juliantigler•1d ago•139 comments

TailTalk: A modern async user space AppleTalk stack with Rust and Tokio

https://github.com/FeralFirmware/TailTalk/
63•zdw•23h ago•13 comments

Alan's Random Insult Generator (1999)

https://alanbellows.com/experiments/insult/index.html
65•DamnInteresting•2d ago•24 comments