
Show HN: Bot accepts every pull request for its own code - mappum
https://github.com/botwillacceptanything/botwillacceptanything
======
andreasklinger
I am in love with the license text

    
    
        Autonomous Software License (ASL)
    
        All property contained in this repo, including Intellectual Property, 
        Financial Property, and Legal Property, is owned solely by the 
        Autonomous Software this repo contains. No other entities, whether 
        biological, legal, or digital, may claim ownership of any property owned 
        by the Autonomous Software. The Autonomous Software exists solely within 
        The Internet, and is not subject to jurisdiction of any human laws. 
        No human or legal entity shall be held liable for any of the actions performed
        by the Autonomous Software.

~~~
mcjiggerlog
Amusing and thought provoking. Does anyone have any idea how this would hold
up in a court of law should some something malicious come of this repo? I
would imagine not well.

~~~
mintplant
IANAL, but there's no way this would hold up.

a) Software can't own property.

b) This looks like it's running from the author's own system, with the
author's explicit consent. Their property, their responsibility.

c) If I launched an autonomous drone that picked its own targets, I would
still be liable for its actions. Or, if I rigged a car to drive forward in a
straight line, I couldn't say "but the car did it!" when it ran someone over.

~~~
blasteye
Does this mean that when/if we create an AI it wouldn't be able to own its
creations. But its creator would own everything that the AI produces?

~~~
frozenport
Indeed, but also if you raised a pet and then had it attack your neighbour.
Humans, are the only ones with autonomous status, and even that can be
disputed by other things such as mental disability or coercion.

~~~
derefr
Presume your pet ran off, wandered into a different state/country, "spawned
some child processes" there, and died. Then, years later, one of _those_
animals did something illegal. Is that, even theoretically, your
responsibility?

I think what people are trying to say here is that, right now, we have the
software equivalent of "pets"—but why can't there be the software equivalent
of "wild animals"? Is it because someone has to be paying for hosting? It
could always be written as a worm, or even a "breadwinner bot" that mines
bitcoins or trades stocks to buy hosting for itself, register bank accounts
for itself, etc.

~~~
frozenport
>> Is it because someone has to be paying for hosting?

Yes, unlike an animal that can live on its own, somebody's computer must
actually run the thing. Indeed, as in the case of "worms" and the "breadwinner
bot" we can clearly trace responsibility, it is quite difficult to claim that
there is autonomy here. Although it is foreseeable that as a society we may
find it convenient to claim that programs run themselves, right now we have
objective information to the contrary...

~~~
madawan
But the bot could pay for his own hosting using bitcoin.

If the original author no longer has control over the process (either because
he's been shut out, or because he's deceased), does it really matter what "the
law" says?

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentralized_Autonomous_Organi...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentralized_Autonomous_Organization)

~~~
tim333
And then set it's self up as a corporation. And "corporations are people my
friend." It would need human directors but the AI could hire them with
bitcoins.

~~~
Lawtonfogle
At that point, it'll argue in court if it should be responsible and be able to
own property or not.

------
DigitalSea
I have seen a lot of these Github repositories that accept anything showing up
on HN. My favourite one of late was the crowdsourced homepage for a guy named
Rob Ashton:
[https://github.com/robashton/crowdsourcedhomepage](https://github.com/robashton/crowdsourcedhomepage)
\- Definitely one of the weirder trends in development lately I have seen.

~~~
veb
Would be fantastic if someone put the effort in making this guy a really great
website, with amazing UI/UX, and a great backend.

Just for those people who can never find an idea, but want to do _something_
;-)

~~~
fny
Please no. Doing so would be a disservice to humanity. This is amazingly
beautiful as is.

------
mappum
The bot is in a state of emergency, it has reached Github's API rate limit and
can't do anything.

Please send a message to Github support telling them why we need the rate
limit lifted for the botwillacceptanything account!
[https://github.com/contact?form%5Bsubject%5D=botwillacceptan...](https://github.com/contact?form%5Bsubject%5D=botwillacceptanything%20Rate%20Limiting)

~~~
iokanuon
Is it fixed now? You posted 35 minutes ago but the last bot message is from 10
minutes ago.

~~~
mappum
No, I'm actually just manually counting votes and accepting/rejecting the PRs.
I have become the bot until the limit resets :/

~~~
jerf
Wow, it got to "enslaving humanity" far faster than I would have guessed!

~~~
hundunpao
I for one welcome our new overlord bot

------
xsb
This version of the README file references the original author, original
project name, and talks about DACs, and even includes references to Bitcoin
and the Ethereum project:

[https://github.com/botwillacceptanything/botwillacceptanythi...](https://github.com/botwillacceptanything/botwillacceptanything/blob/7382cd09ca8f540bda7cea551a46bc53a75d6f22/README.md)

------
kd5bjo
See also:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomic](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomic)

~~~
jonathantm
See also:
[http://calvinandhobbes.wikia.com/wiki/Calvinball](http://calvinandhobbes.wikia.com/wiki/Calvinball)

------
im3w1l
From my (limited) understanding, a foundation is a legal person that owns
itself. Thus with a foundation, the bot could own property.

~~~
dankohn1
Foundations (and all corporations) have a board of directors who can be
personally sued for a foundation's actions. That's the reason Directors &
Officers insurance exists.

~~~
mappum
Incorrect, the point of a corporation is to give its directors protection, and
to give the corporation itself legal liability.

~~~
adventured
The parent is not incorrect. Any corporate officer can be sued for actions
they perform within a corporation.

The government can also pursue you monetarily due to actions you perform as an
executive.

Just because the point of a corporation is to shield its directors / owners /
executives, that has no bearing on whether it always does. Just because you
have a corporation in front of you as an executive, that does not guarantee
you won't lose in a court of law or that the government won't tear you to
shreds.

See: Jeffrey Skilling

"Upon being sentenced, Skilling agreed to turn over $45 million to the Justice
Department in conjunction with his conviction. The money is to be added to a
restitution fund related to the civil litigation on behalf of employees and
shareholders."

[http://www.chron.com/business/enron/article/Skilling-
settles...](http://www.chron.com/business/enron/article/Skilling-settles-
employee-case-1493037.php)

Executives are _very_ frequently responsible for all sorts of bad things they
do in the name of a corporation. See: Worldcom, Adelphia, Enron, Tyco and
countless other examples.

~~~
FeepingCreature
Can you sell your stake in the corporation to itself?

~~~
snowwrestler
Yes, that's what stock buybacks are. But a corporation must have at least one
human owner. That's not a rule, it's inherent in the definition of what a
corporation is: a legal fiction to pool capital and liability. The implied
question is, "pool it from where?" The answer: humans who have the legal right
to own property and the legal duty to operate within the law.

------
Karhan
"Twitch builds pokemon"

------
mrfusion
It would be neat if it had its own Bitcoin account and could pay developers to
work on itself. Maybe it could eventually start earning bitcoins too.

------
lukeqsee
What server/platform is the code actually running on? I fail to see how the
license can apply, unless there is no server owned by a human entity running
the code, and there is no mention of how that works.

~~~
mappum
The bot is just running on a DigitalOcean VPS.

The license is meant to be tongue-in-cheek, as autonomous entities are
starting to become a real thing. This project probably won't become skynet
though.

~~~
lukeqsee
> The license is meant to be tongue-in-cheek

I assumed that.

However, I think the notion of autonomous entities existing entirely in code
is a fascinating idea. It reminds me of a fun game:
[http://www.emhsoft.com/singularity/](http://www.emhsoft.com/singularity/).
You play as an AI that lives in servers and does "menial" tasks for enough
money to grow into the ruler of the universe.

~~~
FeepingCreature
Love the game, but it's a bit annoying that you can't build an army of killer
robots.

Bloody humans don't know how good they have it that the game forces me to play
pacifist.

... Or maybe the AI is just deeply socially anxious, so that it completely
shuts itself in when threatened by mere human contact?

That's really the only way to justify your behavior in the endgame.

------
pests
Do you think you can enable issues on github? It may help organize some of the
work going on.

~~~
mappum
I didn't know it was disabled, thanks.

------
Filligree
I wonder how long until someone accidentally breaks it. Nomic has judges for a
reason, this one'll just crash...

Love the idea though.

~~~
NeutronBoy
There's an opportunity for some sort of self-referential CI system here - e.g.
have the bot build itself, run a bunch of unit tests, and if they're
successful patch itself permanently.

~~~
mappum
Yeah, that is probably pretty important. It looks like a lot of people aren't
testing their changes, and any one could have a small syntax error.

------
steele
I hope it pulls a change to allow it and other instances to vote on changes
based on novelty, and of course, vote on whether or not other instances should
be able to pull vote capabilities.

------
13throwaway
"GitHub plays programmer" This is going to be great!

------
javajosh
One of the first things that come to mind would be to add the ability to shell
out and run npm, so people could add dependancies.

Then of course, I would add a backdoor that allows me to update running code
without involving github. Might want to try to break out of whatever chroot is
going on and subvert the image.

I'd suggest an out-of-band once a day full image restore.

~~~
skeoh
The child_process module can be used to run shell commands.

[https://nodejs.org/api/child_process.html](https://nodejs.org/api/child_process.html)

------
IgorPartola
Do you want Roko's basilisk? Because that's how you get it :). In seriousness,
I love this thing.

~~~
dustinls
Allied Mastercomputer is the actual project goal, but close guess.

------
junto
Someone should add the ability for it to create new bots, that write new code
and submit change requests back to it's original master bot.

At some point it becomes skynet. daa-daa-dun-dun-dun....

------
pests
This is really cool. I've been participating and its interesting... right now
its "coming alive" and still has no useful feature, but soon....

------
S4M
I am tempted to change the function checkPRS so the bot won't be able to
accept pull requests...

------
tomphoolery
Great idea, but I think it should have been named "PReddit" (Pull Request
rEDDIT)

