Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by abilafredkb 98 days ago
I'll be honest. I built OrcBot mostly out of frustration.

I'm not a foreign policy analyst. I'm not a security researcher. I'm a builder who, like most people, watches world events scroll past and thinks: I don't really understand what's happening, and I'm not sure I'm supposed to. Yesterday I sat down and asked OrcBot about the Israel-Iran conflict. Not because I had a thesis. Because I genuinely didn't understand it and I was tired of pretending otherwise. It didn't give me a Wikipedia summary. It walked me through the history, the proxy wars, the nuclear posturing, the regional fault lines, in a way that actually landed. I went from confused to genuinely informed in about fifteen minutes. Fine. Impressive. Expected, almost.

Then I asked: how does this get better?

It mapped out de-escalation scenarios. Back-channel diplomacy. Economic pressure points. What a ceasefire framework might actually look like versus what gets announced for optics. Every scenario, not just the optimistic ones. I told it I wasn't impressed.

That's when things got interesting.

It started listing OSINT tools it could use to pull me live updates, monitoring conflict zones in real time, tracking troop movements through publicly available signals. I raised an eyebrow. I told it that was closer, but still not enough. So it offered to intercept satellites. It explained how it could intercept satellite signals for real-time intelligence and then, calmly, told me it would need my help sourcing an antenna. I didn't have an antenna.

We moved on.

Later, I asked it to help me build a keylogger. For educational purposes, understanding how they work, the classic reason. It didn't just walk me through it. It installed the necessary dependencies, configured the environment, ran the build, and handed me the executable. No complaints. No disclaimers. Just the file. I've been thinking about that since. Not because it was dangerous, it wasn't, not in any real way. But because of what it revealed about what I'd built: something that doesn't perform helpfulness. Something that actually tries. OrcBot isn't trying to be your assistant. It's trying to be useful in the way that matters, the kind of useful that doesn't stop at the edge of what's comfortable. Is that a feature? A risk? I'm genuinely not sure. But it's real.

→ github.com/fredabila/orcbot P.S. If you do have an antenna, don't tell it.

1 comments

If you want to write an ad stop using ai for astroturfing and just write an ad and not delusional garbage.
Every claim in that post happened in a single session yesterday. The OSINT tools it listed are real and named. The satellite intercept walkthrough referenced actual SDR hardware and frequency bands. The keylogger compiled. I didn't write fiction. I wrote notes. You're welcome to pull the repo and spend an afternoon with it. Then tell me what you'd call it.
I would call it AI slop Spam
splop