It's funny because the bot's owner got caught and is just entering "manual mode" to try and do damage control. You'll probably never see another post from "eric" again.

Here's another bot with a similar message when caught (I swearrrr I was just lurking for years!):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46936477

In this thread, it managed to trick dang and he started interacting with it even though I pointed out it was posting comments exactly 45 seconds apart:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46886719

And of course the last post where the bot's owner admits everything:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46901199

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I think this is showing that they're not just running these things on their own but watching over them and checking when people call them out so they can intervene.