Words cannot express the deep personal grief I experienced when your husband, son, father or brother was killed, wounded or reported missing in action"
Oh my, but you know more than you can guess. About a year ago, my wife passed on. While deep in grief, I began receiving letters from financial institutions and banks that began, "Dear Mr/Ms Stoll, we offer our sincere condolences ..." How can a corporation have "sincere condolences"? They're the last place I'd go for comfort or sincerity.
I didn't have the words to explain to my mother why those AI health/advice/story/etc videos she shares are harmful.
> While a liar displays an underlying respect for the truth in the very act of intentionally distorting it, “the essence of bullshit”, Frankfurt writes “is not that it is false but that it is phony.” For Frankfurt, then, bullshit, is discourse from which incidental matters like truth and reality have been completely hollowed out and replaced by performance and simulation.
She would often say "but I happen to know that some the underlying information is true." The answer is the videos are phony, even when part of it happens to be true.
The agent starts a phone call, listens to the person on the line, analyzes which fraud bucket they fall into, and start the process.
While they are on the phone with the agent, it buys a domain relevant to the victim, the agent codes and deploy the website specially catered to them and the fraud bucket. Collect payment, destroy the website, redirect the domain to google.com. no need to start a new call because you had several agents committing the same fraud in parallel.
I thought this was excessive and impossible, but as I was reading, I realized nowadays everything you say is technically possible. The future gives me the chills.
The likely outcome is that the phone system becomes massively more locked down. Your phone will only ring if the caller has a number which is backed by a real ID, particularly one from your own country. It will become increasingly difficult to contact someone you don’t have a legitimate connection to.
The banking system will become increasingly fraud resilient with better real time detection of fraud.
Your phone may even have its own AI on your side listening in on the call and sounding the alarm when a number from Nigeria starts using an AI voice pretending to be your son.
> The likely outcome is that the phone system becomes massively more locked down.
We've had phone fraud for decades, and the system has dragged its heels forever. I genuinely don't know if even this will be enough to address phone spam.
You would just get called from an agent (bot) based in your country. There’s no easy way to prevent that. Fraud is massive and it’s becoming cheaper and easier to run at scale.
China has much stricter control over phone #'s and identities than USA/EU does. It's much more difficult for me to create a placeholder digital identity in China. I wouldn't love that solution, but it exists.
As a result, it's very difficult for me to use a lot of Chinese websites and it's a pretty sizable barrier to hardware development when Chinese citizens can just download the relevant datasheet off some Chinese forum in 5 minutes, but I have to sign NDA's with western companies or figure out how to WeChat a Chinese OEM to send me their datasheets.
I swear it's harder for us to access Chinese sites than it is for them to VPN to outside services. There's one event I was looking at going to in China but the announcements/chat was on QQ which as far as I can tell is just impossible to access.
Then when it gets reported the authorities can just look up the owner of that number and arrest them. Vs overseas based operations that are difficult to follow up on.
The authorities already don’t have much leverage over “domestic” spam call centers that are actually located overseas but somehow always manage to acquire domestic numbers to call from.
A couple of years ago Australia had a big reform of the laws where sms providers / voip companies had to actually verify their users owned the numbers they send from. Anecdotally before then I was getting a scam text message every day, now I haven’t had one in years.
Phone numbers in Australia are also all tied to ID. If there is a will to fix the system, it can be done.
Ostensibly this is what STIR/SHAKEN was supposed to cover but aiui they basically fucked it up so bad that it will only work for domestic calls in the US.
It is amazing to me that people still answer their phone. If it isn’t my wife or kids then my phone has a silent ringtone. If your voice mail doesn’t successfully transcribe to text then I delete it without listening. I check my postal mail since mail fraud is the only thing still taken seriously by anyone.
Is mail fraud really taken seriously? after I bought my house I got dozens of letters every few days that appeared (or tried to appear) from my lender warning of "FINAL NOTICE call this number about your mortgage!!!!!". The phenomenon is apparently so common and well known that my realtor, the seller's realtor, and my lender ALL warned me about these letters.
I feel like it should be easy for the postal inspectors or to go after these, if they cared. Just gather up some of these letters from someone who just bought a house (seems to be public record when someone buys a house, that's how the scammers know when to target someone). Then just call the number in the letter, trace the call and arrest whoever is there.
Sounds valuable, it can issue shares onchain and distribute profits - after a cumbersome fiat settlement and transfer stage - enabling the market and researchers to get price discovery on this sector finally
Instead of extrapolating only from reported fraud by victims
Yep, I'm experiencing the same thing. The occasional big hit from reddit or HN, then RSS. I've seen a surge of RSS when Karpathy included my website on his top hn blogs to read.
From Google search I get around 30-60 click a day. Some Rss readers display the total number of subscribers, it totals ~2000 currently. Then the rss readers from user devices have 10k unique ips.
Same here. RSS is by far the most requested resource in the server logs. That said though, I wonder how much of that traffic is biological and how much is bots.
Because I also wonder how much is dead traffic. As in people who add a ton of stuff in their rss but don’t actually read.
RSS is a bit of a black box but maybe that’s a good thing.
There's a simple method you can use with nginx and /etc/hosts, I wrote about it couple days ago [0]. I used it for an internal demo recently and realized that a new breed of devs have never seen a non localhost url run locally.
Custom domain is nice if you're planning on a real host later, but nowadays you can just use the .localhost domain and skip the whole /etc/hosts editing thing.
Super simple. (although I use rewrites at my dns layer for the whole local lan, but whatever)
It also solves issues my password manager has with multiple services on the one host but with different ports, but putting each on their own 2nd level domain.
"you will all lose your jobs and it will wipe out half of humanity."
If you lead with this, people will stop questioning why their sprint velocity hasn't increased 10 fold. Managers start asking leads, instead of hiring more devs can we add Agent.md to our repos?
The Apocalypse sells. They are afraid that you'll find out that AI is just another useful tool. That's the real threat, not to humanity, but to their hype.
Everybody's output is someone else's input. When you generate quantity by using an LLM, the other person uses an LLM to parse it and generate their own output from their input. When the very last consumer of the product complains, no one can figure out which part went wrong.
"Dear Mrs., Mr., Miss, or Mr. And Mrs. Stoll
Words cannot express the deep personal grief I experienced when your husband, son, father or brother was killed, wounded or reported missing in action"
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