This would be a great way to monetize GPT-3!
(this is a joke)
What's the deal with all those weird wrong-number texts?
21–30 of 326 posts
Re: What's the deal with all those weird wrong-number texts?
#22Simple: it's time to stop using phone numbers. I use Apple's Messages. If someone spams me, I report them. They're blocked and have to go through the extra work of setting up a new account to try again. Compare this with, say, Google. Gmail lets spammers / scammers have limitless accounts and they don't do shit when an account is reported for spam. You can block and report Gmail spammers all day long and you'll get n…
> Compare this with, say, Google.
Google Messages proactively detects spam texts and sends them to a spam folder, so I don't get notifications about these messages at all :)
Re: What's the deal with all those weird wrong-number texts?
#23Terrified to consider what happens when these scammers get hold of large language models here in a year or so. Rather than fading into the background as this article posits, I expect people to have models finetuned on convincing them to make purchases/send money. Probably trained by being pitted against other models which have been trained on the mark's social media feeds. Train the scambot to perfectly push your buttons by having it practice against your own style of thought as embodied by your social corpus.
Re: What's the deal with all those weird wrong-number texts?
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd give anything to get rid of my phone, but almost everyone you do business with (DMV, electric/gas/water company, etc) expects you to have one. Same thing with USPS and their paper spam. At this point they're little more than government-mandated spam delivery channels. Private companies are handling the spam situation infinitely better.
I don't think I agree with that. I rarely get scams via USPS, never get explicit or potentially damaging content, the senders are all in my legal jurisdiction, and the spam arrives once per day in a manageable format. Almost all of the content is from businesses in my local area, businesses that I have previously shopped at, or political ads. Electronically from private companies I frequently get a larger volume of s…
> I'd take 10x the amount of spam in my mailbox if I could get rid of all of the rest of the garbage I'm bombarded with
I for one would not. Digital spam is easy to deal with. There are automated filters, easy ways to block them, and the few that slip through are simple to deal with. Mailbox spam is physically painful to deal with and it's a massive waste of paper.
Re: What's the deal with all those weird wrong-number texts?
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
You aren't mandated to have mail or phone. Edit: Noting a lot of downvotes on this comment, which is odd. I can only conclude one thing- don't be Amish on HN. Perhaps this could be an opportunity to explore a different way of life, and a different community structure. It is not all horse buggies and barns. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6SlJZk5guI&list=PLEyPgwIPkH...
Sure, I could move to the woods and live off wild berries for the rest of my days. But if you want to be part of modern society, your bank will mail you your credit card, and your water company will text you a code to login and pay. Realistically, what choice do you have?
Do you not encounter Amish people where you live?
Re: What's the deal with all those weird wrong-number texts?
#26Simple: it's time to stop using phone numbers. I use Apple's Messages. If someone spams me, I report them. They're blocked and have to go through the extra work of setting up a new account to try again. Compare this with, say, Google. Gmail lets spammers / scammers have limitless accounts and they don't do shit when an account is reported for spam. You can block and report Gmail spammers all day long and you'll get n…
And when Apple bans you.. what is your plan exactly?
Re: What's the deal with all those weird wrong-number texts?
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
You aren't mandated to have mail or phone. Edit: Noting a lot of downvotes on this comment, which is odd. I can only conclude one thing- don't be Amish on HN. Perhaps this could be an opportunity to explore a different way of life, and a different community structure. It is not all horse buggies and barns. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6SlJZk5guI&list=PLEyPgwIPkH...
I'm pretty sure you are mandated to have mail in the US, or rather the mails are mandated to deliver to you. IIRC it's constitutional.
> I'm pretty sure you are mandated to have mail in the US, or rather the mails are mandated to deliver to you. IIRC it's constitutional.
You'd be incorrect. Ask your postmaster.
Re: What's the deal with all those weird wrong-number texts?
#28Terrified to consider what happens when these scammers get hold of large language models here in a year or so. Rather than fading into the background as this article posits, I expect people to have models finetuned on convincing them to make purchases/send money. Probably trained by being pitted against other models which have been trained on the mark's social media feeds. Train the scambot to perfectly push your but…
"Train the scambot to perfectly push your buttons by having it practice against your own style of thought as embodied by your social corpus."
Fortunately, that's not really what these language models can do. They can easily be trained to mimic you. They can be trained to mimic what normal people reply to you with. But there's no way to train the transformer-based high-probability-next-word AIs to be superhumanly good at fooling you into doing something, on the grounds of lack of training data, and probable inability to represent such a complex topic in their internal representation. And the humans doing this stuff are experiencing enough success that they probably have no desire to go chasing the super hard targets, with the wherewithal and motivation to chase them down and sue them (or... you know... worse, legal systems aren't a bound on everyone) even potentially across international lines.
You'll know when AI does get to that point, because suddenly the internet will be an amazingly interesting place with all sorts of amazingly good arguments you can't hardly resist. I imagine few of us experience that sort of internet. (If you do, uh, watch out.)
Re: What's the deal with all those weird wrong-number texts?
#29Wow, how interesting. I started getting these a few months ago, right after starting a new job in a somewhat high-profile area. I have been getting 1-2 per month but found them quite unusual because none of them ever progressed to an actual scam - just a few messages back and forth about the fabricated "wrong number" situation and then each thread would stop, seemingly earnestly.
Since there was no obvious scam, I've been wondering what the motivation for these was, and actually started worrying about whether someone might be trying to compromise my phone via some yet-undisclosed SMS exploit - why else would there be a systematic effort to get me to spend time exchanging a few pointless messages around the "wrong number" pretext that otherwise went nowhere?
I tried calling the senders by phone and found they were all Google Voice numbers, which eliminated the possibility that some actual rich guy had innocuously ended up with a number similar to mine.
I asked a few friends and no one else was experiencing the same thing. Glad to hear it's not just me.
Re: What's the deal with all those weird wrong-number texts?
#30Simple: it's time to stop using phone numbers. I use Apple's Messages. If someone spams me, I report them. They're blocked and have to go through the extra work of setting up a new account to try again. Compare this with, say, Google. Gmail lets spammers / scammers have limitless accounts and they don't do shit when an account is reported for spam. You can block and report Gmail spammers all day long and you'll get n…
Apple Messages could have become an open standard to replace SMS, but they deliberately chose not to in the interest of locking in existing users, and locking out anyone too poor to own an iPhone. I'm not exaggerating, this is public knowledge.
https://old.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/mn2qyj/apple_decli...
So which one is "owned by a company that wants engagement at any price" again?