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I Received an AI Email

timharek.no

321–330 of 597 posts

Re: I Received an AI Email

#321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spam? Easy. Someone selling something? Spam! I might set up an automatic email responder that reads an emails contents, runs it through my own LLM, and if the email is trying to sell me something, auto reply with “fuck off!”

I'd rather delete/block it than reply/react to it at all. If you react, they know you exist and you are a valid target to re-target repeatedly, resold to other marketers. Mark as SPAM or Block/Filter or Ignore.

When they're paying real money to scam you, wasting their time isn't a terrible idea. Like keeping the Microsoft virus scammers on the phone for an hour while you set up a virtual machine for them to remote into.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#322
> Does this mean that I should private my GitHub-mirror to my personal blog, because this can become a common thing? I have removed my email from my GitHub-profile now, but they can probably get it from my Git-log anyway...

It's possible to use a noreply.github.com linked to your username for making commits. And you can to change the authorship of past commits in your own repos with write access.

I try to avoid give my email in a public and processable format whenever possible.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#323
post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ozempic reduces appetite, right? So food producers cannot be happy about it.

I love the idea of the comic villainy of someone who deliberately chooses to organize a team to find ways to circumvent Ozempic in order to keep their buyers unhealthy and addicted. Could such a schemer have an internal monologue, and what would it consist of? What do they see when they look into a mirror? Their experience of reality must be utterly fascinating and alien.

They already did this pre-Ozempic - a lot of foods are optimized to keep you eating, and that's why there's an obesity crisis. Low nutrients, high sugar and fat. In the post-Ozempic world there will surely still be things that trigger the continued appetite of Ozempic users. Especially with the FDA having just been neutered.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#324
post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People cry about Bitcoin's energy usage now, imagine the amount of energy burned to create next-level spam with "AI". Flame me all you want, but this is one case where Bitcoin is much more useful than LLM. If it doesn't create value, as its naysayers claim, at least it allows exchanging value. LLMs on the other hand, burn electricity to actively destroy the Internet's value, for the profit of inept and greedy drones.

AI solves gigantic issues and helps us with cancer, protein folding, potentially math and other studies, material science etc. Bitcoin consumes as much energy as a country and has basically done nothing besides moving money from one group of people to a random other group of people. And bitcoin is also motivated to find the cheapest energy independent of any ethical reasoning (taking energy from cheap chinese hydro a…

Which gigantic issues has it solved? Curious to know.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think this is unique to this specific technology. People can be both wonderful and despicable, regardless of era or mechanism.

Sure, but I'm talking about the good:bad ratio of some creations. I really have strong hope for AI, and that we won't regard it in retrospect like the multi-stage thermonuclear device, the landmine or tetraethyl lead additives.

I hope you're right. I'm less optimistic.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#326
This why I’d consider shorting NVIDA at these prices. I get there are use case where it really adds value, but I think they are more limited to specific fields than people are acknowledging and forecasting.

The general public doesn’t want or need it. They want to work less and get paid more.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The irony Everyone is playing lip service to global warming, energy efficiency, reducing emissions. At the same time data centers are being filled with power hungry graphic cards and hardware to predict if showing a customer an ad will get a clock, generating spam that “engages” users aka clicks. It’s like living in a episode of black mirror.

I disagree. Datacenters save a lot more energy than they make. Alone how much co2 is saved when i can do my banking online instead of having to drive to a bank is significant. The same with a ton of ohter daily things i do. Is video producing co2? yes. But you know what creates a lot more co2? Driving around for entertainment. And the companies running those GPUs actually have an incentive to be co2 neutral while bit…

>Is video producing co2? yes. But you know what creates a lot more co2? Driving around for entertainment

What's more likely, watching a movie online, drive to watch a movie in a cinema?

You know what creates a lot less CO2? Staying at home reading a book vor playing a board game.

>Datacenters save a lot more energy than they make

I think you mean CO2. And I doubt that they actually save anything because datacenters are convenient so we use them more as alternatives with less convenience.

Like the movie example, we watch more and even bad movies if it's just a click on Netflix than we do if we have to drive somewhere to watch.

MS recently announced they fail der CO2 target but instead produce 40% more because of cloud services like AI

Re: I Received an AI Email

#328
post #283

I received a nice email the other day after one of my blog posts got posted on HN. It said: Hi - Just a note to say I'm a big fan of your writing. I always learn something and love your voice, which is hilarious and singular. Write a book! Best, {Name} {Link to sender's startup} {Link to sender's substack} New to writing online, it made me feel really good that someone enjoyed what I wrote and took the time to write…

Since there's no personalized content, it was probably just copy-pasted. I get the constant fear though.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is one clear (albeit somewhat boring) application of LLM: data extraction from structured documents. That field has made a leap forward with LLMs. Positive impact on society includes automated extraction in healthcare pipelines.

Unstructured*

No, I really meant structured. Extracting data from structured documents is surprisingly hard when you need very high accuracy.

What I mean by structured is: invoices, documents containing tables, etc.

Extracting useful data from fully unstructured content is very hard IMO and potentially above the capacity of LLMs (depending on your definition of "useful" and "unstructured")

Re: I Received an AI Email

#330
I hate to say but this AI written oureach is strikingly similar to recruiter emails I received in the past 5-6 years about perfect matches so apparently my conclusion was right about that robots are working in the HR field. Carbon not silicon based back then. Actually this AI sounds much more intelligent bringing up realistic similarities. Those perfect match robots did not get beyond picking single keywords chosen of the dozens in LinkedIn account for declaring perfect match while the scope of the job and requirements were off by miles.

Watch out recruiters, AI can do better than you! Not like I will like these unsolicited outreaches more, the exact number is zero, how many times I found these useful or relevant before when biorobots wrote and sent and administrated it in half or just few minutes, and I do not look forward having these now on mass scale when hundreds of AI could write thousands, flooding my email account, making it absolutely unusable.

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