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I Received an AI Email

timharek.no

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Re: I Received an AI Email

#461

Post by Bluecobra »

echelon wrote: post #415
thrance wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember seeing a talk from Jonathan Blow where he made a comparison: in the 1960s top engineers worked for NASA and put a man on the moon in a decade, basically doing computations by hand. Today, we have super advanced computers and tech companies enjoy 100× times more of the top engineers than NASA ever had, and they are all working toward making you click on ads more.

Just wait. Enough of us will get pissed off that we will develop AI agents that sit between us and the internet. A sufficiently advanced personal assistant AI would use multimodal capabilities to classify spam in all of its forms: - Marketing emails - YouTube sponsorship clips - Banner ads - Google search ads - Actual human salespeople - ... It would identify and remove all instances of this from our daily lives. Fur…

I get what you are saying but what is the end result when someone is so shielded from the outside when they decide to block everything that irks them and stuck in an echo chamber?

What if the user is a conservative voter and considers anything counterpoint to their world view the worst part of the internet and removes all instances of it from their daily lives? Not to say that isn’t already happening but they are consciously making the choice, not some AI bot. I can see something like this making the country even more polarized.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#462

Post by sandworm101 »

loa_in_ wrote: post #457
sandworm101 wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone decided that marketing is now a tech problem. Artists have been replaced by software engineers. The net result is creepy AI emails. I fell for oldschool marketing yesterday. Im moving into a new appartment in a couple months. The local ISP who runs fiber in my new building cold-called me. I agreed over the phone to setup the service. That was proper target marketing. The person who called me knew the situatio…

It's the tech that put you on a queue to be called

There was no tech here. My new landlord contacted the local ISP, the one they liked to work with, to say they had a new tenant arriving soon. I'd bet that my connection will have been setup long before I arrive, at a time convenient to the landlord and local provider. A landlord recommending a favored local vendor to a tenant, or a tenant to a vendor, is the sort of human relationship that predates electricity.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#463

Post by jabroni_salad »

grugagag wrote: post #444
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get -no exaggeration- several hundred spams a day. I have an OG email address that was grabbed by spammers, since the days of Network Solutions (so it’s been awhile). I maintain Inbox Zero, much of the time, and seldom have more than three or four emails in my client at any time. I get there by being absolutely brutal about tossing emails. I probably toss a couple of legit ones, from time to time, but I do have rul…

What are pig butchering operations?

It's people that write you love letters until you western union them your entire retirement account.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#465

Post by ksynwa »

segmondy wrote: post #442
thrance wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember seeing a talk from Jonathan Blow where he made a comparison: in the 1960s top engineers worked for NASA and put a man on the moon in a decade, basically doing computations by hand. Today, we have super advanced computers and tech companies enjoy 100× times more of the top engineers than NASA ever had, and they are all working toward making you click on ads more.

Which do you think is more important? Putting man on the moon or ecommerce? I reckon you been able to get on a device, see a biscuit ads, order one from foo.com and have it shipped to you. Think of how much tech it takes for that to happen, that is more tech than NASA built to send many to the moon, the internet, packet switching, routing, fiber optic, distributed systems, web servers, web browsers, ads, cryptography…

They are clearly talking about one aspect of the industry which is the marketing part related to maximising engagement. It is not meant to be conflated with the e-commerce industry as a whole.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#466

Post by jordanpg »

Perhaps a new signature technology can be used to prove (or at least lend credence to) human authorship?

Something like a marriage of a digital signature with a captcha: the message has a digital signature of the sender that can be verified with their public key, but it is somehow verifiable that the particular signature provider only does the signature if a human being completes the (difficult AI-proof) captcha.

Something like this approach can at least mitigate the mass AI email problem, although the one-off AI emails are unlikely to be slowed by this approach.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#467

Post by jtbayly »

brabel wrote: post #358
mns wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I keep seeing these posts on HN and thinking, man, these are some smart people. Training LLMs, doing all this amazing AI stuff like this guy with the email agents and the other guy with the dropping of hats, and then I open the posts and it's just some guy making API requests to OpenAI or some similar disappointment.

Nowadays, an "AI Expert" is someone who knows how to download an AI client lib and prompt the AI to perform tasks. These are people who are not even technical and have no idea how all this works, but they can at least follow a Youtube Tutorial to get a basic website working.

Someone who can get a website working is actually technical.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#468

Post by lukan »

segmondy wrote: post #442
thrance wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember seeing a talk from Jonathan Blow where he made a comparison: in the 1960s top engineers worked for NASA and put a man on the moon in a decade, basically doing computations by hand. Today, we have super advanced computers and tech companies enjoy 100× times more of the top engineers than NASA ever had, and they are all working toward making you click on ads more.

Which do you think is more important? Putting man on the moon or ecommerce? I reckon you been able to get on a device, see a biscuit ads, order one from foo.com and have it shipped to you. Think of how much tech it takes for that to happen, that is more tech than NASA built to send many to the moon, the internet, packet switching, routing, fiber optic, distributed systems, web servers, web browsers, ads, cryptography…

"Putting man on the moon or ecommerce"

The comparison here is between moonlanding and advertisement. So I choose the moon obviously.

Ecommerce can work just the same without LLM augmented personalized ads, or no advertisement at all. If a law would ban all commercial advertisement - people still need to buy things. But who would miss the ads?

Re: I Received an AI Email

#469

Post by digdugdirk »

segmondy wrote: post #442
thrance wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember seeing a talk from Jonathan Blow where he made a comparison: in the 1960s top engineers worked for NASA and put a man on the moon in a decade, basically doing computations by hand. Today, we have super advanced computers and tech companies enjoy 100× times more of the top engineers than NASA ever had, and they are all working toward making you click on ads more.

Which do you think is more important? Putting man on the moon or ecommerce? I reckon you been able to get on a device, see a biscuit ads, order one from foo.com and have it shipped to you. Think of how much tech it takes for that to happen, that is more tech than NASA built to send many to the moon, the internet, packet switching, routing, fiber optic, distributed systems, web servers, web browsers, ads, cryptography…

It took way too long to convince myself this wasn't satire. I still wish it wasn't.

It made me realize that I think many computing people need more of a fundamental education in "hard" physics (statics, mechanics, thermodynamics, materials science) in order to better understand the staggering paradigm shift that occurred in our understanding of the world in the early 20th century. Maybe then they would appreciate how much of the world's resources have now been directed by the major capital players towards sucking the collective attention span of humanity into a small rectangular screen, and the potential impact of doing so.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#470

Post by dpcx »

yogsototh wrote: post #375
PlusAddressing wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I already started readying for it. I'm ensuring that ALL services that have my email have a Plus Address on them. The plus addresses are random and labeled only on my end. Still not close to 100%, but when I feel like I do, I will then have a filter and an automated message telling people that removing plus addresses from my email is forbidden and I will not read their message if they do. You will tell me where you f…

I am pretty confident the spammers will remove the `+` suffix from your email. And this is why I find the Apple fake email building solution a lot better because they build a fully different email per service. No way for the service to be able to cheat and discover my real email address from the one I give them. Still a smart enough system might be able to discover a valid email from my other id info, like my name. B…

I started worrying about the `+` address functionality as well, so I set up postfix aliases with `me.%@domain` (I use postgres for domains/aliases/accounts) and then have my virtual_alias_map run the query `SELECT a1.goto FROM alias a1 LEFT JOIN alias a2 on (a2.address = '%s') WHERE '%s' = a1.address OR ('%s' LIKE a1.address AND a1.active = true AND a2.address IS NULL)` - I know have `.` address functionality and can do the same functionality. It's much more common for email addresses to have `.` in them, so its' less likely to trigger alarm bells.
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