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I Received an AI Email

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Re: I Received an AI Email

#521

Post by cooolbear »

commodoreboxer wrote: post #475
segmondy wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I keep hearing the phrase "generate wealth" in regards to advertisement and from the mouths of startup founders, but in almost no other context. I'm not familiar with the economic concept of "wealth generation" or its cousin "creating value". Is the idea that any and all movement of money is virtuous? That all economic activity is good, and therefore anything that leads to more economic activity is also good? Or is i…

"Generate wealth" means "make somebody's number go up" i.e. allocating real resources/capital somewhere, with the assumption that 1. allocating that capital creates a net boon for society and 2. those who have "generated wealth" are wise and competent investors/leaders and their investments will create a net boon elsewhere. The first point is probably not especially true very often in contemporary tech (other than 'job creation') and is arguably not true for advertisement. The second point is not really a given at all and seems to be pretty consistently shown otherwise.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#522

Post by commodoreboxer »

runlaszlorun wrote: post #494
commodoreboxer wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I keep hearing the phrase "generate wealth" in regards to advertisement and from the mouths of startup founders, but in almost no other context. I'm not familiar with the economic concept of "wealth generation" or its cousin "creating value". Is the idea that any and all movement of money is virtuous? That all economic activity is good, and therefore anything that leads to more economic activity is also good? Or is i…

> Is the idea that any and all movement of money is virtuous? Maybe this was your point, but this is built in to one of the definitions of GDP, isn’t it? Money supply times velocity of money? I’m no economist though I’m sure there are folks on here who are. But this seems like an unfortunate fact that’s built into our system- that as laypeople we tend to assume that ‘economic growth’ means an increase in the material…

GDP is a measure. I'm very much not an economist, but I am extremely skeptical that the health of an economy can be reduced to any single number. Goodheart's law and all.

I concede that GDP is a good indicator, but I think you can have things that help GDP while simultaneously hurting the economy. Otherwise any scam or con would be considered beneficial, and it would make sense to mandate minimum individual spending to ensure economic activity. A low GDP inherently shows poor economic health, but a high GDP does not guarantee good health.

In my mind (noting, again, that I'm no economist), economic health is defined by the effectiveness of allocating resources to things that are beneficial to the members of that economy. Any amount of GDP can be "waste", resources flowing to places where they do not benefit the public. As Robert Kennedy famously pointed out, GDP includes money spent on addictive and harmful drugs, polluting industries, and many other ventures that are actively harmful.[0]

[0]: https://youtube.com/watch?v=3FAmr1la6w0

Re: I Received an AI Email

#523

Post by thih9 »

mattgreenrocks wrote: post #492
thih9 wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't see this working long term though. Being endlessly positive and ignoring your actual competence sounds like a recipe to eventually bite off more than you can chew.

Oftentimes this is fervor is channeled into personal brand building, which rarely has any sort of feedback mechanism that is tied to actual competence. It's a calculated move on their part.

Brand building actually sounds good and productive to me, as long as it doesn’t approach fraud.

If your audience likes your brand and doesn’t distinguish between your services and services done by more competent providers, then you’ve found your niche. So: snake oil is not fine; but Supreme branded brick sounds ok to me, even if I wouldn’t buy it myself.

I guess the author will find followers who enjoy that approach to software and product growth. If spamming wasn’t part of it, I’d be ok.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#524

Post by commodoreboxer »

mrtranscendence wrote: post #515
commodoreboxer wrote: post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is 100% realistic to read books and play board games. Both markets are massive, and board games in particular are having what I would consider a renaissance. Maybe it depends on your crowd, but everybody I know plays tabletop games and reads books.

You're missing the point. What's not realistic is to tell everyone that they should abstain from any type of entertainment that requires power (TV shows, movies, video games, etc) and should only read books and play board games instead. I don't care what kind of renaissance board games are undergoing, most people still only play the mass market classics, and then only rarely. I don't know how much energy Netflix uses…

My issue was with "we know what modern entertainment looks like" as if humans are now incapable of enjoying themselves without a screen. And you should care about a massive market increase when it's directly relevant to the point at hand. If the initial point was "we know what modern entertainment looks like, nobody plays board games or reads books", pointing out that the board game market has more than doubled in the past decade is far from irrelevant. It actually directly counters the point.

I agree with your second paragraph, and selling the "make better choices to save the world" argument is an industry playbook favorite. Environmental damage needs to be put on the shoulders of those who cause it, which is overwhelmingly industrial actors. AI is not useful enough to continue the slide into burning more fossil fuels than ever. If it spurs more green energy, good. If it's the old "well this is the way things are now", that's really not good enough.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#525

Post by pixl97 »

commodoreboxer wrote: post #522
runlaszlorun wrote: post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is the idea that any and all movement of money is virtuous? Maybe this was your point, but this is built in to one of the definitions of GDP, isn’t it? Money supply times velocity of money? I’m no economist though I’m sure there are folks on here who are. But this seems like an unfortunate fact that’s built into our system- that as laypeople we tend to assume that ‘economic growth’ means an increase in the material…

GDP is a measure. I'm very much not an economist, but I am extremely skeptical that the health of an economy can be reduced to any single number. Goodheart's law and all. I concede that GDP is a good indicator, but I think you can have things that help GDP while simultaneously hurting the economy. Otherwise any scam or con would be considered beneficial, and it would make sense to mandate minimum individual spending…

Going back to the previous posters monetary velocity statement, if you have a trillion dollar GDP, but it's just two AI's bouncing money back and forth high speed while all the humans starve in the street your economy is "great" and totally awful at the same time. The one number has to be referenced against others like wealth inequality.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#526

Post by pixl97 »

mostlysimilar wrote: post #514
madamelic wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Enough of us will get pissed off that we will develop AI agents that sit between us and the internet. Until _that_ company gets overrun by MBAs who are profit-driven then they start injecting ads into the results. It will come in the vein of "we are personalizing the output and improving responses by linking you with vendors that will solve your problems".

> Until _that_ company gets overrun by MBAs who are profit-driven then they start injecting ads into the results. Found companies with people that share your values. Hire people that share your values. Reject the vampires. Build things for people.

Unfortunately it turns out that at the end of the day one of the most common values is the love of massive piles of money. Vampires don't catch on fire in sunlight like storybook villains, they will invite themselves in, sidle up beside you, and be your best friend. Then in the moment you are weak they will plunge their fangs in.

Competing with bad actors is very, very hard. They will be fat with investor money, they will give their services away, and commonly they are not afraid to do things like DDOS to raise your costs of operations.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#527

Post by pixl97 »

ryandrake wrote: post #499
daemin wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has been mentioned before, but I can see the benefit in having curated webrings and similar listings. Where people can verify the content is not LLM generated.

As soon as that becomes effective, you'll have dozens of SEO sites and experts giving seminars on "How to get your LLM-generated website into curated webrings." An entire cottage industry will spring up for the purposes of corrupting legitimate webrings and/or creating fake astroturf webrings that claim to be curated.

Oh, what about the petty fights between different webrings accusing each other of using AI generated content....

Reminds me of the early days of the web.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#528

Post by nojvek »

ossyrial wrote: post #238

The author links to the somewhat dystopian blog where the email sender is quite proud of their work. Their words (or perhaps that of an LLM): > Could an AI agent craft compelling emails that would capture people's attention and drive engagement, all while maintaining a level of personalization that feels human? I decided to find out. > The real hurdle was ensuring the emails seemed genuinely personalized and not spam…

> How much of our societal progress and collective thought and innovation has gone to capturing attention and driving up engagement, I wonder.

Facebook + Instagram is $100B+ business, So is Youtube and Ads.

An average human now spends about ~3h per day on their screens, most of it on social media.

We are dopamine driven beings. Capturing attention and driving up engagement is one of the biggest part of our economy.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#529

Post by remram »

MarioMan wrote: post #402
atoav wrote: post #187

I use catchall email addresses. If your service is called foobar.com I will register at your place with foobar.com@mydomain.com If I ever receive spam addressed to foobar.com@mydomain.com that is unrelated to your service I know you leaked or abused my data. Result: you will get a DSGVO complaint and I filter all emails addressed to this address from my inbox. The good thing about using a catchall email address is th…

While some companies filter against this, most email services support plus addressing to accomplish the same thing. You can register under myemail+foobar.com@gmail.com, for instance, and all emails will still be delivered to myemail@gmail.com https://gmail.googleblog.com/2008/03/2-hidden-ways-to-get-mo... https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/recipients-in-exc...

This is very common, so lots of spammers will just drop the plus-part with a regex. Many sites even prevent signing up with an address containing a plus.

Not trying to tell you to stop though, this is definitely a good idea, when it works.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#530

Post by remram »

atoav wrote: post #187

I use catchall email addresses. If your service is called foobar.com I will register at your place with foobar.com@mydomain.com If I ever receive spam addressed to foobar.com@mydomain.com that is unrelated to your service I know you leaked or abused my data. Result: you will get a DSGVO complaint and I filter all emails addressed to this address from my inbox. The good thing about using a catchall email address is th…

I've long wondered if you could put crypto into this, to make it secure from a human attacker who might figure out the scheme. Otherwise it is relatively easy for a spammer to replace foobar.com with google.com and email you again, escaping your filtering and/or making you think google.com has a data leak.

For example, using a HMAC of the domain. So you generate foobar.com-sr32j4@mydomain.com, it's impossible to generate the sr32j4 part without knowing your secret key, and your mail server checks that sr32j4 is correct before accepting the mail.

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