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Fake Books

lcamtuf.substack.com

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Re: Fake Books

#301

Post by duped »

derefr wrote: post #218
latexr wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As the saying goes, there’s a sucker born every minute¹. An important feature of these scams is to frame success and failure as being entirely in your hands: it’s not the system’s fault that you didn’t achieve success, it’s yours and yours alone, you didn’t want it bad enough. Someone who falls in that hole is bound to do it again, this time for a different grift which looks easier. They’ll do as much as it takes unt…

Oh, no, I do get why people would buy into money-making courses. I'm basically wondering why the market for money-making courses isn't a winner-take-all market, with the wealthiest course-creators spending their advertising budgets (that they earned by building their money-making-course empire when the field was more green) to outcompete upstarts in the money-making course market. Presumably, people can only be activ…

Because the techniques don't work, and when people are conned once they are likely to fall for the next con artist selling fundamentally the same thing but with different branding.

A lot of the marketing behind these scams is that they're different than everything you've tried before - the point being is that the number of people who fall for these scams isn't enormous, but they will fall for scams over and over again. Just probably not from the same person selling it.

It's the same as any kind of cult messaging. It's not surprising that the size of a cult designed to exploit people has an upper limit, but it is shocking that the same people will join multiple cults time after time.

Re: Fake Books

#302

Post by disqard »

allochthon wrote: post #257
apitman wrote: post #252

It's crazy to think that the internet may have already peaked, at least in certain ways. 5 years ago I could Google anything and was confident (maybe more than I should have been) of getting close to the best answer, whether looking for a product recommendation or just general knowledge. That confidence has seriously eroded the past couple years. That said, I'm optimistic that we can keep finding solutions to new pro…

I'm hoping that eventually we'll get around the idea of a crowd-sourced search engine (mostly manually curated) maintained in the manner of Wikipedia, backed by a solid user reputation system to dissuade spammers. This will import Wikipedia's serious flaws. But I'm hopefully that they can gradually be mitigated.

A lot of the underpinnings of such a manually-curated knowledge base did exist in the early 2000s, in the form of Yahoo! Directory.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Directory

Re: Fake Books

#303

Post by derefr »

duped wrote: post #301
derefr wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, no, I do get why people would buy into money-making courses. I'm basically wondering why the market for money-making courses isn't a winner-take-all market, with the wealthiest course-creators spending their advertising budgets (that they earned by building their money-making-course empire when the field was more green) to outcompete upstarts in the money-making course market. Presumably, people can only be activ…

Because the techniques don't work, and when people are conned once they are likely to fall for the next con artist selling fundamentally the same thing but with different branding. A lot of the marketing behind these scams is that they're different than everything you've tried before - the point being is that the number of people who fall for these scams isn't enormous, but they will fall for scams over and over agai…

But if you know that, then — as a cult leader — why not come up with a scalable approach to founding cults, that all share underlying infrastructure (marketing, accounting, etc) but just use different figure-head cult-leaders, different language, and different outreach techniques; and so form distinct isolated cult communities? Different marques of the same company, in other words — like how every "competing" soap or cereal in the grocery store aisle is still making the same company money in the end.

(I do know at least two real exampless of this meta-approach to scamming: 1. there are meta content-farms, which hire people and train them to run seemingly-independent content-farm YouTube / TikTok / etc channels; and 2. there are serial Kickstarter/IndieGogo scammers, that follow a loop of forming a new shell company, hiring a new actor to pitch a fake idea, steal people's money for it, and disappearing.)

And, while they're at it, why not constantly seek to acquire the pitch+content from smaller, nascent money-making course creators, and run their content through your existing business engine? Why not be the EA of scams?

Re: Fake Books

#304

Post by Angelore »

allochthon wrote: post #247
NikolaNovak wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have not yet hacked a good way to search around it though. It presents a massive time sink for me (not to mention frustration) and is probably multiplied across the population. More and more, when I search for advice, review, explanation, solution, or description, I virtually exclusively get articles/websites/books/sources that at first glance (certainly as far as Google and Bing can tell) are exactly what I am loo…

For this reason, I have tended to rely more and more on recommendations from obviously real people these days, e.g., as found in comments on Reddit, or in the New York Times's Wirecutter. The challenge with this approach is that Reddit seems to be gamed more and more by industry and other PR "bots", which makes it hard to sift wheat from chaff. But if the subreddit is not on a controversial topic, it's still possible…

Maybe the way to go forward would be something in the vein of a book club? Delegating such a monstrous task to one person will just bury them in the sea of information, so parallelization looks like a good compromise (meet up once a week/month and share worthwhile books you have found).

Unfortunately, generation of garbage information can still far outpace such a system with few nodes...

Re: Fake Books

#305

Post by LordDragonfang »

hackernudes wrote: post #296
jerf wrote: post #223

One of the things that has kept me out of the cryptocurrency space is that when their advocates discuss value, they speak in pure nonsense. A big part of that problem is that value is very difficult to discuss. On the one hand you have the classic goldbug that insists that gold has "intrinsic value", which is some sort of platonic ideal thing that gold simply ambiently has and defies any attempt to nail down what it…

If you make up what people say and then argue with them it's pretty easy to win. The "classic goldbug" insists that gold has properties that are good for a currency (does not degrade, can be divided, does not rely on a trusted third party, has scarcity) and it has been used as currency for a long time in civilisation. I take "intrinsic value" for commodities to mean "has use aside from being a currency", for example…

>Bitcoin-bugs

Might I suggest: bitbugs.

(Also, "Don't let the bitbugs byte")

Re: Fake Books

#306

Post by root_axis »

garyrob wrote: post #297
garyrob wrote: post #206

I would like to mention the concept of "Soulbound Tokens" as a way of attacking this problem. This is the subject of a paper this year by Vitalik Buterin (founder of Ethereum), E. Glen Weyl (economist/researcher at Microsoft Research) and Puja Ohlhaver. Here's the abstract: """ Web3 today centers around expressing transferable, financialized assets, rather than encoding social relationships of trust. Yet many core ec…

I see a lot of reflexive negativity here. It reminds me of the kind of negativity I received on my blog when I said that eventually, music streaming would overtake music sales—including in a comment from Steve Jobs himself while Apple was still selling music. It also reminds me of the negativity I received from most people when, in (probably) year 2000, I was talking about the possibility that ads would be distribute…

> it reminds me of the kind of negativity I received on my blog when I said...

Cherry picking examples of your past predictions that may have turned out to be correct as a way of defending something in question today is obviously fallacious - hopefully I don't have to explain why that proves absolutely nothing.

> Trust me, you should take a serious look at this... get the knowledge if you are in the internet industry.

Trust isn't necessary when something is actually useful. Explain how the technology is actually useful rather than demeaning the supposed lack of knowledge in others.

> Well, I guess the downvoters just have more of a track record and more experience in the industry than me

Sarcastically appealing to your own authority while claiming your critics just don't understand is another bad faith rhetorical tactic that is often used by cryptocurrency enthusiasts.

> if you understand it more than Buterin and Weyl do, well, tell us all about it, I'm all ears

I read the paper, understood it, and responded with a clear critique to you in a different comment, your response was "Couldn't disagree more. I'm not going to argue about it here though". So what I'm getting from you is "I'm a tech expert, if you disagree you don't understand, I also don't have to prove anything or defend my position, just trust me". Sounds like the typical cryptocurrency grift...

Re: Fake Books

#307

Post by svnt »

coldtea wrote: post #189
svnt wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Author seems to understand supply and demand — they are making the point that the NFT perspective doesn’t include a rationale for demand.

Demand doesn't need to have a rationale (in the sense of "real needs" or "utility value" or something of the like) to work in raising value. It just needs to exist!

Yes, but if the demand doesn’t establish itself in some other context that serves a narrative (whether cultural, material, tax shelter, or other) the dynamics of the underlying market tend to be in the realm of tulips and postage stamps.

Re: Fake Books

#308

Post by aaroninsf »

jerf wrote: post #223

One of the things that has kept me out of the cryptocurrency space is that when their advocates discuss value, they speak in pure nonsense. A big part of that problem is that value is very difficult to discuss. On the one hand you have the classic goldbug that insists that gold has "intrinsic value", which is some sort of platonic ideal thing that gold simply ambiently has and defies any attempt to nail down what it…

A-class critique of the grounding of value.

I will add that there seems to be a substantial correlation between people who are made uncomfortable by the reality of socially-constructed value,

and the social construction of many other "foundational" things, such as "truth" and its relationship to natural language,

which flows naturally into self-delusional "originalism" when it comes to interpreting say the Constitution. Or for that matter the Bible.

which in turn are deeply correlated with autocratic-leaning and socially-conservative politics which favor rigid hierarchies and privilege authority and respect for it, over other values (such as equity, compassion, etc.)

I find it remarkable how many people are made uncomfortable even in otherwise well -educated circles by the premise that in natural language meaning is negotiated and collaborative and requires not absolutes of the universe but rather agents who maintain representations and models of one another's states, beliefs, intentions, etc., against which every utterance is measured and its meaning triangulated.

I guess if you got a degree in EECS rather than say CogSci it's possible to never encounter even anemic instrumental models of this in a pragmatic linguistics class... :/

Re: Fake Books

#309

Post by hot_gril »

fullstackchris wrote: post #48
andirk wrote: post #5

ML-generated content can be pretty funny. This is more an example of Amazon being a garbage distributor of crap; this is an example of fraud. I hope there's a followup of what punishments happen with such a grift from one the world's largest companies.

Writing a book about NFTs (IMO a fraud based market in the first place) with it being full of lies is, as the author said, hardly a crime. It's just unethical. Amazon isn't going to read every letter of every book that it sells, so it's hardly their fault either.

Amazon's fault would come from displaying fake reviews for so long, if anything.

Re: Fake Books

#310

Post by hot_gril »

gzer0 wrote: post #10

This has been a concern of mine for a while; I have also published absolute garbage just to see how far I can take it. I've published music under various pseudonyms, books underneath different pen-names... the list goes on. I've retracted such publications, but it is frightening if one person like myself had the curiosity to try, what is already out there, and, what a well-funded nation-state actor could do. ---- Pos…

I did this (wrote pseudo-random crap, not using an AI) in high school English class for a poetry assignment. The teacher said it was amazing work and the best he's read in a long time. He even wrote about it in the progress report sent to my parents. I don't know if he fell for it or if he was just pulling my leg even harder. The man had a sense of humor.
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