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I Received an AI Email

timharek.no

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Re: I Received an AI Email

#491

Post by tivert »

bloqs wrote: post #121
tivert wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I’m actually thrilled by this, as it means all the hack marketers that spam my inbox incessantly with whatever product they’re hucking - this time for sure perfect for my business, in spite of the fact I’ve ignored their last ten emails - are all out of a job, and good riddance. > ... > At least with AI sending this crap nobody can use these emails to justify their sales bonus. What weird, misplaced animus. You're…

Some people don't realise how lucky they are that they are blessed by the cognitive lottery that affords them a brain and personality that lets them pursue an enriching and engaging career they feel is valued by society. In classic HN style the original reply lacks empathy, and demonstrates a preference of machines over humans. Life goes on...

> In classic HN style the original reply lacks empathy, and demonstrates a preference of machines over humans. Life goes on...

That stereotype definitely rings true. Thank you for helping me put my finger on it!

Re: I Received an AI Email

#492

Post by mattgreenrocks »

thih9 wrote: post #482
mattgreenrocks wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s more about being on the front of the hype train and being endlessly positive versus competence.

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.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#493

Post by staunton »

cpach wrote: post #136
staunton wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using a language model, one can craft an individually targeted email for each of those 100000 recipients. How do you "handle" this without doing anything current spam filters don't? Can you prevent an individual from sending 100000 emails a week? Can you make it cost them money?

Using an LLM to generate 100000 letters is hardly free, is it? And AFAIK, Bayesian filtering (by the recipient) doesn’t require any knowledge of what other people has received.

> Using an LLM to generate 100000 letters is hardly free, is it?

No, but with further advances it might easily get cheap enough that spammers think it's worth it.

> Bayesian filtering (by the recipient) doesn’t require any knowledge of what other people has received.

Agreed. However, assuming people don't individually configure those filters -- which they currently do not and scaling this up would be something quite novel --, this seems quite gamable

Re: I Received an AI Email

#494

Post by runlaszlorun »

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…

> 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 aspects of our life. Which in itself is a debatable goal, but our GDP perspective means even this is questionable.

For example, take a family of five living out in a relatively rural area. In scenario one, both parents work good paying remote tech jobs and meals, childcare, maintenance of land and housing, etc. are all outsourced. This scenario contrubutes a lot according to our economic definitions of GDP. And provides many opportunities for government to tax and companies to earn a share of these money flows.

Then take scenario 2, you take the same family but they’re living off of the grid as much as possible, raising or growing nearly all their own food, parents are providing whatever education there is, etc. In this scenario, the measurable economic activity is close to zero- even if the material situation could be quite similar. Not to mention quality of life might be rated far higher by many.

What rating an economy by the flow of its money does do is, and I’m not sure if this is at all intentional, is it does paint a picture of what money flows are potentially capturable either by government taxation or by companies trying to grab some percentage as revenue. It’s a lot harder to get a share of money that isn’t there and/or not moving around.

Perhaps my take on economics is off base but, for me, seeing this made me realize just how far off our system is from what it could and should be.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#495

Post by ryandrake »

commodoreboxer wrote: post #485
thedevilslawyer wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sure as heck is inspiring to a critical thinking adult. There's been enormous value added to all world's citizens.

Interesting. In my experience, advertisement and the incentives around it have led to the most devastatingly widespread removal of value in human culture and social connections that we've seen in this generation. Huge amounts of effort wasted on harvesting attention, manipulating money away from people, isolating and fostering extremism, building a massive political divide. And centralizing wealth more and more. The…

"Adding value" and "Generating wealth" are always the vague euphemisms that these guys fall back to when they try to justify much of today's economic activity. Adding value for who? Generating whose wealth? The answer is usually "people who are already wealthy." Of course, they'll downplay the massive funneling of wealth to these people, and instead point to the X number of people "lifted out of poverty in the 20th century" as if capitalism and commerce was the sole lifting force.

I wish some of these people would think about how they'd explain to their 5 year old in an inspiring way what they do for a living: And not just "I take JSON data from one layer in the API and convert it to protobufs in another layer of the API" but the economic output of their jobs: "Millions of wealthy companies give us money because we can divert 1 billion people's attention from their families and loved ones for about 500 milliseconds, 500 times a day. We take that money and give some of it to other wealthy companies and pocket the rest."

Re: I Received an AI Email

#496

Post by runlaszlorun »

Jgrubb wrote: post #454
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…

That last line kind of makes the point. Is any of that actually inspiring to a young child?

> Is any of that actually inspiring to a young child?

I think the answer is pretty clear in the fact that so many of them, bluntly speaking, just don’t give a shit any more. I absolutely don’t blame them.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#497

Post by ryandrake »

macocha wrote: post #369
brabel wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Also in most cases they were a "crypto expert" just two months ago.

And they were a leadgen/SEO expert a few years ago. These technogrifters just move from one hot topic to the next trying to make whatever buck they can smooth talk people into giving them.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#498

Post by runlaszlorun »

paxys wrote: post #433
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.

And yet someone is building all those super advanced computers and AI models. Someone is launching reusable rockets into space. Someone is building mRNA vaccines and F1 cars and humanoid robots and more efficient solar panels. The "smart people are all working in advertising" trope is idiotic. Just an excuse for people to justify their own laziness. There is an infinite number of opportunities out there to make the w…

> And yet someone is building all those super advanced computers and AI models. Someone is launching reusable rockets into space. Someone is building mRNA vaccines and F1 cars and humanoid robots and more efficient solar panels.

Which is true. But clearly far fewer people work doing that than in advertising or some other seemingly meaningless grunt work. And I’m including the technological plumbling work with many on this site, myself included, have depended upon to support themselves and/or a family.

Which at best is effectively doing minor lubrication of a large and hard to comprehend system that doesn’t seem to have put society as a whole in a particularly great place.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#499

Post by ryandrake »

daemin wrote: post #438
jacobgkau wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While that might work great on the individual level for a little while, it's unfortunately not how normalized taboos seem to work long-term. You're just going to see more and more people who don't deserve your time until you're wanting for anyone who actually does.

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.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#500

Post by runlaszlorun »

fl0id wrote: post #458
throwaway7ahgb wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"No other values"? When and how is such Doomer Hyperbole getting into HN articles? This is half of major reddit subs now and I fear the same low quality comments will take over HN. People need to go out and touch some grass.

or maybe you need to touch some grass.

I need some grass.
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