I'm still amazed that something as ubiquitous as "daemon mode" is still unreleased.
- Claude Chat: built like it's 1995, put business logic in the button click() handler. Switch to something else in in the UI and a long running process hard stops. Very Visual Basic shovelware.
- Claude Cowork: same but now we're smarter, if you change the current convo we don't stop the underlying long-running process. 21st century FTW!
- Claude Code: like chat, but in the CLI
- Claude Dispatch: an actual mobile client app, not the whole thing bundled together.
- Daemon mode: proper long-running background process, still unreleased.
Unfortunately this is probably just getting started. Con men always existed, but a full scale exploitation of this would make "Nigerian Prince" scams look like artisanal work.
It was a cheaters website and you could pay to send messages to other cheaters, I think that was the business model at least.
Anyways, since the userbase was like 99.99% male, there just were not the numbers to talk with others. So, they just side stepped it and has very crummy chatbots that you would pay like $1 per message to talk with. (this was well before AI LLMs, think AOL bots from the naughts). Thing was, just like with the 'Nigerian Prince' scams, the worse the bot, the better the john.
It all got exposed a while back, but for me, that was the real Turing test - take people and see if they pay real actual money to talk with bots. Turns out, yes, if couched correctly (...like selling ice to Eskimos, just call it French ice).
So, I'm not sure that LLMs are going to unveil a wave of scams. Likely it will be a bit higher, of course, but the low hanging fruit is lucrative and there is enough of it to go around, and that's been true since really forever.
It's like outrunning a bear, you don't actually have to run faster than the bear, you just have to run faster than the poor sop next to you. Same goes for the bear, there is plenty of prey if you just do the little amount of exercise.
The company I work for uses a contracted recruiter for hiring, and the other day he was telling me that they're seeing a huge amount of scams, fake candidates, and "hands off" applications where people are trying to use AI to do basically the whole interview process - apprently even video interviews. We've mandated at least one on-site interview just so we can be sure we're getting actual people.
And most of these job candidates aren't even doing it maliciously, just "life hacking" the interview process. It's going to be a shit show if organized criminals start using AI.
It’s already happened tho, I recall a case in 24 ish, where a person got phished into joining a zoom call with their CFO and team. They were told to transfer money and they complied.
Heck, I think it was in 23/24, after an apple launch event, I saw a video of Tim Cook talking about a crypto coin. I had to look at it twice to reassure myself that it really was a scam. This was immediately after the event, and YouTube very helpfully suggested it for me.
Then there was the paper with Bruce Schneier as an author, about how LLMs result in significant targeting improvements and process efficiency gains for criminals. These enhancements mean that entire demographics that were too poor to be worth targetting, are now profitable.
Plus this is all for people in the developed world, who still haven’t seen the worst of it.
In the majority world, shit was already fucked six ways to Sunday. For example, in India, things are so outrageously, that people who deal with fraud are relieved when people lose less than $100k.
Someone in another thread pointed out that people on HN seem to be very unaware of how bad things are online for some reason.
> I think it was in 23/24, after an apple launch event, I saw a video of Tim Cook talking about a crypto coin
I think around that time there was a trend of phishing large YT channels and uploading deepfaked crypto ads. The channel's popularity ensured the recommendation algorithm showed it to many people.
> Someone in another thread pointed out that people on HN seem to be very unaware of how bad things are online for some reason.
That's probably true, but not totally unexpected. I suspect HN readers are relatively tech savvy, and probably do an above average job avoiding the seedier parts of the internet and generally know to be cautious online.
Religions have been doing it without tech for thousands of years. The 3 inch chimp brain is not exactly immune to delusion. In fact delusion or story telling is fundamental to how it handles unpredictability.
Even if I'm philosophically in agreement with you, I'm pretty sure insulting other people choices or insecurities has never been a great way to increase birth rates.
You're not alone and I'll even say this is evolutionary.
Men haven't evolved to be overly attached to babies or small kids like mothers did - that'd have been a weakness in the survival race. Men skills were completely different, usually related to being away from the kids most of the time.
Translate to modern day, that is men not really wanting to have kids (sometimes just going along with the wife's biological clock), and pretty much "feeling nothing" when the kids are born. There's a million documented examples of that.
However, once kids leave the "little puppy" phase and grow beyond the basic needs care that mothers provide, it's when the fathers start to really relate to them.
If your older kid is maybe 5-6 you're about to start that new phase. That's what happened to me, and I find (maybe not so extreme) examples of that on almost every guy I talk to.
Give it a second chance, maybe having kids is just not for you. But don't assume it's already the case, you may miss out whole new world.
Also, power corrupts. That's a tale as old as time, I have found no evidence that somehow tech-bros are immune to it.
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