But if someone has access to your account information in such a way that they can make purchases in your name isn't that a you, or your bank, problem? Couldn't that same person just spend the money elsewhere?
I'm just trying to understand the scenario here: you are caught up in a fraud, and unknowingly you give the fraudster access to information that they are able to leverage to make fraudulent purchases in your name and the 'win' here is that they can't spend it on crypto?
It seems like there are multiple points at which to address this problem prior to how they're spending your money.
Edit: I guess a lot of the comments are talking about the scam being that you are scammed into purchasing crypto somehow, a different scenario than someone having control of your account. Still though: people have been successfully swindling over the phone for a century. Having someone buy Monero instead of a wire transfer is just procedural.
I feel very fortunate to have been around for this part of internet culture. Chat was so different at the time; this part especially stuck out to me:
>Our MC Skat Kat posted from the persona of this fictional MC Skat Kat, regularly referring to Paula Abdul as his girlfriend. Everyone simply accepted this.
You would see the same essentially-anonymous users every day, and there were users with known-unlikely stories - this is before catfishing as a concept was part of the lexicon - but they were just accepted. Did I think that I was talking, at 13, to Demi Moore about Bruce Willis's latest movie? No, I did not. But someone got online every night to just shoot the shit and pretend to be Demi Moore, and they were just one of the gang. No one believed them but no one tried to prove them wrong, either, because they were otherwise a good citizen. It was surreal, but at the time human interaction in real-time over the internet with strangers WAS surreal, in itself. No one could prove or disprove anything without a lot of work, so people just tended to shrug at wild claims.
I know that newer generations are all experiencing their own forms of social-media-ingrouping that they will feel just as nostalgic for, but it truly was a unique time.
> I know that newer generations are all experiencing their own forms of social-media-ingrouping that they will feel just as nostalgic for, but it truly was a unique time.
BBSes, MUDs/MOOs, Usenet, things like this, and even EFNet had things that don't really exist in the same way very often anymore (not every one had each of these things, but..):
- A broad optimism about technology and communication using technology
- Reasonably small communities. Even during EFNet's simultaneous 100k peak (of which many were bots), there were probably 30k truly active users and a few thousand people feeling deep ownership of the network and community. It was more like a medium sized town. (And now it's like that town after most people have moved away).
- A shared culture (coming from the smallness of the communities).
- A broad focus. Subreddits are small; discords are small; etc. But in these other places you'd run into and talk to the same people about many different kinds of things. You might have a discord group of a few dozen friends, but it's not likely to be a semi-exclusive social channel for you for many topics.
- Local ties. Especially with the BBS.
- Blurry lines on anonymity. Purely anonymous, distant connections morphed to real life ones far more often than today.
> A broad optimism about technology and communication using technology
A big part of this in my mind was the novelty of it. It was actually a whole new capability for people.
In 1977 if you loved Star Wars maybe you could talk to your friends about it. If you didn't know anyone that felt the same about it you were kind of stuck. If you were lucky you might have a sci-fi convention nearby you could attend. Magazines might give you some interesting details but it wasn't a conversation.
This was the same in 1987 for most people. Unless you had a 1) computer 2) modem 3) BBS client 4) a local BBS that was affordable to call that let you talk Star Wars 5) the knowledge to do all that you were stuck with few options to talk Star Wars.
By 1997 the average Star Wars lover had a lot more good options for talking Star Wars. You no longer had to hope a local BBS had good Star Wars options. The Internet gave everybody on it global reach. Your homepage could declare your love/hate of all things Star Wars. You could get e-mail or guestbook responses to stuff you wrote.
If you were just getting into Star Wars in 2007 there had been at least a decade of existing discussion and web pages about Star Wars. It was just assumed people on the Internet were talking about Star Wars and you could jump into any of those discussions. The same was true in 2017.
The 1997 time frame was really the first time that idea was true. It was enpowering to just be able to write stuff about a subject and publish it in a globally accessible way. Normal people never really had that ability before. It was also very much "on the Internet no one knows you're a dog". A 15 year old's fan page about something existed alongside a 30 year old professional writer's fan page.
Sure-- I agree with all that. And I mean, I've benefitted from the new thing: being parts of groups of 50 people assembled worldwide hacking on one thing because it's interesting or whatever where you'd never have a critical mass on a local board.
But there was something about having consistent groups of friends online. It stayed around on the internet for awhile after mass adoption, but really started to dry up around 2002, and then the rise of social media hastened the demise.
Man, I lived on EFNet from 99-04. Our channels were subject to near-constant coups and hostile takeovers, thwarted by a steady rotation of automodded teens in timezones across the globe.
I don't remember how it was orchestrated, but someone always gave us a heads up when a netsplit was imminent to help retake lost chans.
More fun than MMO raids or time limited events, for sure.
I remember when my local BBS started letting you type emails. You would write your email, type the address to send to, then everyone's emails were sent out in one batch in the middle of the night. At the time, I was absolutely amazed. That and logging in to play Legend of the Red Dragon in full ASCII color!
Pre-pandemic I started commuting by train and even though it was nearly the same time spent, my attitude and outlook was worlds better than when I was driving in heavy traffic every day.
There are multiple workable solutions, and unfortunately most US cities aren't heavily invested in any of them. My city has very limited rail lines and it was only happenstance that my work was close enough to a stop for it to be a reasonable way to get to the office. Literal millions of other people in the metro area don't have that option.
> You should only use ChatGPT for things that you are able to review it's work.
This keeps being my argument when people at work daydream about time and cost savings by offloading non-critical business functions to AI. I say, "Great, so it can produce 1000x more work than a person. But then what army of people are we planning to use to check those outputs?"
I'm super-impressed with the current crop of language models for their ability to so accurately simulate correctness, but their inability to understand what they don't know - because, in fact, they don't 'know' any of it in the sense that we do - makes them like very productive but completely untrustworthy employees. A junior dev who monopolizes his mentor's time through inconsistent performance is not a good hire.
Eh, part of the problem is people don't currently understand what LLMs are doing...
Have you ever had a dumb/wrong thought in your head? I'm going to go ahead and answer yes for you, you do all the time. In fact you don't (hopefully) verbalize a stream of consciousness to other people around you. In general you think of something then reflect on what it is true/false.
This is not what LLMs do, they pitch back the first 'thought' they have, "correct" or not. This is why things like COT/TOT greatly increase the accuracy of LLM output. The problem? It requires at least an order of magnitude more processing to get an answer, and with GPU time already in high demand and expensive you don't see much of it happen.
Betting on LLMs commonly being wrong is not a safe bet at this point.
Even if the error rate of LLMs decreases with additional GPU power there's little rhyme or reason to their confabulations. Even if only 1% of the code is in error there's no guidance or pattern to where those errors might be.
It's like reviewing an overconfident junior developer's code except you can't learn their particular weaknesses. If a developer is bad about memory leaks, you know to check their every PR for memory leaks. An LLM won't necessarily produce the same types of errors given similar prompts or even the same prompt with some period of time between invocations.
In this paper, we introduce the Tree-of-Thought (ToT) framework, a novel approach aimed at improving the problem-solving capabilities of auto-regressive
large language models (LLMs). The ToT technique is inspired by the human
mind’s approach for solving complex reasoning tasks through trial and error. In
this process, the human mind explores the solution space through a tree-like
thought process, allowing for backtracking when necessary. To implement ToT
as a software system, we augment an LLM with additional modules including a
prompter agent, a checker module, a memory module, and a ToT controller. In
order to solve a given problem, these modules engage in a multi-round conversation with the LLM. The memory module records the conversation and state
history of the problem solving process, which allows the system to backtrack
to the previous steps of the thought-process and explore other directions from
there. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed technique, we implemented
a ToT-based solver for the Sudoku Puzzle. Experimental results show that the
ToT framework can significantly increase the success rate of Sudoku puzzle solving.
Agreed - the issue is the false dichotomy implied by suggesting that commuting itself is the answer. I think that it would be much more honest to opine that DESPITE the tolls on our health and time, in-office work provided a social and personal structure that had its benefits, and that many people struggle to replicate those structures in their newly-isolated personal lives.
It's not like commuting is hard-coded into our DNA. Over the past 60ish years commuting slowly changed a lot of things about modern life, and taking it away suddenly revealed a lot of those. But that doesn't mean that commuting is, itself, the answer to our social or motivational desires.
> I like sitting down and solving problems with code, getting a brief and build something cool.
It's a huge problem in tech that companies traditionally try to force engineers into management positions to allow their careers to keep growing. I have had more shitty managers who were just Individual Contributors who were told they needed to manage to succeed past a certain point.
> I tried telling myself that it's a childish and idealistic way of thinking and that it's all a part of career progression regardless of where you work at
The above, however, is no longer true. I work in a smallish tech company (~250ppl) that has gone through a major shift in the past few years to support the career advancement of Individual Contributors; the message being, "You don't need to be a shitty manager if you'd rather be a kick-ass engineer, and we will still provide paths for promotion and advancement."
As other comments have noted, it sounds like maybe your company is just not at a stage of their development that can support pure engineering career paths past a certain point. You do NOT have to be an unhappy manager to succeed in tech. And frankly during a time of economic contraction I feel safer as a valued IC than as a manager whose role could always be 'absorbed' by someone else's position during layoffs.
Maybe not the average, but millions of people commute to a city like Atlanta every day. From the middle of Forsyth County in GA, where there are many exurbs of Atlanta that feed workers into the city, the drive is slated to be 1-2 hours over 44 miles to downtown as we speak even now. And nothing is 'wrong,' currently - this is not some outlier.
Many people that I know make this kind of drive in the Atlanta area, and that's not due to them all being in particular industries either. 1-2 hours to get across the city and into the suburbs/exurbs is a fact of life, and millions do it.
I have never had cancer of any kind in my family tree, and I had a precancerous polyp found at 38yo.
You should get a colonoscopy. If you are at low risk and look totally healthy after, they'll tell you that you don't need another for a good while and you'll get the benefit of not (often) getting something that you don't think you need and, as a bonus, not die of treatable cancer.
You'll die of something else then. That's the part that so many people seem to overlook.
There is a money-making industry around colonoscopies and mamograms. I'm not saying to disregard medical advice in this regard as for any individual there may be good reasons to have these procedures. However you can't completely discount the financial incentives for the providers.
As someone who lives in the south but has done a lot of traveling both inside and outside of the US, rednecks (or redneck-equivalents) are absolutely everywhere. It's a lot more of a class/rural thing than a regional thing, and certainly in the US 'redneck culture' has become mainstream basically anywhere that is not a major urban center.
Also I'm not convinced on the idea that it is unlikely to elicit change. My current employer takes exit interviews very seriously when they lose good people, and tries to fix the situation before losing more.
Like you said, if it is handled professionally - that is, you have valid concerns/criticisms that you are able to quantify and address in a constructive manner - it can be very useful for everyone involved.
I get that for every company that seems to care there are probably 10 that seem to not, but I always find this sort of stereotypical "work sucks and is a zero-sum game" attitude that is common on Reddit and HN a little saddening. Sure, your primary concern should be to take care of yourself, but this idea that everything with 'Inc.' after its name is full of layers of uncaring, heartless drones is frankly untrue. People think the same about IT/tech/dev, and it's not true there either. It does not have to be you vs them, even when you decide to leave.
I'm just trying to understand the scenario here: you are caught up in a fraud, and unknowingly you give the fraudster access to information that they are able to leverage to make fraudulent purchases in your name and the 'win' here is that they can't spend it on crypto?
It seems like there are multiple points at which to address this problem prior to how they're spending your money.
Edit: I guess a lot of the comments are talking about the scam being that you are scammed into purchasing crypto somehow, a different scenario than someone having control of your account. Still though: people have been successfully swindling over the phone for a century. Having someone buy Monero instead of a wire transfer is just procedural.