If you’re okay with involving LLMs in this, you can use it to string them along and make them think you’re falling for the scam (I assume it’s a scam because I’ve never heard of a legitimate business using tactics like this). That way they waste their time chasing a lead that will never actually net them any money, and prevents them from scamming someone else in that time.

Don’t even need an automated system for this, just paste their email into an AI and paste the phony response back.

I think of all the ways AI is being used, messing with scammers is one of the ways that’s actually beneficial for society. You can self host a Deepseek instance on your own computer and it doesn’t actually use that much energy.

First, I’d say it depends on the rumour. But in general for a sufficiently serious rumour:

Being “wrong about me” wouldn’t be the thing I’m pissed about. Anyone can assume the worst of anyone else, god knows I’ve done more than my fair share of that. But to spread a rumour goes above and beyond in level of malice. They showed that they, 1, didn’t care whether what they were saying was the truth or not, 2, didn’t care how it would affect me if they were wrong, and 3, are willing to ruin someone else’s social standing to improve their own since that’s usually why people spread rumors. Without further context to the contrary, these are systemic traits of a horrible person and strongly suggest they’ll do it again no matter how sorry they say they are.

The Canadian internet cycle:

Fuck Bell, I’m switching to Rogers

Fuck Rogers, I’m switching to Telus

Fuck Telus, I’m switching to Bell

Any of the charities that go door to door, won’t take a one time donation and insist on setting up monthly payments forever, and keeps trying to guilt trip you even after you refuse.

If you act like a sleazy salesperson while trying to get me to donate to a supposed good cause, I’m going to assume you have more to gain than the people you’re claiming to help.

I live in Vancouver, Canada, in a townhouse with windows that swing out from the side like these:

See how little that window is open? That’s very likely the MAXIMUM it can be open which is dumb as hell.

They also make it impossible to hang a window air conditioner which means you’re limited to the significantly less efficient portable air conditioners. But even then you can’t form a good seal between the exhaust pipe and the window, which make them even less efficient.

Fuck my windows. We’re not allowed to change them even though we own the townhouse because the strata wants to keep all the townhouses consistent. So fuck stratas as well. And the worst part is I see these types of windows EVERYWHERE in new construction around Vancouver.

Ah yes, I was born in the month of Jay.

I’m not trying to convince you on this, but this is my personal belief:

There are runaway reactions already being triggered in the atmosphere that will make the planet hotter and hotter without stopping or slowing down for millions of years. Where are you going to live when the minimum temperature is 60C or higher? A difference of 30C or so is enough to make life impossible for us but isn’t even a rounding error compared to the temperature range of a planet. Look at Mars.

Will it happen in the next few centuries or even millennia? No. But those timescales are miniscule compared to the life of the Earth or the lifecycle of an entire species.

We will be the cause of not just climate “change”, but pretty much a life reset. Like the asteroid. EVERY animal larger than 10 or so cm will die. There’s no way out of it. This is the great filter.

Phones. I haven’t been excited about a phone launch in literally years and I really think they’re getting worse by the year. Whenever I have to buy a new phone, I feel frustrated and angry because it’s never because I wanted to upgrade to the latest model or anything, it’s because my previous phone’s glued in battery has degraded so much that it’s unusable while the rest of hardware is still perfectly capable of running the latest software (or they arbitrarily decide to ban your device from the latest update meaning you either get a new one or expose yourself to even more cybersecurity risks than having a phone already entails).

There’s no meaning to life. We are an accidental self sustaining chemical reaction that has lasted for billions of years. There’s no creator, no higher power, nothing waiting for us when we die.

We’re also about to go extinct and are way past the window of being able to save ourselves. You and I are among the last humans that will ever exist.

And IMO that’s extremely comforting once you actually internalize it. Focus on making you and the people around you happy in the short time you’re here, don’t worry about the far future because it doesn’t matter.

IMO, simple fact that the majority of drunk drivers survive accidents that kill their victim instantly shows that no higher power is looking out to punish the wicked or protect the innocent.

Not having to use JS is below all of those.

I hate how that’s the language everything is slowly converging to. Even if you don’t work on websites, you always have this fear in the back of your mind that one day your project will be infected.

It’s not even easy like people claim it is. I find JS significantly more difficult than Java because there are way more things that can go wrong and troubleshooting is way more frustrating. Just because the app will launch even with errors in the code does not make it easier in the long run. Compile time errors are good actually.

Anything really polarizing can end up with a cult following. Just look at Rust.

People would be less mad if you straight up used a stock image with a watermark so I don’t understand why people go out of their way to use AI when they know people will comment on it and it will detract from the point of the article.

Also, using AI in the thumbnail makes people automatically assume you’re using AI in the text as well. And if you’re not doing that, why would you lessen the perceived value of your writing by making it seem like you are?

It just seems pointless and actively harms your actual goals because people will get hung up on the fact that you used AI and ignore your actual valid points. Especially when you’re writing about open source projects when most people interested in open source are vehemently anti-AI, it really just shows you don’t know your target audience.

Vulnerability driven developer

Fax is also HIPPA compliant, email is not.

Yeah I just love having my cancer diagnosis sent in plaintext over copper wire such that anyone with a dollar store audio recorder and physical access to the wire can intercept. If there’s one thing 19th century data transmission tech is known for, it’s security and privacy.

Is it too much to ask that hospitals use the literally decades old AES standard for sending medical data?

Isn’t that literally how art guilds in the middle ages operated? Like if you weren’t part of the guild and tried to sell art you made, a mob from the guild would come along, destroy all your works, and probably beat the shit out of you for good measure?

Hell, I’ve heard of Americans coming to Vancouver Canada and being pleasantly surprised about our public transit. We don’t even technically have a proper heavy metro, and the SkyTrain is classified as automated “light” metro, AKA the kind they have in tiny German towns that are too small for heavy metro or S-bahn, AKA basically the same as an airport peoplemover but built out for a metro area of 3 million people.

FreeBSD does not have support for multiple drives

What really? Isn’t Freenas a Freebsd distro? Isn’t ZFS like something you can only do efficiently on BSD?

Long pork /s

Dumbest AND most genius: Fake captchas that get the user to press windows+R, then control+C, then enter.

Dumbest because if you paid attention to what’s being pasted, it’s usually a call to power shell with an arbitrary script, and it’s being pasted into your OS’s run box which is basically like a console.

But also genius because there are tons of people that fall for it, and it’s a social engineering masterpiece.

John Hammond with more: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSa_wHW1pgQ

This really highlights two systemic issues: tons of people don’t know what they’re doing with computers and don’t know basic security concepts like don’t run an arbitrary script from an untrusted website, and we should probably do something about that. Which brings me to the second point that Windows is pretty ass for making it this easy. Why can you run an encoded power shell script from your run box, and why would you make bypassing the execution policy as easy as a flag in the command you’re invoking? I can’t imagine those have a lot of legitimate uses and aren’t just being abused by criminals.