Theres a business there for sure - does a business you hate use AI in any customer facing way? make them burn tokens. I would 100% do this to StubHub after they screwed me over. If anyone from StubHub sees this, one day you will regret your "hang up on people with complaints" policy. People dont forget when they've been screwed by a corporation. Anthropic, this happened to me 12+ months ago and StubHub is still on my shit list, you're making enemies for life with all your current BS
My StubHub story: bought $500 tickets and accidentally bought ones in the dsabled seating section. Called 2 minutes after purchase when I realized - their response "you can relist them on the site". Who else was going to buy them?? Nobody did. Any normal human business would let you correct a basic human mistake like this, not even 10 mins after purchase, but not stubhub. They could have upsold me and I probably would have left happy! At least I could have attended. Cost me $500 but cost them a lifetime of emnity
I used to buy used things from the Mercari marketplace (similar to eBay), until someone sent the wrong item and I emailed Mercari the same day since their web site wasn't working to open a return request (you have to resolve wrong items within 3 days). Support waited 3 days to respond and told me I was outside the window so they couldn't refund me and that I should have done it sooner. I did a chargeback and they were angry and told me to reverse it. They then banned my household for life.
And then there's PayPal who refused to refund from a clear scam for almost $5K, even after I left a BBB complaint. Credit card chargeback saved the day, again. They didn't ban me, oddly.
I guess this is an endorsement of using a credit card.
For this use case it matters a lot less if LLMs can solve it. As long as it costs you more to solve the captcha than it costs your adversary to serve it to you, it is still (some what) effective.
My insurance company and Synology would be my first targets. I'd gladly throw ~1k at each.
Of course, I suspect the true business model to be to do nothing. You sell the "service" to people customers, but your enterprise customers pay you a subscription fee to not execute the order. ELaaS: Everybody Loses as a Service
Haha. You could also add in some "fun" Uber-isms, too!
Suppose an enterprise customer released a new update that everyone absolutely hates, so angry customers are are more likely to wage war on their bots with the company's anti-bot token-draining mechanism: "Oh, whoops! Looks like you're in surge pricing territory. We can only refuse to do nothing for so long before we start to lose credibility with our people customers, so what would have been a subscription fee has now slipped into premium pricing territory!"
hatePerPerson can be calculated as the averaged comment-to-upvote (or upvote to downvote, if available) across Social Media platforms.
If you want to be exceptionally malicious, you can also offer dynamic discounting to the person customers at the same time, to drive up the surge pricing even higher!
I would call this unethical but, well, every aspect of it kind of is. Everything from the service existing, to the the people participating, to the secret backend service, to the enterprise customers paying for that secret backend service. Might as well drain as much dosh from everyone as you can, if everyone is tip toeing in that dark-grey area anyway. :)
You know what? If I have time, I might even make a mock site to sketch all of this out. I've been meaning to come across a fun little project. This could work! lol
That one is good I think. It's German and adheres to EU privacy laws. The main FLOSS one is called drip. Has some funding from the German government as well as Mozilla
Common knowledge shouldn't need a source. Asking for one is a technique used to dissuade further discussion. If someone has evidence contrary to the common knowledge then they should be the one to produce that evidence
Yes, of course, the perceived editorial line of the Economist is similar to the Holocaust. Also, it is quite easy to do in the later case, you can link the relevant wikipedia article.
Depends if we are in agreement. If we are, no. If we aren't and we want to have a sincere discussion, yes.
If all you do is come, claim that the Holocaust happened in a certain way, and hoped to call it a day without any proof nor evidence, that's just a demonstration of your own bad faith and intolerance.
Luckily for many, the internet is filled with evidence about it, so any good faith argumenter should have little difficuty doing so.
The only people averted to do so are people not interested in a proper discussion, at which point, they should just leave rather than spout baseless claims. Even if their conclusion is correct, poor arguments do nothing more than hurt the pursuit of the truth (normally for spreading intolerance, which helped the Holocaust happen).
I also regularly keep up with The Economist and other western news outlets and I completely agree with GP's impression that we see a "China is doomed" opinion piece every other month. Same with geopolitical youtubers.
Obviously none of us are committed enough to this internet discussion to do a formal study to prove our impressions but I think the majority of regular readers would also agree. Asking for sources for what is common knowledge is just a silly way to shut down discussion instead of engaging with it
If you can't show any proof or even circumstantial evidence of your theory, it's worthless and the Economist is not a China-doomer paper.
The reality is that it's a lie and the Economist is quite balanced about China (even while they are banned from publishing there!). For instance, their latest cover was quite positive about the country: https://www.economist.com/leaders/2026/04/01/how-china-hopes...
That user always does this. They make bold claims then frantically google and fail to read their own links, and it’s always in favor of China or some communist dictatorship.
TL;DW: HIPAA was actually created to allow insurance companies to share patient data without having to get patient consent. Before HIPAA, data was more fractured and less commonly shared. The only privacy protections it offers is, e.g., your doctor not giving your data to your boss. But about 1.5 million private entities can legally access your data (everything from health startups to insurance companies to hospitals)
Reminds me of this Seinfeld episode when Elaine was marked as "difficult" in her chart, and then she couldn't get a single doctor to see her. She wasn't allowed to see her chart or edit it after that. As soon as she got to a new clinic, they would receive a phone call from another doctor warning them not to treat her.
> But about 1.5 million private entities can legally access your data
Somewhat. They are allowed to access it "for treatment purposes", not just to nose around out of curiosity.
I found myself explaining this to a number of my patients (I used to be a paramedic) who were irate about disclosures they'd made to their therapist, doctor, etc., that they had said they didn't want revealed to other providers (but were actually germane to their care).
"Does the HIPAA Privacy Rule permit doctors, nurses, and other health care providers to share patient health information for treatment purposes without the patient’s authorization? Answer: Yes. The Privacy Rule allows those doctors, nurses, hospitals, laboratory technicians, and other health care providers that are covered entities to use or disclose protected health information, such as X-rays, laboratory and pathology reports, diagnoses, and other medical information for treatment purposes without the patient’s authorization."
One problem is all the data breaches it encourages. Data breaches are already bad enough with the providers I actually use without 1000s of random companies having access.
There are a plethora of open-source implementations available on F-Droid. They need to be looked at for privacy before choosing one, but there are completely offline ones.
- around since 2023. Last updated 2 years ago.
- iOS
- Swift
EDIT: Someone else pointed out this closed-source alternative that got a 92% by ORCHA: https://www.my28x.com/
I think the biggest thing I'd like to see is a data format standard defined. You should be able to "take your data with you" and go anywhere you like. If you decide an app is unethical or if your favorite OSS app stops being updated, it should be simple to switch. Many apps let you export your data. Maybe someone can make a converter between popular proprietary apps and a common data structure spec
China is citing national security as AI is becoming a key industry. It's no different from all the times the US intervened to stop China from buying out US companies. E.g.
> President Trump issued an order blocking the $1.3 billion sale of a Portland, Ore.-based company called Lattice Semiconductor to private equity firm Canyon Bridge Capital Partners. The stated rationale for Trump’s order was national security.
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