I zoomed into a handful of random spots, and quite a few (maybe 30%) do not appear to show basketball courts at all. Many seem to be just rooftops or construction sites.
The labels seem to be taken from OpenStreetMap, so blame imperfect labelling there.
I guess taking labels from OSM is akin to taking your facts from Wikipedia (except that Wikipedia actually tends to be pretty well curated these days).
In fairness to OSM volunteers, a lot of Wikipedia's subject space is historical or otherwise relatively stable, while everywhere OSM maps is in danger of being changed in the real world. Just comprehensively mapping one small town takes many hours and by the time you work your way through region much of what you mapped will be different IRL. Aerial photography only updates periodically, which helps in a sense but also hurts because anything you map with that will most likely be outdated from the start.
Unlikely, I zoomed in on one that had a pool with round edges within a square concrete area that had the rough geometry of a basketball court and I imagine a image recognition engine being confused by that.
> If you live in Miami or Phoenix, you need air-conditioning to survive the summer. But if you live in the middle of the country, try leaving the air-conditioning off when it’s hot but not too hot.
The more accurate description of this opinion piece is therefore "if you live in areas where it's not too hot [Kansas, where the author is situated, seems like it has average upper temps of mid 80s right now], you don't really need AC much". ....Well, no kidding?
These days, its best to always travel with a retained team of attorneys, ready to intimidate and threaten litigation against anyone that tries to treat you like a kafka protagonist.
> It might sound a little bit creepy from a privacy perspective, but Gamgee insists that all motion data is processed and stored on the routers themselves, and never in the cloud.
This seems deceptive. Sure, the data may be processed and stored locally, but if the routers themselves may be accessed remotely (e.g., by Gamgee, if the routers are compliant with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TR-069), then the fact that the data isn't stored in the cloud is a moot point.
Not at all. OpenAI follows basic accepted standards for security reporting. This is like complaining that you can't find if a website doesn't want specific directories crawled because you don't know about the existence of a robots.txt.
Specifically, OpenAI has a security.txt [0], which is:
> an accepted standard for website security information that allows security researchers to report security vulnerabilities easily [1]
Whenever attempting to find where to report a security issue, the easiest thing to do is always check if the website has a security.txt file.
The email address they have listed there is defunct, and they haven't bothered to update this security.txt page. When you try emailing disclosure@openai.com, you get an auto-reply saying:
Hello and thank you for reaching out to OpenAI. Our vulnerability disclosure program has migrated to OpenAI's bug bounty program, and this mailbox is no longer monitored. Please use the "submit report" functionality available through our bug bounty platform to inform us of security concerns, or reach out to support@openai.com for any non-security-related inquiries.
Thank you for your help in securing OpenAI!
Bug Bounty Program: https://bugcrowd.com/openai
... that was a joke, right? So only people who have heard of the security.txt convention are expected to find this information easily when they need to report a bug?
> Keep your links safe and accessible only to authorized users
Is the operator of this service also able to access the links?
If yes, then right away this claim is not true and merits caution: the random unknown owner of this service can now harvest links which were deemed sensitive enough to merit a password to access.
> I think it is an interesting idea that scammers intentionally make typos and absurdities, just to weed out discerning people in favor of easier victims
This is an apocryphal anecdote or theory that gets passed around, but I'm not sure how true it actually is, and certainly not universally true. In that, I think scammers are way more likely to just make typos than to setup an elaborate low-level target filter. Regardless, I've also never actually seen scammers admit to this.
This is exactly the kind of thing I was talking about, taken to an extreme. A lot of theorizing about ROC curves and optimal operating point formulae, and absolutely no empirical, qualitative evidence (such as any interviews with actual scammers).
For example, there is no actual sample data provided to substantiate even the premise, let alone the conclusion of this claim:
> In choosing a wording to dissuade all but the likeliest prospects the scammer reveals a great sensitivity to false positives.
Thanks for being more eloquent about critiquing that paper than I could be. But that leaves the observation about grammar and spelling in spams and scams unexplained. How should we explain scams terrible presentation?
Occam's razor: the messages are created by the uneducated dregs of society in countries where English is not a first language, and that's the best they can do.
This scam is successful because it is predicated on the same appeal that ventures like lotteries, sweepstakes, slot machines, or giveaways have (albeit accentuated with a seemingly guaranteed win, that these other ventures don't have): the belief that you can just luck into a giant treasure chest of money by expanding minimal effort.
Broadly, this is a modern version of what's known as an advance-fee fraud, which has been around for hundreds of years - paying a small amount upfront (hence the 'advance fee') under pretense of receiving a much larger amount later.
The difference is that while lotteries and casinos are out to take your money they're at least honest about it. If you win they'll pay out in real money. They're not rug pull scams.
The dishonesty lies in obfuscating the actual odds of winning, making the honesty about the payout a moot point as it's not particularly applicable for most entrants.
For it to be clear how unrealistic the odds are. They're not exactly broadcasting "you're 40 times more likely to be struck by lightning than to win the jackpot", instead their site screams "Millions Could Be Yours!". That is the dishonesty and obfuscation. Millions _could_ be yours, but they are very unlikely to be yours, in fact realistically approaching zero. While advance fee scams say "millions will definitely be yours", with the odds being absolutely zero. But neither are meaningful odds.
Though regardless, my original point wasn't about odds but about the lure and the appeal of both of these things: the potential for getting a lot of money for doing virtually nothing (other than spending a bit of money up front).
The problem is that no culture/philosophy has (yet?) even found a clean line.
Ex: How different must the fixed menu picture of the "Burger and Fries combo"--designed to manipulate me into feeling hunger--be from the real food before it's fraud? If I tell you "pink elephants", I have created text that placed an idea into your mind against your will, but is that an offense?
If it's not a picture of food cooked by a worker at the company, in the regular kitchen, with the normal ingredients then surely it's fraud (lying to get money)?
Market capitalism needs truth and transparency to have any chance of optimising delivery of goods/services. These should be preeminent goals of Western Capitalism.
Fraud requires purposeful deception. It doesn't need to be 'the not-yet-existing burger', it just needs not to be designed to deceive you.
I'm not arguing the line isn't subjective.
But, if it's not made with the same ingredients, or for example isn't actually food (as with many marketing images for food), then it's deceptive. I hope you agree?
If it wasn't even made in the restaurant you're in, then I'd agree that is more of a blurred line - if it was made with the same equipment, to the same standards, by the same company, that's reasonable.
I think my point still stands that truth is essential if the mechanism of market forces is to be at all effective.
> But, if it's not made with the same ingredients, or for example isn't actually food (as with many marketing images for food), then it's deceptive. I hope you agree?
The point of the image is to give a preview what you’re about to get. It doesn’t have to be the real thing. If I sell screws online and only have CAD drawings and 3D renders of them, is that deceptive? As long as the product is properly described by the image, it doesn’t matter where it comes from. You could also sell burgers with hand-drawn preview images of them if you wanted to.
>As long as the product is properly described by the image, it doesn’t matter where it comes from. You could also sell burgers with hand-drawn preview images of them if you wanted to. //
I think we agree.
The only thing left is to decide what properly described means -- as is so often the case with such matters. Thanks for your comment and pushback.
At a certain point it falls to personal accountability. A would be lottery ticket buyer can get all that info in 30 seconds by googling "How likely am I win to win the lottery?" If they don't do that, that's on them.
Advance fee scams are different because 1) they are telling outright falsehoods and 2) they come cloaked in a broad variety of disguises, which means that a naive web search is not guaranteed to unveil the deception
IMHO, if you don't spend one afternoon out of 365 in the year researching what to do with your money and you lose money as a result, you can't claim victim status. It's analogous to being out of shape because you never go to the gym. Good results take effort. It's not someone else's fault if you never put in the effort. And the effort needed to learn how to make sound financial decisions is actually a lot less than the effort of going to the gym every day.
To draw another analogy, let's say you don't max out the pretax contributions on your 401k even though you have the means to do so. There are tens of millions of people in this situation right now, losing thousands of dollars in potential retirement savings each year. Are these people victims too? What is the difference between them and people who view lottery tickets as an investment vehicle? In both cases it's a financial loss due to lack of research.
In any case, I suspect that most people who buy lottery tickets are doing it for the entertainment value (the thrill of gambling), in which case dropping $20 on a lottery ticket every week isn't much different than dropping $20 on the movies. It's hard to to call them victims from that standpoint as well.
You made it look more prominent by linking directly to the tab that details the odds.
On mobile that tab isn't even visible when you load the page, you have to know that it's possible to scroll to the right in the tab bar. Otherwise what you see is the tag line "Imagine Winning $48 Million", details about when drawing happens, and a button that says "claim a prize" with an ecstatic man on a phone.
I will say that the government-sponsored lotteries tend to be less blatantly abusive than casinos, but I'm still very comfortable saying that they do actively work to inflate people's sense of the odds.
The details about this guy at the end were hilarious. Apparently he always stays at Motel 6 and eats at 7-11. Totally living it up on Ma Bell’s dime, I see!
I vaguely recall visiting Boston c1990 and discovering pay phone calls there were still 10¢, while they had been 25¢ in Indiana as long as I could remember. I'd be curious when and where the last ten-cent phone call was made.
I'm pretty sure I remember being thoroughly offended about 1980 when I found a pay phone that required 25 cents. I think that this was in the Denver area.
