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Years ago I was involved in a service where we some times had to disable accounts for abusive behavior. I'm talking about obvious abusive behavior, akin to grie

by Aurornis 10mo ago

Years ago I was involved in a service where we some times had to disable accounts for abusive behavior. I'm talking about obvious abusive behavior, akin to griefing other users. Every once in while someone would take it personally and go on a social media rampage. The one thing I learned from being on the other side of this is that if someone seems like an unreliable narrator, they probably are. They know the company can't or won't reveal the true reason they were banned, so they're virtually free to tell any story they want. There are so many things about this article that don't make sense: > I'm glad this happened with this particular non-disabled-organization. Because if this by chance had happened with the other non-disabled-organization that also provides such tools... then I would be out of e-mail, photos, documents, and phone OS. I can't even understand what they're trying to communicate. I guess they're referring to Google? There is, without a doubt, more to this story than is being relayed.

dragonwriter 10mo ago
The excerpt you don’t understand is saying that if it has been Google rather than Anthropic, the blast radius of the no-explanation account nuking would have been much greater. It’s written deliberately elliptically for humorous effect (which, sure, will probably fall flat for a lot of people), but the reference is unmistakable.
fluoridation 10mo ago
"I'm glad this happened with Anthropic instead of Google, which provides Gemini, email, etc. or I would have been locked out of the actually important non-AI services as well." Non-disabled organization = the first party provider Disabled organization = me I don't know why they're using these weird euphemisms or ironic monikers, but that's what they mean.
- mattnewton 10mo ago
  Because they bought a claude subscription on a personal account and the error message said that they belongs to a "disabled organization" (probably leaking some implementation details).
  - fluoridation 10mo ago
    That's the part I understand. It's the other term that I don't understand.
    - mattnewton 10mo ago
      Then I’m confused about what is confusing you haha. The absurd language is meant to highlight the absurdity they feel over the vague terms in their sparse communication with anthropic. It worked for me.
      - fluoridation 10mo ago
        Because what is meant by "this organization has been disabled" is fairly obvious. The object in Anthropic's systems belonging to the class Organization has changed to the state Disabled, so the call cannot be executed. Anthropic itself is not an organization in this sense, nor is Google, so I would say that referring to them as "non-disabled organizations" is an equivocation fallacy. Besides that, I can't tell if it's a joke, if it's some kind of statement, or what is being communicated. To me it's just obtuseness for the sake of itself.
        nofriend 10mo ago
        >To me it's just obtuseness for the sake of itself. ironic, isn't it?
        mattnewton 10mo ago
        It’s a joke because they do not see themselves as an organization, they bought a personal account, were banned without explanation and their only communication refers to them as a “disabled organization”. Anthropic and Google are organizations, and so an “un disabled organization” here is using that absurdly vague language as a way to highlight how bad their error message was. It’s obtuseness to show how obtuse the error message was to them.
        10mo ago
- gruez 10mo ago
  No, "another non-disabled organization" sounds like they used the account of someone else, or sockpuppet to craft the response. He was using "organization" to refer to himself earlier in the post, so it doesn't make sense to use that to refer to another model provider.
  - fluoridation 10mo ago
    No, I don't think so. I think my interpretation is correct. > a textbox where I tried to convince some Claude C in the multi-trillion-quadrillion dollar non-disabled organization > So I wrote to their support, this time I wrote the text with the help of an LLM from another non-disabled organization. > My guess is that this likely tripped the "Prompt Injection" heuristics that the non-disabled organization has. A "non-disabled organization" is just a big company. Again, I don't understand the why, but I can't see any other way to interpret the term and end up with a coherent idea.
    - saghm 10mo ago
      It seems just as likely to me that they're just using their terminology inconsistently as it is that they're using it consistently but with that egregious amount of ambiguity. The only thing that I'm confident about is that they're communicating in a very confusing way, and that doesn't really give me any strong insight into whether they're being consistent but vague or just plain vague.
      - fluoridation 10mo ago
        Again, I don't agree. If you replace every instance of "non-disabled organization" with just "company", the sentences make sense. There's no need to suppose that the term means anything else, when this interpretation resolves all the outstanding questions satisfactorily and simply.
        hluska 10mo ago
        I’m sorry but the fact this has turned into a multi comment debate is proof that that phrase was way too ambiguous to be included. That phrase made no sense and the article, while unreliable, would have at least been more readable without it.
- quietsegfault 10mo ago
  He used “organization” because that’s what Anthropic called him, despite the fact he is a person and not an “organization”.
  - fluoridation 10mo ago
    No, Anthropic didn't call him an organization. Anthropic's API returned the error "this organization has been disabled". What in that sentence implies that "this" is any human? >Because what is meant by "this organization has been disabled" is fairly obvious. The object in Anthropic's systems belonging to the class Organization has changed to the state Disabled, so the call cannot be executed.
  - gnatolf 10mo ago
    Yes, even if you create a single person account, you create an 'organization' to be billed. That's the whole confusion here. Y'all seemingly don't have an account at anthropic?
- saghm 10mo ago
  Is it? It sounded to me like they're still using the other Claude instance (Claude B, using their terminology in the article). I could be wrong though, which I guess would just be more evidence that they were more confusing in their phrasing than they needed to be.
nawgz 10mo ago
> I'm talking about obvious abusive behavior, akin to griefing other users Right, but we're talking about a private isolated AI account. There is no sense of social interaction, collaboration, shared spaces, shared behaviors... Nothing. How can you have such an analogue here?
- Aurornis 10mo ago
  Plenty of reasons: Abusing private APIs, using false info to sign up (attempts to circumvent local regulations), etc.
  - nawgz 10mo ago
    These are in no way similar to griefing other users, they are attacks on the platform...
- direwolf20 10mo ago
  Attempting to coerce Claude to provide instructions to build a bomb
  - genewitch 10mo ago
    virtually anything can become a bomb if you can aerosolize it. even beef jerky, i wager.
    - QuadmasterXLII 10mo ago
      Hot dogs if you really overdo it on the nitrate salts
    - saghm 10mo ago
      You can also die from eating 10,000 pounds of beef jerky, but that doesn't mean that it's as dangerous to eat as arsenic.
      - genewitch 10mo ago
epolanski 10mo ago
Tangential but you reminded me of why I don't give feedback to people I interview. It's a huge risk and you have very low benefit. It once happened to me to interview a developer who's had a 20-something long list of "skills" and technologies he worked with. I tried basic questions on different topics but the candidate would kinda default to "haven't touched it in a while", "we didn't use that feature". Tried general software design questions, asking about problems he solved, his preferences on the way of working, consistently felt like he didn't have much to argue, if he did at all. Long story short, I sent a feedback email the day later saying that we had issues evaluating him properly, suggested to trim his CV with topics he liked more to talk about instead of risking being asked about stuff he no longer remembered much. And finally I suggested to always come prepared with insights of software or human problems he solved as they can tell a lot about how he works because it's a very common question in pretty much all interview processes. God forbid, he threw the biggest tantrum on a career subreddit and linkedin, cherrypicking some of my sentences and accusing my company and me to be looking for the impossible candidate, that we were looking for a team and not a developer, and yada yada yada. And you know the internet how quickly it bandwagons for (fake) stories of injustice and bad companies. It then became obvious to me why corporate lingo uses corporate lingo and rarely gives real feedback. Even though I had nothing but good experience with 99 other candidates who appreciated getting proper feedback, one made sure I will never expose myself to something like that ever again.
- lysace 10mo ago
  Had a similar experience, like 20 years ago. This somehow made me remember his name - so I just checked out what he's been up to professionally. It seems quite boring, "basic" and expected. He certainly didn't reach what he was shooting for. So there's that :).
- netsharc 10mo ago
  I wonder if there needs to be an "NDA for feedback"... or at least a "non-disparagement agreement". Something along the lines of "here's the contract, we give you feedback, you don't make it public [is some sharing ok? e.g. if they want to ask their life coach or similar], if you make it public the penalty is $10000 [no need to be crazy punitive], and if you make it public you agree we can release our notes about you in response." (Looking forward to the NALs responding why this is terrible.)
PunchyHamster 10mo ago
If company bans you for a reason they are not going to disclose, they deserve all of the bad PR they get from it. > Years ago I was involved in a service where we some times had to disable accounts for abusive behavior. I'm talking about obvious abusive behavior, akin to griefing other users. But this isn't service where you can "grief other users". So that reason doesn't apply. It's purely "just providing a service" so only reason to be outright banned (not just rate limited) is if they were trying to hack the provider, and frankly "the vibe coded system misbehaving" is far more likely cause. > Every once in while someone would take it personally and go on a social media rampage. They know the company can't or won't reveal the true reason they were banned, so they're virtually free to tell any story they want. The company chose to arbitrarily some rules vaguely related to the ToS that they signed and decided that giving a warning is too much work, then banned their account without actually saying what was the problem. They deserve every bit of bad PR. >> I'm glad this happened with this particular non-disabled-organization. Because if this by chance had happened with the other non-disabled-organization that also provides such tools... then I would be out of e-mail, photos, documents, and phone OS. > I can't even understand what they're trying to communicate. I guess they're referring to Google? They are saying getting banned with no appeal, warning, or reason given from service that is more important to their daily lives would be terrible, whether that's google or microsoft set of service or any other.

dragonwriter 10mo ago

The excerpt you don’t understand is saying that if it has been Google rather than Anthropic, the blast radius of the no-explanation account nuking would have been much greater. It’s written deliberately elliptically for humorous effect (which, sure, will probably fall flat for a lot of people), but the reference is unmistakable.

fluoridation 10mo ago

"I'm glad this happened with Anthropic instead of Google, which provides Gemini, email, etc. or I would have been locked out of the actually important non-AI services as well." Non-disabled organization = the first party provider Disabled organization = me I don't know why they're using these weird euphemisms or ironic monikers, but that's what they mean.

mattnewton 10mo ago
Because they bought a claude subscription on a personal account and the error message said that they belongs to a "disabled organization" (probably leaking some implementation details).
- fluoridation 10mo ago
  That's the part I understand. It's the other term that I don't understand.
  - mattnewton 10mo ago
    Then I’m confused about what is confusing you haha. The absurd language is meant to highlight the absurdity they feel over the vague terms in their sparse communication with anthropic. It worked for me.
    - fluoridation 10mo ago
      Because what is meant by "this organization has been disabled" is fairly obvious. The object in Anthropic's systems belonging to the class Organization has changed to the state Disabled, so the call cannot be executed. Anthropic itself is not an organization in this sense, nor is Google, so I would say that referring to them as "non-disabled organizations" is an equivocation fallacy. Besides that, I can't tell if it's a joke, if it's some kind of statement, or what is being communicated. To me it's just obtuseness for the sake of itself.
      - nofriend 10mo ago
        >To me it's just obtuseness for the sake of itself. ironic, isn't it?
      - mattnewton 10mo ago
        It’s a joke because they do not see themselves as an organization, they bought a personal account, were banned without explanation and their only communication refers to them as a “disabled organization”. Anthropic and Google are organizations, and so an “un disabled organization” here is using that absurdly vague language as a way to highlight how bad their error message was. It’s obtuseness to show how obtuse the error message was to them.
        10mo ago
gruez 10mo ago
No, "another non-disabled organization" sounds like they used the account of someone else, or sockpuppet to craft the response. He was using "organization" to refer to himself earlier in the post, so it doesn't make sense to use that to refer to another model provider.
- fluoridation 10mo ago
  No, I don't think so. I think my interpretation is correct. > a textbox where I tried to convince some Claude C in the multi-trillion-quadrillion dollar non-disabled organization > So I wrote to their support, this time I wrote the text with the help of an LLM from another non-disabled organization. > My guess is that this likely tripped the "Prompt Injection" heuristics that the non-disabled organization has. A "non-disabled organization" is just a big company. Again, I don't understand the why, but I can't see any other way to interpret the term and end up with a coherent idea.
  - saghm 10mo ago
    It seems just as likely to me that they're just using their terminology inconsistently as it is that they're using it consistently but with that egregious amount of ambiguity. The only thing that I'm confident about is that they're communicating in a very confusing way, and that doesn't really give me any strong insight into whether they're being consistent but vague or just plain vague.
    - fluoridation 10mo ago
      Again, I don't agree. If you replace every instance of "non-disabled organization" with just "company", the sentences make sense. There's no need to suppose that the term means anything else, when this interpretation resolves all the outstanding questions satisfactorily and simply.
      - hluska 10mo ago
        I’m sorry but the fact this has turned into a multi comment debate is proof that that phrase was way too ambiguous to be included. That phrase made no sense and the article, while unreliable, would have at least been more readable without it.
quietsegfault 10mo ago
He used “organization” because that’s what Anthropic called him, despite the fact he is a person and not an “organization”.
- fluoridation 10mo ago
  No, Anthropic didn't call him an organization. Anthropic's API returned the error "this organization has been disabled". What in that sentence implies that "this" is any human? >Because what is meant by "this organization has been disabled" is fairly obvious. The object in Anthropic's systems belonging to the class Organization has changed to the state Disabled, so the call cannot be executed.
- gnatolf 10mo ago
  Yes, even if you create a single person account, you create an 'organization' to be billed. That's the whole confusion here. Y'all seemingly don't have an account at anthropic?
saghm 10mo ago
Is it? It sounded to me like they're still using the other Claude instance (Claude B, using their terminology in the article). I could be wrong though, which I guess would just be more evidence that they were more confusing in their phrasing than they needed to be.

nawgz 10mo ago

> I'm talking about obvious abusive behavior, akin to griefing other users Right, but we're talking about a private isolated AI account. There is no sense of social interaction, collaboration, shared spaces, shared behaviors... Nothing. How can you have such an analogue here?

Aurornis 10mo ago
Plenty of reasons: Abusing private APIs, using false info to sign up (attempts to circumvent local regulations), etc.
- nawgz 10mo ago
  These are in no way similar to griefing other users, they are attacks on the platform...
direwolf20 10mo ago
Attempting to coerce Claude to provide instructions to build a bomb
- genewitch 10mo ago
  virtually anything can become a bomb if you can aerosolize it. even beef jerky, i wager.
  - QuadmasterXLII 10mo ago
    Hot dogs if you really overdo it on the nitrate salts
  - saghm 10mo ago
    You can also die from eating 10,000 pounds of beef jerky, but that doesn't mean that it's as dangerous to eat as arsenic.
    - genewitch 10mo ago

epolanski 10mo ago

Tangential but you reminded me of why I don't give feedback to people I interview. It's a huge risk and you have very low benefit. It once happened to me to interview a developer who's had a 20-something long list of "skills" and technologies he worked with. I tried basic questions on different topics but the candidate would kinda default to "haven't touched it in a while", "we didn't use that feature". Tried general software design questions, asking about problems he solved, his preferences on the way of working, consistently felt like he didn't have much to argue, if he did at all. Long story short, I sent a feedback email the day later saying that we had issues evaluating him properly, suggested to trim his CV with topics he liked more to talk about instead of risking being asked about stuff he no longer remembered much. And finally I suggested to always come prepared with insights of software or human problems he solved as they can tell a lot about how he works because it's a very common question in pretty much all interview processes. God forbid, he threw the biggest tantrum on a career subreddit and linkedin, cherrypicking some of my sentences and accusing my company and me to be looking for the impossible candidate, that we were looking for a team and not a developer, and yada yada yada. And you know the internet how quickly it bandwagons for (fake) stories of injustice and bad companies. It then became obvious to me why corporate lingo uses corporate lingo and rarely gives real feedback. Even though I had nothing but good experience with 99 other candidates who appreciated getting proper feedback, one made sure I will never expose myself to something like that ever again.

lysace 10mo ago
Had a similar experience, like 20 years ago. This somehow made me remember his name - so I just checked out what he's been up to professionally. It seems quite boring, "basic" and expected. He certainly didn't reach what he was shooting for. So there's that :).
netsharc 10mo ago
I wonder if there needs to be an "NDA for feedback"... or at least a "non-disparagement agreement". Something along the lines of "here's the contract, we give you feedback, you don't make it public [is some sharing ok? e.g. if they want to ask their life coach or similar], if you make it public the penalty is $10000 [no need to be crazy punitive], and if you make it public you agree we can release our notes about you in response." (Looking forward to the NALs responding why this is terrible.)

PunchyHamster 10mo ago

If company bans you for a reason they are not going to disclose, they deserve all of the bad PR they get from it. > Years ago I was involved in a service where we some times had to disable accounts for abusive behavior. I'm talking about obvious abusive behavior, akin to griefing other users. But this isn't service where you can "grief other users". So that reason doesn't apply. It's purely "just providing a service" so only reason to be outright banned (not just rate limited) is if they were trying to hack the provider, and frankly "the vibe coded system misbehaving" is far more likely cause. > Every once in while someone would take it personally and go on a social media rampage. They know the company can't or won't reveal the true reason they were banned, so they're virtually free to tell any story they want. The company chose to arbitrarily some rules vaguely related to the ToS that they signed and decided that giving a warning is too much work, then banned their account without actually saying what was the problem. They deserve every bit of bad PR. >> I'm glad this happened with this particular non-disabled-organization. Because if this by chance had happened with the other non-disabled-organization that also provides such tools... then I would be out of e-mail, photos, documents, and phone OS. > I can't even understand what they're trying to communicate. I guess they're referring to Google? They are saying getting banned with no appeal, warning, or reason given from service that is more important to their daily lives would be terrible, whether that's google or microsoft set of service or any other.