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> Has anyone else noticed that the AI industry can’t take “no” for an answer? AI is being force-fed into every corner of tech. It’s unfathomable to them that so
by Terr_ 10mo ago
> Has anyone else noticed that the AI industry can’t take “no” for an answer? AI is being force-fed into every corner of tech. It’s unfathomable to them that some of us aren’t interested. The entire AI industry is built upon a common principle of non-consent.
I can't help but see the spam as more circumstantial evidence of a bubble, where top-down "pump those numbers" priorities overrides regular process.
- hsbauauvhabzb 10mo agoAgree. The number of services i use where the apps continually add new marketing preferences which are defaulted to ‘enabled’ despite the fact that all other preferences are disabled is disgusting and clearly used by some companies to ignore people’s actual preferences. LinkedIn is one of the worst offenders.
- duskdozer 10mo agoHave you noticed certain financial providers sending blatant marketing emails with no unsubscribe option and a comment along the lines of "these emails are not marketing"
- pil0u 10mo agoThis is illegal practice in the EU
- duskdozer 10mo agoIt's illegal in the US too as far as I'm aware. But you missed the part where they clearly stated "it's not marketing" ;)
- nkrisc 10mo agoThey go in the junk folder and then get marked and reported as spam.
- chrisjj 10mo agoDangerous, since this invites genuine service emails to be junked.
- MiddleEndian 10mo agoI think that's fine. If 20% of the emails from some company (let's say Paypal) are spam, then all email providers (especially Gmail, the largest provider) should mark ALL of their emails as spam by default until they stop spending spam. If they want to keep spamming, they can at least humiliate themselves by telling people to check their spam folders for their emails.
- chrisjj 10mo agoIt proved not fine for me on an occasion of missing a service email and losing an account as a result.
- MiddleEndian 10mo agoI would say the base problem is that said organization sent you spam and then disconnected you, rather than the spam filter.
- chrisjj 10mo agoThe disconnection was the fault only of the spam filter hiding the service mail.
- MiddleEndian 10mo agoI mean if said company first spammed you and you marked them as spam, then it is on them. No different than if someone sent you a bunch of unwanted letters and you threw them out, but one of them happened to be relevant. It's on the organization sending you junk.
- Terr_ 10mo agoThe corporate version of video-uploaders writing "no copyright infringement intended", except with less an an excuse for not knowing better.
- technothrasher 10mo ago"For Off-road Use Only"
- chrisjj 10mo agoYet rife. My complaint to a major UK provide was rebuffed with the blatently false assertion that the email promoting a website refresh was an essential service email.
- hsbauauvhabzb 10mo agoYes, but not anywhere near as annoying for me at least.
- vee-kay 10mo agoThe trick is create a filter to weed out such junk. And if a company sends me marketing fluff without unsubscribe option, then it goes in the junk/spam folder, and I may eventually discontinue my account with that service provider altogether. Because I periodically check my sp/junk folder to see if legitimate emails got dumped there, so I eventually know who's a spammer and who's not.
- genewitch 10mo agocontrol+alt+shift+Win+L
- junon 10mo agoThis never stops annoying me that it exists.
- duskdozer 10mo agoWhat the fuck lmao
- MiddleEndian 10mo agoIn Windows 10, they added a shortcut Ctrl+Win+Alt+Shift to open Microsoft Office 365 (or whatever they call(ed) it). Caused me a ton of confusion and annoyance when I picked up my laptop by the corner of the keyboard.
- genewitch 10mo agodon't do that, that made me wince a bit, toughbooks from yesteryear aside.
- dwedge 10mo agoWhenever I login to LinkedIn I get "emails aren't getting through to your main email address". 1. That's by design, because you spammed the shit out of it. 2. Given that all I do is send them to /dev/null, HOW DO YOU KNOW?
- mnw21cam 10mo agoThey're checking to see whether any of the links they put in the emails are being fetched from their servers. It's stupid, but it works for most people. I had a similar situation with SMS messages that were being sent to me with links informing me of status updates. These texts were useful, and I would go over to my real computer to check the web site. Then after a few days the text messages said "It looks like these messages aren't getting through to you, so we'll stop sending them." Which is also stupid, but it works for most people that load the web site on their phone from the SMS link. God help you if you have a dumb-phone.
- Sharlin 10mo agoYou don't need the recipient to actually click on any visible link. Tracking pixels are the oldest trick in the book.
- pluralmonad 10mo agoOnly if people naively automatically load remote content. My inbox receives the bits that actually come in the email and nothing else. If you send an empty email with all images, you sent an empty email...
- direwolf20 10mo agoProbably tracking pixels in the emails
- dwedge 10mo agoSo they'd miss it anyway, my mail client is firewalled to only be able to access the mailserver. I've been unsubscribed from a handful of newsletters because I don't read them. I replied to one and told them I did, even reached out on Twitter, but they still deleted me.
- hattmall 10mo agoThe really strange thing is that so much of it doesn't work. Like I get that the SOTA models perform some tasks quite well and have some real value. But the AI being implemented in every corner creates a lot of really bad results. The Shopify code assistant will completely wreck your site and basically gets nothing correct. It will write 100 lines to change a color of a single DIV. The Amazon product Q&A will give you wrong information more frequently than not. In what mind frame is it logical or necessary to put these extremely poorly functioning products in to the wild?
- TeMPOraL 10mo agoIt's a desperate attempt at staying relevant, even if most of those companies don't realize it yet. Because of its general-purpose nature, AI subsumes products. Most software products that try to "implement AI in every corner" would, from the user's POV, be more useful if they became tools for ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini. People's goals are rarely limited to just one software product, and products are basically defined as a bag of tools glued with UI, that work together but don't interoperate much with anything else. That boundary drawn around a bunch of software utilities, is given a name and a fancy logo, and sold or used to charge people rent. That's software products. But LLMs want to flip that around - they're good at gluing things, so embedding one within a product is just a waste of model capabilities, and actually makes the product boundary more apparent and annoying. Or in short: consider Copilot in Microsoft Word, vs. "Generate Word Document" plugin/tool for a general LLM interface (whether Gemini webapp or Claude Code or something like TypingMind). The former is just an LLM locked in a box, barely able to output some text without refusing or claiming it can't do it. The latter is a general-purpose tool that can search the web for you, scrap some sites and run data analysis on results (writing its own code for this), talk results over with you, cross-reference with other sources, and then generate you a pretty Word document with formatting and images. This is, btw., a real example. I used a Word document generator with TypingMind and GPT-4 via API, and it was more usable over a year ago than Copilot is even now. Partly because Copilot is just broken, but mostly because the LLM can do lots of things other than writing text in Word. Point being, AI is eroding the notion of software product as something you sell/rent, which threatens just about the entire software industry :).
- njhnjhnjh 10mo ago[flagged]