Perhaps that is in the eye of the beholder. I thought it was quite unimpressive. There were several anecdotes that appear to be cherry-picked, and some claims that are just wildly implausible. And then at the end, we learn the author discovers she didn't actually make the cut for a GATE program and threw up when she learned this. It's no surprise she wrote this attempted takedown in the wake of her identity being shattered like this.
The article you linked is from last month, when the issue was just starting to pop. This article is a different story about substantive developments that have occurred in the last couple weeks. Perhaps it should be "related" instead of "previously" (which IMO should be reserved for articles that are essentially the same).
It is funny how things that were completely ordinary 100 years ago are now considered luxury items. I suppose it's because they're used for leisure instead of as work horses/transportation, and because feeding/housing/mucking is now a burden for city/suburban dwellers.
The more time goes by, the more wondrous the recollection of my grandfather (1909-2006) telling me about growing up living across the street from a livery stable (i.e. horse commuter parking). Men would come into town to work at the steel mill and leave their horse for the day. He would say that after about 1922, cars were much more common, which in retrospect given the relative cost makes me think more that they crowded out horses, rather than the common mill worker upgraded from a horse to a car.
I find the title confusing/misleading. "X has come for Y" typically means that X is out to get Y, at least to me. It doesn't generally mean "X is starting to use Y now".
In the case of genAI using a particular expression style, there is less difference between those two meanings than it may seem. If genAI picks up an expression style, it means that style is less suitable for use by humans.
That's a fair point, though I still feel like it's a very roundabout way of saying "Y is going to die because X is going to use it so humans won't want to use it as much".
I think that within a few years, most lawyers will expect that clients will have run contracts through an LLM prior to sending them to outside counsel. Emails will be along the lines of:
Please see attached contract we received from [counterparty]. ChatGPT says blah, blah and blah should be revised. What do you think? Is there anything else that we should change?
Right. That will reduce workload for the lawyers. But will their fees then go down? I'm kinda worried that if I don't give them the LLM produced legal docs for review they will just use the LLM themselves and then charge me for the work the LLM did :-)
It's bit like with doctors, you'll want a second opinion, if you can afford it.
TBD. Probably depends on whether what you're paying for is access to their lawyer-level LLM, which they would run it through, or for actual expertise.
Probably for important deals, detailed human review will be expected.
Maybe the real value-add will be the insertion of language that LLMs won't be able to figure out, but which will be favorable for the side that inserted them.
What surprises me most about gmail and AI is that they seem really quite bad at filtering out obvious spam. I get so many messages from people I have never heard from, on relatively new domains, with endings like "if this isn't relevant for you right now, say "not now" and I'll not circle back" (a clear attempt to allow unsubscribe without using the word).
How is it that they haven't figured out how to stop these messages from getting through? I'm at the point that I'm considering those email services that require the sender to confirm they're human before an email is delivered. It would be a hassle to people I communicate with (once), but the ongoing hassle to me is sizable enough that I'm considering it.
If it was profitable for them to fix it they could probably fix it immediately. They don't care because it's no longer profitable for them to provide excellent service.
They only care about providing a service that is just good enough to keep enough people from jumping ship.
And the cool thing is that damn near every company on the planet is doing the same thing right now so even if you DO jump ship you aren't guaranteed anything better, just shitty in different ways.
They can fix it. They have certainly figured out how. But their "killer feature" is not that you don't receive spam, it's that the mail you send isn't flagged as spam by their fellow oligopolists.
We're now at the place where it's virtually impossible to run your own mailserver and have the mail delivered, consistently at Gmail and Outlook/Live/Hotmail. At least not without hours a month tuning, re-configuring, monitoring etc.
Basically, Gmail, Apple Mail, Microsoft, Yahoo (and to lesser extent, Fast-email, proton, or one of the handfull of dedicated email providers) have cemented an oligopoly. You must invest serious infrastructure, time and effort, or else your mail will be /dev/nulled (at random, often).
This "anti-spam" works, reasonably well. Because Gmail can now trust that Microsoft has measures in place to disencourage new accounts from sending large amounts of mails - and vice versa. Obviously Gmail can trust other Gmail accounts. And so they have a win-win-win.
win: No need for heavy, resource-intensive spam-training or scanning for the bulk of incoming mail - if its from a fellow BigTech, let it through. Win: an almost impossible high barrier to entry for any serious competitors. Win: Lock in, because anyone wishing to move will see their email not reach the inboxes of users at other Big Tech - aka the vast majority of inboxes.
The worst part for me are the false positives. I frequently need to get into the spam folder to discover emails that Gmail thinks they are spam, even though there is absolutely no reason for it. I have been thinking about leaving it.
My account is ancient; every spammer in the world knows it.
But practically no spam gets through. And there are very few false positives. Going though my spam folder, I see a few legitimate commercial emails that I don't care about, but the rest is junk.
Most of it is being dropped on the floor without even getting into the spam box. I have only 65 emails in my spam folder. A few years ago, there were tens of thousands. I don't know what they did, but at some point they clearly started rejecting the worst of the worst, i.e. the vast majority of it.
I have no idea why your experience is so different. I'm on a Google Workspace; perhaps that's something?
> a clear attempt to allow unsubscribe without using the word
I would have assumed it was primarily an attempt at getting you to verify the address is a real, monitored inbox. I guess it's probably a 2 birds with one stone kind of thing, lie about a way to unsubscribe to get off the spam filter and mark the email as a prime target for other domains.
I think there might be a small domain reputation boost to having you reply. Email providers score your domain on reply rates sometimes, as well as open rates & whether you're marked as spam.
Could be worse. I see the email from another person that has the exact same email direction that me, except that he doesn't have a "." . I see his private emails and I get double of spam...
I use only Gmail as a "register and get a spam" email account. Any serious or important email goes to proton mail.
PD: I contacted that person and I formed about the situation some time ago.
Do you suppose they are running the messages through any LLM? I don't know. I would guess it's too much volume to run all mail through a "good" model, but no idea whether it would be feasible to run mail through the kind of dumb model that generates "AI Overviews."
Oh for sure. I have even been solicited by companies that do such a thing, and brag about how they reword every email so it doesn't get flagged as spam.
I'm seeing a lot of domains that are clearly registered to spam without a reputational hit to the root domain; for example, wh***teams.work spamming me on behalf of wh***teams.com.
Doing SEO/marketing tricks on behalf of your competitors which gets them penalized by Google is a form of blackhat SEO with a rich tradition & history.
I got a lot of group spam, where someone seems to have created a google group and added my mail to it. And then people answer the spam, and the answer is also send to everyone in the group
I get spam in my gmail all the time. And worse. Just minutes ago received a very official looking email from Bank of America telling me I had received a wire transfer.
You'd just end up arguing about when the property appreciated. The owner would say it all happened since the last tax payment was due.
It would also complicate the home buying negotiation. People would look at your recent tax payments and put a cap on the bids they would make based on what would trigger back taxes for you.
I was indeed assuming that if you declared a value of $X but then sold N years later for $Y, then you pay N*(Y-X) in taxes.
You are right to imply that it seems unfair if you discover in year 49 of your happy 50 year tenure that your Queens bungalow was built on top of a seam of pure gold nuggets all along.
I was thinking about the situation where someone cheats and declares their property to be half as valuable as it actually sold for. They would then owe back taxes for all of those years when they declared it as $X when it ended up having a market value of $2X.
But as you rightly pointed out, property values go up and down, so the vendor would say that extra $X was only in the past year, not the previous 10 years or however long they had been self declaring at a low value.
It depends on how the $ is spent. If it's spent on "free preschool" then it benefits parents who use the free preschool. These are by definition not the people paying this non-resident-only tax.
> increase the cost of hotel rooms and reduce the cost of owned-housing
Reducing the cost of $5M+ homes will slightly help some wealthy people who live in NYC, and there will be a modest trickle-down effect into less expensive properties. But I thought the goal was to generate tax revenue from the taxes, which wouldn't happen to the extent they end up in the hands of NYC residents.
EDIT: apparently it hits all homes over $1M, which means it will hit more homes but also won't generate revenue to the extent the homes end up being owned by New Yorkers.
"I thought the goal was to generate tax revenue from the taxes, which wouldn't happen to the extent they end up in the hands of NYC residents."
You're right, I'm saying I think it is a good tax for reasons secondary to revenue. We all know NYC is going to squander the money, at least they might make housing slightly cheaper for the average New Yorker in the process.
Perhaps that is in the eye of the beholder. I thought it was quite unimpressive. There were several anecdotes that appear to be cherry-picked, and some claims that are just wildly implausible. And then at the end, we learn the author discovers she didn't actually make the cut for a GATE program and threw up when she learned this. It's no surprise she wrote this attempted takedown in the wake of her identity being shattered like this.
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