dcow

If you're not sure why I brought up the hypothetical situation and you don't want to engage with it then... don't.

I'm curious, which is why I brought it up. In my worldview humans should have a right not to be advertised to and all advertising should require consent. Even today, humans can ignore and block ads without committing ad fraud. So I don't see a difference between humans and bots consuming ad-laced content. --because no guarantees can be made as to wether an ad will be "consumed" or not, only show

Since I don't distinguish a difference, I wanted to discuss whether the case at any level hinged on the bot factor. That's all.

What I do value is the ability for institutions to control who uses their space/services. So I support regulating and punishing inappropriate use/access. In this case that would be bot usage of Spotify in ways that breaks the contract you agreed upon when you signed up to use their service.

But there's a difference between "this person committed fraud and it's criminally bad because something was fraudulently obtained from advertisers", and "this person breached their contract with spotify and possibly committed criminal computer abuse etc". So it's semantics around who is being defrauded.

No that’s not my argument actually. I don’t think theft here is justified just because it’s a streaming service or big ad or it’s just a click. There’s a real crime here.

I am uncomfortable with the idea that something that is allowed if you pay humans is also illegal if you use bots. That feels like it deserves more discussion. And it feels like while there is a clear crime here, it’s also a problem that the ad and streaming industry have a model that reduces one stream to one human. I don’t want to worry about jail time for automating tasks with bots and accidentally falling on the wrong side of some industry’s really bad/dated monetization model and having it look like fraud. That isn’t the case here, but it encroaches.

It’s not about redistribution for me. I’m not of the mind “fuck big advertising and streaming any theft from them is justified”.

It was more about making sure we don’t punish people for something that would otherwise be legal if they paid humans to do it but instead used bots. And it doesn’t seem like that was the case here after more discussion panned out.

And also that we don’t ignore the minor but still real part of this that’s due to a really poor assumption that “one stream == one human”.

I wasn’t detailed enough. What I was actually curious about is whether it mattered that bots were used.

d.1) convince humans and they use their main account

d.2) convince humans and they use and alt account

I think the resolution to my question is: it’s still fraud if humans do it, like you said. And it makes me wonder if more things should be considered fraud like paying people with free products for Amazon reviews or purchasing GH stars.

I don’t think fraud requires enrichment, does it? I know we commonly associate the two but it’s somewhat of an annoyance IMO that we only care about scheming material misrepresentation when it involve money.

Edit: interesting it does look like there must be an object of the fraud, likely to prevent the law from being used broadly to punish lying.

It’s rhetorical. Setting aside the obvious credit card fraud because I didn’t know that was a factor when initially asking the question, no it’s not clear to me that using bot accounts to consume a digital streaming service is fraudulent or morally wrong the same way assuming a fake name to use someone else’s credit card is.

I don’t care if a service seeks civil remedy for any damages due to a breach of contract.

I also don’t fancy a future where people have to be worried about criminal penalties for spinning up a bunch of agents to automate something that enriches them.

Is buying likes and gh stars fraud? Is it okay if humans click the star button? Is it okay if a large distributed workload does it?

Anyway my actual stance is that it looks like in this case it’s not the bots that are the key focus of this matter so my earlier comment is mostly just a digression. And that I’d hope this case would be ruled similarly if for example human users were paid to stream his songs, however that would be adjudicated.

Yes the list is rhetorical. Yes I am aware this isn’t securities fraud.

Personally, I am not sure I consider pointing a bot at a service to use it, even if it enriches you, generally to be evil or fraud. I think now more than ever the concept of a bot is almost meaningless. So my angle with the comment is to talk about the spectrum and understand why people so clearly see (e) as criminal relative to the other situations when the harm or effective outcome is the same.

We seem generally okay with deception until it is used for personal enrichment. Why is that?

I find this fascinating, actually. On one hand we must disincentivize fraud. On the other hand enforcement of laws really should have observable utility and not feel arbitrary. I’m much more on the “fix the model” side of the spectrum on this one. That doesn’t mean I think we should allow what SMITH did.

I feel uncomfortable when we start handing out prison for things that are isomorphic in utility to things that seem clearly legal.

Which of these are fraud:

a) I block or skip ads in media I consume

b) 1000 people block or skip ads in media they consume

c) I convince 1000 humans to play my songs every day and all of them listen to the ads

d) I convince 1000 of humans to play my songs every day and all of them skip the ads

e) I program 1000 bots to play my songs every day

(b) (d) and (e) all have the same outcome for ad agencies, nobody hears the ads. If (e) is the only one that’s problematic, then we aren’t solving the problem by prosecuting (e).

Similar vein to Matt Levine’s “everything is securities fraud” takes.

Genuine question: what if my agents produce better output if I stream audio to them while they work? Is that fraud?

Came to share this setup too, though I’ve managed to keep the doc in the monitor.

Very neat and fun project though, and good to know there’s a nice solution if the need every arises.

No that’s not what’s being said. Nvidia gave him the wrong total. He paid for that total. He’s saying there’s a world in which he is owed the other 9k shares. He put some lawyers on it and it turns out it won’t be this world.

And even if you prefer to view the constitution as primarily setting up restrictions on government power, I think most of us here would agree that the at-scale data collection and surveillance our government performs under the guise of national security is an incredible power that is new and novel enough to warrant a discussion on keeping it in check.

The federal government a) saves everything, b) is constantly trying to attack encryption, c) tries to insert backdoors in hardware, and d) otherwise gives itself the means to spy on citizens and aliens alike. Even though we fight and have won, it’s been pyrrhic. I’m tired of constantly having the battle every time a new generation forgets why privacy is important.

I can’t imagine ways in which an amendment asserting every citizen’s innate ownership over their digital footprint, data sovereignty, etc. could be a misuse of the constitution. “No government shall abridge access to secure and private communication technology. No government shall collect or persist a profile of any citizen except as required to serve justice. No government can compel decryption of private data. Etc…”

The constitution applies to government, yes. But it's predicated on an enumeration of inalienable human rights that need to be recognized and defended. That's what makes our government different from other instances of government. The enumeration of rights sets the stage for what we value as a society. And privacy is sorely missing from the modern dialog.

I'm sympathetic to the idea that the right to privacy in the digital age is fundamental enough that it needs to be distinguished in our founding documents and elevated to a level on par with the freedom of expression in more than just case law. Most importantly, the government shouldn't be able to spy on citizens either. Right now it does. This has implications for encryption law too.

The point of an amendment is to establish the axioms upon which we evaluate all future laws. From there we can build a legal framework that applies similar ideas to the private sector, as and where appropriate.

"Hey look I got this brand new tool it can do everything my old tools did and more but I'm scared to use it to do more--might shoot myself in the foot."

I think most people have felt that way before. Only way forward is to practice with the new tool (=

> I think what's nice about these tools is that I can just write a document that says things like "prefer immutability" and then I neither need to micromanage nor accept code I don't like

Why are we even arguing then? You and I agree. Did I ever say "don't share a single preference with the AI"? You set the guardrails and preferences and the AI follows them. This is how it's always worked so it's reasonable for me to assume that people "fighting the AI" have already done this and are being overly pedantic about the output. Otherwise it wouldn't be eating up inordinate amounts of time...

> Have I always been the manager of a team of bash scripts? No.

No. You're not even remotely close here. Let's revisit this once you've figure out how to have a team of bash scripts implement 100k lines of code and build entire systems in 2 weeks based on high level instructions and requirements shared in context and prompts. You have responsibility at a different level and scale in an AI native workflow.