#fintech bros

[atmosphericradar]

Found another odd tag — keyed off the word "hiding" — and this time it's a long one!

So, the full tag is:

#blac chyna is hiding true feelings about her ‘rebirth’ makeover – her ‘lip clamps & droops’ are the proof

This sounds like a celebrity gossip headline! And sure enough, this tag is full-to-bursting with this article exclusively.

I got this from the desktop site, because it's wild to see. It's just a wall of the same article, all the way down, for multiple pages.

They're all from early November 2023, and all from blogs with names that end in *-polycom, *-mag, or *news. It seems fairly self-evident that this is the work of some kind of tabloid, but I'm a curious cat. I want to dig deeper.

Digging Deeper

Most of these posts tell you (they don't provide links!) to go read the full article on POLYCOM. Ok, what is a POLYCOM? I don't think it's Poly Inc., maker of video- and teleconferencing appliances, but a few cursory Google and DuckDuckGo searches yield no evidence of anything else.

The most recent post tells us to go track down the article ourselves on "IN TREND", but provides no URL or link. Searching around for "IN TREND" on the web is fairly difficult, returning results for well-known fashion publications, trend analytics, and a brand of clothing called "Intrend". Searching for "In Trend Today" returned more interesting results, including an InTrendToday YouTube Channel and Facebook page. The Facebook page seems to have stopped posting in late 2018, but the YouTube Channel last posted a video on Dec 18, 2023. I'll talk more about the YouTube Channel under the cut at the end of this post.

Some of these posts do have "read more" links pointing to posts on Wordpress, all of which claim to be "on MAG NEWS". Each *-mag blog links out to a separate Wordpress account which seems to be re-uploading the same story. All of these Wordpress Accounts are deleted (for violating Wordpress ToS), and all of these linked posts are gone (here are two examples):

Somehow, I doubt this is some covert arm of the Maricopa Association of Governments newsroom.

Digging down into the results on Tumblr, I found a copy of this post made by the blog vouxsportsnews. They link a Wordpress article from another dead Wordpress account:

BUT, their most recent post on their blog (a gossip article about Zendaya posted on Jan 5, 2024) does have a working Wordpress link, to vouxsportsnews.wordpress.com (clever 🙄):

This is an archetypal internet-based gossip rag. I didn't know these still existed! I guess Wordpress is hunting them down for sport?

The "Read More ..." link in the article goes to a website called top.neotrends.today, which is a sketchy link I will not be clicking on. The "full article" is apparently hosted on www.primesky.media, which I also will not be directly navigating to. I did manage to get a screenshot of the front page of primesky today (Jan 8, 2024) using a webtool:

I blurred the article shown on this page to preserve the privacy of the person it featured.

Primesky is hosted on a Cloudflare virtual private server, and no public info is available on who owns the primesky URL. A search for "redroads amag" on DuckDuckGo leads back to primesky. A search of the same on Google leads to a website at www.clickhere.world, which is immensely sketchy and looks identical to primesky. At this point, I'm going to end my search for a culprit.

Conclusion

I thought I could find the tabloid hydra's body, but I just found more heads. I'm not surprised the operators of a gossip rag bot network on Tumblr are also playing dirty on Wordpress, and covering their digital tracks well. Sometimes it's best to just report spam and go on with your day.

It should go without saying, but DO NOT NAVIGATE to these websites! At worst, they will give you every virus. At best, they will mine crypto in the background of your browser (and rot your brain).

The YouTube Channel Digression

The YouTube channel intrendtoday was created on Oct 4, 2017, and it has more than 53,000 subscribers as of my posting this post (Jan 8, 2024). However, the earliest video on the channel was posted on Nov 7, 2023. That is suspiciously close to when all of these Blac Chyna spam articles went up.

Given that the videos posted get less than 50 views on average, I think the grossly-out-of-proportion subscriber count is evidence of bot subscribers. Maybe the channel re-branded and deleted a prior back-catalog? Archive.org has no snapshots of this YouTube channel, but SocialBlade claims they lost nearly 3.5 million video views in early September of 2023 (indicating they deleted a lot of videos).

SocialBlade also indexes this channel under the name "demattradinginfo", not "intrendtoday". Archive.org doesn't have records of a YouTube URL for the channel demattradinginfo, but a Google search of that name shows results for Demat Accounts, which are a type of financial account commonly used in India to hold securities and trade stocks.

It's possible that whomever is behind the gossip news spam is also in control of this YouTube channel. I wouldn't be surprised, given how frequently people offering financial advice on social media are either scammers or spammers (and sometimes both!). However, I have no proof that the people behind this YouTube channel are the same people behind this social media gossip spamming.

[atmosphericradar]

News outlets and modern discourse should replace the phrase "artificial intelligence" with "algorithmic decision-making".

It's far more accurate to what the software actually is. Demystify your tech-bro experience.

[atmosphericradar]

AI Leader Proposes a New Kind of Turing Test for Chatbots

A new book floats a provocative idea for testing whether machines are capable of human-like intelligence. But first…

This is a very revealing moment for how the modern AI community is thinking:

The question now is whether passing the Turing test even matters anymore. “It’s totally unclear whether this is a meaningful milestone or not,” said Mustafa Suleyman, a founder of DeepMind, now a division of Google, and the founder of Inflection.Ai, a startup making personal AI assistants. “It doesn’t tell us anything about what the system can do or understand, anything about whether it has established complex inner monologues or can engage in planning over abstract time horizons, which is key to human intelligence.”

This is both fair criticism of the Turing Test, and nothing new. Turing himself didn't think his experiment was a good judge of intelligence, either. Where is Suleyman going with this?

Suleyman argues that there’s a misplaced focus in the tech industry on the distant possibility of achieving Artificial General Intelligence, or AGI: algorithms with cognitive abilities that match or exceed humans’. Instead, he said the more achievable and meaningful short-term goal is what he calls Artificial Capable Intelligence, or ACI: programs that can set goals and achieve complex tasks with minimal human intervention.

To measure whether a machine has [become an] ACI, he describes a “modern Turing test” — a new north star for researchers — in which you give an AI $100,000 and see if it can turn the seed investment into $1 million. To do so, the bot must research an e-commerce business opportunity, generate blueprints for a product, find a manufacturer on a site like Alibaba and then sell the item (complete with a written listing description) on Amazon or Walmart.com.

This major C-suiter in the field of AI just said that the best test of a being's intelligence is exploiting business opportunities.

Obviously the final goal for all of the present-day investment into AI is to generate a financial return. It's no surprise that businesses would salivate over AI that can independently come up with, market, and sell new products all on their own.

But think about what that intelligence test says about the mindset of the big-wigs in AI right now! If the true test of human-like intelligence is being able to turn a 10x profit, what does that say about humans who don't (or can't) make tons of money? If your parents came to you one day and said: "we honestly think you're sub-human because you don't make enough money for how much money went into raising you", that would be prestige-drama-villain behavior.

Rich people think that they are smarter and better than everyone else. It's no surprise that, on a philosophical level, investment-capitalist tech bros will idolize (and seek to re-create) technological investment-capitalism.

I have my own thought experiment: I wonder how many of these Fintech C-suiters has rich parents that gave them huge loans or high-paying jobs right out of school, and I wonder how that affected them later in life...

[atmosphericradar]

"Disruptive technologies" or "disruptive businesses" are not inherently a good thing.

Businesses who brand themselves this way will say that "disrupting the industry/market/sector" is a good thing. But think about that. That advertising line implies that the state of the market sector they are entering is currently bad; so bad that it needs explicitly disruption and not improvement. It's so bad that improvement may not be possible, and it certainly isn't guaranteed, but the disruptive company is willing to give it a shot!

These companies are telling you that they aren't experts in whatever market they are entering. They don't know how to do something better, just differently. They'll use some buzzwordy cloud-based software, and a business strategy that undercuts the current market's bottom lines, because that attracts investors. And investors are always looking for new markets to extract money from.

Consider that markets which have stopped seeing superlative growth year-over-year might be reaching maturity, instead of dying. Were cab drivers not getting paid? Were the taxi and shuttle businesses going broke? Not until ridesharing platforms like Uber showed up. The industry was stagnant, but still able to pay its workforce, provide services to its customers, and maintain itself. Nothing was wrong.

Uber, by comparison, constantly comes under fire for not providing a living wage for the people who work for it. They also don't pay for car maintenance. This is by design: the investors are getting a lot out of Uber, because Uber has such a low bottom line in comparison to taxi cab services.

Investors could have poured money into existing taxi services: a company trying to appify 2nd party taxi companies, or a taxi company itself trying to hire a software team to make an app in-house. But investors didn't go for those options. They saw the chance to make lots of money by up-ending a unionized industry.

Every company that claims to be "disrupting an industry" will be providing some kind of software convenience at the expense of the people currently within that industry. And don't worry, that software will get worse over time. The customer convenience will wane. The investors' business strategy will make sure of it.

If a new business truly has a better way of doing things, they will absolutely say so. They won't call themselves disruptive.