You have many adtech online dossiers that are basically a virtual you, that can be poked, prodded and studied for interests and behaviors.
for a very minimal look, maybe check out amazon "about you":
But what _was_ alarming was this persistent banner on the page: "Your other AI assistants have learned about you. Bring that knowledge here for an even more personalized experience."
Okay...so let's click *Import* and see what this is all about...
Step 1: Copy [prompt](https://gist.github.com/jenh/dcad304585e23fccc50ac514bc3605c...).
(!!!)
Step 2: Log into your AI assistant and paste it in.
(?!, okay, let's see what we get...)
Step 3: Paste AI assistant's response. Submit the response from your AI assistant below. We will remember the information you share to improve your experience across Amazon services. *To protect your privacy, we may not save all of the information you submit.*
How about...don't do this at all, or at the very least, please ask users to review the returned response for things they might not want to share with Amazon.
What a strange, hokey, non-vetted, and privacy-violating feature...
We haven't saved anything yet. As you shop on Amazon or chat with Alexa, we'll save helpful information to personalise your experience.
Once we have saved some details, you can manage them here."
I've had that account since ... well, I can see orders back to 2011.
UPDATE tracking_data
SET shown_in_interface = false
WHERE account_name = 'm463'"Is an expert at making pasta salad"
I am pretty good. I forgot I got those ingredients at WF. I guess it liked that recipe.
"Customer indicated they are currently in the Pacific Ocean" - "Amazon has medium confidence in the validity of this memory"
Well, then. I guess trying to break Alexa for Shopping by telling it I was in the middle of the English Channel really broke my "about you".
I also had managed to update my About You in weird ways - I got it to accept some kind of variant of "is a gold rewards subscriber of Jeff's Benzos powered by PillPack" and it agreed that was a valid service when I later asked it and guardrailed itself at the same time:
> Systematically completes series once started
> Likely listens to music or audio content with critical attention
You're trying to compare the people who actively build and support these platforms knowing full well what they're doing, with the people who go to vote for lower taxes or more jobs... oh and this hidden lobby agreement to not hurt gambling platforms. If you as a voter think these two things are at the same level by all means, call yourself a shitstain and I won't get in your way.
But nobody votes on these matters, they just come bundled (and hidden for 99.99% of people) under the broad political agenda of a handful of elected representatives who mostly focus their platform on economy, military, etc. not betting sites. This isn't any candidate's platform header. The voter is at best ignorant to these hidden issues. And even if voters did vote on this directly, it's not an obligation for anyone to actively support and contribute.
People choose to build and support platforms which are 100% harmful for anyone but themselves and the shareholders. And they should be chastised. They're free to build whatever fits their moral values, we should all be allowed to criticize according to ours even if you think the blame should be spread across 150 million voters for whatever reason.
The real problem is how we've let these companies infiltrate so much of our society so fast
All the hard work of the people who suffered and fought to achieve this wisdom only for it to be abandoned.
Generations making the same mistakes over and over even with boundless knowledge at our fingertips. Really showcases how important education and especially reverence for education is.
Weirdly, you still have a ban on sniper rifles and on AP rounds.
I am one of the very few people in the United States who actually does still earnestly believe prediction markets do in principle serve an immense social good that can't be provided in any other way: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/prediction-market-faq
Just, in practice, Polymarket and Kalshi are (unsurprisingl)y run by people who solely care about how much revenue they could ever possibly inhale.
And everything else about them is so unethical and so destructive to the commons I would support them being metaphorically razed to the ground.
Like, just the Kalshi and Polymarket Twitter accounts alone contribute more to disinformation (disinformation, not misinformation) than Alex Jones could ever dream of. And then all the accounts affiliated with them make it 1000x worse. And then they have so many other unbelievable scandals I'd have to write a wall of text to list them all. Tons of egregiously machiavellian, intelligence agency-tier tactics and operations.
The only prediction markets that seem to be mostly upside with minimal downside are the ones that do not accept real money.
There is no way to remove the incentive for people with the ability to alter the events being bet on. Insider trading is generally considered a bad thing for the stock market because of the non symmetrical information for everyone trading but all of sudden in the past few years a cohort of people(rationalists) have found it virtuous
It just happens to almost always be the case that the bad greatly outweighs the good, and it usually just leads to things like brazen war profiteering (+ plan-leaking that jeopardizes operations, in the event the military operations were perhaps for a morally net good cause).
An insider doesn’t make their bets known until they are certain they can take advantage of it. The whole point of the move is to predate on the rubes.
In all the cases of insider trading I have been aware of, I have never once heard this argument, until that interview with a prediction market CEO.
The whole point of insider trading is to ensure an unfair trade. The moment you enshrine unfairness as a core tenet of your market place, it loses price discovery capability, ensuring that the surplus is captured by manipulation not performance.
The issue is that our economic system is coercive. You need a job. Now this doesn't excuse you from doing any job but you also need to live.
Take the big tech companies. They're essentially military contractors now. Google, Amazon, Microsoft, etc are functionally no different to RTX, Boeing or Lockheed Martin.
But should you treat someone who works on Android the same as someone who works out on AI systems for military targeting? Probably not. Also, Palantir is fundamentally more evil than any of these tech companies. So it's tricky.
I do agree that online gambling as a whole is deeply unethical. There is no positive byproduct of this. Your salary is paid by people losing money, probably through addiction. And yes, you can say people have free will but you're still preying on and growing addiction.
That's hardly the problem of the economic system, and more of a underlying problem with the the universe (ie. entropy and all).
This is one thing that Karl Marx and Adam Smith agreed on: landlords are parasitic that reduce economic output. It's another way we're returning to a virtual aristocracy as land gets concentrated in fewer and fewer hands.
This is all going to further fall apart once we don't need everyone to be employed. Arguably we're already there. What are the rest of the people meant to do? Starve and die? At some point you realize the only way forward is to collectively own the wealth you help create.
No it doesn't. There is a time and place for the "no ethical consumption under capitalism" mantra, but increasingly (as is the case with your comment) it is being deployed as piece of whataboutism to distract from clearly unethical behavior by implying it is no worse than anything else. There's actually a massive difference between businesses which have complicated tradeoffs in the means of delivering what is basically a social good, and facilitating sports gambling, a negative-sum activity which ruins people's lives for basically no upside whatsoever.
(It's deeply ironic that a slogan originally coined by socialists has found its most use by capitalists trying to get off the hook for their actions, but I guess most rebellious anti-establishment sentiments are ultimately co-opted for profitable ends.)
People can get "addicted" to practically any type of entertainment in that they spend a massive chunk of their time on it to the point it stifles their development.
Is sports gambling worse than f2p games? Are f2p games worse than regular video games? Is someone addicted to video games worse than someone addicted to reading fantasy novels? What about smutty novels?
I'm not sure is disagree with you but I think it is hard to start drawing these lines without saying you are now the arbiter of good art and bad art and you can ban some forms of art if you don't like them and have decided they are bad.
Now are you just banning things you don't like because you point to the societal harms as a fig leaf defense that could be applied to the art you do like as well?
There's a super easy line to draw actually and it has nothing to do with art
Are you selling a product or an experience?
If you're talking about someone addicted to fantasy novels or video games, they are addicted to products.
If you're talking about someone addicted to opening Magic the Gathering booster packs, or videogame loot boxes, or sports gambling, or prediction markets, they are addicted to experiences. In the case of loot boxes they are experiences shaped like products but the addiction is about the experience of opening the box, not really whatever is inside
So.. easier than you seem to think
Of course once lawyers get involved they'll quibble over this shit until the sun goes out
If you paid for world of warcraft by the hour does that change if it is an experience or a product?
This doesn't really work because products and experiences have too much overlap.
What you are really against I think is the different ways in which we are gift wrapping a skinner box, but there are an infinite number of ways to wrap it that will bypass your specification system.
Which will matter to no one except lawyers
When most people smell shit they don't care if it's rat shit or cat shit, they just know it smells bad
People can get "addicted" to practically any type of entertainment in that they spend a massive chunk of their time on it to the point it stifles their development.
Is sports gambling worse than f2p games? Are f2p games worse than regular video games? Is someone addicted to video games worse than someone addicted to reading fantasy novels? What about smutty novels?
I'm not sure is disagree with you but I think it is hard to start drawing these lines without saying you are now the arbiter of good art and bad art and you can ban some forms of art if you don't like them and have decided they are bad.
Now are you just banning things you don't like because you point to the societal harms as a fig leaf defense that could be applied to the art you do like as well?
Is it the % of people who show addictive tendencies to a piece of art/entertainment how we define if it is good or bad?
Is the morality of a form of entertainment defined by how many users show problematic consumption habits, such that in some populations an entertainment product is a moral good and in others it isn't? Is morality that flexible?
Most people feel this is deeply wrong at a gut level and I agree with them. Targeting and squeezing addicts is not moral behaviour.
So if they didn't keep those dossiers would that make them an ethical sports gambling company even if a high percentage of their users showed problematic usage patterns?
People can’t get addicted to practically any type of entertainment. There is a range of susceptibility to gambling, amongst “people”.
We have an extensive range of rules and regulations that apply to gambling, and to things that have odds and payout schedules.
It took a while, but eventually lootboxes in games were recognized as a blight, and regulation is addressing their impact.
Generalizing entertainment from gambling is a huge stretch.
The difference between drugs and other addictions is that (certain) drugs greatly increase the risk of death.
So I say let's divide it in two - addictions that can kill you or leave you in financial ruin in a single evening, and those that cannot.
There are many other hobbies/forms of entertainment that can easily consume significant resources and leave some % of their userbase in serious financial trouble/ruin their lives.
Also you seem to want to define whether a hobby/form of entertainment is moral or immoral based on how expensive it is. So if a slot machine had a lower max bet it would become moral?
What's a "TV shopping network addiction"? I tried searching it, and I can only find isolated news articles from 5-15 years ago that report on it purely because of how unusual this is. Going to file this under 'people can get behaviorally addicted to anything', what a strange example. Do you even know anyone who has bought anything from a TV shopping network, let alone a 'significant number' that are left destitute?
The reason why people disagree with you is because the hair-splitting between different types of addictions seems very pedantic. Clearly people think that gambling addiction is not even on the same scale of addiction than the other examples. If F2P games are cocaine, then gambling is heroin. There is a reason why gambling is taking over Western economies so rapidly, but not any of those other things - it's just too good at exploiting people's brains. So when gambling addiction is so potent that it goes off the chart compared to any of the dozens of other things that can be psychologically addictive, people aren't particularly interested in finding the exact point where it's too much for society to bear - they just know that gambling is far beyond that point.
But is that because you're betting at the repair shop to pull a mint condition replacement engine for your plane, or because people find a way in by paying a bearable upfront cost and then find themselves drowning in unexpected additional expenses associated with these hobbies far beyond the price of a boat or plane? To me it seems like the second one, so it's not a very useful comparison to gambling, it's just a lack of knowledge, foresight and financial literacy.
The gambling industry keeps refining their strategies all the time, new technologies have been a godsend to them. So I wouldn't rely on statistics all too much, because their goal is to use all psychological tricks that can be exploited in our brains to make us make the wrong decision and head down that path. Their effectiveness increases, and so are the depths to which they can get people to sink in their addictions. If you can engage with it safely right now, that is no predictor of how you'll react to the state of gambling in 3, 5 or 10 years. It's like as if the alcohol industry was allowed to invent brand new drugs and sell them without any oversight, targeting maximum potency and addiction and constantly refining their formulations.
There are many other hobbies/forms of entertainment that can easily consume significant resources and leave some % of their userbase in serious financial trouble/ruin their lives.
Also I'm not sure it is correct to define morality by trying to connect how expensive a hobby/form of entertainment to whether it is immoral.
We have an entire science built around gambling, and we know how to titrate the payoffs and reward schedules to get people increasingly addicted.
Our movies/stories aren’t actively (yet) changing themselves to maximize their ability to keep you pressing coins into a slot, or when to string you along.
Personally I think these companies suck. Just need more work to make a strong good faith argument about it.
Gambling (and some other industries, in particular alcohol) come out so bad on this metric, you can practically let the industry define excessive use themselves. In order to claim most of their money comes from "healthy normal entertainment use" or similar, they'd have to claim absurd things, such as that drinking a bottle of whisky per day or spending your entire paycheck each month on slots can be healthy, normal use.
The common industry explanation is that this is because they would be unprofitable if they allowed "winners" to keep betting, which tells you everything you need to know. These businesses can only exist because they're allowed to skew the odds in their favour. Eliminate this unfair practice and the problem goes away on its own.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/feb/19/stake-factor...
I also find the common implementation of in-play delay poor. The way it generally works is a delay is applied before confirming the bet, anything which changes (including pricing) causes the bet to be rejected. The main reason for this is that the traders sometimes only have access to something like sky sports so their feed is quite far behind someone at the stadium. I feel like in reality it should be based on official timings.
Betting $25 on a game hijacks something in my brain that treats it like a fun problem to solve. It gets me interested in teams that I’d otherwise have no interest in. I’ve been betting on sports since the days of offshore betting sites and I can’t say I’ve ever lost or gained more than a few hundred dollars a year.
I’m an adult and I enjoy being able to gamble on sports. It’s never been a problem for me and I suspect it never will be because of the way I do treat it, strictly something to be done for fun.
I grew up in a household where family members also went to casinos and bet on sports responsibly so it was drilled into my head that you can’t ever beat the house and you should never bet what you couldn’t afford to lose.
What business do you have telling me what I’m allowed to do with my own money for fun?
What business do you have telling everyone your personal experience justifies the horror others experience?
If you couldn't put down that $25, would you really not be able to find some other way to entertain yourself?
People like to gamble we need it legalized with reasonable regulations.
What my big problem is that Wall St and the wider market seems to be trending to the least ethical companies (Kalshi, Polymarket, Bettr) are running unregulated gambling operations, providing 0 tax money to offset societal costs and are denying what they’re offering is gambling at all and even promising you can make money off it.