And then you use the smallest, cheapest local model to keep their AI bot busy

bad_haircut72 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Theres a business there for sure - does a business you hate use AI in any customer facing way? make them burn tokens. I would 100% do this to StubHub after they screwed me over. If anyone from StubHub sees this, one day you will regret your "hang up on people with complaints" policy. People dont forget when they've been screwed by a corporation. Anthropic, this happened to me 12+ months ago and StubHub is still on my shit list, you're making enemies for life with all your current BS

My StubHub story: bought $500 tickets and accidentally bought ones in the dsabled seating section. Called 2 minutes after purchase when I realized - their response "you can relist them on the site". Who else was going to buy them?? Nobody did. Any normal human business would let you correct a basic human mistake like this, not even 10 mins after purchase, but not stubhub. They could have upsold me and I probably would have left happy! At least I could have attended. Cost me $500 but cost them a lifetime of emnity

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gblargg 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I used to buy used things from the Mercari marketplace (similar to eBay), until someone sent the wrong item and I emailed Mercari the same day since their web site wasn't working to open a return request (you have to resolve wrong items within 3 days). Support waited 3 days to respond and told me I was outside the window so they couldn't refund me and that I should have done it sooner. I did a chargeback and they were angry and told me to reverse it. They then banned my household for life.

And then there's PayPal who refused to refund from a clear scam for almost $5K, even after I left a BBB complaint. Credit card chargeback saved the day, again. They didn't ban me, oddly.

I guess this is an endorsement of using a credit card.

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jorvi 17 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

I have this vs. a TV webshop in The Netherlands that stiffed my parents because their €430 TV broke and was within a few months of an expiring warranty.

Anytime anyone in my social circle asks for a TV recommendation, I specifically tell them not to order from that shop, explaining they have a habit of stiffing people on warranties. I also tell those people to tell anyone they know not to order from there. I do the same whenever TVs in general or that webshop comes up on Tweakers, the biggest Dutch tech site.

I've been at it for quite some years, and roughly estimating it's costing them ±20 TV sales a year, averaged €650 per TV. That's €13.000 in lost sales per year. Working my way towards €100k cumulative, at which point the score feels settled.

Losing €100k in sales over not honoring the warranty on a €430 TV. A nice, solid x233 loss multiplier :)

If you have a vindictive streak in you, see this as your clarion call. You can cause some real cost to a company's bottom line with relatively little effort. And the more of us do this, the worse the pain gets for crappy companies.

	▲	andybak 5 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> was within a few months of an expiring warranty A few months inside or a few months outside? Because that seems to determine who's being unreasonable in this.

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setopt 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

How long until we have to solve a captcha per message to counter that?

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AlexandrB 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Are captchas still effective against modern LLMs?

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PunchyHamster an hour ago | parent | next [-]

They are if your goal is to burn their GPU time but instead of hundred requests a second you're busy solving captchas

	▲	gowld an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Claude can burn tokens solving the captcha for me. Double the effect.

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verve_rat an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

For this use case it matters a lot less if LLMs can solve it. As long as it costs you more to solve the captcha than it costs your adversary to serve it to you, it is still (some what) effective.

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registeredcorn 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

My insurance company and Synology would be my first targets. I'd gladly throw ~1k at each.

Of course, I suspect the true business model to be to do nothing. You sell the "service" to people customers, but your enterprise customers pay you a subscription fee to not execute the order. ELaaS: Everybody Loses as a Service

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bad_haircut72 2 hours ago | parent [-]

You must have worked for Yelp

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registeredcorn an hour ago | parent [-]

Haha. You could also add in some "fun" Uber-isms, too!

Suppose an enterprise customer released a new update that everyone absolutely hates, so angry customers are are more likely to wage war on their bots with the company's anti-bot token-draining mechanism: "Oh, whoops! Looks like you're in surge pricing territory. We can only refuse to do nothing for so long before we start to lose credibility with our people customers, so what would have been a subscription fee has now slipped into premium pricing territory!"

(Forgive my math below; avoiding coffee today.)

Surge pricing for Denial of, Denial of Chat Bot Token rate: (personPaymentPerHour + averagePricePerPersonPaid) * daysLeftInPaymentCycle ^ (hatePerPerson / time) + 1

hatePerPerson can be calculated as the averaged comment-to-upvote (or upvote to downvote, if available) across Social Media platforms.

If you want to be exceptionally malicious, you can also offer dynamic discounting to the person customers at the same time, to drive up the surge pricing even higher!

I would call this unethical but, well, every aspect of it kind of is. Everything from the service existing, to the the people participating, to the secret backend service, to the enterprise customers paying for that secret backend service. Might as well drain as much dosh from everyone as you can, if everyone is tip toeing in that dark-grey area anyway. :)

You know what? If I have time, I might even make a mock site to sketch all of this out. I've been meaning to come across a fun little project. This could work! lol

	▲	neonstatic an hour ago \| parent [-]
		> hatePerPerson All roads, inevitably, lead to two minutes hate. The man was a prophet.