> "If it takes me 30 seconds to fire off a prompt that has potential to benefit me it's worth it regardless of the 2 minutes of work it creates for a dozen people" scaled to all of society.

People love this stuff if it benefits them. It even gets cheered on when the receiving end can be reduced to something disliked, like a big corporation or a bureaucracy.

There was a startup that would fight traffic and parking tickets for you and everyone loved the idea. Until, that is, you realize that the company is doing automated requests to jam up your local government systems with extra work. The ticketing agents and government workers who have to put in extra time on these cases don't really care because it's no different than any other work. In some cases they might be able to get some overtime.

The real losers are people who have legitimate complaints who get backlogged behind a thousand automated requests from people who asked ChatGPT to try to fight something for them.

Then later, we all lose when the only way to contest things is to go to a physical location in person and prove that it's you trying to do it, not the bot.

Already seeing this with job applications, too: Apply for a job and you'll be mixed in with 1000 automated submissions. Do the interview remotely and they'll be wondering if you're cheating. Now you have to fly on site for middle interview stages to prove that it's you, not a bot, who can answer the questions.

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hansonkd 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Thats assuming the people using automated tools don't have legitimate complaints and putting the blame on them for their government's failure. If the system was designed better and responded better, maybe less people would have to turn to spamming the IRS line (as an example) when it opens for a glimmer of hope of talking to a person.

Same with the job search. if so many companies didn't make it a pain to input your information, maybe they could get more sympathy.

	▲	Aurornis 26 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Nobody thinks that everyone using automated services to beat parking tickets or whatever was actually being wrongfully accused. Most just want to find a loophole to get out of it. You're missing the important part where people with legitimate complaints are being crowded out by these frivolous attempts to avoid fines. Everyone loses when filing automated frivolous complaints becomes the default response to getting a parking ticket, for example. > Same with the job search. if so many companies didn't make it a pain to input your information, maybe they could get more sympathy. What does this have to do with application spammers? Or are you just trying to turn it into us-versus-them and score points against the other side? Again, the spammers are taking away from legitimate applicants

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kurthr 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Just talking to some InfoSec guys at a party on Saturday at noon, they couldn't drink because they were headed back into work. It's not just PHP, it's everything. They were "joking" about changing professions, because it sucks and it's getting worse. They can't even use frontier models, just use open weights to not get degraded.

	▲	cykros 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		If the Bitcoin Red Team efforts/saga are anything to go by, we have a pig to get through the Python and anyone developing anything sanely will be in better shape on the other side. The caveat is, Bitcoin is 17 years old, and monitored and developed by very security minded people. Much of the infrastructure we use is closer to 60 years old and cobbled together with tinkertoys, COBOL, and chewing gum, so it will likely take longer to get through. Anyone that doesn't adapt their development process will just get ripped to shreds with their vulnerabilities and the market will do its thing. But in the meantime, expect at least a few months and maybe years of the question of "what is sleep?" from the security crowd.