I recently tried to sign up for paypal, "tried" being the operative word since their garbage, broken processes couldn't verify me despite bank info, etc.

After seeing their profound incompetence at customer acquisition, ineptitude on the security front is no surprise.

I think in general, it's getting harder and harder to 1. newly sign up for online services, and 2. come back to these services after long periods of inactivity. Everyone's got overly-aggressive automation that blocks you for no discernible reason, and endlessly requests more and more invasive "verification" schemes.

I hardly ever use my Microsoft account. Probably haven't logged into it for years. But recently I wanted to give my kid a few bucks to spend on Minecraft micro transactions, and boy, just logging in was a nightmare of verifications and codes and resets. And then making a purchase? Instantly denied with a vague error message that directed me to contact what turned out to be their fraud department. Totally user-hostile, when I'm just trying to get them to take my money.

The security tail seems to be wagging the dog at these companies.

I've noticed this as well. It's kind of insane how hard it is to sign up for popular services.

My first go at paying MS for anything was buying Minecraft for a child, it was pain from start to finish.

I'd bought Minecraft twice from Mojang, simple as.

Naturally the first impulse is to protect criminals while law-abiding citizens are ignored.

He's writing about Revolutionary France's debasement, but Mackay's Extraordinary Delusions documents France's debasement under John Law about 70 years earlier, which shows how easily such mistakes are repeated.

Oh, yes, only "important" people deserve customer service. That is an appallingly elitist attitude.

Nobody said that.

Even mainstream gaming sites cannot review even a fraction of the mobile games market; you've created for yourself a truly Sisyphean task.

A better approach might be to highlight the fraction of mobile games that deserve more recognition for avoiding dark patterns, like this site does:

https://nobsgames.stavros.io/android/

Alternately, focus on AAA games.

I read the whole article, but have never tried the model. Looking at the input document, I believe the model saw enough of a space between the 14 and 5 to simply treat it that way. I saw the space too. Impressive, but it's a leap to say it saw 145 then used higher order reasoning to correct 145 to 14 and 5.

I also read the whole article, and this behaviour that the author is most excited about only happened once. For a process that inherently has some randomness about it, I feel it's too early to bit this excited.

Yep. A lot of things looked magical in the GPT-4 days. Eventually you realised it did it by chance and more often than not gets it wrong

I always wondered if there was some genetic factor related to mutations, perhaps, that was stronger in dogs than cats, horses, cows, sheep, etc. There's such morphological variety.

If I my retirement was tied up with some startup trying to IPO, I'd be furious. It's the exact opposite of responsible stewardship.

They just said shareholder

Smug blogger visits foreign country for a few days, finds evidence of his pre-existing belief system.

I mean, betterhelp would probably be an improvement over counseling via hallucinating AI.