Yes you do. You're being over-literal.

"Noise" in context doesn't mean random characters, it means garbage or spam or content not worth your while.

No, I'm not being over-literal. Here's why:

Yes, it could be that for you a given advert is irrelevant or not worth your while, but the point he was making is that it won't even be worth it for the advertiser to put out the advertisement because it will be noise for everyone.

However, there is only one kind of noise that is noise for everyone: literal noise.

So long as the spam is about something, it is relevant to someone, and therefore it does not necessarily have zero ROI.

EDIT: The only kind of noise that has no semantic is actual "mathematically pure noise" as the person below commented (/u/dang banned my account so I can't reply)

> However, there is only one kind of noise that is noise for everyone: literal noise.

I feel like you're a bit too literal here. When people talk about noise it doesn't mean mathematically pure noise. A signal-to-noise ratio close to 1 is also colloquially called noise.

Addressed above

He is talking about semantic noise. Something that appears to have substance but is just slop actually. When everything is that. Then all email will become equivalent to slop. How could it not? Someone will be burned once or twice, but after that, there is a semantic phase shift.

What is "just slop" though? A spam advert for a product is still an advert for a product. Therefore it's not just semantic noise, it is still an advert for a product, and therefore his point is invalid: there is an ROI and people will continue to be employed to do it

> A spam advert for a product is still an advert for a product. Therefore it's not just semantic noise, it is still an advert for a product

Ergo slop and semantic noise.

Companies that used adverts which weren't noise went out of business long ago.

Adverts have semantic content, they aren't noise.

Let's just call it slop then. Peak HN: Another conversation is logjammed by nitpicking the precise definition of a word rather than discussing the overall point.

Except I am still discussing the point: the companies won't stop getting an ROI because "slop" still produces an ROI, even if people know it's slop, because it isn't contentless noise, it has semantic content.

Just because you and the others don't understand what point I'm making doesn't mean the conversation is "logjammed". I am still discussing the overall point, you just don't see it.

For the record I agree with you--just pointing out a silly, but common, HN pattern.

"How could it not?" There are ways.

Consider that we have fairly decent anti-spam measures which do not look at the body of a message. To these methods, it is irrelevant how cleverly crafted the text is.

I reject something like 80% of all spam by the simple fact the hosts which try to deliver it do not have reverse DNS. Works like magic.

E-mail is reputation based. Once your IP address is identified by a reputation service as being a source of spam, subscribers of the service just block your address. (Or more: your entire IP block, if you're a persistent source of spam, and the ISP doesn't cooperate in shutting you down.)

To defeat reputation based services driven by reporting, your spams have to be so clever that they fool almost everyone, so that nobody reports you. That seems impractical.

How AI spammers could advance in the war might be to create large numbers of plausible accounts on a mass e-mail provider like g-mail. It's impractical to block g-mail. If the accounts behave like unique individuals that each target small numbers of users with individually crafted content (i.e. none of these fake identities is a high volume source), that seems like a challenge to detect.

These IP blocklist services also have a reputation of their own: if you are trying to send legitimate mail, there's a good chance your IP is on several of these blocklists for reasons you have nothing to do with. You can only remove it by grovelling and paying lots of money (extortion). So using one of them will cause you to reject legitimate mail.