wwtl12

Running software from LLM output is like building a bomb with the Anarchist Cookbook.

The Mechanical Turk is super impressive if you don't know how it works.

I wish I still believed that massive companies charged for things because they need to, and not simply because they can.

It reminds me of freezing your credit (you know, the thing that makes it a lot harder to get your life ruined with identity theft (in the US)). This used to cost about $10, each time, and I believe you had to send a letter with a check to each credit bureau.

Now? It's free, and you can do it on-demand online (although they all try to upcharge you into buying their stupid credit score nonsense every single time, which should be illegal). It's curious how this used to cost money, and then a lot of scandals happened, and either laws were passed or threatened to be passed, and now something pro-consumer that should have always been free... is free. And Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion are still making craptons of money.

The astute reader might ask why they ever charged for this in the first place. It couldn't be that they needed to, because they aren't now, and the universe hasn't imploded. So the only explanation is that they did it because they could, because it locked up something people needed to do behind a paywall, and was profitable.

Yeah, like single moms and people who experience unexpected deaths or job losses. How irresponsible! Maybe if they were rich app developers like Hacker News, they wouldn't have to be punished so much.

They do make significant profits from them, especially from poorer people who incur them. They're also a great pretense to charge even more penalty fees, trapping people in a cycle of debt that is, conveniently, very profitable.

This is the same board where people will tell you to charge $10,000 a week for cloud consulting because it's "value-based pricing", and to steadily increase the per-user costs for your dime-a-dozen CRUD web app "because people will pay it". Amazing.

Banks do it because they can, buddy. It's wealth extraction, and if you aren't the one doing the extracting, you're the one being extracted.