It wasn't until I used TikTok that I understood why it's so scary. Just based on how you interact with the app: how long you watch, what you like, how fast you're scrolling, etc. it starts to show you videos that are eerily related to what's going on in your life and what you're thinking. You don't even have to search for topics. You just start getting videos that seem to be reading your mind. The idea that they can tell what huge swathes of the population are thinking and feeling is scary. I think that's got to be a huge reason they want it under their control: it's sort of a mind-reading app.
I'd be surprised, given the technical savviness and polish of these scams, if they weren't using LLM's that are scripted such that the bot isn't "aware" it's a scam.
Probably more just to be able to fill in the calories. For instance, I probably ate a lot more tuna salad on celery than I would've if it were on bread.
I've tried to do heavy workouts on low-carb. Like you said, it's very effective for weight-loss. But there were a lot of thousand-yard-stares I gave, trying to get the motivation to pick up the heavy weights.
I can personally attest to low-carb. I lost 40 pounds in two years. It wasn't easy. No diet is. Everyone told me I'd gain it right back and gave me visceral reactions when I told them how I did it and how it's been years now since I've switched back to a sensibly balanced diet to maintain it.
I don't think people want that particular diet to work. Granted, it's got its downsides. And you can do it in a very unhealthy way. But being 40 pounds overweight was probably worse than intermittent lower-carb with healthy(er) options like chicken caesar salads, stuffed peppers made with turkey, or tuna salad on celery. It just let me eat less calories without as much hunger.
That would all track with the linked piece. He basically says "you're smart, and you're relying on that instead of taking the time to learn a way to do it that works best when the code has to be shared."
I think that's what he means by "gifted". Innate ability that can propel you through personal greenfield projects, but hits a wall when you're not the only cook in the kitchen.
While I agree there needs to be incentives to be credit-worthy, isn't that what the credit report is for? I think you'd probably argue the fees are better than it hitting their credit report, but I'm not sure those people would agree. Those late fees are then unable to be paid as well, causing further damage to the credit report than the actual debt. They get punished twice for it.
I have a friend who's in that situation. Medical bills for his entire family have basically crushed him. Without the late fees, he'd be just scraping by with bad credit. With the late fees, he's still got bad credit. But now he's got late fees, too.
Good chance most of the phones are virtualized as well to test across OS builds and that the actual deploy to real phones aren't tested nearly as well.
I've learned the same lesson, and why things like ping checks aren't enough. Even just a WGET of the front page isn't enough. You need the monitor to login and replicate at least part of the user experience if you have a complex setup. It's very embarrassing when someone tells a user "shows it's up from my side." and they're relying on a naïve monitor.
My CIO was a big RTO proponent. He also lived a few miles away in a ritzy part of town, had full-time child-care, a parking spot at the building, a garage at home. All this in a dense city. Then he'd walk into an office that had a view, a door that closed, independent temperature controls, furniture, workspace, was quiet, and private. Contrast that to the guy who drove 1.5 hrs each way due to construction on the main highway expected to last years, pays $30-40 a day in parking, $5-15 in gas and tolls, drops his kid off at daycare that costs $500 a month and charges extra every time he's gotta stay over. It costs that guy over a thousand bucks to work in an office every month. To do the same job he was doing remote. At an Ikea desk shoved in a row of Ikea desks.
It's insane that we spent a good 30-40 years or so on the open-office concept. It's like the setup of school but without the structure of everyone having quiet time at the same time. That level of density only works when someone's directing the chaos.