More interesting: in the future with gpt5 and image generation tech, how will we know if anything is real ever again online? Actual question
Another question... Say we discover a new planet in 2030. Countless low quality, click/ads driven websites are going to report about it using gpt-4 text and dall-e 4 pictures.
Now how do we train gpt-5 and dall-e 5 to know about that new planet, yet somehow sort between what's "real" about that planet and what's poorly generated by inferior AIs (by that I mean inferior to the new version of the AI we're trying to train)?
Do we now need an AI to first determine what's real and what's not to know how to correctly train the new AI without using polluted data?
Mind blown.
What may happen is that everyone begins to realize that the shit they read every day is pointless garbage that doesn't actually pertain to them at all.
Case in point: I crossed the border into Canada this week and woke up one morning with some extra time for google news doom scrolling before I got out of bed. It took about halfway through the scroll to realize I was logged out and that all the crime and politics headlines I was reading were about things that had happened in Canada. Which meant nothing to me and which I would never have heard about otherwise. (And yet there was a whole different galaxy of stories that had clearly been going on for some time). This was like in the 80s when you'd intentionally turn on the local TV news in your hotel room to see local broadcasters wherever you were visiting, except it wasn't intentional. And yet I realized my brain could not give two fucks before coffee if these stories had been generated by an AI or they were irrelevantly Canadian, I just needed to doom scroll some shit before breakfast. But after that I stopped reading the news and just enjoyed being in a country where nothing much happens. So my prediction is that the moment people realize they're reading AI-generated news, they'll just tune out completely. It would be like suddenly realizing you've been listening to CBC.
And Second Variety
And Total Recall (We Can Remember It for You Wholesale)
And The Father Thing
https://theoutline.com/post/995/targeted-individuals-paranoi...
What, a Wayback Machine copy from ~ the original byline[1]? Brewster Kahle is in on it too? This goes higher up than I thought[2]...
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20170318075738/https://theoutlin... [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/b7bhdu/a_jfk_conspir...
It would also be pretty hilarious to have an article debunking claims about secret technology being secretly written by an AI.
Nothing is real at a quantum level.
If you’re British and work in tech you don’t even need a visa and the tax rates are good. Things will seem relatively normal for around the first year - sometimes longer sometimes less.
You’ll notice subtle negativity from people and think they don’t get it. But that’s what they want you to think. The low tax economy is a privilege the locals keep for themselves. They fund it by creating psychological hell for newcomers they don’t like using most of the tactics documented in the article and bleeding the targets dry. The police and justice system are totally complicit and will overtly signal they part of the game.
You will eventually have legal trouble and find the lawyers (called advocates on the island) do not provide any client confidentiality and lie to you while relaying any information they learn about you (all while bleeding you dry).
The locals all know each other. You will be told this and will initially think it’s quaint.
What they really mean is they are very practiced in messing with your psychology and everything you do will be observed and communicated by “nice neighbours” who are really the equivalent of Stasi informers. Repeating conversations or repeating information they research about your past in parallel stories is also what they do. Not seen the audio projection tech used but there’s a book published by Springer on the technology so it does exist.
Still sceptical? Look up the flag of the Isle of Man and then the flag of Sicily… draw your own conclusions.
The idea that written history is an objective record is something that is loved by modern academics. In places that aren't seen to be "that" important, local social factors can affect what gets recorded. The Russians rewrote their history books. Britain still omits from its education system bits of history that are inconvenient or uncomfortable.
Re: the population being self sustaining, not really. There is a fair amount of inbreeding that is visible in the population but not enough to sustain the population and keep the island running.
Workers are imported and are left to do their thing. Higher incomes or high net-worths are a legitimate target - not just for the financial benefit but for sheer entertainment of the pedigrees.
It seems that "manxman" may be getting some targeting that I am not.
Do they all have Legge locks on their doors by any chance?
Sounds like the QAnon mantra "do your own research".
There actually is such a thing as an air loom.[1] Air looms make most of the world's fabrics today. They're what made fabric cheap. But they don't go back to 1815. Developed in the 2nd half of the 20th century.
https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/illustrations-of-madnes...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TempleOS
He had a famous video (which I won't link here, as he goes on a racist tirade about incandescent CIA employees) in which his random word generator- which he claimed sent him messages from God- prints the words "China virus election." The video is from 2017. Of course it printed lots of random garbage too, and any impression of prescience is merely coincidental, but certain corners of the Internet did notice and remark on the coincidence.
These dark corners of the Internet, 4chan in particular, have their own large populations of users who sincerely think they're victims of gangstalking. While it's amusing to see them find strange coincidences like COVID and the output of Terry's word generator, it's depressing to see such ill people feed off each other's delusions.
Still imortilised to this day in the innermost ring of GCHQ.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-surveillance-watchdog...
> “If you only focus on instances in which the NSA violated those laws, you’re missing the forest for the trees,” he said. “The bigger concern is not with willful violations of the law but rather with what the law itself allows.”
Totally agree.
It's a question of culture and effective oversight.
Obviously some individuals have been targeted and likely driven into self-destruction while people did not believe their story:
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/02/opinion/02hotchner.html
"In the years since, I have tried to reconcile Ernest’s [Hemingway's] fear of the F.B.I., which I regretfully misjudged, with the reality of the F.B.I. file. I now believe he truly sensed the surveillance, and that it substantially contributed to his anguish and his suicide."
Other individuals will imagine persecution. The only interesting number is which percentage of reported cases is correct. Given frequent documented stories about police harassment, that percentage is much higher than the smug articles would have us believe.
- a stalker (who is intelligent, well-off, but has the resources of a single individual); and
- briefly, by a major organization (who has $20B, and can easily afford to e.g. hire a PI, or a grey hat cybersecurity firm, but ultimately doesn't have anyone who wants to harm me per se).
There weren't any special tech devices involved. Just people spreading rumors, harassment complaints filed with various agencies, invasions of privacy, etc. In the organizational case, I simply folded. I gave up credit for something I invented and financial rewards which would be valued at somewhere between $1M and $200M, depending. The harassment stopped.
I've also seen harassment by my local municipal government. Fortunately, I wasn't the target. It's enough to know that:
1) Harassment does happen.
2) It's very hard to prove, if the other side is at all smart.
3) If I described the things which happened, I'd sound crazy.
However, I'm pretty sure this sort of shit is a lot more common than people give it credit for. I'm also guessing if it were done by a covert agency, there would be tech we don't know about.
I'm not sure the overlap between people talking about harassment and actual harassment. There are plenty of mental health disorders. At the same time, if you actually are being harassed, it's not something you talk about, at least without a veil of internet anonymity.
> The [1648] Treaty of Westphalia is accepted as the beginning of modern international relations since it introduced the concepts of sovereignty, mediation, and diplomacy ... the foundations of modern international law were laid as governments recognized each other's sovereignty.
Sorry, but the whole story is far more consistent with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizophrenia than V2K (Voice-To-sKull?) or any other whacky technologies:
> Major symptoms include hallucinations, ..., paranoia, ...
Those wackos didn't even bother to gather wikipedia-level knowledge on what they're talking about:
Article > Basically, the biggest difference between mental illness and being electronically harassed is, if you have a mental illness it usually shows up throughout your life.
Wikipedia > Symptoms typically develop gradually, begin during young adulthood
How do such ramblings make it to the top of HN?
The article is about paranoia and irrationality. It would throw off the pacing and be condescending to the reader if they were constantly stomping the brake to explicitly refute each one of the steady stream of plainly outlandish claims.
Read the article again - it's a quote from a snakeoil salesperson they spoke to.
That's rubbish. Psychotic illness (and these mind-control delusions are suggestive of nothing so much as psychosis) generally kicks in in the early 20s. Sometimes it's triggered later in life by some traumatic event.
https://quwave.com/QuWave-USB-Harmonizer-Computer-&-TV-EMF-P...
I hope the vast majority of people will take the word of people associated with quwave with appropriate quantities of salt.
I have first hand experienced some of this as well but I knew the individuals and their intentions and I learned to tolerate it as a temporary thing and move on with life. It really really messes with your head when you incidentally and actually find a RAT, for non-technical people they have no idea what that is, they just know somehow their most secret moments are known to strangers.
For those unaware, there communities of "underground" creeps that RAT people (usually women though) and share this shit between each other. I'd imagine these are also the same peope that are into gore and other messed up stuff?
In short, other disturbed people sometimes (but not always) cause people to think they are victims of gang stalking and sometimes they are not wrong.
Hypothesis: the people responsible for the electronic harassment of "targeted individuals" use a variant of RAT done in hardware with its own radio and working even without Internet, inserted during processor design, making harder to uncover it, but it can be done.
Consider:
"It's not technically hard to make a device that complies with the FCC that listens to nonpublic bands but then is quietly waiting for some activation trigger to listen to other bands," said Eduardo Rojas, who leads the radio spectrum lab at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Florida. "Technically, it's feasible."
To prove a device had clandestine capabilities, Rojas said, would require technical experts to strip down a device "to the semi-conductor level" and "reverse engineer the design." But, he said, it can be done.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/23/politics/fbi-investigation-hu...
I guess if the silk road guy can try to hire an assassin, so can anyone.
It's also known by those who use targeted harassment because it gives them perfect plausible deniability.
Think about it from the side of the guys who stand to gain from targeted harassment. It's not really worth it for harassing people working at a low level in organisations unless they're a real problem. But think about it from the perspective of targeting people with wealth, political/social influence or those with skills.
If you can make the target look crazy it becomes easy to get what they have or make them do what you want (eventually everyone breaks)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-8PklxYM3w
He's using all the terminology employed by the targeted individual community - he clearly found "his people" online, and with it validation and an explanation of what he was experiencing. I wonder what role this played in the fact that he never got the help he needed.
There are also targeted people.
And even the paranoid have enemies. ;)
WestWorld S3 featured an Uber-like gig economy app for crime, inspired by blockchain dark markets, https://www.unfinishedman.com/the-westworld-rico-app-is-comi... & https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsj4LDu1__Y
> The closest thing we’ve got right now is a prediction market called Augur. It essentially allows people to place bets on the outcome of events – any kind of events – and with a little bit of tweaking, well… I probably don’t need to explain how that could be applied to a real-life version of Westworld’s RICO app.
Other variations on this theme can be seen in The Adjustment Bureau (2010), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZJ0TP4nTaE and Daniel Suarez's Daemon (2011), where an AI coordinates and coerces a network of strangers to implement narrow tasks which lead to complex outcomes. Daemon was cited by Vitalik Buterin as an inspiration for Ethereum and DAOs.
In the real world, we have Cass Sunstein's "nudge" theory, https://www.newstatesman.com/encounter/2019/05/cass-sunstein..., predictive policing in Pasco FL, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24363871 and Austin TX, https://www.austinchronicle.com/news/2020-07-24/apds-secret-...
> secret citizen spying program that's active in the Austin area and across the country ... Threat Liaison Officers (TLOs), who report suspicious activity or behavior ... each TLO must sign a nondisclosure agreement with ARIC, including those not working in law enforcement, essentially creating secret citizen officers. These informants, known as For Official Use Only TLOs, are able to access the fusion centers' national intelligence database (excluding personal identifying information). The FOUO TLOs include private security officers with local hotels, malls, large venues, and local semiconductor companies.
DOJ's prosecution of former eBay executives for journalist cyberstalking concluded this year with guilty pleas, https://www.theverge.com/2022/5/14/23073054/former-ebay-exec... & https://www.justice.gov/usao-ma/pr/former-ebay-executive-ple...
> eBay’s former director of global resiliency ... pleaded guilty to taking part in a bizarre harassment campaign, which involved sending live cockroaches, spiders, a bloody pig face mask, and other strange items to a Massachusetts couple ... Harville wasn’t the only higher-up involved, either — Popp served as eBay’s former senior manager of global intelligence, Gilbert was the ex-senior manager of special operations, Baugh worked as eBay’s senior director of safety and security, and Stockwell was a former manager for the company’s Global Intelligence Center.
The world didn't lose it's collective mind.
We learned that the powers that be are every bit as crazy as the tin hat people told us they were. The only thing our foil wrapped friends got wrong were the details.
That the Epstein saga isn't a lurid trashy paperback spy thriller but an actual thing that happened and involved both parties presidential candidates in 2016 is the only rebuttal needed to people who tell us to believe the adults in charge.
Most paranoia is baseless and delusional, but every now and then it has some foundation. It depends on who you are. This is why I don’t want to be famous, or a journalist, or a prominent activist.
I’m a regular Joe Schmo and can barely have any privacy anyways due to the way the Internet has been designed.
The article gets one thing right, regardless of your opinion on the rest.
If you are blind to this as of now it is your own doing
