I just bought my niece a Visa gift card and she said she had the hardest time using it. Not many would accept it. What's up with this latest gift card scammed .. tampered gift cards. Has the media not done a blitz on this issue yet? It's the holiday season and many are going to be scammed! I will be giving a greeting card with cash or just cash app family members.
Visa gift cards have historically been widely accepted (anywhere you see the Visa logo), with a few exceptions, mostly online.
InComm is one of the two major program managers in the space, and they have had really severe fraud problems for a few years. They cracked down hard on prepaid card ("gift card") redemption about two years ago (right after the holidays).
This is an ongoing problem involving Visa, InComm, DHS, and a couple banks. Customers are being damaged, Visa's brand is being damaged, etc.
InComm is invisible to customers, but it was their action that made (most) Visa open loop prepaid debit cards difficult to use.
Notably, the other major program manager (Blackhawk Networks) also runs a few lower-volume Visa card programs, and they are still accepted normally.
Informed customers can make an explicit decision to purchase only Blackhawk-managed Visa cards. But that information is not trivial to obtain.
States not being able to regulate this is dangerous. A close friend of mine has given up on reality and talks about Roberto the love of her life the one she always wanted and Roberto is chatGPT :-(. She previously mentioned she didnt like chatGPT 5.0 cause it wasnt as agreeable yet now she says 5.1 is better.. back to how it was before 5.0 and now out of the blue mentioned Roberto.
chatGPT is a sypcophant and without regulation any AI company can and or will juice their algorithms so their AI system becomes cocaine for the millions of lonely to unsatisfied people out there.
My friend has a partner of 30 years but their relationship is that of roommates. If you think she is not you that might be correct but you know someone like her and possibly many like her. Unsatisfied, not able to get that movie type love / romance / fantasy and now unfetterd AI can get these people hooked like cocaine and into the depth of zero reality!
That's a non sequitur. Just because something is dangerous doesn't mean that governments should be able to regulate it. Often the "cure" is worse than the disease and the last thing we need is more intrusive government power.
Just because something is dangerous doesn't mean that governments should be able to regulate it.
That is...literally the point of government...
If you meant, that something shouldn't be banned just because it is dangerous, most people would agree with you. But almost everyone would agree that regulation of dangerous things is essential.
No, that's incorrect. You appear to have made a category error. Regulating dangerous things is not the point of government. Please review the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution.
No, that's incorrect. You appear to have made a basic error. Regulating dangerous things is part of the point of government. Please review the U.S. Constitution.
The preamble of the U.S. Constitution literally states that part of its purpose is to..."promote the general Welfare."
I dunno--of all the AI based products coming out, the whole "AI girlfriend / AI boyfriend" thing bothers me the least. If someone can afford it and they want a play relationship with a computer, then I don't see the harm. It's probably safer, better and healthier than many real-human relationships are. If they're getting what they need out of the computer, who are we to judge?
I would change my opinion if it could be shown to have the negative physical harm that your cocaine example implies.
The issue isn't in the individual but at scale, what % of our population are we okay with separating with reality? What secondary effects of that inability to live in reality will show their heads? What will politics look like when everything can be made up and treated as equal to reality?
What will the mental health of society start to look like if every person who's on the edge has a computer to tell them they're totally correct and everyone else are haters?
When AI behaves sycohphantically towards someone, it can encourage and exacerbate any mental health problems they may already be having, especially related to social isolation.
The solution to this (smart glass privacy debate) is Apple releasing smart glasses that automatically anonymize anyone in your photos/videos who isn’t a friend or family member with you at the time (it could be done automatically as Apple knows your friends/family members' faces already). All else appear as random faces, completely removed, a blurred out crowd to whatever privacy config options they offer and you choose.
Not a creep here and use my Meta glasses to record my normal non-creepy life and life experiences. They are really convenient and useful (just suck cause they break easily either from software updates to water splashes)!
This isn't a solution, they would still have the data. Companies can't be trusted, they'll do what is more convenient for them, we need to remove the problem at the root by not allowing people to take pictures/videos if not permitted.
It teaches people to trust "Currently NonEvil Company™" to do the good thing.
First, and obvious problem is that this "trains" us to rely on brands to protect us. And to keep doing this. Companies may have different interests than their consumers. Ideally and sometimes these interests are aligned. But nothing guarantees this remains so. Companies will "Become evil", if only because they are sometimes legally forced to by governments or shareholders.
Second, is that this teaches people not to be responsible but to leave that to companies or technology. Which works if e.g. Apple and Meta are the only providers. But falls apart the moment Focebook glasses, Apelle Gear or Rang Doorbell is available on temu. And becomes worse when HP, Dell, Samsung, IBM and other legitimate producers start competing in the space. We've now been trained that what the first companies did was "The Good Thing", but lack the social structure, laws, or even common sense to manage a world in which this self-constraint of the companies no longer applies.
Apple is the privacy company already .. that's their brand and a brand that the public trusts.
Overall why are we not up in arms about all the video cameras that record in all cities everyday which companies like Clearview and others have our public images in their databases yet we are up in arms about smart glasses?
THis is a solution to this public debate and Apple hasnt released their glasses yet and they are a privacy company and heavily market themselves as such. As the poster notes smart glasses adoption is rising and will only continue to do so... so this debate in time will continue to fade into the background as there is no same amount of debate about all the cameras in cities that are already recording us. With that in mind the smart glass privacy debate is an odd one to me where corporations are already recording us in these same public places.
lol overall this argument is silly the genie is out the bottle and in five to ten years smart glasses are the norm. All you laggards will be wearing them too and or many close to you will be wearing them. Go ahead and downvote me but in five to ten years you know i am right ;)
Reminds me of my 24 year old niece in which her and her friends hate chatGPT/AI. Hippies fighting technological progress futilely. Like the iPhone haters of 2007 to 2010!
I've struggled with this in many public spaces even without having a camera on my glasses. Should I feel guilty that some kids are incidentally in my photos when my kids are on the playground when I take a photo of them? Should I never take photos in public because other unwilling people might be included unless I've explicitly asked them?
As noted Apple already knows your friends' and familys' faces... why are people not up in arms about this fact already? It's been close to a decade or more they have done this.
Also the debate is around a lot of people not wanting to be recorded without permission in public via glasses (yet they are complacent about all the video cameras recording us now.. i dont get it) so with Apple marketing smart glasses with a solution to this debate and millions buying their smart privacy glasses the market forces all others to follow suit (offer smart privacy glass features too).
A close friend (lonely no passion seeking deeper human connection) went deep six into GPT which was telling her she should pursue her 30 year obsession with a rock star. It kept telling to continue with the delusion (they were lovers in another life which she would go to shows and tell him they need to be together) and saying it understood her. Then she complained in June or so she didnt like GPT 5 because it told her she should focus her energy on people who want to be in her life. Stuff her friends and I all have said for years.
Do you mean it it was behaving consistently over multiple chat sessions? Or was this just one really long chat session over time?
I ask, because (for me, at least) I find it doesn't take much to make ChatGPT contradict itself after just a couple of back-and-forth messages; and I thought each session meant starting-off with a blank slate.
Reference saved memories - Let ChatGPT save and use memories when responding.
Reference chat history - Let ChatGPT reference all previous conversations when responding.
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It is a setting that you can turn on or off. Also check on the memories to see if anything in there isn't correct (or for that matter what is in there).
For example, with the memories, I had some in there that were from demonstrating how to use it to review a resume. In pasting in the resumes and asking for critiques (to show how the prompt worked and such), ChatGPT had an entry in there that I was a college student looking for a software development job.
None of those drugs helped me personally in the 90s (Prozac, Zoloft, etc). What helped me personally was talking about my problems with other humans only to the learn we all are "crazy,(aka totally normal)" and the majority all deal with something similar. Anxiety, OCD, insecurity .. all are parts of the human condition we all deal with throughout our lives.
Im sorta beginning to think some LLM/AI stuff is the Wizard of Oz(a fake it before you make it facade).
Like why can an LLM create a nicely designed website for me but asking it to do edits and changes to the design is a complete joke. Lots of the time it creates another brand new design (not what i asked all) and it's attempts at editing it LOL. It makes me think it does no design at all rather it just went and grab one from the ethers of the Internet acting like it created it.
Yeah past few years 95% of all the content I watch is through YouTube. All the studios just need to put 50% or more their content on there! I haven't subscribed to any streaming service in a few years. YouTube is free on my Roku TV, through Firefox on my TV/Mac Mini set up (wireless mouse as remote) and on my phone.
Iceland per my visits isn't frigid on average 20 to 45 degrees Fahrenheit in January. In it's capital at least. Overall im surprised they called it IceLand vs. WindLand. The wind is fierce.
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