Dose of Paranoia - 2025-07-27
It gets worse before it gets worse...
Important Stuff
My heartfelt thanks to the people of Scotland, who gave our PedoFelon in Chief an appropriate welcome on his $10 million taxpayer funded business and golf trip to his properties there.
And since I have run out of fingers and toes to count the incredibly terrible things that this criminal is doing every single day, I am also grateful to the folks who have put together this handy dandy tracker which provides charts, data, and categorization of at least 804 and counting (at this writing) terrible things (that we know about) that the detestable/stupid people who voted for this guy brought us.
On with the Paranoia…
Infosec/Scam Stuff
The robot will price gouge you now - It was only a matter of time… the AI assisted enshittification of everything continues with Delta Airlines announcing that it is experimenting with “AI pricing” which changes fares based on flyers’ profiles. Who needs fair, transparent pricing when you can gouge customers with opaque algorithms? Time to exclude Delta from flight searches… consumers need to punish companies which go this route - we cannot expect our corrupt oligarch driven government to provide help here. I expect to see this scam proliferating over the next few years across many industries.
Is any text not a scam?? - If you feel like your mobile phone has become just a pocket sized scam machine, you ain’t alone. Apparently, 96% of Americans report receiving at least one scam text, email, or call each week. Apparently, the bad guys are looking for new bait messages as more and more of us are tiring of the oldy but goodies - one new technique is to send scary messages about your online cloud storage. Apparently, Apple is working on some new features in the upcoming iOS 26 which will enable your iPhone to insulate you from spammy texts. I’m hoping that this will reduce the annoyance factor as well as provide some additional protection for vulnerable communities.
If you can’t beat them… - Well, I guess this was to be expected. A story out of Japan where a 73 year old scam victim decided to join the ranks of scammers, getting arrested while attempting to scam an 88 year old victim. I wonder if we are going to see more of this kind of thing going forward…
Tech Stuff
What are people actually asking Chat-GPT? - An interesting infographic showing how people are using the leading LLM chatbot in 2025. As I expected, the biggest use case is coding. LLMs actually seem to be good at helping human coders turn out more code and automate repetitive/simple tasks. Or are they? One study is showing that AI tools actually slow down experienced developers. These results could be due to the immaturity of current tools, or they could reflect a deeper issue - that LLMs are good at replacing junior (or mediocre) developers but that (gasp) humans are still better at coding than the robots. The other use cases on the infographic are telling - the next most common thing we ask AI about is… AI. Hype much? Next comes economics and finance. Must be the White House asking about placing tariffs on penguins to replace the income tax. I am not impressed.
AI might be useful for something after all - Apparently, social scientists have been doing research on using LLM chatbots (think Chat-GPT) to help deprogram people who believe in conspiracy theories and have seen some success (in research settings). A paper in Nature (sadly paywalled) describes an experiment comparing use of social media and chatbots to try and convince anti-vax folks that vaccines are in fact a reasonably safe preventive measure for many horrible diseases. Since the chatbots are trained on a wide variety of material about vaccines, they provided more convincing responses than the social media echo chambers which tend to prioritize the most alarming and sensational content. The Guardian had an article about similar research by the same researchers aimed a wider variety of conspiracy theories. If we want to get back to some semblance of sane politics in this country, we need to fight disinformation and this might be one tool we can use at scale.
Return of the glassholes - I think that smart glasses are going to make a big re-introduction in 2025-2026 and are going to raise all sorts of new questions and issues. China seems to be a bit ahead of the US in this space. There are some interesting applications here - real life closed captioning for people with hearing disabilities looks like it could be really useful. However, these things also record and transcribe the conversations they hear - a legal and privacy nightmare. The next step with these things is more integration with LLMs, allowing wearers to identify objects and people and pull up information about them. I could see applications for tourism and museums, but I also wonder about the effects of further abstracting our experiences of the world beyond the phone. And whether wearing these things while behind the wheel is a recipe for more accidents.
Fun Stuff
Chuck E Cheese (finally) arrested - I would have thought that when I saw Chuck E Cheese led away in handcuffs, it would be for culinary crimes against pizza, but no… the original Pizza Rat was taken in for credit card fraud. The OG Pizza Rat was not available for comment.
Some men buy a Ferrari during their midlife crisis. I bought a Japanese toilet. Trust me… you want a Japanese toilet. And now my midlife crisis toilet is about to be surpassed by a new and improved model which combines all of the Japanese toilet goodness we know and love with a model which analyzes your, um, leavings, and tracks them in a smartphone app (because of course it does). What a time to be alive. For now, I think I will stick with my oldey timey washlet - I don’t want to be the first person whose toilet was hacked. Apparently, South Park did a whole episode on Japanese toilets, according to which I am a total jerk for even mentioning my ownership of one. Oh well.
Here’s someone who took another path with his midlife crisis - much cooler than my approach…
And finally… don’t mess with this baby.
Finally a Man Bites Dog story...or whatever.