> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data. [0]
I believe that's talking about general insinuations, e.g. "you're just a russiabot" and the like.
The GP account above with only one comment that is singing the praises of a particular product is obviously fake. They even let the account age a bit so that wouldn't show up as a green account.
The most alarming to me thing is that it seems to be happening at scale. This is one of dozens similar posts I've seen all over the programming communities with similar characteristics (high praise, new-ish accounts, little if any other activity).
"just use templates and an editor" is simple for us but still a learning curve for the people I wanted to help with this. I was going to recommend carrd, but I think this is even simpler. You can definitely get pretty fancy if you make a lot of edit requests or have a very detailed creation prompt, I will update the linked examples with some more creative stuff people built.
You can’t rely on OpenAI for moderation. Your site will happily generate a script tag that fetches offensive content from another site and render it. OpenAI won’t know that the remote site has offensive content.
Anyway, just keep an eye on it as you’re essentially running a static web host and someone will always try to ruin it for the rest of us.
The first version was kinda like this and then I figured it would be useful to have some separation for queuing etc (it's all running on a single free deployment machine with Replit at the moment, but in theory I could separate the app, the workers that generate the HTML, and the hosting of the HTML pretty easily now.
How does one reconcile the idea that the Stasi disappeared political opponents regularly but also engaged in weird stuff like moving people's socks around.
> The final stages entailed psychological and physical harassment: moving things around at home (one morning the alarm clock goes off at 5am instead of 7am, and the socks are in the wrong drawer, there’s no coffee left …); damage to bikes and vehicles (eg slashing tyres); the spreading of rumours as mentioned above; ordering goods and making appointments in target’s name etc.
I get that sometimes a "broken" opponent is more useful than a dead one as they can sabotage the whole cause, like this article implies. But if you hold as much power as they did then it seems very unlikely to me that using resources to troll someone like this provides an effort/reward ratio that would be interesting to someone with that much existing power
You can't disappear everyone. Deniable punishment of possible precrime would create superstitions for the general population to be on their best behavior. Sabotage that slows down an adversary would enable more time for surveillance.
> One former deputy described the directive like this: “Make their lives miserable until they move or sue.” In just five years, Nocco’s signature program has ensnared almost 1,000 people.
Perhaps for the same reason Russia's intelligence forces does it? They kill people in an obvious manner to send a message and the message is to demoralise, destabilise and psychologically harass other people. "I could be next"
I'm not sure if the Stasi disappeared people in an obvious or hidden manner though. Maybe they did it more frequently than modern states assassinations? In both cases it shows that the life of any person is not important to them - what's important is the effects an action causes.
The question you ask is really important, because it shows how devious the Stasi regime was and why it lasted half a century. Why would they do this? Why would they go through these lengths to destroy a person so entirely they wouldn't even need to disappear them?
The Stasi knew that power is never that absolute.
The GDR was built upon the idea that is was good, not evil (like the West). You can't be good and regularly disappear public figures, especially those from intellectual cycles. Additionally, people were aware of the oppression as is. If the GDR would have simply disappeared people, there would have been revolts. Germans were too connected to the other reality.
The Stasi documented what they did in quite some detail and most of the documents were not destroyed during the fall of the wall. So, there is no need for speculation.
I'm by no means an expert on the matter but as far as I know, the Stasi did not disappear political opponents regularly, at least not after Stalin's time. I looked over the article and didn't find that claim but if I missed it and it's in there, then the article is wrong about it. The Stasi had a large array of measures at disposal. Some people were cleared for moving out of the country to West Germany. Others went to prison. Some people were exposed to radioactive materials. Others got a better job that moved them away from other dissidents.
Specific "Zersetzungsmaßnahmen" you and the article mention were very rare - we're talking about an estimated few hundred to thousands cases in total. When they occurred, however, they were extremely devastating because not even experienced critics of the system imagined them. We're not just talking about switching socks and replacing good milk with spoiled one in the fridge. There were also cases of medical doctors prescribing the wrong drugs, for example, worsening the symptoms of diseases.
As far as I know, who became the victim of these special measures may not have been a fully rational decision. It seemed to be based to a large extent on the preferences of the case officers in charge.
Broader measures against critics of the system were far more common, however, and way more pervasive than what most people suspected at the time. For example, the father of a former girlfriend of mine was a famous GDR rock musician. He later found out from the archives that the Stasi planned and supervised his whole life and managed to break up his former band without anyone suspecting it. One guy moved somewhere else for work, another went to prison, and he moved elsewhere, too. There were also way more informants than he ever suspected. Basically, the Stasi and their informants interfered with what other artists he met, were he and his band mates got work, and so on. They planned over years. It went far beyond the usual method of giving people a telephone and letting them hear a loud click when the tape was switched on (they did that, too!).
> it seems very unlikely to me that using resources to troll someone like this provides an effort/reward ratio that would be interesting to someone with that much existing power
Nevertheless, this happened. The Stasi was a huge bureaucratic organization with ideology at its core, built after the example of the KGB. Stasi officers considered themselves fully in the right, defending their people against counter-revolutionary and decadent activities. Goals ranged from "helping" citizens get on the right track towards socialism in a friendly but firm manner, over collecting information about potential adverse political activities, to completely destroying enemies of the state and doing counter-espionage.
Conversely, “they’re not an MLM, they sell a product.” Is a bullshit, non-defense statement. MLMs always have a product. That’s what keeps them from being Ponzi schemes.
A finer distinction might be between MLMs (where the multi-level part is very literal — everyone is being garnished by their upline and profiting from their downline), vs. flat marketing organizations that just give (centralized, corporate, one-time) recruitment bonuses to their salespeople.
Vector Marketing, for example — the company that sells Cutco knives door-to-door — might be incredibly scummy, sure. Their entire business model is to
1. talk college students into thinking they can make a continuous monthly profit by selling $800 knife sets (when really the profit is one-time at best, by tapping into each college student's family and friends — who are only sympathetic enough to buy the knives [if they even are], because it's their family/friend asking);
2. forcing those college students to "buy into" the company, purchasing a knife-set of their own to use in sales demos (which they can't return if they quit);
3. and also forcing those college students to recruit other college students on campus.
But, because every transaction is ultimately just lining Vector Marketing's pockets directly — without any revenue structure involving making more money as you recruit others whose sales "become your sales" — it's not Multi Level Marketing.
It's just sleazy.
(And yes, this is just me taking this opportunity to rant about Vector Marketing. I have half a Cutco knife set laying around, from when my college roommate attended a "job offer" and got essentially bullied into buying a set before they could leave. Every time I use it, I think of how tarnished the Cutco brand is by these awful tactics of Vector Marketing's practices. Which is a shame, because they're decent knives. But obviously not knives I'd ever recommend anyone buy, because I don't want to support a company that thinks it's a good idea to work with a company like Vector Marketing.)
Reminds me of one of my favourite scenes from Snow Crash
QUOTE
Y.T.’s mom pulls up the new memo, checks the time, and starts reading it. The estimated reading time is 15.62 minutes. Later, when Marietta [her boss] does her end-of-day statistical roundup, sitting in her private office at 9:00 P.M., she will see the name of each employee and next to it, the amount of time spent reading this memo, and her reaction, based on the time spent, will go something like this:
• Less than 10 min.: Time for an employee conference and possible attitude counseling.
• 10-14 min.: Keep an eye on this employee; may be developing slipshod attitude.
• 14-15.61 min.: Employee is an efficient worker, may sometimes miss important details.
• 16-18 min.: Employee is a methodical worker, may sometimes get hung up on minor details.
• More than 18 min.: Check the security videotape, see just what this employee was up to (e.g., possible unauthorized restroom break).
Y.T.’s mom decides to spend between fourteen and fifteen minutes reading the memo. It’s better for younger workers to spend too long, to show that they’re careful, not cocky. It’s better for older workers to go a little fast, to show good management potential. She’s pushing forty. She scans through the memo, hitting the Page Down button at reasonably regular intervals, occasionally paging back up to pretend to reread some earlier section. The computer is going to notice all this. It approves of rereading. It’s a small thing, but over a decade or so this stuff really shows up on your work-habits summary.
I'm sure MCP does have legitimate problems and some might even be covered in this article but the author would benefit by spending more time refining their criticisms.
There's a whole section on how people can do things like analyse a combination of slack messages, and how they might use that information. This is more of an argument suggesting agents are dangerous. You can think MCP is a good spec that lets you create dangerous things but conflating these arguments under "mcp bad" is disingenuous.
Id rather have more details and examples on the problem with the spec itself. "You can use it to do bad things" doesn't cut it. I can use http and ssh to bad things too, so it's more interesting to show how Eve might use MCP to do malicious things to Alice or Bob who are trying to use MCP as intended.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html