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Because she mentions Obsidian. Though I don't hold that against her.


It sounds like you get that LLMs are just "next word" predictors. So the piece you may be missing is simply that behind the scenes, your prompt gets "rephrased" in a way that makes generating the response a simple matter of predicting the next word repeatedly. So it's not necessary for the LLM to "understand" your prompt the way you're imagining, this is just an illusion caused by extremely good next-word prediction.


In my simple mind "Who is the queen of Spain?" becomes "The queen of Spain is ...".


Obtaining something of value through deception is fraud.


My name is X and another person also named X tells me to gather their documents from the office. Other X also signs a paper for me that says I'm allowed to do this.

I ask the office clerk: "Hi, I'm here to retreive the documents for X". He checks my ID and gives me the documents without asking for written permission from the other X.

It's deception by omission, but there is no fraud. I was legally allowed to do this. It's also a win for everyone because it avoids complications.


"with the approval of the intended recipient" makes it like breaking into someone's home with their consent


They didn't obtain anything, though.


I understood that they obtained legal documents


They retrieved those documents and gave them to the intended recipient. “Obtain” suggests something longer term.


So the story says. But what if they didn't? What if it turned out the person receiving the document from the person picking it up also wasn't the intended recipient. How would they know? And if so they'd be holding a document that they shouldn't have in the first place.

You could easily be a paw in an identity theft play like that.


No, "obtain" suggests "obtain".


There's no sense in quibbling over a vague and imprecise summary of the concept. Legally, fraud requires an injured party. In our scenario here, nobody was injured, so no fraud. Whether temporarily possessing a document to hand it to its intended recipient counts as "obtaining" is not really the pertinent question.

I suspect it may fall afoul of a law about making false statements to the government, but that's distinct from fraud.


That's obviously nonsense. Lying on a loan application is fraud, even if you don't get the loan. You're confusing criminal liability with civil liability, which does require damages.


The key term in most statutes is dishonesty.

Impersonating someone at their behest as a favour is unlikely to be dishonest.


That's debatable. If I let my friends impersonate me to use my zoo membership for free entrance, then were clearly defrauding the zoo (obviously that's not high stakes, but I dare someone to argue it's not). If one of a set of identical twins is better at math and takes all the math tests for their sibling, that's pretty clearly academic fraud, again pretty low stakes but fraud is still fraud

Key note because in case someone decides to go bad faith here, I think the gp comments use case of fraud is a positive thing (if a bit dangerous). Redefining a term just because you don't like the pejorative implications is not a positive thing, though.


There are so many things wrong with this thread. At least you make an effort, but the categorical dismissals are interesting as well and probably explain to some extent why so many hackers end up in trouble with the law.

It's pretty simple: they are deceiving the other party that the document was handed to the right person, the consequences of which range from 'meh' to spending 6 years behind bars.

Let's say this was a summons for a court case. Then the judge would believe the papers were served properly, when in fact they were never served. Permission doesn't enter into it here, it is wilful deception by two parties of a third. The same name should not normally be enough to get away with this but assuming the story is real (there are many reasons to doubt this, such as the ID matching the name, but nothing else) it all depends on who does the checking. In some cases you might not even go home without a small detour in case you are found out (for instance, because the person handing the document over is familiar with the real recipient).

So, jurisdiction matters, what that document was matters, whether the permission was granted in writing (procuration), who the counterparty was, what the value of the document was, whether the parties lived in the same state/province or country and whether or not the permission was communicated to the person passing the document to the wrong recipient (probably not) and lots of other factors besides, such as the person giving permission still evading some legal obligation, which - conveniently - the story doesn't relate (and which hinges on what that document was).

And that's before we get into the wilder options of the second person being social engineered because after all, the only way they could be sure that they were acting on behalf of the real recipient would be to check their identity, in person, and with someone who is able to do that in a way that is legally binding.


Impersonation is inherently dishonest



No it isn’t.


Ah, to be young.


And just not having an ultra super-wide extra large screen.

Peers of my age also can't stand looking at my screen contents, so maybe it's also because I have bad eye-sight and am used to infer letters from general shapes and context.


That's not the only alternative, there are a range of options between those extremes.



Recently I've noticed the 555 prefix being used less, in favor of prefixes starting with 1, which are also invalid in the real world.


I thought 1 is the country prefix for the USA?


Technically it's the country code for the North American Numbering Plan, which is used by several other countries as well as the US.

But in this context it'd be the first digit of the area code, with no country code being used because the call is within the US. There are no area codes in the the North American Numbering Plan that start with a 1.


Have none starting with 1 been assigned, or is there some technical reason there are none?


Per Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_North_American_Numberi...

"The syntax rules for area codes do not permit the digits 0 and 1 in the leading position."

My guess would be it's to avoid ambiguity with the fact that 1 is also the country code. If I recall correctly, historically, dialing the 1 was necessary for any long distance call (even if not international).


>If I recall correctly, historically, dialing the 1 was necessary for any long distance call (even if not international).

You recall correctly. I haven't had a landline for a number of years now but I think it was still required latterly when I still had one. Don't think it was ever needed on cell (or maybe even valid) when I first got one at some point in the 1990s.


It used to be the case that the middle digit of an area code had to be a 0 or a 1. All the O.G. "cool" area codes like 212 are in this format, and the less desirable new area codes like 646 are not (yes, this is an accidental Seinfeld reference).


It is, although I'd imagine many Americans aren't aware of this.


+1 is also the prefix for Canada


I think that’s at least in part because some 555 prefix numbers have been assigned for non-directory information uses (I have a vague notion of seeing this for some toll-free numbers).


Historically they connected to a periodic time-of-day announcement. So assigned in a way that didn't preclude TV/movie use.


Damn your standards are low


In the introductory section: "No trawling through hundreds of pages of chat logs, just a few well-crafted questions, and your deepest secrets are revealed."


I mean.... feed the hundreds of pages of chat logs to the LLM and ask it to spill the tea. Wipe hands on pants.


Many colos disallow photography.


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