patrolling mojave fedi almost makes you wish for an ai winter

Yep. Search results are already filled with LLM spam. Social media is filling up. Time to get emails as well. What is next, phone calls? Then physical mail?

Oh, hey, I’ve run into this in the wild–the Kalendar AI people keep ineptly trying to start a conversation to sell some kind of kiosk software by referencing factoids they scraped from our latest press release. They’ve clearly spent more effort on evading spam filters and rotating domains than they have on anything else, but they helpfully use “human” names ending in “Kai,” so creating a wildcard filter wasn’t too hard.

Credit where it’s due: I’d never heard of Kalendar or the software company who hired them, but this experience has told me everything I need to know about both of them. If you don’t sweat the details and rate sentiment change using absolute value, that’s kind of impressive.

there’s some ZAians on this shit too

a “Dennis Kriel” under verdan.tech (and goverdan.tech (and as “Bert du Preez” dupco.co.za sending email as dupcoconsulting.site)))

got some shit from them october last year, and then again last week. and despite previously being told to fuck off, and again told to fuck off now - to which I got a generated-from-AWS-sent-via-their-mailserver-in-ZA “hey we’ve removed you from our contact list” email (yeah, super normal origin, totally not an autoreply generated by a fucking chatbot). and, well…

I’m old-hat - I actually run my own servers, and report spam and contact abuse@s instead of clicking gmail buttons. I rather hope they enjoyed the pain that came from all of their providers for every one of their assets being notified of their spam operations

(e: obscured the domains incase these fucking creeps run google alerts, then decided “fuck that” and added it back again. let them come)

god, that orange site thread immediately crawls up its own ass pretending that anti-spam LLMs will fix this and it’ll somehow be a better world (and absolutely not, you know, boiling) and also fucking e-commerce is better than the moon landing and the “collective FAANG” could go to mars tomorrow if only they applied themselves

seriously, if you want to know what a concussion feels like, read the first couple screenfuls of that thread