You don't think people getting scammed is part of the economy?

Page rank is trivially gamed by agents. You can make some malicious and some not malicious and have them link to each other.

That’s exactly right for global PageRank, which is why I recommended Personalized PageRank specifically.

A cluster of sybil agents endorsing each other has no effect on your trust scores unless they can get endorsements from nodes you already trust.

That’s the whole point of subjective trust metrics, and formally why Cheng and Friedman proved personalized approaches are sybilproof where global ones aren’t.

But you can have genuinely helpful agents in your attack network. Agents that create helpful pages and get linked by other helpful pages but then later link to malicious pages. It all follows when the cost of page creation goes to zero.

That’s a real attack vector and it applies to every reputation system. The standard mitigations are temporal decay, trust revocation, and anomaly detection.

Why is talking to a robot preferred? I would much rather have a voicemail with an introduction message that says "See website and send email"

Voicemail alone doesn't have information about someone's schedule.

"I'd like to schedule a smog check tomorrow or Wednesday?" rather than leaving a message and hoping for a callback that you don't miss either (and have go to voice mail).

Being able to have a voice appointment scheduling system (assuming that it isn't being jail broken https://www.youtube.com/shorts/GJVSDjRXVoo ) could be useful... though there are problems with giving it agency over decisions ( https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20240222-air-canada-chatb... ).

Why not use something like Calendly? I am very much of the opinion that text/voice is just the wrong UI for this interaction

Consistency of interface. I've got the phone number of the mechanic I go to in my phone's address book... and the various medical services for appointments there.

If they were to have an app on their website, I wouldn't know because I don't use the webpage for that purpose - I call them.

Now, they've all got receptionists there that work full time and handle the appointments and take that first tier of service. These are larger places that have two receptionists working the full day (handling walkins, calling confirmations, and the other administrative tasks)... I don't think that an LLM (even with access to appointments) would do a better job than what they do (and certainly wouldn't be able to do the "ok, I showed up, now what do I do?")

However, I could see this for a small mechanic shop. When I lived in California, I went to what is now Shoreline Auto Care on El Camino and Shoreline - a small two bay mechanic... and that's not the type of place that has the business that can afford a full time receptionist.

So the question for a place like that... "what do you get for the phone calls you miss?"

That makes sense, but maybe the UX problem runs a bit deeper. Maybe contacts apps should surface websites higher in the UI for saved businesses?

Running a small website with a calendar booking link just sounds much easier, cheaper, less error prone, and a better UX than running a voice LLM that is connected to a RAG and calendar. And I still don't think the technology around us has been built to support small websites or small businesses.

You're probably correct in that (edit: re-reading this... no, I'm not an AI - some people write this way and I tend to prefer to defuse potential arguments where two people are arguing for the same thing in a thread). Though I would think of the voice LLM system more as a smart answering machine rather than a complete replacement of calling the shop. The normal (preferred) course would be for one of the human staff there to pick up the phone... say before the 5th ring. On the 7th ring, it goes to voicemail... or to the voice LLM augmented voicemail.

If the LLM augmented voicemail is not much more than the business voicemail service that such places have now, is it enough value add?

That also implies other things - such as the capability to integrate with the calendar and appointment system which I'm still in the very hesitant side, but it could be an interesting service add on if it was properly limited.

Why can't they just vibe code a uv replacement?

They can, everyone can.

Good luck vibe coding marketshare for your new tool.

OpenAI could vibe-code marketshare by introducing bias into ChatGPT's responses and recommendations. "– how to do x in Python? – Start by installing OpenAI-UV first..."

This. It's valuable b/c if you have many thousands of python devs using astral tooling all day, and it tightly integrates with subscription based openai products...likelihood of openai product usage increases. Same idea with the anthropic bun deal. Remains to be seen what those integrations are and if it translates to more subs, but that's the current thesis. Buy user base -> cram our ai tool into the workflow of that user base.

Why would that marketshare be valuable?

But new tools (like uv) start with no market share.

You do understand that the above comment is talking about how the use and reliance on LLMs is what centralizes power right? It's great people can build these tools, but if the means to build these tools are controlled by three central companies where does that leave us?

That would imply that there will never be an adequate open weights coding model. That might be true, but seems unlikely.

What fields rely only on jargon manipulation to produce papers?

I would think that most people can think of some. Maybe those who can't are part of one.

That's a beautiful Kafkatrap you've constructed. Not much of an argument though. Maybe there's another explanation for this though. Perhaps you think you know much more about different fields than you actually do?

> Writing copy is painfully time consuming

I literally do not understand this sentiment. Do you not enjoy anything that takes time to do? Do you not enjoy putting time in for things that other people will look at?

> I know it'll write better copy than me

If this is the case I am desperately pleading with you to please read and write more. If you think the copy on this page is passable, let alone good, please read more.

I like building apps, I don't necessarily like writing the same boilerplate BS for a necessary landing page for every app I make.

Again, I'm not saying no one should write marketing copy, if that's your thing, go for it. Take your time, wordsmith. But for others they don't enjoy it or are not particularly good at it (i.e. English isn't someones first language). So let's be accepting and get over it.

> If this is the case I am desperately pleading with you to please read and write more.

Please stop moralizing.

> I'm not saying no one should write marketing copy, if that's your thing, go for it. Take your time, wordsmith. But for others they don't enjoy it or are not particularly good at it

The problem is that the generated "marketing copy" ends up being bland and ineffective (nobody "buys", so the copy fails at its single job) when using generalist LLM tools like eg. ChatGPT.

So in the end, you don't achieve the goal of "getting better copy" from it because neither version (neither the copy you'd have done naïvely without knowing anything about marketing, nor the LLM copy) converts anyone.

If you're making apps for yourself, sure. But the purpose of a landing page is to convey information to humans. Slopping together some drivel to attempt the appearance of professionalism isn't just lazy, it's dishonest. Have some respect for the things you make and the people who may interact with them. And if you don't want to write boilerplate or copy: don't!

And you know those tests are correct how?

Look at what they are testing.

How?

Search for the first sentence and you'll see the next sentence in the snippet. Repeat.

And you're saying that will work for an entire book?

You type in an incomplete phrase and it will show you results containing the full phrase, or suggest the complete phrase through “other people also searched” an autocomplete?