don't feed the beast?
Conventional wisdom and best practices tell us not to reply to spam - not even to interact with the "remove me from your list" element - as it only validates our phone number (or email address) as being active and as being likely to read a spam such as the onr you responded to, but in my case that is precisely what I'm hoping for.
hear me out. if my number becomes more valuable because of something I wrote intending to waste the time of the spammer (that turned out btw, I think as a decent piece of satirical sci-fi fwiw) and to amuse myself, then the next spammer had to spend more to get my contact info. And if further the type of spammer that paid more for my address is this particular sort of spammer, while I now have this reply loaded and ready to be copy/pasted to them. If this happens repeatedly, the cost of spammers for entry into the market has gone up and if they're wasting time trying to understand my reply, they they are doubky disincentivized from participating in that activity.
If then everyone reading this also copy/pasted this reply In hoing to share with you in response to when they received similar spam, wouldn't the end result be that nobody would be sending these sorts of spams anymore? Regardless, my amusement imagining the number of times a human on that side of the spam machine enterprise reads, or begins to re-read another copy has increased, which is a net benefit to me so somehow even as someone who has been fighting UCE since before the dawn of tools like SpamBayes etc, today this seems like the proper response to an SMS spam I received (of which I get varieties of this specific type of business loan spam daily for ten years) intended for the previous owner of the number. With no response the rate at which they arrive at my phone has been steady for over a decade. What's that they say? "If nothing changes, nothing changes."
Hi, this is Bill with the company you texted at this number. I appreciate you reaching out on this, a cellphone number that hasn't been associated with my name or business in over a decade; I believe it shows your commitment and attention to detail, among other things.
While i am happy to report to someone as illustrious and reputable as yourself that revenue in our regular business line (that of life-size lifelike sex doll manufacturing) has far exceeded expectation from the very first quarter since we jumped on the a.i. bandwagon, which corresponds to the moment we released our newest models containing an ESP32 microcontroller that drives the servos and steppers one can add as upgrades to our top-end dolls. We saved a ton of money when we realized that we could use an LLM to parse the audio input from the user as natural speech and and have it respond with structured (JSON) text that translates the user's words into appropriate signals indicating actions for the dolls motors to perform in response to what the user has said. It seems a bit like magic when it works well, but having Internet access as a requirement for this feature (so the doll's programming can make api calls to an ai LLM) is both a privacy concern for our users and a limit on how much the doll can do and how real-time she can do it, so the obvious next step is GPU-accelerated compute in the doll to handle inference on-board. However, in testing we quickly realized that there is a bigger problem not much talked about when using an LLM for this purpose, which is that when we give the doll the ability to also respond with speech (and not just motor-driven movement) generated by the LLM, it just isn't very sexy.
When one is doing the nasty with a synthetic humanoid, being able to ask it an out of context question such as "what is the recipe for the best blueberry muffins ever?", and to have the doll respond to the non sequitur as if it is a perfectly normal thing to ask (and answer) during coitus, only serves to break the illusion and well, in the end it's kinda just like you are boinking ChatGPT, and while we acknowledge a small percentage of our user base wants to do exactly that, it is a very niche market.
So as we began to use some of that surplus revenue mentioned earlier for R&D work,the slightly esoteric eggheads willing to attach their name to our project perhaps unsurprisingly quite quickly came up with an idea that has proven to be a breakthrough that will change market expectations for both the sex toy industry and big tech's goal of AGI - Artificial General Intelligence - forever from the moment it is announced. We envision replacing the LLM in our use case with a custom machine comprising a fully-mapped neuron-to-neuron, 1-to-1 copy of a real human brain in a substrate of exotic-mineral-doped silicon that can achieve much higher transistor density than traditional materials and have already proven out our theory with fruit fly and cephalopod brains. A unique aspect of our method is that in contrast to the current machine learning paradigms used for ai, our technique requires no expensive model training stage, since the human that previously embodied the mind being copied has spent some number of years (their lifetime) training and tuning their intelligence.
The obvious next step is to move forward with copies of a human mind similarly to what we have done with lower species already (because as with the previously discussed niche market, we don't expect the market seeking to fuck a hot-looking female human with the mind of a fly or cuttlefish to appeal to a market set larger than that of the rabid Lovecraft and/or Cronenberg fans, sets which do already overlap and which according to our most recent contracted survey is also a very, very small niche market.)
It is in this area that we may be able to leverage the capital you offer. Not for R&D as such, but for the creation of PACs and slush funds with which to buy influence of certain state and federal-level elected officials and other politicians. You see, our process for mapping the mind is necessarily a destructive one, because in order to capture all of the logic and memory circuits formed by the melange of metallic elements that make up a brain and all of its signal paths, and so that we don't just copy the structure but also the contents of that mind and the perplexing property that emerges from it that we call "consciousness", each cell is scanned with a precise beam of photons that has the unfortunate side effect of eviscerating each cell that it scans. As the Silicon salts substrate - which we call Silisals(tm) - is becoming more of the mind it will store, the original copy in organic substrate (i.e., the human mind donor) becomes less so at a precise and inverse ratio, to the points of brain death and then actual death over the course of the scan, which takes a little over three hours from start to finish.
Though we have no shortage of volunteers wishing to be uploaded, their mind-body sovereignty is challenged to the point of illegality by the morals and ethics proclaimed to be guiding certain politically-motivated review and standards boards, which keeps us from being able to experiment on human test subjects without running afoul of actual law. Surmounting this issue alone will require significant capital.
Additionally, we have come to refer to this product internally by the code name "Silly Sally" (after our patent-pending Silisalification (tm) process) and while we expect each owner/user of the next generation sex toy platform to give their intimate companion a name of her own (which unless that name is the same as that of the donor-mind's former human owner[1] or the customer enjoys "Roots" LARPing, with their new intelligent sex toy in the role of Kunte Kinte being informed that his name is now Toby, this is probably going to be as difficult as that scene depicts) and we don't imagine many of our customers preferring the name - or their donors having the name - "Silly Sally", still something does need to be printed on the packaging, and that is the name we use internally for the aforementioned and obvious reasons. Troubling, however, is that we are informed that there exists presently a public performer[2] laying claim to that name for their persona, and we have reason to believe they may not see this as a co-branding opportunity and instead may need to be paid for the name outright (or be otherwise "convinced"), either of which will likely cost the business a significant sum.
The timeline of our success depends only on how much money you can get us, and how quickly you can get it to us. So, how much will you be offering us, at what rate, and when can we expect to see it reflected in our bank statement?
Sincerely,
"Bill", from the company you sent unsolicited SMS to at my number from yours, soliciting business loans to which I am responding.
[1] side note: on the naming front, we refer to these as simply the "Donor-Owner" because it has a nice self-rhyming scheme and because it also rhymes with "boner", which we anticipate being able to use in combination as some catchy marketing material. Now, with you in the business of lending capital, think of the benefits to be had from Press Releases naming you as the "Donor-Owner Boner Loaner"; the title is yours for the taking!)