This is will only make all the people that know you not able to contact you (well, you might consider that a feature, but let's say this isn't what you're going for). First you'll have to contact each of them and go through the whole "who are you?" dance, that is if you don't fall into one of the many options that makes them ignore unknown numbers in the first place, and even if they see your chat or call don't take one of the other deny/ignore/report whatever option, especially after the scary "be careful with unknown numbers like this" message. And then after you iron out who you are with each and every person you might want to chat in the future with 90% won't even save your "alternate" to their address book, and from the remaining 10% if they don't contact you often enough to be at the top it'll be 50/50 chance next time when they try to do something to be on the right number (as it's not a special address book, but the one that's shared for everything, including regular calls and SMS).

Wouldn't it be easier in the first place to not post your status like "I'm off to Maldives with my secretary, losers" and a similar profile picture (switched to "visible to everyone") if you don't want that info to be public?

Also what has anything to do with the tablets? You can have a second (and a third, and a fourth) "linked" device beside the main one. These can be other phones, tablets, desktop apps, or logged in browsers. That changes nothing, it's the same account, with the same things visible (or not), etc. If you meant to take even ONE MORE number for the tablet that's bad, for the reasons above.

It's different from humans in that human opinions, expertise and intelligence are rooted in their experience. Good or bad, and inconsistent as it is, it is far, far more stable than AI. If you've ever tried to work at a long running task with generative AI, the crash in performance as the context rots is very, very noticeable, and it's intrinsic to the technology. Work with a human long enough, and you will see the faults in his reasoning, sure, but it's just as good or bad as it was at the beginning.

Let's see what that link provides:

"This category explores how manipulative groups regulate and dominate their members’ actions and behaviors through strict rules, rewards, and punishments, limiting individual autonomy."
Hijab, burka, yarmulke, baptism, circumcision, the wearing of 'mixed' clothing

Examining the tactics of manipulative organizations to control information flow through censorship and propaganda, restricting members’ access to outside perspectives.
- I give you the Church of Scientology

Focuses on psychological techniques used by such groups to shape beliefs and attitudes, suppressing critical thinking and promoting conformity.
- I give you the Mormon Church

Explores how manipulative organizations manipulate emotions, fostering dependency and loyalty through love-bombing, guilt, and fear-based indoctrination.
- "If you're bad you won't see your family in heaven" really hard to say that's anything other than fear-based coercion

I am by no means an expert on religion(s) but to say religion isn't a cult is to whitewash it into respectability. Hence, 'A large *popular* cult'

I have a Mac Studio. I also have a Mac pro from the last Intel era that is full of memory, cores, SSDs and is basically a brick now.
There's no reason for a computer to take up more space than a Mac Studio.

You're so close to getting it lol

Correct. This is why I don't like the term "hallucinate". AIs don't experience hallucinations, because they don't experience anything. The problem they have would more correctly be called, in psychology terms "confabulation" -- they patch up holes in their knowledge by making up plausible sounding facts.

I have experimented with AI assistance for certain tasks, and find that generative AI absolutely passes the Turing test for short sessions -- if anything it's too good; too fast; too well-informed. But the longer the session goes, the more the illusion of intelligence evaporates.

This is because under the hood, what AI is doing is a bunch of linear algebra. The "model" is a set of matrices, and the "context" is a set of vectors representing your session up to the current point, augmented during each prompt response by results from Internet searches. The problem is, the "context" takes up lots of expensive high performance video RAM, and every user only gets so much of that. When you run out of space for your context, the older stuff drops out of the context. This is why credibility drops the longer a session runs. You start with a nice empty context, and you bring in some internet search results and run them through the model and it all makes sense. When you start throwing out parts of the context, the context turns into inconsistent mush.

Is this the same Klarna that has already been through one cycle of being super bullish about AI and then having to re-hire some actual customer support?

Things businesses have to hide from unauthorized access or making public accidentally:

Direct Identifiers
Name
Address
Social Security number (SSN)
Other identifying number or code
Phone number
Email address

Indirect Identifiers
Gender
Race
Birthdate
Geographic indicators

We can't even log these identifiers together internally. If we see First Name, Last Name, Phone Number in HTTP access logs and they're not replaced by ***** characters, we have to fix that right now.

I don't know what good zip ties are unless you tie the hands behind the back. There are a lot of people who would not be able to bite through zip ties anyway. It's unlikely the biting through zip ties works when there's someone monitoring you and making you stop biting through zip ties by kicking your face.

They TRIED numbers and sometimes got pictures or status or whatever else people might have set to be visible for everyone (I think only the "hey there I'm using Whatsapp" thing is public by default).

The only way to prevent this was to have enough bits in the account definition, but that isn't the case with phone numbers, plus most are taken and most do have WhatsApp so the attacker won't waste orders of magnitude more efforts to span the whole possible space. What's more if one needs this information for any nefarious or semi-nefarious purposes from spam to political whatever they usually care only about local users, be it from Canada or from Quatar (for example), they don't need to brute force billions, possibly tens of billions of possible phone numbers for everyone in the world starting at the top with India.

It's daft on multiple layers, first these countries surely could get directly a list with the verification SMSes from the provider and won't have to go only for the subset of people that have a "Hey there! I am using Whatsapp" status and it's public for anyone to see (especially if this is a thing that carries heavy penalties).

I hope the Tolkien estate sues all of them. You know a company is associated with Peter Theil if it has a LOTR name.

This reminds me of Home Alone voicemail, except worse, just setting the message to "We're the McCallisters and will be in Paris for the holidays" but for a modern experience doing it on Meta's platform and then of course complain it's someone else's fault for the info getting public.