Comment by Zak
2 hours ago
I got one of those too, from "Alya", which seems to be an LLM-based tool the creator describes as his daughter.
Beyond the usual rudeness of spam, that's a little creepy.
2 hours ago
I got one of those too, from "Alya", which seems to be an LLM-based tool the creator describes as his daughter.
Beyond the usual rudeness of spam, that's a little creepy.
I also got the Alya message.
In addition to all the creepiness, the email had a link to stripe to pay them $500? I wonder if the email is hiding a prompt injection somewhere to trick a bot into paying?
You should call these folks/companies out by name, they aren't respecting you, your time, or situation.
I don't think they're actual companies. One of the more recent emails I received contains this bit:
"If you're already employed, I can also support you in taking on additional contract work. I'll guide you through the entire interview process to help you succeed and get hired. In this partnership, your main role would be attending client meetings, while I handle all development and written communication. We would then split the income, with you receiving 40% of the project earnings."
Guy introduced himself as a "senior full-stack developer with over nine years of experience in web, mobile, and iOS development".
Oddly specific number.
Those are known scams. They usually reside in sanctioned countries like North Korea (but I've also gotten a lot of Chinese ones), and they make you bear any legal risk if they try to install backdoors in the client codebase. They also run the same scam with wanting your Upwork or similar credentials.
Ain’t that one of those North Korea “scam” things where they need an intermediary due to sanctions lol I could be very wrong though
1 reply →
I received the same Alya email. This vibe-coded site was linked. https://mydaughteralya.com/
I got that too, and "creepy" is the same word that came to mind.
For one, the choice of child, is already creepy even if you refer to a pet as a child, but a software system as a substitute for childbearing, it reminds me of the claw cult, you can call it a company, a system, a project.
And calling it a daughter, man I don't even want to get into it.
> For one, the choice of child, is already creepy even if you refer to a pet as a child, but a software system as a substitute for childbearing, it reminds me of the claw cult, you can call it a company, a system, a project.
On the other hand, I feel like the obsession with childbearing (constant fear about birth rates, pressure on women to become mothers, etc.) to be a lot more creepy than someone having wholesome protective love for their pets.
I fully agree with you about the creepiness of software "children", but I can't really relate to the pet part. It's honestly weird to me when people just kind of think of their pets as like, non-human roommates or something, when there's clearly one entity that has a responsibility to care for the other one since they're dependent on them for food, water, and shelter.
> the obsession with childbearing
To be fair, I think all species are obsessed with producing offspring, regardless of culture.
http://www.art.net/studios/hackers/hopkins/Don/text/rms-vs-d...
>" Following your example, I might send the list an announcement whenever a new GNU program is written. That happens less often than babies are born, it does the world a lot more good, it reflects more conscious creativity and hard work, and some of the readers might actually find the information useful. Even so, I think most of the readers would consider this outside the scope and purpose of the list. Clearly that goes double for babies." -Richard M Stallman
I have a cat named Emacs -- I wonder how Doctor would analyze that?