Big Balls is back, baby!

Head of Engineering on the team responsible for the new America.gov site.

Dear Amazon,

It’s nice that you’re trying to educate your customers on how to avoid email scams. However, when telling people how to verify the message before clicking on a link, do not give them verification links to click on. Duh.

Verify messages with Alexa for Shopping

If you receive an email, text, or phone call claiming to be from Amazon, you can now check whether it’s legitimate.
There are three easy ways to verify:
Log in on the Amazon shopping app or on Amazon.com [link!] and type your question into the Alexa for Shopping chat, for example, “Did Amazon email me?” or “Did Amazon call me?”
You can also visit the Identify a Scam page [link!] to submit any message for verification.
Submit your question or forward a specific email to verify@amazon.com [link!].

If Amazon sent the message, you’ll know in moments.
Do not engage with a suspicious message in any way before verifying. We will automatically submit a report to Amazon internal teams, and we’ll continue to monitor your account for suspicious activity.

Visit amazon.com/scams [link!] to learn more ways to verify messages, access resources for scam prevention, and understand Amazon’s efforts to protect customers from fraudulent activities.

Dear Indian Contract Recruiter,

Yeah, this email offer really looks legit:

Title: Datacenter Engineer
Location: Reno, NV (Onsite)
Duration: 6+ months contract
Interview: MS Teams
Posiitons: 10
Pay rate: $25/hour

It goes on to describe multiple years of broad experience that are required, enough to at least double that hourly rate, even in an area with cheap cost-of-living.

Random useful GenAI

My large collection of meme pics tend to have terrible filenames that make them impossible to find later. I knocked together a simple prompt for a vision model to create better ones:

Analyze this image and use its significant elements and themes to compose a meaningful file name for the image using only letters, digits, and “-” to separate words; no other characters are permitted. Words MUST be separated by “-”. The filename MUST be no longer than 48 characters, and MUST NOT include a date or timestamp. Output only the new filename, with no formatting.

It’s not perfect. qwen3-vl-4b occasionally went batshit crazy (including one meme where it just repeated “kiwi” about 300 times), so I switched to a larger but sadly slower model.

(see if you can spot the reason that this GenAI photograph is impossible; you’ll need to click through to the full-size version)

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