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Comment by incomingpain | Hacker News Reader

>for the past three months, he had been replacing regular table salt with sodium bromide. His motivation was nutritional—he wanted to eliminate chloride from his diet, based on what he believed were harmful effects of sodium chloride.

Ok so the article is blaming chatgpt but this is ridiculous.

Where do you buy this bromide? It's not like it's in the spices aisle. The dude had to go buy a hot tub cleaner like Spa Choice Bromine Booster Sodium Bromide

and then sprinkle that on his food. I dont care what chatgpt said... that dude is the problem.

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> I dont care what chatgpt said... that dude is the problem.

This reminds me of people who fall for phone scams or whatever. Some number of the general population is susceptible to being scammed, and they wind up giving away their life's savings or whatever to someone claiming to be their grandkid

There's always an asshole saying "well that's their own fault if they fall for that stuff" as if they chose it on purpose instead of being manipulated into it by other people taking advantage of them

See it a lot on this site, too. How clever are the founders who exploit their workers and screw them out of their shares, how stupid are the workers who fell for it

Both can be true at the same time. You can be an idiot to fall far a scam while the scammer is a dickhead criminal.

Scammers only work because they know some percentage of the population is going to fall for it

Can't we have some empathy for people just trying to do their best in a world where so many people are trying to take advantage of them?

Their victims are often the vulnerable ones in our society too. The elderly, the infirm, the mentally ill. It's not just "stupid people fall for scams" it takes one lapse of judgement over a lifetime of being targeted. Come on

Of course people need to be protected. That's why it's literally illegal to scam people almost everywhere. That doesn't men that people should not ALSO attempt to protect themselves from scammers.

It's quite dirty to bring up the elderly, infirm and mentally ill. Because of course they cannot help themselves. Those groups are not what this is about, and you damn well know it. This is about normal functioning adults walking into scams with their eyes open. And yes that group has a responsibility to keep up with the scams that are commonplace. It's ridiculous to encourage people to go through life with their blinders on because "the world should just be a fair place". Yeah it should be, but tough luck, reality is different.

> Those groups are not what this is about, and you damn well know it. This is about normal functioning adults walking into scams with their eyes open

Normal functioning adults will also benefit if we take steps to protect the infirm and dysfunctional

That's why it isn't meant to be "dirty" to bring up the vulnerable in society. If we take sufficient steps to protect them, we all benefit

I'm not arguing for not having protections. You are arguing against a straw man.

> See it a lot on this site, too. How clever are the founders who exploit their workers and screw them out of their shares, how stupid are the workers who fell for it

I have literally never seen that expressed on HN.

In every case where workers are screwed out of shares, the sympathy among commenters seems to be 100% with the employees. HN is pretty anti-corporate overall, if you haven't noticed. Yes it's pro-startup but even more pro-employee.

> HN is pretty anti-corporate overall, if you haven't noticed.

My observation is that any given thread can go either way, and it sometimes feels like a coin toss which side of HN will be most represented in any given thread

Yes, I have seen quite a lot of anti-corporate posts, but I also see quite a few anti-employee posts. This is likely my own negative bias but I think many users here are generally pro-Capital which aligns them with corporate interests even if they are some degree of anti-corporate anyways

Probably I just fixate too much on the posts I have a negative reaction to

What kinds of anti-employee posts have you seen?

I'm genuinely curious, because I can't think of any. But I'm wondering if maybe I'm mentally categorizing posts differently from you?

Agreed, but, it is in the spices aisle if your spice aisle is amazon.com

You haven’t lived if you haven’t tried my Bromine Chicken. I make it every Christmas.

We could also point the finger towards the popular consensus that "salt is bad for you". This guy just took it to the next level.

> Ok so the article is blaming chatgpt but this is ridiculous.

People are born with certain attributes. Some are born tall, some left handed and some gullible. None of those is a reason to criticise them.

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