Or by her participating that she is knowingly involving herself in a scam. Which, yeah, it's just books - but it's pretty obviously a pyramid.
No shame if you don't see how it's a scam, the cozy blanket and glass of wine are meant to throw you, and they chose 36 because it's a confusing enough number where you don't think too much about how it grows.
She gives one book to her upline. She then sends out post to 36 more people to give her 36 books. Each one of them then needs to find 36 people each, which is now 1296 people in that level if they each want 36 books. Thus the exponential pyramid. Of course there is zero way each of them will find that many people, let alone the levels below that. It's a scam that benefits those higher up, and the ones lower will likely not receive anything.
Of course she sees nothing wrong with that. She said "Sometimes I get books, sometimes I don't, that's just part of the game". Which... it's not a game when it's real money being passed around.
On top of that, whenever we see a pyramid scheme we should be stamping it out - hard. Folks, please spot the signs and point them out. Don't be afraid to comment on posts calling them out as scams.
Edit: To be clear the idea of a growing book exchange isn't a bad one, as explained in the comments though the way to make it not a scam is to make it 1:1. You either send a book and receive a book, or if they like the 36 number, you change it to "I'll send a book to whoever sends me a book!". Then it's a true book exchange.
Okay so I had a meltdown last year. I was staring down a startup that was circling the drain, I knew my time there was limited, and I was being bombarded daily with layoffs and friends not being able to find work, while hearing constantly that I was going to be left behind due to AI. (of course the layoffs were happening because tech CEOs heard AI and started frothing at the idea of getting rid of some of their most expensive staff)
So, I took it on myself to learn AI. I figured well, if it's coming for my job I might as well learn how it works. And oh lorde, did I learn a lot. To the point where I'm running several LLMs now at home, I have them running in k3s, across multiple servers, and have built several apps to interact with them. I've trained finetuned LLMs, I've played with image generation, voices, I dove headfirst in. Eventually I did lose that job, and that gave me a couple months to focus even more before finding my current one.
My biggest learnings, which I'm sure many of you know:
if(nsfw) dont(). You have to spend a lot of time forcing the LLM to not give weight to the users course, and it's to the point that it hardly seems worth it.whileloop.There's more but this is too long already. It's neat, it's useful, but the hype was just as intense as blockchain. We're going to see some real great usages out of it, like integration with something like Word or a browser to summarize things is honestly a good idea. But there are so so so many pitfalls.
For coding? I think it's a great place to get started, or to get an idea. I would never trust it in production. It will take a very long time for us to get to the point where you can say "Go build this feature" and I would blindly trust what it generated.