Author: Bob - Page 2 - Robert J Wallace

February 9, 2025February 9, 2025

The Psychology Behind Scams: How Fraudsters Exploit Human Behavior

Scams are not just about deception—they are psychological manipulations designed to exploit cognitive biases and emotional triggers. Despite advancements in security measures, fraudsters continue to succeed because they understand how people think and react under pressure. This article explores the key psychological principles that make scams effective and examine real-world examples demonstrating these tactics in action.

February 5, 2025February 5, 2025

Battle of Wits: AI vs. Community College Students

After years of teaching community college and working with AI, I’ve concluded that comparing their intelligence is like comparing apples to artificially generated images of apples. AI can instantly calculate complex derivatives that make calculus students weep, yet it confidently insists that Abraham Lincoln was the first astronaut to walk on Mars. Meanwhile, community college students might take 20 minutes to figure out how to connect to the schools network, but at least they know that playing computer games during lectures is a bad idea – most of the time.

February 1, 2025February 3, 2025

The Amygdala Hijack: How Scammers Exploit Your Brain in Romance Scams

Note: this article was written by ChatGPT.

Have you ever looked back on a situation and wondered, “What was I thinking?” That feeling of acting impulsively, without your usual logic, is often caused by what psychologists call an amygdala hijack. This reaction can make people vulnerable to emotional manipulation—and it’s exactly what romance scammers count on.

January 31, 2025February 3, 2025

Analyze WhatsApp Scams with This Simple Tool

In today’s digital world, WhatsApp scams are becoming increasingly sophisticated. To help combat this, I’ve created a simple tool that lets you analyze any WhatsApp conversation for potential scam indicators. The tool extracts your conversation and copies it to your clipboard so you can easily get it analyzed by Claude.ai.

January 28, 2025January 29, 2025

Revolutionizing US Tax: A State-Based Approach

The United States federal tax system, with its complex forms, massive bureaucracy, and army of auditors, could be dramatically simplified through a revolutionary yet practical approach: eliminating direct federal tax collection in favor of a state-based system. This isn’t just a pipe dream – the framework for such a system largely exists in current state tax operations.

January 28, 2025January 29, 2025

Casting AIs in Person of Interest: Who Fits?

I have been a fan of the TV program “Person of Interest”, which has two fictional AIs in the cast. Lately a new AI has come on the market, “Deepseek”, so for fun I had the following conversation with it.

Are you familiar with the tv program “person of interest”

Yes, I’m familiar with Person of Interest! It’s a science fiction crime drama television series that aired from 2011 to 2016. The show was created by Jonathan Nolan and produced by J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot Productions.

January 25, 2025February 10, 2025

My Experience with a Romance Scam on Facebook and WhatsApp

Read about my experience with a typical romance scam. This started with a Facebook message, moved to WhatsApp, and then to crypto currency using an “app” named HTX-Web3 (HTXWeb3). I was smart and limited my losses to a level I was willing to lose. You can read about it on “I was scammed“.

December 22, 2024December 23, 2024

A few Sandwiches

There are probably hundreds of methods for achieving the “Sandwich” effect, where the selected card is found between two face up court cards. Here are some that I have learned over the years.

All of these, unless otherwise noted, start with the court cards removed and face up on the table. In the descriptions below I use the red kings.

December 22, 2024December 22, 2024

Using gThumb in ubuntu

I use gThumb for organizing and viewing my photos. One feature I wish it had (version 3.8) was the ability to list un-tagged images. I recently figured out a way to do that. I search for all images, then tag them all with the tag “temporary”. Then using the find (search) dialog I search for those images that only have the tag “temporary”. The first step of tagging all images takes a while but after that it makes it easy to find “un-tagged images.” Those are the images with only a “temporary” tag.

August 24, 2024February 9, 2025

Up-scaling images.

I keep getting ads for Topaz up-scaling software, and have wondered if it is any good. Not that it matters, since I am running on Linux computers, and Topaz is Windows. But recently I found an open source up-scaler program names Upscayl, which runs on Linux, Windows, and Mac. So I installed it to do some testing. First thing I discovered is that my built in graphics card wasn’t powerful enough to run the software. So I had to buy a Nvidia GPU. I bought the least expensive one I could find, and it runs the software just fine.