Critical to the story, he wasn’t an employee. He’s a rideshare driver, and therefore an independent contractor. That gave him the flexibility to just stop accepting rides for years, but it also meant he had no legal job protection or internal avenue of recourse when his account got banned, likely for suspicion it had been stolen to be used for someone who otherwise would not be accepted as a driver.

As an aside, he lost 200 lbs over 2 years, so about 8 lbs a month.

Thats on the aggressive side of a healthy weight loss pace, so kudos to him for not just losing the weight but apparently doing it healthily over an extended period of time instead of trying to rush it.

It's an interesting story as some people see facial biometrics (with increasing fidelity) as an escape from document verification deepfaking threats.

But people's biometrics really can change over time, and I don't think there's a clean way out. Back to expensive and inconvenient in-person checks?

Interesting. Rather than run an in-house verification team, you allow for a third party (Howard Finkelstein's Help Me Howard) to do the "this is not just a scam; it's worth escalating" and then trust them. Howard benefits by getting to do a bit and you get to cut verification costs. A non-monetary payment works here where financial reward would result in capturing a significant portion of the surplus from both the banned driver and the employer. Definitely interesting.

Reminds me of the time when my roommate wasn’t let into a bar soon after college because he had seriously bulked up since high school. We spent a half hour arguing, showing that all his credit cards are under his name and that even his work badge had his name and a recent photo. This feels politically relevant now too

Reminds me of the people that travel for plastic surgery and need to take special precautions to get back through customs.

I thought this would be about Gabe Newell https://reddit.com/r/valve/comments/1vt6iqe/new_chad_gabe_lo...

Gotta love how these companies are careful to make account suspensions seem like an intentional decision by a human and not the result of a Claude prompt.

I guess the point of the article is the difficulty he had getting back to his job, but man... good for that dude for losing that much weight. It's genuinely super hard to make the changes needed for that, good on him.

I think a huge amount of the AI backlash is really the centaur/reverse centaur debate, about the mechanization and withdrawal of humans from all touch points and loops for companies.

AI is the new header that this already well under way de-humanizing (in multiple senses) process has sort of gotten subsumed by, and it just feels (and is) so bad, is such a ossifying horrible anti-responsiveness that is so gross to run across.

That systems are so locked, so un malleable, means the agents riding atop them are infuriatingly limited. Be those human or LLM agents. And this lock in? That's 50% of what's making "AI" so hated, so loathed. That it is the useless messenger, the helpless bearer of the bad news, that the system does not allow it.