MudMan

Top upvoted comment just tore a big fat hole into the entire argument and I have to say, good for the comments section. That’s so rare.

One open question here is whether we’re seeing youth employment decrease because AI is effectively replacing entry level workers in these fields, or because executives wrongly think AI can or will soon be able to do so?

You have to assume that if anybody puts a hiring freeze for junior employees right now it’d be out of some combination of caution, hype and insecurity about the economic landscape thanks to the usual suspects.

Turns out if the discussion is “quantitatively rich” but is ignoring the obvious qualitative observation it may end up flip-flopping a bunch. I’m not sure I’m as excited about that as the author, because man, is that a constant of the modern corporate world and does it suck and cost people money and stress.

There’s a growing wisdom gap coming in America. The people who are already well versed in company practices and culture are going to use AI to complete the tasks that they would have otherwise given to assistants and junior resources.

Counterpoint: no, they are not. Not with the current path of tech progress on the field, at lest.

Because seniors well versed in company practices and culture will get tired of having to manually redo junior work corrections really quick, and we are nowhere close to closing the error correction needs at this point.

Repetitive work that could feasibly have been automated or removed already? Maybe. There was a TON of room for automation that people weren’t investing on doing and the AI gold rush will feasibly take advantage of some of that. But AI replacing junior jobs wholesale? Nah. The tech isn’t there.

That seems overengineered as hell to me. But then, having an entire LLM to do what much older voice recognition software could do better is overengineered by definition. The LLM won’t validate those things because the point of it, if it has one at all in this scenario, is for it to recognize off the cuff speech and malformed orders.

Which is partly why people are finding this idea doesn’t work, I suppose. Have a chatbot improvise based on what people are shouting and you get garbage inputs. Have strict requirements for voice commands and you get lots of failed attempts.

Unlike a bunch of other applications of AI chatbots this one maaaay eventually work. But then again, so may your idea. Honestly, if I was going to overengineer the shit out of having a tortilla-wrapped laxative inside a car I’d have you order directly in your phone and use that license plate recognition idea to prevent you having to talk to anybody or anything in the first place.

Holy crap, people have been reposting takes on this interview for like three days and you can track the degradation of the actual content via the game of telephone in the headlines.

It’s kinda depressing.

FWIW, having read the original interview everybody is reheating, the 18000 waters was a random example the Taco Bell exec WSJ interviewed used to explain that part of the issue is that people feel less guilty about messing with automated orders than when they’re talking to a human. They are also not backing out from automated orders, which is why the headline is using “rethink”.

The core of the issue is correct, though, the guy does spend a significant amount of time giving corpolese synonims of “it’s a mess”. “We’ve certainly learned a lot” has to be my favourite.

I am very confused by this repot, as it seems to imply something different than what it’s saying and what it’s saying seems to be… nothing specific at all?

So things are not going great, but that is not stopping Taco Bell from pushing forward with its AI embrace in one way or another. The fast food staple’s parent company, Yum Brands, announced a partnership with Nvidia earlier this year with the goal of improving the technology that powers its AI operations, including the order takers.

Now I have cognitive dissonance from both the uncanny use of fastidiously grammatically correct but unnanutral sounding Spanish in the headline AND the headline being entirely mismatched with the article.

Also, Gizmodo is still a thing? Holy shit. Would have lost money on that bet.

EDIT: Oh, it turns out the mismatched headline seems to be because the article is straight up retyping a similar piece from WSJ. WSJ’s take is also light on a specific event they’re reporting, beyond an executive talking about a thing, but at least they bother clarifying to what extent there is a change of policy. Turns out Gizmodo is absolutely still a thing. I had forgotten the regurgitated reporting-on-reporting stuff.

Hah.

Steam has always been an anti-piracy tool. Gabe Newell is very much on the record about convenience (and inconvenience) being the key to the problem.

People were mad at them for a while, then they proved him wrong by forgetting that had ever happened.

No, not that one. But I guess there are multiple angles, dark mode overall has been pretty rough.

The one that gets in my way the most is their already spotty xlsx conversion seems to parse Office’s default font color as black instead of automatic, which means when you open Excel docs on LibreOffice you get black text on black background by default.

You can just select all and manually change the text color, but it’s a pain, and on spreadsheets you have to do it on each spreadsheet page. From what I’ve seen there have been bugs opened and reclosed with “you should set the text to automatic”, which is engineer excuses for what is obviously a genuine issue with the defaults of document conversion, as far as I can tell.

Is dark mode no longer busted?

I guess I’ll find out.

Americans elected a fascist, extremist president and corporations cozying up to power are moving towards fascism and extremism to cozy up to power.

I am experiencing the least amount of shock possible.

Now, if Americans owned the monumental fuckup, that would be a surprise.

I don’t remember many dreams, but I also don’t recall dreaming about computers or TV much.

Maybe brains just have a hard time hallucinating user interfaces.

Is there a widely accepted European equivalent for “Sir, this is a Wendy’s?”

Didn’t think I needed one, and then…

Well, the EU has a consultation period on new regulations, but I don’t know if that’s open for this specifically.

Generally, I would say organizations on each country are often the ones with the infrastructure in place to issue a recommendation on these things. Consumer support orgs, unions, privacy groups and so on. Political parties if your country has one with a definite stance on the issue. If you can get those involved and they can get the press involved now you have an avenue for mainstream awareness, which frankly is more likely to do something than a purely online-driven signature or email campaign.

The rest may differ per country and even per party. It depends on what participation mechanisms you can deploy for each.

To be clear, I’m not against also reaching out to MEPs, but given how in many places they act as a collective blob representing national partisan interests and how electorally they don’t have a particular incentive to engage with individual voters I don’t know that it’d work best in isolation. I’m not particularly against that, either. “Contact your representative” is a staple of small district, majoritarian, first-past-the-post nonsense and I have no particular desire to move in that direction. I’m way more comfortable with a party-heavy system than with that weirdness.

MEPs get elected with proportional representation on closed lists in a nation-wide single district.

Emailing 60 of them from an array of different parties with no official stance on the issue and no more of a direct relationship with you than with millions of other people is less direct political action and more spam. Pretty sure collective action would have a better chance.

This is true. The thing is, all data needs a medium.

It doesn’t matter if you own a file sitting in a hard drive or a disc sitting in a box. Discs are nicer because you get a thing you can put on a shelf to act as a backup of the file you dump from it. Plus they often come with nice extras. If you don’t think things on shelves are nice your priorities may be different.

The problem is that all the competitors are enshittifying the same way at the same pace. If there was a holdout in a position to grow their platform we may at least go back to the days of “Netflix is all you need”.

As it is, it makes more sense to go back to physical media purchases, and I blame absolutely nobody if their disposable income and lack of box fetishes makes them think downloading the content is perfectly equivalent. The Plex server where I store all my physical media backups is by far the best streaming library I have access to, at least if you discount novelty as a factor.

I don’t know that I’d say they refuse to believe it, it’s more that there are short term goals and milestones to hit because literally every single industry is held to the standards and timelines of speculative investors rather than actual investors.

Everybody understands you should be servicing your audience and keeping them happy, and everybody is happy with you doing that… as long as it’s within the constraints of hitting quarterly goals. In a world where content routinely takes 3-5 years to make that is not a great fit.

Newell doesn’t have any investors to answer to so he gets to say those things when he’s in billionaire club. Everybody else just goes “no shit, Gabe” and keeps working on squeezing something out to keep pretending to have done better year on year.

It’s a remarkable example of the aggregation of incentives going against every single individual person involved, including those setting the incentives.

Heh. It’s a very software-centric view. Open source trivializes things that can run as software on readily available hardware, but if there’s a linear relationship between cost of hardware/manufacture and results you aren’t solving much of the gatekeeping. There’s plenty of open source availability for a lot of stuff, from email to LLMs, that nobody self-hosts. The problem isn’t the underlying reproduction rights.

I will say this, I don’t care about what the author or anybody else “supports”. If we should have learned something from the last decade or two is that “support” means jack shit.

I care about regulation. And just like I think education, transportation, medical patents, health care and other key resources should be fundamentally public by law, the same is true of other technologies.