Undoubtedly I’ve seen / played with you at one point or another. I spent many years in these kinds of servers, because with active mods they weren’t toxic. You kept the cheaters at bay, and they were reliable places to jump in, frag and chat for hours. I used a handful of different names over the years, but usually bounced between variations of “Trigger,” “Asylum,” and “Shifty”. I miss the days you could bop into a server, meet a handful of people, end up on a CAL team with them, and find friends for the next few decades. Best case today, everyone in online games now might as well be a ghost. They’re just strangers in passing if they talk at all. And worst case - they’re overly toxic, loud, and abusing the mic. The only communities I belong to now are the ones I build myself and with friends I’ve made in real life - and we jump between games together now.
I'm afraid that time we long for is gone now as we've all gotten older, busier, and moved on to other things. So long, and thanks for all the fish.
The self-checkout is the one that gets me. I'm paying you money for products, and you both continuously raise prices, and make it less convenient for me to shop there. That is, unless I want to order it for delivery online, and pay an extra fee. Every retailer doesn't need to be Amazon. I don't even want Amazon to be like Amazon anymore. Maybe this is me getting older, or me having worked in technology too long - but I'm growing tired of the hyper-fixation we have with optimizing every possible thing, at the loss of human interaction.
I like self-checkout on balance. The stores have a lot more self-checkout stations than they had cashiers. Most of the time I'm buying less than a dozen or so items. The work of having to scan and bag them myself is hardly more than taking them out of the cart. It's way faster than waiting in a queue behind someone who's apparently buying groceries for two weeks for a family of 8 and then has several dozen coupons and finally is writing a check. Or waiting behind several such people.
I guess if I were buying two weeks of groceries for a family of 8 I might prefer the cashier to scan them and the bag boy to bag them for me.
Self-checkout feels analogous to certain digital goods platforms - at certain times, it makes stealing/piracy the easier and more rational choice than paying for the product. They're both giving consumers great training in how and why to evade shitty corporate security tech!
> Candidates tell Fortune that AI interviewers make them feel unappreciated to the point where they’d rather skip out on potential job opportunities, reasoning the company’s culture can’t be great if human bosses won’t make the time to interview them. But HR experts argue the opposite; since AI interviewers can help hiring managers save time in first-round calls, the humans have more time to have more meaningful conversations with applicants down the line.
“This gives me a bad feeling about your company” “But you’re wrong”
Same argument for removing customer service with chatbots or AI. It's entirely untrue, and creates a much worse customer experience, but because people drop out your KPIs / NPS is based off of people who were willing to put up with shit to get to a real human.
Give me an AI chatbot over someone with poor English skills reading a script any day of the week. My problem probably isn't unique, it's probably something fairly obvious that was vague in the instructions.
Now, the important thing is offer a way to upgrade to a human. But I have no problem at all starting with AI, in fact I honestly prefer it.
That doesn't really match my experience. Usually if my problem is not unique it's already documented somewhere and I've solved it that way (And support generally puts some effort into documenting the non-unique problems to reduce their workload). If I'm calling support, it's because I've exhausted all other options and I've either concluded I need them to do something I can't do with an online form or the information is not at all accessible elsewhere, in which case first line support is nothing but an obstacle.
Sure, because you've already lived with 10+ years of enshittification in the process. Customer support used to be an in-house team that was actually trained on providing relevant support, not an outsourced call-center that's as (or more) useless than a chatbot.
In some ways it's not that different with hiring. I used to work with HR teams that knew the roles they were hiring for extremely well and could make reliable calls on whether or not to pass a candidate to a hiring manager. More recently I've seen HR get outsourced entirely, or staffed with cheaper employees that just shuffle documents through systems.
Certainly, because not deviating from the scripts also cuts off the infinite range of made up nonsense a bot can hallucinate. And it's not like the bot will have magic authority to fix the real issue it can't be bound by the script, so in this regard there is no upside.
We've had chatbots for a long time before LLMs, and while they're of course much more limited as you have to explicitly program every thing it should be able to do, by that very virtue, hallucinating is problem they do not have.
For this kind of customer service chat scenario, I find them much better than just a free style LLM trained in some internal docs.
(Though really, probably the ultimate solution is a hybrid one, where you have an explicitly programmed conversation tree the user can go down, but with an LLM decoding what the user is saying into one of the constrained options. So that if one of the options is "shipping issues", "my order is late" should take me there. While other forms of NLP can do that, LLMS would certainly shine for that application)
What is an AI interview going to glean that it can't already from a resume?
The power imbalance is already so far tipped to the employer side. This verbiage doesn't even consider the applicant a human with time worth saving or worth having meaningful conversations!
Gleaning information isn't the goal; whittling down deluge of applicants is. For the company, candidate time is free and manager time is massively expensive. The AI tools are cheaper than hiring more HR staff, so companies buy them lest they be haunted by the ghost of Milton Friedman.
Anybody who has been on the hiring side post-GPT knows why these AI tools are getting built: people and/or their bots are blind-applying to every job everywhere regardless of their skillset. The last mid-level Python dev job I posted had 300 applicants in the first hour, with 1/4 of them being from acupuncturists and restaurant servers who have never written a line of code. Sure, they're easy to screen out, but there are thousands to sift through.
Having said that, I don't like AI interview tools and will not be using them. I do understand why others do, though.
> The last mid-level Python dev job I posted had 300 applicants in the first hour, with 1/4 of them being from acupuncturists and restaurant servers who have never written a line of code.
That has to be due to policy failure of forcing people on benefits to apply for jobs to get benefits, even if they already have applied to all suitable jobs there are right now?
> candidate time is free and manager time is massively expensive
This is a naive view of the proceedings. Why not hire literally the first person that applies? That would reduce your cost even further.
The point is to figure out who would be good at making you money. The question is, does an ai chatbot wasting your prospective candidates time make you more, or less, likely to find people good at that? Perhaps it reduces the amount of cost reviewing applications, but I imagine it also drives away a good number of the better candidates, those that have more options, away. If you're cutting corners and cost this much, why are you even hiring? surely the point of the exercise is looking towards future growth.
Naturally, there is also a limit to that line of thinking also - spending weeks reviewing each one of the ten thousand applications to your junior developer role wouldn't be the most efficient way to grow. But surely there are better filtering methods you can think of than this, which is imo the equivalent of planning on reducing the number of candidates by lining them up in a room for hours in sweltering heat and hurling verbal abuse at them until only a couple of the wretched ones without a shred of dignity are left
I’ve worked in technology roles for 20 years. If you told me 20 years ago that my career was going to evolve the way it did, I never would have believed it. I’ve worked at 8 companies in that time, had 12 different roles, and managed people for the last 7 years. Every role I’ve had has been wildly different than the one before it. Passion and interest comes and goes, and the biggest factor is usually other people. In the last decade or so, most of my disinterest in my career has stemmed from collective shiny object syndrome from everyone I work with. People who want to adopt and build new things no matter the cost (or need). People trying desperately to pad their resumes, rather than truly improve things. Some of the more successful people I’ve seen in my career have been those that are truly curious, make sound decisions, constantly dig into solving difficult problems, teach others around them effectively, and can manage their own ego (not an exhaustive list by any means). What I do on a daily basis changes with every different team I’ve managed. Every team has been at a different stage, has different dynamics and challenges, needs different input and oversight, and needs more or less hands on leadership. I’ve played the role of a thought leader, salesman, mediator, therapist, project manager, etc. If you’re hands off (no technical contributions), it can be boring. You need to find a balance of being prepared for meetings (meaningful ones, with actual decisions and team driven outcomes), for your team members (1-1’s, performance management, mentorship, venting, etc.), following up on their asks (servant leader), keeping a backlog of work, addressing HR tasks, digging into PRs, planning execution around people possibly disappearing for a week or 12, etc, etc. Think about and answer the questions “What does the next month look like? What about 3? 12?” Hire, coach, fire, and everything that goes into all 3. Oh, and surprise Prod is down - now you’re behind on something, and you’re interrupting the business. Oh, the adult toddlers who are all the smartest person in the room are angry at each other? That was expectedly unexpected. The thing someone asked to work on suddenly isn’t as fun as they thought it would be? Couldn’t have predicted that since the last time it happened. If you’re working people too hard and they can’t self-regulate, you’re burning them out. If you’re not working them hard enough, they’re not growing and they’re bored. But everyone has different thresholds and skills and interests, and you need to figure these all out to make sure you can put them on tasks that keep them engaged, and challenge them, otherwise supplement with other work that will. What does this all look like at the end of the day? Click. Type, type. Click. Talk. Write (yes, on paper). Type type. Click. Talk talk talk.
Nice illustration that it's a real skill to be able to describe this stuff. At the "type, type, click, talk" level of abstraction, every white collar job is exactly the same.
The Fiat 500 and Smart car survive surprisingly well in crash testing. If the IIHS put Kei trucks through fair crash tests and they passed, they should absolutely be given a fair chance. I’m a big proponent of vehicles like this being on the road, and realistically bringing back more small and affordable vehicles to the masses. Realistically, I would love to see the 25 year rule go away so the rest of the overinflated market could have some competition.
You can also see an uptick in cheating after a certain point, leading me to believe that potentially some of their additional measures were effective, until cheat makers learned how to get around them.
Whether you agree with the Affordable Healthcare Act or not, I feel like nobody remembers “lifetime maximums.” I have some relatively minor (but massively impactful) pre-existing conditions, and I would have exceeded my lifetime maximum by age 30 due to testing, procedures, hospital stays, etc. I have family members that would have exceeded theirs before age 1.
How does the concept of health insurance, risk pooling, etc., make sense if there are no lifetime maximums…?
Eventually 100% of the population will need healthcare of some type.
And without maximums to plan and set prices against, wouldn’t it just be a wealth transfer scheme from the relatively young and healthy to the particularly old and sick…? (With those in the middle roughly neutral)
At least I can’t see any credible way to insure against something 100% of all possible customers will need.
Health insurance is already a huge transfer to older generations (not that that's a bad thing). Medicare pays for older folks but it doesn't pay anywhere near the cost of the services that older folks receive. Prices are higher for everyone else to fill the gap at health care providers.
Health insurance is in many ways not even insurance, it's in many ways a price negotiation mechanism.
Anyway the whole system is overly complex, based off a tax credit from the 1950s, but the transition to a new scheme is nearly impossible while one political party is dead set against any improvement, especially if it might be perceived as a positive for the other political party, and also they have become so hyper partisan that they are not allowed to work with the other party in a bipartisan manner.
It isn’t a simple money in, money out system. You’re taking higher value money in one year, and paying out some money that’s worth less later (inflation)… while at the same time, you’re investing the pool of money you collected, and earning returns on that before you pay out claims - claims that you’ve already negotiated down in price. But by the time the healthier customers need to start making large claims, they’ve already both subsidized the claims of other customers, and made the insurance company more money than they’ll draw in claims.
It's a simple money in, money out system. Health insurance isn't like homeowner's insurance where the insurer accumulates and invests a pool of money in anticipation of occasional rare events like natural disasters that cause a spike in claims. Medical expenses across a large patient population are very predictable and there is no significant carry over of premiums from year to year. In fact, under the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), it is actually illegal for most health insurers to do that. Any excess premiums collected must be returned to customers at the end of the year.
I'm afraid that time we long for is gone now as we've all gotten older, busier, and moved on to other things. So long, and thanks for all the fish.
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