Shopping online for Xmas? AI chatbots know whether you want to be naughty or nice It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you have clicked on Add to Basket. T-800, eat your endoskeletal lubricant pump out: I'm talking about the new wave of ecommerce virtual assistants. It seems that you are not the only …
There was a machine I used as a child in the shoe shop in the 1970s I suppose, but that was just with a hole to put your socked foot in, each in turn, then metal blocks slid in from front/rear then left/right to touch your foot and there was a display of the calculated size. Not X-Rays.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoe-fitting_fluoroscope
That's not a fail, I'd call that a damn-well programmed interface. MY experience with the damn things, from Comcast and Juniper, are that they can only help you find the top 3 answers that 1) you already know or 2) are actually printed in the text on the page you're currently viewing...
What I like are tech support like the lady at Dell Data Security. I've had to call twice, and because I didn't take good notes during the first call, as soon as my second call 3-4 months after my first call was answered, she said "Did you forget that you have to ...(whatever the solution was)?" She was absolutely correct. I felt like an idiot because (whatever the solution was) was the answer to the question that 1) I hadn't asked yet and 2) was the same question I had 3-4 months previous and 3) was simple, straightforward, and logical.
It is not difficult to buy computer memory of the wrong kind: I think if the chatbot referred you to a human salesperson, it was a smart decision.
I once dealt with two PCs having had apparently identical memory upgrades - as far as I could tell - but one not booting properly, although masked by cached RAM up to a point. Cache turned off, the RAM seemed to just fade back to 00000000 after a few seconds.
I swapped the RAM from each PC into the other, and both were fine.
Evidently not 100 percent identical, then.
So we just left them swapped.
Back in the telephone days, there were companies that tried automated voice recognition systems which insisted on wanting to make me use voice commands. Through trial and error, it came to me to keep my mouth shut, just randomly mash buttons like Tekken™ and lo an behold an actual human materialised, spoke to me and assisted with my enquiry…
I do not chat with humans, let alone have the urge to waste time chatting with a pretend artificial intelligence Thinggie…
I mean, HAL 9000 was cool, but that is so 1969 it is not funny…
Chatbots are so 1969…
Sorry HAL...
Northern Powergrid has an interesting variant. Option 2, fault reporting, asks for our post code then repeats what the recorded greeting told you, i.e. the area they serve, then tells you you don't appear to be in it and aks if you want to speak to an advisor. It understands "yes" with no trouble and puts you through to a human who then asks for your post code and has no trouble in determining that you are indeed in their area.
Yes, it's really clever. But what use is it?
AES 256 CBC encryption uses it (in a slightly different way than that used in cryptocurrency) to ensure that if you encrypt the same data using the same key multiple times, the encrypted data string will be different every time, which reduces the effectiveness of some attack vectors.
About three years ago my large animal Vet came in with a funny bit of advertising. This guy's in his second career, he became a Vet after 25 years as a DBA working for IBM. He knows I'm a computer guy, and thought I'd be amused. The ad was for a large animal veterinary practice management software package "NOW WITH AI!!!"
The Vet was laughing, and wondered how many times the company in question got Vets inquiring about their new Artificial Insemination package. Without a pause, I dialed the 800 number ... the answer was over 80% of calls! The guy on the other end wasn't amused when I suggested they fire their marketing genius and hire an AI expert ...
Our amazing BezosBot AI™ has analysed that since for the past 6 months you have been buying useless tat from Amazon during lockdown then you will want to buy these amazing products for your family for Christmas. Do not worry: in the true tradition of an Amazon purchase they will either be unusable, break quickly or have a completely intelligible manual that only a pygmy tribe from just north of the Gobi desert can translate for you.
Happy Religious Festival of your choice from everyone at Jeff's Grotto of Tat
since for the past 6 months you have been buying useless tat from Amazon during lockdown then you will want to buy these amazing products for your family for Christmas
I think Covid-19 cut off the supply of tat from conferences for family Christmas presents
You won't have noticed but three paragraphs fell out of my column this week. They concerned an automated metadata tagging system devised by a porn site to recognise and tag different types of sex act in user-uploaded videos. This is what I was referring to in my sig at the end.
Why? Did you get an automated preemptive DCMA takedown request from MindGeek? Goddamit, I watched one gay interracial midget bdsm video because it i thought it was funny (and it really, really was), and now that's the only kind of vids they offer me... and I can't just log into my modem and release/renew to get a different address to escape their classifier.
I'm clearly becoming a greybeard.
20 years or so ago that little bastard clippy could induce a level of rage that would invoke Yosemite Sam telling you that you needed to calm down a bit when you realise you've been typing away merrily but none of it is in the document because clippy has changed the focus in the name of being "helpful".
Nowadays every second website has a similar malignant little bastard hiding in the lower right corner of the screen trying to tell you that if you just bough coffee you might want some shoe polish. Don't get the correlation myself, but as I've often said before Amazon (amongst others) never suggest I might want to repurchase anything consumable, it's almost always things like tools or paint rollers that it thinks I need weekly.
The one criticism I have of my ISP (Origin) is that their tech support is one of the little bastards lurking in the lower right corner as well, although I suppose it's better than the old days of phoning BT during an outage to be told "you can find lots of help on our website". Not right now I can't.
Ha, just set up SAML SSO for a Jira/Confluence deployment a few months ago. Don't get me started on that, especially the "date not in correct format" crap you get with change management when you type 5/11/20 and it changes it to 5/Nov/20 then tells you the format is wrong.
Still orders of magnitude better than BMC Remedy, which is hands down the worst helpdesk system I have ever used. Including using an Excel spreadsheet.
The problem with remedy is it is too customisable. Out the box it is apparently quite good, but then someone decides to improve it.
My current workplace has just implemented a new change control system which for one change will email you about 10 times.
When the change is created
When the change is Submitted
When the first approval is complete
When the second approval is complete
When you start the change
A nag if you don’t start when the change was set for
A nag if you don’t finish the change at the set time (repeatedly)
When you complete the change
And that is before it comes back from someone needing revisons....
"I am unable to log in to my account. A help message tells me that I can correct this by logging in to my account. Could you locate the copywriter responsible for your site's UX interactions and punch him in the face for me?"
The last sentence is sufficient on its own and is universally applicable.
If they know and it isn't "never", then the Web site may say when, instead of "Out of stock". So "Out of stock" does mean "Don't know".
I think that while I was browsing the catalogue in Sainsburys Argos the other day, what I was looking at got changed on the home page from something like "Order now, pick It up on Friday" to "Out of stock".
And I think my experience there is, once out of stock, forever out of stock. The previous time, some months ago, I was scouring Argoses across lockdown land (a special circumstance) for a Microsoft Surface Go (and ironically unlock it). Plan B became to buy one that my sister could have sent to her house or could collect - it was somewhere where Argos delivers to her but not to me. But Argos wouldn't deliver my purchase to her address, so Plan C was for her to buy it... but in the meantime, Plan D or E was to buy from the John Lewis online shop, which I did and I'm "typing" on it now.
has one of those crappy so called AI helper bots. All I want to do is update my email address on their site, but there is no feature to do that, alongside my old email address it says to contact them to change it. Clicking contact takes you to their bot. After asking it how to change email address it gives you a link to the previous screen where you can change your phone number but not your email address. So you go around in circles.
Asking the bot if I can speak to a person results in it saying nobody is available. On one "lucky" occasion three months after my email address had changed it actually put me in a queue at position 99 to chat to real human being. Over an hour later I'd got to position 12 in the queue, then got a message saying "reconnecting" and I was dropped from the queue.
I did a google search on how to contact Shell Energy and found an email address for their customer services. Sent them an email and a week later still no reply. I will be changing energy supplier at the end of my contract. Replacing the majority of their customer services staff with a so called AI bot is as useful as a chocolate penis.
"On one "lucky" occasion three months after my email address had changed it actually put me in a queue at position 99 to chat to real human being. Over an hour later I'd got to position 12 in the queue, then got a message saying "reconnecting" and I was dropped from the queue."
Have you considered that there was never a human involved at all and you only got to position 12 because the people in front also got dropped from the queue? They just build the delay in to make it seem like there's some sort of real process happening.
My mother used to tell people "they broke the mold when they made him -- thank god!"
I've recently had issues with actual human non-intelligence online. I'm selling my old house and I asked my credit union for a realtor through their online service.
So the realtor instantly sets up a search portal to find houses for me to buy.
Then sends me an email containing such gems as:
"We understand that [Your Company] connected you with one of our agents (name redacted) who is top agent in your marketplace."
and
"In a moment, I will be reaching out to check in with you to be sure you are having the best real estate experience possible, as a [Your Company] VIP Client of ours."
And they wonder why I no longer want their services.
Edit: yes, [Your Company] was an actual unfilled mailmerge placeholder
"I've recently had issues with actual human non-intelligence online."
I recently had the misfortune to contact PayPal's customer service regarding problems with PayPal accepting my postal address. He asked me if I was in the UK and I told him that I was in England. He said "So you aren't in the UK then." Duh.
Don't forget that they are Murkans, and so know nothing about geography. Most can not understand that the English language is so called because it reached them from England.
It's not just the Outside World that is unfamiliar. The Atlanta Olympics had two ticket lines, one for USA and the other for everywhere else. People from the state of New Mexico were told that they needed to redial and use the "everywhere else" desk.
"Don't forget that they are Murkans, and so know nothing about geography."
You Brits aren't exactly immune to this kind of thing ... A friend of mine's Wife was absolutely certain that London was south of where they lived, because "my Uncle lives in South Kensington, which is near London" ... Their abode? Croydon.
Another example: This Yank workedvolunteered[0] as a tour guide in York during his time in Yorkshire. You wouldn't believe how many British folks asked where "Old York" was ... usually while standing in The Shambles or in the castle or on the wall. Their logic was that they were in York, they knew of New York, so there must be an Old York, right?
[0] It was part & parcel of the archeological work I lucked into helping out with.
"Realtor" is one of those really weird American words that I find non-cromulent and just can't take seriously as a real word. (Along with "faucet", "burglarized" and doubtlessly some others that I can't think of just now.)
Yes, I'm sure <troll>proper English</troll> also has some words that you folk over there think are equally bizarre, but I'm just saying...
It would be much better if she replied in the style of the old Sierra Software games. IIRC Leisure Suit Larry just said "same to you pal" whereas the less risque games like Space Quest would go with something like "does your mother know you talk like that?"
Or perhaps Life of Brian style would be better. "How shall we fuck off, O Lord?"
And thank you so much for that link. I will be referencing that to no end every time I have the opportunity to put down some blabbering idiot who thinks that his "investments" are secure.
That said, there is a bit of fluff in that article, such as this :
"Blockchain is primarily used for recording transactions made with cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin. However, it has many other applications as well. "
Many others ? Such as ? Oh, yes, there is Ethereum, LiteCoin, and other funny-money apps. It's the same thing.
The one "application" that is indeed different is, from the article, Tron, which is "a blockchain-based decentralized platform with a goal to build a free, global digital content sharing system ". Yay, we will get to have a free second Internet, that we will have to pay the storage space and the bandwidth for. Great idea, guys. Revolutionary even.
My opinion on blockchain is not changed : anything using it is useless and a nuisance.
I'm not defending the blockchain hype but if you consider it to be what it is -- an append-only data stream -- it has uses beyond cryptocurrencies, such as log file storage in which any tampering can be detected due to the cryptography involved.
You can do this with other approaches, of course. If you think of BC as an append-only data stream, it melts away the hype.
C.
The trick with blockchain is to try to forget anything to do with monetary currency and concentrate on its application as a distributed, tamper-proof database which engenders mutual trust. Four years ago when I was still trying to warn people about the financial Ponzi scheme that is cryptocurrency, I wrote this about using blockchain for environmental applications.
If blockchain is a record of each transaction, how do people get away with stealing cryptocurrencies? It seems like the tranactions and the participants would be trackable.
I've not "invested" in them, so it might be a naive question, but it if currencies can be stolen, why can't electricity be stolen? What makes the currencies different?
They launder it through other crypto-currencies, exchanges, and marketplaces, so that the trail stops. Until they do that, you can follow the movement of the funds, and there are companies out there that make a living out of tracing coin transfers for the cops and others.
C.
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