Posts by GoneFission 146 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Sep 2022
I realize it might be The Reg shooting the hand that feeds, but this article is sorely missing a "having these features forced on you by your employer" angle. Nobody in their right mind would enable this on their personal device, but unless you're holding the reins for implementing these solutions in your org, you're more than likely going to be subjected to OpenAI's spyware under the guise of "productivity monitoring" with your only viable long term opt-out being quitting the job.
At this point everyone knows he's naked, but it's no longer enough to simply claim the non-existent tailoring work is highly fashionable and enviable, now you also have to point out which of the imaginary fabrics are so stunning that it makes your own work measurably more productive and fervent. But don't compliment too much, that's wasteful!
Sure glad we're progressively burning the planet for all of this
It's also kind of hilarious in that it evokes the image of a dedicated, highly motivated software engineer on-site building out tools and integrations just for your fancy, special, one-of-a-kind company as well as any other demands and ideas your suits can dream up. It's selling customers the closest thing to "getting Bill from Microsoft on the phone to fix this ASAP!!!".
In reality it's really just the same team of off-site over-allocated, under-resourced software developers who used to be able to work on new features and improvements in a semblance of peace, but now have to also spend hours upon hours answering phone calls and zero-notice meeting requests from every suit-wearing client that sales manages to rope into signing on the dotted line. Why pay for customer support or client relations if you can just tack it onto the developers' job description at no extra cost?
A big important revenue-generating department whined and complained how this AI transcription tool is "vital" and how "work cannot be done without it" until an M365 tenant admin was forced to enable the integration, at which point the AI data slurper gets global tenant access and can join any meeting created by any employee, on-by-default.
An even more disturbing amount of these tools don't give their meeting agent a clearly identifiable name (such as "XYZbot"), and instead join the meeting as "Wanda" or "John" with a GenAI profile picture so participants aren't unduly unsettled by having their every spoken word transcribed for later review by management, and really anyone else willing to shell out money for it.
This is an excellent summation of the big gamble that is keeping the entire AI bubble afloat. If you can get enough massive orgs hooked on your brand's single-channel proprietary method of getting anything done, it doesn't matter that it's also actively destroying societies and our environment because it will keep printing money until either the sun dies or we do.
It's kind of bizarre how far we've come, and yet somehow we're collectively (maybe arguably reluctantly) okay with a modern website landing page costing multiple to tens of MB of pre-image bandwidth while consuming 2-5 seconds unpacking a mountain of Javascript & third party integrations before any content is even displayed. Then you prudently disable Javascript and half the world's websites no longer work at all.
It's a PoC that lets them shift the compute costs onto the device and still harvest query metadata. If a large enough number of Chrome users install it, you can start running trial groups for query result comparisons between a web-hosted "full-strength" model and the Nano one on the device. If the output quality is similar (or tolerated) enough, you can gradually offload those from your servers for all Chrome users without much pushback.
Devices (particularly phones) and optimization processes are now mature enough to where most normal (non-dev/IT) people won't notice if their "how to make an apple pie" query result comes from a local model or a big web one hosted in a datacenter. For all the tech-inundated folks like those on this site, Google already has enough data on you to make that a single flag in your user profile and route your marginally more complex queries to a full-capability model instead.
We've finally arrived at AaaS. Wonder how long it'll take for them to start subcontracting sacrificial lambs that will assume legal responsibility for the AI- and agent-generated output as a show of confidence, or if the polished turd can be made exclusively the customer's problem to deal with for a while longer.
Unfortunately the gears of late capitalism are driven by the endless chase after exponential profits. Values like respect, ethics, compassion and moral decency won't make the line go up in the short term quite as much as the investors and stakeholders would really like to see, so this is the reality we get instead.
The optimistic part of me wants to congratulate them for ratifying a reasonable position to protect their community and utility rates.
The cynical part of me knows that if there is money is to be made in the US, you can legislate, poison, smear and/or displace any number of ordinary people standing in the way of your projected profits, with little to no consequences.
I paid $5000 to willfully disregard the existence and privacy rights of others with my constant recording, not to embarrass myself in front of remote strangers being paid minimum wage to review footage! I bought these for a continuous vapid feeling of superiority in a society where the legal system near exclusively protects me and my absurd amounts of wealth required to so callously spend money on such nonsense, so I am free to surreptitiously record peasants at Starbucks all I want. I will not be made a fool!
If we stumble into some bizarre mirror universe where the tech actually works and does what these drug-fueled C-level psychopaths ultimately want it to do, they will waste 0 nanoseconds in establishing digital slavery as the norm. The only difference will be how exponentially more self-aggrandizing these PR puff pieces will end up being. It will make "taking the ol' deprecated AI model out to the farm" drivel look downright quaint in comparison.
All of the issues of ROI not happening for AI projects is conveniently the fault of the employees who fail to use it properly, and even more conveniently the "solution" is expensive remedial training courses that will fail to materialize any real-world improvement on that lack of ROI, which will also be the employee's fault for "just not trying hard enough".
We can't admit the Emperor and court lackeys aren't actually wearing pants, that would be absurd. It is the people who are wrong!
>Regulations mandating easy access to human agents will encourage customers to request a human by default, bypassing AI agents
The whole "integrating AI to make customer service better" only ever *barely* works if you spend the exorbitant time, energy and resources necessary to train customized AI agents on your organization's properly formatted datasets. Instead what you get is Tata and their ilk forking over millions for the absolute-lowest-bidder garbage chatbot they can find, hurling it at their employees & customers with mandatory use and calling it a job well done when people out of sheer frustration give up on contacting support altogether.
Did it make the product or experience better? Did it solve any problems? Did it streamline things? Are employees happier? No, but people completely removed from all of that got paid, and that's all that seems to matter anymore.
>"[...] he no longer feels the need to immediately hire replacements for departing staff. The CIO fully understands the possible implications of that choice but thinks his network engineering team can protect their jobs by becoming better users of AI"
The crappy autocomplete is resulting in open positions not being filled, and you can avoid the same fate by using the crappy autocomplete more. Any errors or mistakes it produces are your fault, but any time savings, however minute, can only be attributed to wise and prudent strategic AI decisions by management. We collectively sank billions of dollars into this, and if the magical promised return on investment doesn't happen soon we will have to fire a few more thousand people that clearly aren't AI team players.
Thanks Matt for writing this. It's a really kind and empathic method of framing things. The entire labor industry in the US and UK has been set up in a way that puts an overwhelming burden (and needless blame) on job seekers for decisions that are not only out of their control, but take place on a plane completely removed from any daily work achievements, struggles or concerns.
But how else would you sell them counseling, resume tailoring services, AI job seeking solutions, out-of-pocket certs and self-improvement courses? And what approach is easier than blaming an individual, rather than having to reflect on the broken system they and yourself are subjected to? How many months or years do you see yourself being away from ending up in the same position?
What the "nothing to hide" crowd fails to consider is that they only need an incentive to go after you, not a reason or justification. If you're already at the "getting your digital presence searched" stage of being on someone's radar, they will either find evidence or materialize it themselves.
"But that's plainly illegal! I'll take them to court!"
Good thing the legal system is intentionally set up for impartiality and fairness then! /s
>the undercover agent asked Albashiti to demonstrate the malware worked by connecting to an FBI-controlled server. In doing so, Albashiti revealed his IP address
>the Jordanian national applied for a visa in 2016 using the same email address used to register the r1z account on the cybercrime forum he used to advertise his illicit wares
Sometimes I wonder if this kind of carelessness is the norm, or if these are only the few exceptional individuals that actually get caught
It's massively profitable if you're selling the shovels and picks (Nvidia) for the gold rush craze that every C-level seems to be punch-drunk on. I'm sure the consumers and workers will be the ones left holding the bag yet again, and all of those price increases aren't magically going to vanish once it's been determined that "this is the cost the market is willing to bear". More profit for investors, infinite growth, whee!
Which is exactly what they want. "ChatGPT which car should I buy / candidate should I vote for / investment option should I pursue?" is far easier for a single tech company & advertisers to take advantage of than an even just somewhat well-informed consumer researching multiple independent data points. That the same consumer is actively and continually feeding all of their wants, needs and interests to Deforestation Clippy for resale is just a pleasant side effect.
"Vibe coding" with no prior tech background is the digital equivalent of toddlers hitting a Speak&Spell with a hammer until it makes the noises they like, only it also sometimes happens to be linked up to critical data and life-or-death decision making logic, and a big chunk of the aforementioned toddlers are adorned with mis-matched suits and oversized egos.
A typical employer would say that you should be replaced with someone who does not need naps to solve problems. Or someone whose attention is laser-focused on work for 8+ hours a day. Or someone with no family, hobbies or personal life that was grown in a vat for the sole purpose of performing free and eternally grateful labor for the genius thought-leadership stewarding the C-levels.
I'd be less concerned about that private info finding its way back into training data, and more about them fastidiously labeling & tagging every conversation in order to create comprehensive profiles on its users. You already have entire families, including kids, talking to these spam bots for hours every day. They can of course claim that the exchanges themselves are private, but any inference made from them regarding the nature of the discussed content is completely up for grabs, with no pesky privacy laws or restrictions getting in the way of churning out profits.
You generally don't see those two mentioned groups (either self- or otherwise labeled) espouse:
>(...) issues such as misogyny, male supremacism, hateful and antisemitic memes, a counter-movement to ‘political correctness’, and both references to and calls for violence. A recent ADL report, for instance, found that while the majority of gamers emphasise positive aspects of gaming, a majority has also witnessed or been the victim of harassment, doxxing, racism, and hate against LGBTQ+ communities.Nearly a quarter of players reported exposure to far-right and white supremacist ideology. Allowing such content due to a lack of moderation on gaming (-related) platforms, may facilitate the participation of radicalised indivdiuals in such spaces.
>[They] insisted that safeguarding staff data remains "a top priority."
I'm sure. What recourse do the 10,000 employees and contractors have whose bank account and personal data was exposed? Oh right, "free credit monitoring for 6/12 months". So you'll get a helpful email when someone has successfully stolen your identity, and then can begin the months-long struggle of contacting a dozen different banks, agencies and police outfits where you get to fill out a slightly different form 23 times and sit in endless phone queues while they bounce you around between agents and departments. Fun!
He really hit the nail on the head with the OS being just another vehicle to deliver ads and data harvesting methods onto the consumer.
Why make a thing that performs a single feature reliably, when you can wirelessly update it at any time to spam the user, force them to engage with your "GenAI" offering to juice metrics and bill them monthly for the privilege? They're going to use it either way, if your only incentive is profit at all costs you might as well drain them for all they're worth.
Remember when businesses were lucky to have a single phone line that would be answered between 8am and 3pm if nobody else happened to call at the same time and got you a busy signal? Maybe we should go back to that. Parasitic profit-growth-at-all-costs seeping into every crevice of our limited mortal time on this planet isn't a good thing, and workers shouldn't be spending it trying to figure out how to make GenAI more lucrative for investors by juicing the usage statistics.
>As is customary in cases of data theft in the US, Prosper confirmed it will be offering affected individuals free credit monitoring services
It will never cease to amaze me that the reparation for having your personal information & data handled recklessly is a coupon to a service that requires your personal information & data
Nah that's just, like, your political opinion, man. It's perfectly valid to value individual wealth and its afforded security, personal more-free-than-others liberties and the enshrinement of one particular form of religious expression over things like human rights, lessening class divides and taking care of other people by broadening access to basic necessities like housing & health care.
They're the same thing, really, one's just for me personally, and I like that one better. Also them locking people up I don't really care for is cool too I guess
They're personal echo chambers with probably one of the most comprehensive personal data models a company could ever dream of collecting on an individual, empowered to expose you to whatever advertisements and general agenda they deem the most profitable.
And people keep feeding it like their best interest is anywhere on the corporate Venn diagram of abuse and exploitation
Companies claim that employees are hesitant to adopt the new RTO mandates despite a VERY expensive contractor-created study showing that in-office workers live in a magical land of happiness and fulfillment twixt the chocolate trees and orange juice rivers, while the grumpy and unwashed remote worker has thunderclouds over their head and a perpetual frowny face. Experts argue that leadership needs to "raise the stakes of the narrative" to drive their RTO goal.
Fortune 500 companies have responded by hiring another contractor to introduce & familiarize employees with the dancing musical animals that will brighten up their workday, but that instantly expire as soon as they are removed from a corporate office setting and are therefore not available to remote holdouts.
>"I hear enterprise customers ask all the time, how do I know if my engineering teams are productive? Where should I be putting my AI dollars? And how do we measure the ROI of our AI investments?" said Cannon-Brookes in a canned statement.
Turns out your engineering team members are only using our expensive AI tools 10-15% of their working time, which is a personal failing on their behalf. You can fix this by micromanaging them more closely and driving the usage rate up, then we can point to that increased rate and say "look here's your return on investment, clearly shown on a graph where number go up! Thanks AI!"
I'm becoming more and more convinced that modern workplace management in the age of AI is completely divorced from any mission or product, and has devolved into 24/7 ass covering to justify all the money wasted on "miracle AI solutions", but nobody up the food chain and with reins on the company purse wants to sit down and admit they got roped into a "too good to be true" grift operation.
Somehow we ended up with a whole industry propped up by people in suits lying to each other how they'll all be rich overnight and fire all their human employees if they just try a little harder and believe in the AI revolution a little more faithfully.
"We spent an embarrassing amount of money and workforce hours procuring several thousand pounds of these magic GenAI beans, and now we need everyone to rattle their allocated glass jar of beans loudly and frequently so we can rest assured our investment has paid off. Oh, and the beans will eventually replace all those pesky workers and generate endless magical rivers of billions upon billions of dollars for all of our investors, C-levels and shareholders. If against all expectations that doesn't happen in the next 3-6 months, our employees obviously didn't rattle them hard enough and need more GenAI training."
It's very important to those holding the corporate real estate contracts, equally important to micromanagers whose only productivity measure is how furiously you're typing on your keyboard when they hover by your desk, and to businesses who only exist to profit from commuters.
Your personal time on this earth, well-being and sanity are the offerings on the altar upon which the gods of capital and commerce will feast on their sacrifice.
This proves yet again that companies and investors will gladly pour billions of dollars into magic GenAI beans that promise to grow into endlessly churning money printers "any day now", all without a pesky employee workforce crying about labor rights or governments imposing regulations on how reckless you can be with it.
We just need all the electricity you can generate, a few hundred more data centers and endless pallets of purpose-built hardware you can *totally* use for other, more productive things once this collective cash-greed hallucination falls apart.
