Posts by Oliver Mayes 576 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Nov 2008
Gonna need a source on that first claim, sounds like sour grapes about how many of his own party voted against him in the primaries.
The donation was a completely different person in another city who happened to have the same name, not many 17 year olds are donating to political causes.
I had a similar experience recently, buying a book of cocktail recipes from amazon that was very clearly AI generated. Half of the recipes made no sense, ingredients listed that were never used in the instructions, the same recipe three times in a row under completely different names. When I went back to look I realised how fake all the reviews sounded now, praise for sections that weren't in the book, comments about the full colour photographs of the finished cocktails when there were no pictures at all in the purely monochrome book.
I just don't trust amazon any more, they've gone from selling useful products to just being a dumping ground for chinese dropshipping sites, you can't trust anything they sell to be usable.
I once had to debug a broken button on one of our internal systems, user helpfully sent a screenshot of the page in question so I'd know which button she meant.
I checked, and sure enough someone had broken it a few days earlier with a minor update. Took me maybe 90 seconds to apply the fix and deploy it, asked the user to try it now... still not working.
I asked her to close and restart her browser and try again, still not working. I dragged myself out of my chair and crossed the building to where she was seated to watch the continuing issue in person, she demonstrated clicking the button and noted that nothing was continuing to happen.
I pointed out that she was clicking on the screenshot she'd taken earlier and the actual button was behind it. Ticket resolved.
We played around with one of these a few years ago. They set it up in the middle of the office and encouraged everyone to explore it and see if it would be useful to put one in each of our meeting rooms.
After a few days there was a presentation about it in the all-hands meeting, where a manager gushed about the functionality and demonstrated how it even had a 'History' feature, so if you erased something by accident you could rewind it and get your notes back. He clicked the revert button rapidly and a wide variety of crude drawings, that had previously been erased, returned to life in front of a few hundred staff.
We once fired a salesperson who then demanded access to personal items left in their locked desk. The company didnt trust him to take only his own items out and he didnt trust the company with the key. Ended up with us having to carry the entire desk down three flights of stairs so that it could be opened in reception under the gaze of lawyers.
We had a new data center constructed a few years ago, as it neared completion some of our engineers went out for a final inspection before we began the process of moving all our on-site servers into it. They found it a little warm inside, eventually discovered that the builders had somehow connected the shiny new aircon system up backwards. It was cooling the outside air and dumping the exhaust heat into the building. Great for the planet I'm sure but not a happy place for 30 racks of servers to live.
"GPT-3 forgot the specific times a patient said they were unavailable, and it instead suggested those times as appointment slots."
Sounds pretty realistic to me, all it needs now is to book an appointment three weeks in advance and then call the patient the day before to cancel it because it just remembered the doctor isn't actually in the clinic on that day, and it'll have perfectly emulated my GPs receptionist.
I had one interview about... 8 years ago? 3 managers sat around a conference table while I stood at the front with a paper flipchart and a chunky board pen. They read out programming scenarios and I had to write the code to solve them.
Paper was definitely not an ideal medium, being impossible to erase or change anything I'd written when I realised I needed to insert a line between two I'd already written.
There's no chance I'm going to install any of these apps. Rushed through with no oversight, they'll just be a collection of security holes held together with snippets from stack overflow. I also don't put it past any of them to start harvesting and selling off my data the first chance they get.
It wasn't exactly a choice for some of us. Unless you want womens designer clothes or naff jewellery my local town center has no shops of any interest. We now boast about 15 coffee shops and 3 separate branches of Greggs but if you want to buy anything else it's about a 20 mile drive to another town.
I've got no sympathy for companies who don't pay attention to this kind of thing. People make mistakes, it's happened to everyone. The company should be taking steps to make sure things like this are caught and fixed. This mailing list was so important to them that no-one at all ever checked how many people had subscribed to it?
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