sturger

They’re saying “free” email services. What they mean are disposable e-mail services. You go to a website, they provide you with a random e-mail address. You enter that address into the form, check for the verification code on the disposable e-mail site and you’re done with the disposable e-mail. You never visit the disposable site again. Do a search for “disposable email”.

I will never forgive Carley Fiorino for killing HP.

Eventually they’ll start demanding you run their crypto-miners in order to watch a video.

“AI” is a blanket term that has recently been used to cover everything from LLMs to machine learning to RPA (robotic process automation).

Yup. That was very intentionally done by marketing wanks in order to muddy the water. Look! This computer program , er we mean “AI” can convert speech to text. Now, let us install it into your bank account."

Sure. And AI that identifies objects in pictures and converts pictures of text into text. There’s lots of good and amazing applications about AI. But that’s not what we’re complaining about.

We’re complaining about all the people who are asking, “Is AI ready to tell me what to do so I don’t have to think?” and “Can I replace everyone that works for me with AI so I don’t have to think?” and “Can I replace my interaction with my employees with AI so I can still get paid for not doing the one thing I was hired to do?”

Agreed. Unfortunately, one half of our population thinks that anyone in power is a genius, is always right and shouldn’t have to pay taxes or follow laws.

Man, if only someone could have predicted that this AI craze was just another load of marketing BS.

/s

This experience has taught me more about CEO competence than anything else.

Guess this means Apple has run out of ideas on how to make iPhone better.

What can we do to distract attention away from the fact that we don’t have any decent new features?

• “Rename the business unit so we can print new letterheads and business cards?” Our customer don’t work here, sir. “Dammit!”
• “Release a new color that nobody wants? How about a light blue that is so close to the regular silver no one can tell?” We did that last year, sir. “Dammit!”
• “Oh, I know: Repeat the year 2000 mistake by naming our OS versions after the current year using only 2 digits. That will never bite us in the ass in the future.” Brilliant, sir.

"It is not uncommon for cybercriminals to re-package previously disclosed data for financial gain. We just learned about claims that AT&T data is being made available for sale on dark web forums, and we are conducting a full investigation.”

Translation: “We have no information whatsoever. Based on our complete lack of information, we feel confident is saying this isn’t our fault. This sort of leak could not have been foreseen by anyone, it’s not our fault. While we ‘investigate’, we’ll continue business as usual – taking in large sums of money, demanding all customer private information for even the most trivial service, store that PII insecurely, paying our C-Suite insane amounts of money for failing to keep customer data securely and claiming that there is nothing else we can do. Regards, Customer Service.”

Wait. I thought we were going to be replaced with robots. What do they need AI for? To interview the robots?

You are correct. But without defending Stack Overflow, I feel the need to point out that the arrogance and condescension is by no means limited to their platform. I’ve been on several “support” pages that were the same or worse. For example Evernote’s “support”. It wasn’t “officially” hosted by Evernote, but had the Evernote logo everywhere . The most common phrases I remember from there are the equivalent of:

• “The Evernote devs don’t read this site, so you’re wasting your time trying to appeal to them here.”
• “That’s stupid, why do you have that problem?”
• “No, you don’t want to do that.”
• “No, you don’t want that feature and neither does anyone else.”
• etc.

I can only guess that asking moderators deal with the internet public for no pay is more than reasonable people are willing to do. So we wind up with unpaid people with people skills equivalent to 13 y.o. boys put in charge. Their only compensation being allowed to troll users and feel they have power over some small portion of other people. My guess is they eventually grow older and move on to being in charge of a homeowner association.

People keep forgetting that these companies’ product is stock price, not whatever they’re advertising at any given moment.
Their “CEOs” have gotten sloppy because the grift has gotten so easy they naturally assume everyone is in on it. If everyone is in on the grift, there’s no need to lie about it.

Yeah, I’m looking for something that would understand the operation (? insert correct term here) of the language well enough to rename intelligently.

Honest question: I haven’t used AI much. Are there any AIs or IDEs that can reliably rename a variable across all instances in a medium sized Python project? I don’t mean easy stuff that an editor can do (e.g. rename QQQ in all instances and get lucky that there are no conflicts). I mean be able to differentiate between local and/or library variables so it doesn’t change them, only the correct versions.

Looks like the Oligarchs are serious about crashing the economy.

That sounds like a good plan, except for the cautionary tale of the Golgafrinchams from Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy:

Golgafrincham was a planet, once home to the Great Circling Poets of Arium. The descendants of these poets made up tales of impending doom about the planet. The tales varied; some said it was going to crash into the sun, or the moon was going to crash into the planet. Others said the planet was to be invaded by twelve-foot piranha bees and still others said it was in danger of being eaten by an enormous mutant star-goat.

These tales of impending doom allowed the Golgafrinchans to rid themselves of an entire useless third of their population. The story was that they would build three Ark ships. Into the A ship would go all the leaders, scientists and other high achievers. The C ship would contain all the people who made things and did things, and the B Ark would hold everyone else, such as hairdressers and telephone sanitisers. They sent the B ship off first, but of course, the other two-thirds of the population stayed on the planet and lived full, rich and happy lives until they were all wiped out by a virulent disease contracted from a dirty telephone.

/s

Tell your coworker to review it with his AI and then ship it.

I think C-suite’s maniacal push to be early adopters of an unproven technology reveals just how bereft they are of good ideas.

Any leader with business sense would say, “Ok, we’re doing good now. Let’s investigate AI and see if/how it can help our business. Also, fuck no I’m not gonna go online to tell everyone what we’re doing because that would only tip off our competition.”

Instead, what we’re seeing is a large number of C-suites thinking AI is fullfilling their wet-dream of firing everyone else and driving their stock prices to infinity by verbally masturbating in public media.

In the earlier days of StackOverflow, the founders try to fight the toxicity. I don’t know whether they got overwhelmed or just gave up, but the trolls wound up taking over. Maybe good moderators aren’t willing to put up with both overwhelming toxicity AND no pay.

I still love what StackOverflow once was. I tried coming back and giving a chance a few times. My last question got “answered” by people who clearly had not taken time to read the question. After updating the question with, “Note: I’m am NOT talking about ‘X’, its subtle, please read the question fully.” I was told that I didn’t know what I was talking about.

I eventually figured it out and didn’t bother posting the answer to the issue. Fly-by answers by people just looking to improve their stats made continuing to interact with SO frustrating and pointless.

You know what’s even cheaper to run than this “new technology”? Breathy promotion pieces that give no evidence whatsoever to support it’s claims. Way to go, PR folks.