That is absolutely a sentiment I can get behind. I just am afraid it’ll backfire and I’ve been lucky enough to not have to have that battle yet.

“You demanded I put AI here. This is *your* fault.”

I don’t do fast food all that often, but if I’m in the mood for a burger or taco or whatever, I’ll sometimes visit one.

Many in my area are still humans on the other end of the drive-through, but I sometimes get a chatbot.

I haven’t done this, because I don’t want the fallout to hit the underpaid human workers on the other end, but I have a fantasy of ordering 1000 tacos or chicken nuggets or something and then just driving away. Honestly, this is a likely root cause of the “misinterpreted orders” that others have seen: they were behind someone like me who was fed up enough to go through with it.

This isn’t to discount the various other ways LLMs can screw up.

McDonald’s told franchisees it would remove the tech…

I suspect this is also a franchisee option. Even if the brand isn’t forcing it, I think the local stores can implement their own independently. It’d be neat if a brand put no-ai in their franchise agreements. I’d give that brand more attention.

I think you’re one un-caught hallucination away from having claude eat the production database. I get that you think you’re approving suggestions, but there are many examples already of “<llm> ignored my directive of don’t make changes and then said sorry” out there.

If a prompt can make changes, then at some point a prompt will make bad changes. It hasn’t happened to you yet, apparently, but you’re playing Russian Roulette with the business.

I do agree it has some use cases, but shouldn’t be used to make pictures, video or writing text a human claims as something they produced.

To be fair, power point - if you don’t regularly use it and especially if you’re using a ‘template’ someone made - is a miserable experience.

Add four words to a sentence - why did the fucking font size change and why did an unrelated text box shrink?!?!? I just need to add ‘this has been approved’ to my status deck.

Why can’t I update a blob of text? Oh, it’s in the Slide Master, which has exactly one instance of this slide type in the deck.

/rant. I haven’t lowered myself to using copilot to make these changes, though.

Thanks! The Web of Trust is a concept I’ve heard of, but never really understood/realized. Your links were informative. I had several questions that were answered when I read them.

A lot of Americans would instantly jump to a Chinese competitor

I think this is pretty true. To expand:

I am stuck between a rock and a hard place. I have to either run my own email/hosting/storage servers and surrounding infrastructure with the tech understanding required to do so*, or give my data to someone else. Not having an email address is not realistic when it’s the primary key for your bank, school, employer, etc.

*A decade or so ago, running an SMTP server was trivial. Now, it needs DMARC, DKIM, SPF, publicly trusted certificates, and maybe newer things I’m not familiar with in order to be able send email. These are not bad things, but they increase the requirements for self-hosting.

Right now, that ‘someone else’ is generally google or microsoft for most people, and those companies are so big they get to dictate how other tools I need to use work. They also freely sell my data or give it to the government - possibly without any sort of warrant via ‘data sharing agreements’.

US-based data brokers are actively hostile to me. A Chinese data broker is less likely to care, since I’m further from their profit model: I’m unlikely to buy a Chinese cereal or make-up brand or visit a restaurant halfway across the globe. This only matters as long as US and Chinese data brokers don’t share info, but I suspect there’s friction there. If there’s not, then there’s no reason to NOT switch.

If I have to give my data to someone, then I’d prefer to give it to someone who doesn’t directly impact or care about me the way google/microslop and the US government do.

And Google was still ‘nice’.

Microsoft, at least in my lifetime, invented the ‘embrace, extend, extinguish’ method, but google was certainly taking notes.

One of the many little compromises.

I just want to push back on this being a ‘gamers’ problem. We’ve basically hit the point with technofeudalism where we can all collectively moan and groan, but still be effectively locked in.

How do you feel about google or apple… but you must have an acceptable(to the bank) phone in order to set up MFA for your bank account, and you might need to have one for your work or school accounts. How do you feel about linkedin… it’s managed to insert itself into the hiring process for many places and if you don’t participate, then a company will overlook you because you don’t exist. How do you feel about twitter… but the US government almost exclusively drops breaking news there first, if not on the shittier versions.

For the wants instead of needs, the dynamic changes a bit, but the enshittification and perverted “ownership” is coming for us all: TVs, printers, dishwashers, cars, etc. All these things are ‘optional’… but your Quality of Life will be reduced if you give them up and you will either be spending your precious time and energy doing something that used to be easier; or giving up on some of the social and cultural fabric by eschewing the shows/movies/games that others around you are enjoying and want to talk about.

Considering this only a ‘gamers’ problem and that only ‘gamers’ are the mindless cattle is missing the bigger picture.

Another aspect is the difference between Publisher and Developer and Platform.

Sony/Playstation is the platform and they get to do shitty things. So can the publisher. The Developer doesn’t get to make those decisions most of the time. Sometimes we can avoid the bad actors, but not always. The next book in your favorite series has just been released, but it’s not going to be printed, it’s only released on Amazon as an E-book. The author isn’t happy, but their contract says the publisher gets to decide where and how to publish and the publisher gets more money from e-books and expects the audience for the book will not revolt. Same with music. This new album is only available on spotify; no physical CDs, and the artist didn’t have a say because they weren’t big enough to fight back.

Sure, piracy solves some of those access issues (insert Gabe Newell quote), but it robs the artists of their cut because the publishers or platforms are being assholes, which will prevent future content that people like. Do you punish the artist, and remove their ability to make more stuff you want because some monolithic company has locked themselves in the process?

I won’t buy GTA6, or the next Call of Duty or FIFA, because those are not games I’m interested in; but there are other franchises that I would like to enjoy the future. I want to fight back and orgs like Stop Killing Games or the EFF, FULU, Repair.org and more are all helping push back.

We do have hope, and if we understand this isn’t a single-slice-of-the-consumer problem, we can band together.

Boys (and girls) lose their jumping out of trees magic too. Getting older sucks.

Keep that magic as long as you can. The more magic you use, the longer you get to keep it.

"We announced changes that required auditing, that required using our audit assistance tool, which detects abnormal behavior, and we’re calling on state regulators to focus less on banning this type of technology and more [on] holding our law enforcement community accountable.”

This is absolutely passing the buck. “The collection of your data isn’t wrong, it’s just the myriad ways it can be abused. We want to play whack-a-mole for every problem; as unelected corporate policy that totally isn’t purely profit driven.”

Not-a-lawyer, but I’m quite sure I haven’t signed any TOS allowing Flock to capture or retain my data for any amount of time. Just by driving through a city where some other idiot signed away my rights probably shouldn’t hold up in court.

Legislation should be prioritizing punishing misuse of PII, expanding what PII means in our modern world, and enforcing information sharing barriers instead of eroding them.

If you can tell exactly where I was yesterday at 2:35pm because my car’s internal spyware pinged, my cellphone pinged, I drove past a few ALPR cameras and my credit card was used at a vendor, all without a warrant; then the related data is PII and needs to be protected in a way it isn’t currently.

Corporations should not have data-sharing agreements with governments and should not be allowed to sell their user data to third parties at all.

The only caveat I have here is that he’s a puppet. The likelihood that there are intelligences behind him is too great. Trump doesn’t have a strategy, but others do.

Flatter him a few times and ask him to say something stupid and it’ll get said. He is the distraction, but doesn’t know it.

My holdout for hope is that this much of a stooge can only come around every few years. There can’t be another idiot waiting in the wings, right? Right?

I don’t think those in his circle will dance on the same strings that trump will, and will break the illusion if asked to, but I’m just an optimist.

I really think this is it. Calling for a cab was an effort. pushing a button in an app that says, “I need a cab here” was the secret sauce Uber provided. That’s old news now. They also had a benefit of pricing while they had VC, but that’s evaporating.

For the record, I don’t uber or equivalent. I either am or find a DD or “rideshare” with friends and family.

I haven’t used them, but there are taxi apps that seem to hook into the less-predatory transport businesses. Pricing may not be as competitive, but that comes with the drivers earning a stable wage.

This is my fear.

You’re working a job. You’re expected to be working during your shift. If I save you a few moments by returning my cart correctly or stacking carts in the corral, then I’m not actually saving you any time, because all I’ve done is move the next task closer.

The flip side is something like the movie theater floor cleaner: If I throw my popcorn everywhere, then that person has a job. If I’m tidy and don’t make a mess, that job might go away or the staffing for it cut.

My hope is that by reducing the need for the unskilled jobs of cart cowboy or floor sweeper, then we build more skilled people. But I also recognize the need for unskilled jobs because no one starts out with a professional background.

I return my cart because it feels right… but is it?

Same. And I’m being serious here while it could sound sarcastic:

I feel good knowing I saved the cart return guy 15 seconds. His day will not be improved because he still needs to move all the carts; and when that task ends there will be another. I understand this, but I still feel like I made the place better than I found it. Where I am, it’s hot-AF outside right now, so I hope that I’m making the next indoor task sooner and my time is appreciated – but my time is literally like <1 minute, so I know it’s not a lot of anti-entropy.

My math is that, with billions of people on the planet, if even part of us tried to save someone 15 seconds every few days, we could build so much faith in humanity.

Right. The root cause here is that companies are allowed to collect stupid amounts of information about private citizens - and then sell that information to a government or abuse it for their own purposes under the cover of an EULA of ‘we will collect [various information] for business purposes’. If I can’t apply for a job without agreeing to 3 EULAs that sign away my personal information, then I’m not agreeing to them; I’m being held hostage by them.

If flock was not allowed to store PII data (and PII was extended to cover location history, nearby devices, and a few other things), then their business model would evaporate.

Most people are familiar with the “you’ll feel that tomorrow when you poop”, but I think relatively few have experienced the spicy pee the next day.

Something about Carolina Reaper does that to me. I wonder if there’s some compound that gets processed differently in that pepper, or if it’s just the overall concentration of capsaicin.

Just adding here, what is clear to all of us as Coaster indicated, that aggregate privacy and anonymity are what is really at stake here.

Sure, I’m in public and just walking around. I don’t have a right to privacy in those instants. Some jerk with a camera is within their rights to capture my image.

The other aspect of the laws, though, is that even a few years ago, that image was of an anonymous person. The photographer didn’t know who I was and couldn’t find out without asking me and if a cop wanted that picture they had to request it from the taker. Now, though, that image can be shuffled off to a giant datacenter to be processed and potentially figure out who I am, coordinating the time, place, clothing, activities, nearby people, and myriad other details and the tech companies have no problem handing it over that information without any of the humans ever knowing.

I think the simplest solution is that any LEO querying a company’s data about a private entity should require a warrant or subpoena. Data sharing agreements between companies and governments should be illegal.

The longer solution is that collecting and retaining this information “for business purposes” needs to be more heavily regulated. The current definitions of PII are out of date. PII should include things like location, likeness, mood, etc, and the history of those things. Look at what Walmart and others are doing with dynamic pricing, for example.