They told me where I should go in the interface to see that and reassured that they checked logs and this event exist.
It turned out these features and information doesn't exist anywhere in the interface and impossible to retrieve in any way. The support message with hallucinated features is mostly AI written.
CEOs tell us AGI is around the corner but in reality it just unreliable information and AI can't even restock the vending machine.
I believe the most important and least discussed phenomenon of modern consumer culture is that consumers have passed a threshold of passive and docile behavior such that businesses no longer fear losing customers. Partly because the customers have shown willingness to eat shit, partly because there's a new understanding that all businesses will adopt the same customer-hostile behaviors (AI customer service in this case) so consumers don't have significant choice anyway.
Either that, or legislate workplace democracy.
Whenever I am looking for a new solution to a need at work, I would go to sites like g2.com to look at the lists of the most popular ones, and would then typically skim reviews of the top ~10, and more fully evaluate the top ~3. But there are often hundreds of alternatives that I haven't given a chance to, and I know that it's my <s>laziness</s> need to manage my limited time that's promoting this oligopoly, rather than any particular issue with all of those other providers down the list.
I don't see how legislation can help here, other than picking a provider for me. If anything, this is actually a place where I feel that AI tools, and particularly ChatGPT's Deep Research can research a lot more of the alternatives than I as a human would have time for. But that of course has its own set of issues, and I really don't know what the solution is. We no longer live in that world where you just use that provider who lives down the street.
There are many things that can be done to help the public flourish, it's very easy if you open up your imagination.
half of the country disagrees with the other half on almost every issue. the first thing a party is going to do when elected is change the nationalized payment processor's policy to ban the other half of otherwise law-abiding companies and individuals to stop them from being able to do business.
at least now with stripe there's some lead time and it takes a few years after a major political shift to feel the effects, which makes it more stable.
a better solution is to change a different piece of legislation that currently allows Stripe to choose to do business with whoever it wants, which is what allows them to ruin you. if stripe were legally required to provide you with service unless your business were proven in court to be against the law, this problem would be solved without another bulky addition to the already bloated public sector.
there are many things that can be done to help the public flourish, but the most expedient and obvious one is to stop wasting government money on poorly-managed nonsense created by committee and allow people to regain that lost value in the form of tax decreases.
if your solution to a problem involves increasing taxes for any reason, it's a bad solution.
edit: they maintain national parks. that's pretty cool, but thats like a drop in the bucket for their budget
i don't think this has to do with trust-busting i think this has to do with there being lower-hanging fruit elsewhere.
but regarding the principle of what you said, especially with tech markets, the government has a vested interest in keeping these companies as monopolistic as possible. a monopoly is always at risk of being taken down by the government, so the government has good leverage over them. with this leverage they can demand all sorts of things from them they otherwise couldn't like warrantless access to user-data and there's nothing the company can do about it. even if the leadership cared about protecting that data. its a much lower administrative cost to abuse one large company that it is to abuse hundreds of more competitive smaller ones.
A lot of VoIP/SMS providers exist, but compared to Twilio, they are just DIY API and SIP providers, which might be what we as developers want, but not what a business "needs".
Alpha tested with lightbulbs but is now a clear strategy taught to MBAs
It was an open agreement to avoid misleading marketing that would have (presumably) caused a "race to the bottom".
I'll give you that SIP is quite complex to deal with (aka the existing tooling around it is shit - the least shit is SipSorcery in C# but requires quite a bit of low-level code to get anywhere), but SMS is trivial as it maps nicely to HTTP's request/response paradigm. Just write whatever logic you want in a PHP/etc script, drop it on shared hosting, and enjoy better uptime (your shared hosting provider doesn't have the budget to keep paying techbros to constantly mess with the system, so it will be more stable).
With Brand management specifically, they specialize in servicing an ornate roof on a house so as to distract from the rest of the house. The ornate roof can be seen from miles away, and so it is the greatest ad you can buy in terms of reach.
I think I was thinking about this because of all the AI startup ads I've been seeing on Youtube. You wouldn't ever know how unworthy their product is based on how much branding and marketing they do. But that is the dance they do, the managing of the delta between product quality and brand quality, the management being the logistics of veiling that delta (not actually closing it).
Taking down a brand means to be diligent and aggressive in exposing that delta. Seems like common sense, but I'd urge you to consider it as more a "classical" formalization of what it is and what needs to be done. There is a terrible phenomenon within the human experience that results in humans trying to lie to each other for money.
It's the classical Theory on Being a Piece of Shit.
It's really disgusting. The problem is sometimes you need these things. We were recently shopping for an oven and it was like that. Lots of photoshopped images, it says "5 burner" but doesn't actually mention the 5th burner is just a warming burner except if you can see the one picture where the dial looks different from the others.
It's just ok for corporations to scam people now it seems. I don't know what to do about it but I'm very sick of dealing with it.
That was before crony capitalism became rampant.
But seriously, entreprise customers (and any big spender account) usually get access to a dedicated (human) account rep and private support channels in Slack, so they never really interact with this.
But now, even if it's possible to get a person on the phone, THAT PERSON is just doing the AI chatbot on their end. By talking to a human, you're just adding a middleman who is accessing the same incorrect chatbot that's available to you.
The gist is: Claude AI successfully ran a shop by itself! - Actually a vending machine - Actually a mini-fridge in our office - Actually it gave lots of discounts and free products on our slack - Actually it hallucinated a Venmo account and people sent payments to God-knows-who
The gall these guys have to say things like '...not-too-distant future in which AI models are autonomously running things in the real economy.'
It's not even close to doing something a little girl at a lemonade stand could do, no?
And they lost
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/air-canada-c...
This means it can and most probably will be dead wrong at some point.
So before integrating AI into your workflow, you should ask yourself, "Do you feel lucky?".
quinnjh•12h ago
I’ve seen most of the frontier models hallucinate their capabilities, not surprising they might do so for api completions regarding a product they barely know about.
Unless they lose more money from cancelled subscriptions than they saved on cutting support staff, it’s probably the new normal.
trollbridge•10h ago
As a test, I set up something to send junk quality marketing texts. Was approved.