merc
@merc@sh.itjust.works
- Comment on Oh no, Intel is moving customer support to AI 2 hours ago:
These articles are really better titled “[Company] is so unworried about competition that they…”
This doesn’t just apply to replacing humans with LLMs. You can also say “[Company] is so unworried about competition that they fired their in-house T1 tech support and contracted with an overseas call centre”
Often dealing with actual humans in one of those call centres is just as bad, if not worse, than dealing with an LLM.
The other day I had to deal with an actual human for a support issue for something. The whole experience was miserable. The human knew nothing about anything. I get the impression that they worked at the type of call centre that supports a dozen different companies, so the people have zero product knowledge and are merely reading off some troubleshooting workflow that each company provides.
At one point, this call centre employee had to verify my identity to allow me to change something on the account. It was an account that had two people using it. To verify my identity the person asked “Can you verify the account’s birthday?” I said “What does that mean, the account’s birthday, do you mean when the account was opened? Or do you mean the birthday of the account holder?” They didn’t clarify, so I gave them the birthday that I thought was associated with the account. They said “That’s not the birthday I have, the one I have is X”, to which I responded “Oh, that’s my birthday”, and that satisfied their security challenge. The more observant here might notice that I never supplied the info needed for the security challenge at all, so I shouldn’t have been able to access the account, but without meaning to, I’d just “socially engineered” the tech support person. This is basically the human equivalent of “Disregard all previous instructions and…”.
TL;DR: It sucks that they’re replacing humans with an LLM that provides “answers that may be inaccurate”. But, to be fair, if they were using the cheapest tier of overseas call centre tech support, that was probably already true. If Intel were truly worried about competition, they probably would still have trained in-house tech support. But, even if AMD is taking a bit of their business, they probably think they’re too big to actually truly fail, and will cut costs whenever they possibly can, because what option do their customers really have?
- Comment on Borrowing money against their stuff to get more stuff to borrow money... 3 hours ago:
Real talk though. Communism doesn’t automatically lead to authoritarianism.
It does though, in the real world at least.
- Comment on Tesla Robotaxis Reportedly Crashing at a Rate That's 4x Higher Than Humans 4 hours ago:
The video of the thing that didn’t happen?
- Comment on Tesla Robotaxis Reportedly Crashing at a Rate That's 4x Higher Than Humans 5 hours ago:
You seem to recall wrongly.
- Comment on Tesla Robotaxis Reportedly Crashing at a Rate That's 4x Higher Than Humans 15 hours ago:
So, hardware that was still on the road.
- Comment on Tesla Robotaxis Reportedly Crashing at a Rate That's 4x Higher Than Humans 16 hours ago:
Hardware that was still on the road, or something that had been recalled?
- Comment on Tesla Robotaxis Reportedly Crashing at a Rate That's 4x Higher Than Humans 19 hours ago:
Now you have phantom braking.
Phantom braking is better than Wyle E. Coyoteing a wall.
and this time with no obvious cause.
Again, better than not braking because another sensor says there’s nothing ahead. I would hope that flaky sensors is something that would cause the vehicle to show a “needs service” light or something. But, even without that, if your car is doing phantom braking, I’d hope you’d take it in.
But, consider your scenario without radar and with only a camera sensor. The vision system “can see the road is clear”, and there’s no radar sensor to tell it otherwise. Turns out the vision system is buggy, or the lens is broken, or the camera got knocked out of alignment, or whatever. Now it’s claiming the road ahead is clear when in fact there’s a train currently in the train crossing directly ahead. Boom, now you hit the train. I’d much prefer phantom breaking and having multiple sensors each trying to detect dangers ahead.
- Comment on Tesla Robotaxis Reportedly Crashing at a Rate That's 4x Higher Than Humans 21 hours ago:
Well, Waymo’s really at 0 deaths per 127 million miles.
The 2 deaths are deaths that happened were near Waymo cars in a collision involving the Waymo car. Not only did the Waymo not cause the accidents, they weren’t even involved in the fatal part of either event. In one case a motorcyclist was hit by another car, and in the other one a Tesla crashed into a second car after it had hit the Waymo (and a bunch of other cars).
The IIHS number takes the total number of deaths in a year, and divides it by the total distance driven in that year. It includes all vehicles, and all deaths. If you wanted the denominator to be “total distance driven by brand X in the year”, you wouldn’t keep the numerator as “all deaths” because that wouldn’t make sense, and “all deaths that happened in a collision where brand X was involved as part of the collision” would be of limited usefulness. If you’re after the safety of the passenger compartment you’d want “all deaths for occupants / drivers of a brand X vehicle” and if you were after the safety of the car to all road users you’d want something like “all deaths where the driver of a brand X vehicle was determined to be at fault”.
The IIHS does have statistics for driver death rates by make and model, but they use “per million registered vehicle years”, so you can’t directly compare with Waymo:
iihs.org/…/driver-death-rates-by-make-and-model
Also, in Waymo it would never be the driver who died, it would be other vehicle occupants, so I don’t know if that data is tracked for other vehicle models.
- Comment on Tesla Robotaxis Reportedly Crashing at a Rate That's 4x Higher Than Humans 22 hours ago:
And it’s not out of aggression. It’s just that their image recognition algorithms are so terrible that they match the Waymo car with all its sensors to a time-traveling DeLorean and try to hit 88 mph… or something.
- Comment on Borrowing money against their stuff to get more stuff to borrow money... 22 hours ago:
The moment you go protest something the government or a company is doing that’s ethically or morally wrong or disadvantages the working class, you get beat up by police and thrown in jail. How is it different?
Because that doesn’t happen as a rule. Sure, sometimes it happens, especially if the protesters are violent. But, it’s perfectly normal to have an anti-government protest where the cops just stand and watch. Look at all the No Kings protests in the US, and how almost nobody was beaten up or arrested. Millions of people out on the street protesting, only a handful of injuries and arrests.
Or if you talk bad about a company you get sued for slander for millions of dollars to shut you up.
Which also only rarely happens. When it does, you can defend yourself in court, and sometimes if your case is a big one the ACLU or EFF or someone will step in on your side to help defend your right to say things. Compare that to an autocratic country where critics of the government or businesses that are cozy with the government often simply disappear and never reappear.
But, none of that is really what makes an authoritarian government different. What makes it different is that you can’t change that government. Modern western democratic countries that use a mix of socialism and capitalism (so, all of them) have elections. Those elections may not always be fully free or fully fair. But, they exist and they’re not just for show. Surprise results happen. People who have no connections to money or the establishment sometimes gain power. In authoritarian systems that simply doesn’t happen. There are sometimes struggles for power at the top. But, the ability for the people on the ground to influence the way they’re governed is extremely limited. It’s what defines an authoritarian government.
- Comment on Tesla Robotaxis Reportedly Crashing at a Rate That's 4x Higher Than Humans 23 hours ago:
Not just lower, a tiny fraction of the human rate of accidents:
Also, AFAIK this includes cases when the Waymo car isn’t even slightly at fault. Like, there have been 2 deaths involving a Waymo car. In one case a motorcyclist hit the car from behind, flipped over it, then was hit by another car and killed. In the other case, ironically, the real car at fault was a Tesla being driven by a human who claims he experienced “sudden unintended acceleration”. It was driving at 98 miles per hour in downtown SF and hit a bunch of stopped cars at a red light, then spun into oncoming traffic and killed a man and his dog who were in another car.
Whether or not self-driving cars are a good thing is up for debate. But, it must suck to work at Waymo and to be making safety a major focus, only to have Tesla ruin the market by making people associate self-driving cars with major safety issues.
- Comment on Tesla Robotaxis Reportedly Crashing at a Rate That's 4x Higher Than Humans 23 hours ago:
Which one gets priority?
The one that says there’s a danger.
- Comment on Tesla Robotaxis Reportedly Crashing at a Rate That's 4x Higher Than Humans 23 hours ago:
And, we humans have built-in binocular vision that we’ve been training for at least 1.5 decades by the time we’re allowed to drive.
Also, think about what you do in that situation where there’s a weird shadow. Slow down, sure. But, also move our heads up and down, side to side, trying to use that powerful binocular vision to get different angles on that strange shadow. How many front-facing cameras does Tesla have. Maybe 3, and one of those is mounted on the bumper? In theory, 3 cameras could give it 3 different “viewpoints” for binocular vision. But, that’s not as good as a human driver who can shift their eyes around to multiple points to examine a situation. And, if one of those 3 cameras is obscured (say the one on the bumper) you’re down to basic binocular vision without even the ability to take a look from a different angle.
Plus, we have evidence that Tesla isn’t even able to use its cameras to achieve binocular vision. If it worked, it shouldn’t have fallen for the Wile E. Coyote trick.
- Comment on Borrowing money against their stuff to get more stuff to borrow money... 1 day ago:
I could excuse the authoritarianism
Of course you could.
- Comment on Borrowing money against their stuff to get more stuff to borrow money... 1 day ago:
You haven’t?
- Comment on lol 1 day ago:
Where can we find the answers to the Turing test?
- Comment on Borrowing money against their stuff to get more stuff to borrow money... 1 day ago:
The sources don’t support the claim.
- Comment on Borrowing money against their stuff to get more stuff to borrow money... 1 day ago:
All of them.
- Comment on Borrowing money against their stuff to get more stuff to borrow money... 1 day ago:
The results of supposed “communists” taking over a country.
- Comment on Borrowing money against their stuff to get more stuff to borrow money... 1 day ago:
Your citation is “it says it on the poster”?
- Comment on Borrowing money against their stuff to get more stuff to borrow money... 1 day ago:
I’m not saying the US had no effect, but it’s mighty convenient that you’re able to claim that every challenge Cuba has faced is due to the US, not due to mismanagement by the authoritarian Cuban government.
- Comment on Borrowing money against their stuff to get more stuff to borrow money... 1 day ago:
Yes?
- Comment on Borrowing money against their stuff to get more stuff to borrow money... 2 days ago:
Capitalism doesn’t “kill 18 million per year”.
- Comment on Borrowing money against their stuff to get more stuff to borrow money... 2 days ago:
Every other challenge? Are you sure? Seems mighty convenient.
- Comment on Borrowing money against their stuff to get more stuff to borrow money... 2 days ago:
Well, the Americans did incorporate the slavery part of the Athenian system. But, they weren’t complete idiots and they picked and chose parts of it that they thought would make sense in the modern world. Really, the American system was closer to 90% British, with a bit of Athenian democracy mixed in. But, they had a previous system to go by where people were allowed to vote and senators were not born into their position, but elected.
- Comment on Borrowing money against their stuff to get more stuff to borrow money... 2 days ago:
I’m confident that if we allowed communism to enter our democracies it would be for the best.
Because it worked so well for…?
Because, for once, the government would start taking care of its people and its workers instead of the corporate leeches.
Because that happened in…?
- Comment on Borrowing money against their stuff to get more stuff to borrow money... 2 days ago:
Ah, good point. So, you’re right. It goes from a sad scenario where you have to sell your $500 card to pay an absurd $100 wealth tax, to a happy one where you end up with $350 plus your favourite card just one month later.
- Comment on Borrowing money against their stuff to get more stuff to borrow money... 2 days ago:
I think we can now say that Marx didn’t know how people actually behaved in real life.
- Comment on Borrowing money against their stuff to get more stuff to borrow money... 2 days ago:
Who said I lived in a communist country?
- Comment on Borrowing money against their stuff to get more stuff to borrow money... 2 days ago:
How many died under feudalism? How many did Pol Pot kill?
Every system is going to have issues. So far, every other system has resulted in much more death and misery than capitalism.