5 years ago voice assistants were being promoted with all the breathless excitement that “AI” is receiving today. I imagine in 5 year’s more time Google will be giving the same listless attention to their AI products that they are giving to their voice assistants now. Well, actually to just about every product they’ve ever made, except maybe for Google Mail.

My how things have changed over the years! Why, when I was a young girl, we didn’t have the internet. When we wanted to turn a light on, we had to write a letter to Ford Motor Co. (They were the tech of the day.) I’d write, “Dear Mr. Ford, please give us permission to turn on our light in the dining room.” Of course then we’d have to find a stamp, then walk the letter down to the nearest post office. (That was faster than waiting for the mailman to pick it up from the neighborhood mail box.) Sure enough, 6 weeks later we’d receive a reply saying, “Fine, turn on the light in the dining room.” The postman delivered mail in the morning, so we had to wait until dark to all gather around in the dining room and turn on the light with great ceremony.

We never understood why we needed to get permission from a company far away to turn on a light switch, but we were patriotic Americans, so we knew better than to question the process.

I’m not sure which is worse:

• greedy, irresponsible tech bros trying to convince everyone that their pinball machine can fly an airplane.
• people desperate to let the same pinball machine tell them what to do with their lives.

Oh, stop your complaining. It’s not perfect, but we’ve all seen how easy this is to fix. Just barge into Tesla tomorrow and randomly fire 20% of the employees. That’s how real leaders get things done.

/s

I read a quote somewhere to the effect, “The successful politician knows the exact time to step in front of the parade and pretend they’re leading it.”

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.

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.

Maybe I can pitch them on my new startup idea: Cell phones that never need recharging. You drive to the theater and enter into a soundproof booth. You pay with bitcoin, then type in the phone number of the person you want to talk to…

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.