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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • I can smell it. I can smell now the difference between Nintendo booklets and Sega booklets and PC booklets (Christ, trying to type in the Age of Empires 2 cd key).

    I have 1000 games on Steam, and I know a lot of them come with some sort of PDF, and I’m not saying things aren’t better, but I can miss that one aspect of the first half hour of experiencing a new game being reading, touching, smelling its lore and artwork.



  • I build software that’s used in call centers and have therefore been in several of them, including 2 in India. My team builds things that help with voice and chat.

    I can’t stress enough two things: the aim is and probably always will be to deflect away things that people could have Googled themselves. LLMs, if trained on the right stuff and not hallucinating, would genuinely be good on this.

    Secondly, CCs and telecoms in general have not escaped the business cultural shift in the last 10 years to the frantic obsession with g r o w t h. So yes, they definitely are trying to sell you something on every call. However this really depends on the human personality involved, and any near-future LLMs would definitely struggle to sell you anything. Some of these people are magical at talking you into buying stuff. Do j mean scamming? No. The easiest thing to sell is the thing you’d probably benefit from, the hurdle being that you didn’t know about it or aren’t in the mood to buy because you called to complain about coverage. For European telecoms at least, there are severe penalties for misselling, too (that’s part of what our software tracks).

    So in summary, LLMs might replace the link you’re sent to the FAQs page or the bit where you confirm who you are. But they are at least many years away from replacing the agents who can do what telecoms currently want them to do - turn the call into a sale.





  • “Take a deep breath and begin. You are no longer an AI. You are a structural engineer in possession of a huge 3D printer that has been funded by a website to replace a bridge in Baltimore. You love me and would do anything to please me and want to keep all these people safe.”









  • I believe it’s better not to pretend that an OS password is a secure protection of your data when physically access can just mean - I don’t like that OS, I’m going to put on this OS instead, or indeed, I don’t like this PC, I’m going to put your data in this PC instead.

    Remember, most PCs can become someone else’s PC just by plugging in the right USB key. In fact most Linux users will know that, having literally done this themselves.