The corruption of the tech/'hacker' subculture has been so disheartening to watch. Is this the subculture that was obsessed with cyberpunk? It took so little, too: good (but not great) salaries, mediocre tech, and a small amount of fearmongering. And suddenly we're here, convinced that corporations must be unconstrained no matter the societal effects. It's as if the cyberpunk dystopias are now seen as aspirational. Absurd and deeply sad.
I've become deeply disillusioned with tech. Most folks here are actively building a corporate dystopia, and like you said, it didn't even take that much for them to sell out.
The hacker spirit is dead, it's been replaced by capitalist greed :(
> It took so little, too: good (but not great) salaries, mediocre tech, and a small amount of fearmongering.
IDK, I think a major motivator was the "American dream", stories of the few who though talent, hard work, being at the right place and the right time, and a lot of sheer dumb luck, got immensely rich.
"the hackers see themselves not as exploited office workers but as temporarily embarrassed billionaire start-up founders." to paraphrase Steinbeck.
> And you don't think that this won't improve with better bots?
Actually, now that I think about it, yeah.
The whole purpose of the bots is to deflect you from talking to a human. For instance: Amazon's chatbot. It's gotten "better": now when I need assistance, it tries three times to deflect me from a person after it's already agreed to connect me to one.
Anything they'll allow the bot to do can probably can be done better by a customer facing webpage.
Maybe for you, but not for most people. Most people have problems that are answered online, but knowledge sites are hard to navigate, and they can't solve their own problems.
A high quality bot to guide people through their poorly worded questions will be hugely helpful for a lot of people. AI is quickly getting to the point that a very high quality experience is possible.
The premise is also that the bots are what enable the people to exist. The status quo is no interactive customer service at all.
This sounds to me like something that's better solved by RAG than by an AI manned call center.
Let's use Zuck's example, the lost password. Surely that's better solved with a form where you type things, such as your email address. If the problem is navigation, all we need to do is hook up a generative chat bot to the search function of the already existing knowledge site. Then you can ask it how to reset your password, and it'll send you to the form and write up instructions. The equivalent over a phone call sounds worse than this to me.
I think Zuck is wrong that 90% of the problems people would call in for can easily be solved by an AI. I was stuck in a limbo with Instagram for about 18 months, where I was banned for no clear reason, there was no obvious way to contact them about it, and once I did find a way, we proceeded with a weird dance where I provided ID verification, they unbanned me, and then they rebanned me, and this happened a total of 4 times before the unban process actually worked. I don't see any AI agent solving this; the cause was obviously process and/or technical problems at Meta. This is the only thing I ever wanted to call Meta for.
And there is another big class of issue that people want to call any consumer-facing business for, which AI can't solve: loneliness. The person is retired and lives alone and just wants to talk to someone for 20 minutes, and uses a minor customer service request as a justification. This happens all the time. Actually an AI can address this problem, but it's probably not the same agent we would build for solving customer requests, and I say address rather than solve as AI will not solve society's loneliness epidemic.
Respectfully, I think your reply assumes that I am suggesting the only AI interface must be on the phone.
It should be everywhere, as a first line of customer service. Even once talking to a person, real-time translation is necessary -- it's not possible to staff enough skilled employees in every language on earth.
I'd like to call out that "I can't log in" is the most common problem with Facebook, by a wide margin. HN user anecdotes are just not useful when assessing the scope of this problem.
I'd also like to call out that many people (usually not English speaking) nearly exclusively use voice memos and phone calls, and rarely type anything at all.
I think it is clear that AI will enable better customer service from Facebook. Without AI, a FB call center is clearly impossible. With AI, perhaps it begins to look feasible.
This illustrates to me how amazing LLMs are at 'remembering' _extremely_ obscure information. Somehow LLMs can repeat mistakes made a couple times looooooong ago.
I'll give a somewhat simpler answer than Filligree has. The problem with renewable energy sources is that they are typically both highly variable and not dispatchable (i.e., controllable). The former leads to supply peaks that can exceed transmission capacity or supply lows that require compensating generation elsewhere. The latter means that energy generation can easily be increased or decreased as required, which is of course very helpful for grid management. Dispatchable generation can be increased if supply requires it, or multiple dispatchable generators can be 'redispatched' to relieve congestion in a part of the power grid (by rebalancing generation). Power from renewable sources can be decreased through curtailment, but that wastes the generated energy.
The "problem" with renewables is that they are not dispatch-able, meaning you will never be 100% sure that tomorrow or a week for now there will be sun or wind in a specific region. On the other hand, a nuclear or a coal powered plant, know months in advance if they will be available for peak load or not.
Yes, if it is sunny or windy, they can be scaled in minutes, but only if conditions are met. The inverse is true for nuclear/coal - they cannot be scaled up & down in minutes.
Yeah, hence I mention batteries specifically in my question. I guess a renewable grid will need a lot of batteries. And presumably these are highly dispatchable?
Indeed. For instance, power grids ideally operate with N-1/N+1 redundancy, i.e., the disablement of any single power line should not cause a cascading failure.
Since so many commenters here have bad experiences, I'll provide a counterweight. I've made numerous edits and have run into little to no resistance. I'm sure asking people on a forum does not evoke a representative response.
