hellotomyrars

It can be both. It depends a lot on what kind product is being supported. Tech support usually doesn’t get abuse hurled at you by the callers but financial/medical it gets a lot dicier.

That said, I 100% left every call center job I had when I couldn’t put up with the bullshit middle manager crap anymore.

Nothing like having a “team leader” who knows literally nothing about the product who then has to come up with the most nitpicky garbage because they’re required to have criticism on call reviews. Meanwhile some other asshole starts yelling at him to yell at you for not being on the phones enough when the reason I’m not on the phone is because everyone on the team turns to me to ask questions to because, unlike our illustrious leader, I know what I’m doing.

I think ascribing humanity to to something that isn’t human is far more dehumanizing to actual real life humans than the alternative. You are taking away actual people’s humanity if you’re giving it to anything we call AI.

I am capable of distinguishing between talking to another person and talking to an LLM and I don’t think that is hard to do.

I don’t think there is any other word than delusional to describe someone who thinks LLMs should be treated as humans.

AI isn’t “from a different culture”. It doesn’t have culture. Any culture it does have is what it has sucked up from its training data and set in its weights.

There is no need to be “humane” to AI because it possess no humanity. It has no personhood at all. It can’t feel. You can’t be inhumane to something that is literally incapable of feeling.

A blade of grass has more humanity and is more deserving of respect than anything being referred to as AI does.

Aliens might not be received well but it’s going to depend a lot on how they show up.

AI is a “revolution” where the promise is that nobody will have to do meaningless work anymore ( I guess).

The only problem is right now basically everyone has to do work meaningful or “meaningless” because the dominant thinking requires it for human survival. Weird how most people aren’t happy for the thing that is pitched to take away the meager scraps they get under the current regime.

I literally asked you what worse off means so that I can specifically respond to the claim you made, but okay.

Have a nice day.

I agree by the way that a one line comment of “show your work” is not useful or constructive, much like your original one line comment. (I don’t mean that as a slam against you either, I appreciate that you actually followed up with additional information)

I disagree that I’m not responding to your actual argument and am specifically asking you to clarify the terms of what “worse off” means so that I can address it with more specificity or at least understand what you’re saying.

I still think citing an opinion poll to argue that people are happy with their employer insurance while also making an argument about how opinion polling is deeply flawed is a very strange way to back up your own argument.

I have yet to actually hear anything that supports the idea that people with employer provided insurance will be worse off because of M4A other than you saying they the way the costs would be less obscured means people would be more upset. This wasn’t even an argument about the real cost of M4A vs Prost insurance, it was just a statement saying that the money looks different.

Well you can’t prove a negative so I’m not sure how useful a theoretical one line comment about a CEO saying his insurances means we need M4A would be received.

Regardless if you’re not willing to support your argument that’s fine, but at the same time if you’re going to put something out there and and then be upset if other people being skeptical of your skepticism then I don’t know what to tell you.

I still don’t really see how anything you’ve offered necessarily means people who currently have employer provided private insurance plans will be worse off. I especially don’t see it because people with incomes like you proposed the median income for households with employer provided insurance plans often have employer provided private insurance plans in countries that also have a public health system.

I guess maybe here is the meat of it and what matters. How are you defining worse off? Are you defining it based on quality of care/outcomes or in a financial sense? Either way seems pretty speculative to me but I’d be interested to know which (or both) of those you think makes them worse off.

Sorry but I reject this thinking. You’re essentially saying that Medicare for all is bad because it’ll seem to cost more because the way the money works isn’t obscured so people will be mad and that it has to be worse than their existing policies.

I’m still not seeing how or why it has to be worse. This just seems like an assumption you’re making. Also sure the exact existing policy you have won’t be available by definition because the system has entirely changed but once again if you want private insurance you will still be able to get it, as is the case in other countries with socialized medicine.

Also really don’t see why you would say that the polls that say people want socialized medicine are rigged and not-representative but the polls that you’re saying show that most people with private insurance are happy with it are accurate. Not really sure how that stands to reason.

I really feel like the argument you’re making here boils down to M4A is bad because it has to be worse and people who have private insurance now are happy with their plans and could only have them replaced with something that would be worse. Or even more simply: Change is scary so I guess we’re stuck with the current system and actually people like it so don’t rock the boat.

Also the median income for someone with employer provided healthcare is 120K? I’m going to need some data on that. Also you’re then cutting out everyone with marketplace insurance which is 24 million people.

More people are poised to lose Medicaid and my marketplace insurance plan, if I chose to accept it for next year was going to cost me 6X for the monthly premiums and require co-pays I don’t have before as well as much larger copays for ones I did.

I’m going to be completely honest. I don’t care if people making 120K/year are upset if their visible cost for healthcare is more obvious or not. From 2024 census data 41.2% of households made above 100K annually. That number becomes roughly 33% when you step it up to $150K/year and drops to something like 12% when you get to $200K/year. By the time you get to $400K/year you’re at like 3%.

Also households as a unit isn’t necessarily representative of the distribution of people within them.

I reject the idea that government system are inherently bad and so we can’t have them. I reject the premise that the wealthy will be forced to have worse healthcare to subsidize the majority of Americans. I absolutely reject any notion that our private healthcare as it exists is efficient, affordable and the superior system.

You’re right. The No Surprises Act did make this a lot better. However it still doesn’t cover ground transport (and specific state laws do in some cases.)

Additionally for post-stabilization care the hospital is going to shove a lot of papers in your face and they’re probably not going to tell you that one of them is the one that says you agree to pay to whatever those services and waive your protection against balance billing. Yes they’re supposed to present it on its own and with your full consent and yes you can dispute that but people sign the forms and then still get screwed.

While I might not have been happier income-wise when I was on Medicaid vs now, I was much happier with my medicaid insurance than I have ever been with any private insurance. I could see basically any provider and didn’t have to deal with any of the typical insurance bullshit.

Also when you’re beyond the Medicaid threshold but not that much beyond it absolutely sucks. One year I was paying for dramatically worse insurance with a deductible that would have just made it better for me to just not make more money because if I hit that deductible I would be net negative on my income vs the threshold for Medicaid.

Also I think this is such a false premise. You can still have private plans if you want in the UK or elsewhere with a public health system. Nobody is forcing you to use the public system if you don’t want to. To wit, I don’t have children but I still pay for schools with my taxes. You might not want to use the public health system and instead go private, but yes, you should still be paying for a freely accessible healthcare system.

Here’s the rub on that too: The prices we pay here are so much higher than in Europe even if you go private in those countries. Our system is terrible. Point blank.

I would agree that the NHS in the UK has gotten pretty bad. A large part of that is the result of the Tory government actively working against it though for a very long time. The waitlists for a lot of things are quite long and my fiancé who is from the UK and still lives there has to do some things there are crazy to me. On the other hand she still is able to get care freely. She’s paid private for some dental work but that also cost her pennies on the dollar compared to what I’d be paying if I did the same thing here.

If you’re happy with your insurance I am truly thrilled for you because I don’t think of that as being a common experience.

Based on what? Why even leave this comment if you’re just going to say “would likely be worse off” without giving literally any evidence or even suggestion of why.

Insurance is a pool. The bigger your pool the more you spread the risk/load. It’s brain dead simple. Medical care is a human right, beyond that.

Nothing about our system makes any sense and it is built to pad so many pockets in entirely opaque ways between you and the care you actually receive. Cut out several layers of middlemen and the costs go down. God forbid you have an accident and you end up at the wrong hospital when the one down the road is in-network but the one they took you to is out-of-network and you wake up owing thousands of dollars.

I had pretty good marketplace insurance this year but the plan I’m on now isn’t even offered anymore and if I got the next closest offered plan I’d be paying 6X as much for the premiums with higher copays on top. I’ll be switching to my union offered plan instead which is much better than the new marketplace plan but still worse than the marketplace insurance I had before.

Who exactly is the target audience? Browser not exactly a hot bed of competition. Am I in the market for an AI browser? No.

But is anyone?

Those features are already being pushed in the browsers people actually use.

Sure it’s hard to turn a ship around in 2 years but the situation got worse, not better.

Also bailing out a foreign government for failed libertarian policies is incredibly ironic and also not America First.

Good grief. Developers who use Unity/Unreal/Game Maker/ whatever don’t announce their game as being a revolutionary new tech.

The problem isn’t that they made yet another chromium based browser with their garbage on top. The problem is that they’re positioning it as this exciting and radical new thing when it’s just chromium with their garbage on top.

I work for a small ISP servicing both fiber customers and a diminishing (Thanks, starlink) number of fixed wireless customers.

We use all Mikrotik hardware for routing. RouterOS is so flexible and capable. But it is absolutely not user friendly.

For large scale commercial deployments we use Ubiquiti equipment. There is always a Mikrotik router but the APs are all Ubiquiti. It’s just easier and cleaner for us to manage deployments that way.

I see no reason why someone just casually playing with their home network would use Mikrotik though.

We use Cambium for Point-to-Multipoint mostly because the price and selection is better than Ubiquiti but we use the wireless backhaul gear from Ubiquiti in a few spots.

To be perfectly honest if Ubiquiti had the right kind of hardware and management capabilities for us to serve as the root of any deployment I would probably use it everywhere.

How long do you think Tesla is going to be worth their funny money market cap?

Not only are they not really hurt that much by the loss of the tax credit, they’ve already pulled back from their EV ambitions in many ways. That’ll be even easier for them now if they don’t have to spend money on offsets as well.

It is a bad time to be an EV-only manufacturer with mass-market ambitions right now.

Consumers on average are more interested in buying hybrids from the big boys instead of pure EVs and the promised mass market cheap EV game changer is now even more removed from reality with the loss of the tax credits.

To be fair 99 Bananas still tastes like ass with a hint of incredible artificial banana.

Also the cultural aspect is just different. It is generally harder for kids to get alcohol in my experience and also you (usually) don’t carry a bottle of 99 bananas and swig it every few minutes out in public.

Perhaps most importantly is that alcohol doesn’t contain nicotine. People get addicted to alcohol but not in the same way people get addicted to nicotine.

These aren't unique to Tesla, though a lot of manufacturers want you to pay to have a lot of that stuff in their app, which is fucked. I also want less touch controls and less entirely featureless controls. My car is a 2012 Mini Countryman (no screens other than dot matrix displays) and I was on a roof at a work site and threw my keys down to another guy to move it, He described it as being like `in a spaceship`. Which really tickled me because he had a 2024 mustang with big touch screens in it. I guess mine was like a spaceship to him because of all the physical controls and toggle switches.

My parents have a 2021 Hyundai Santa Cruz (First model year!) and the design is baffling to me. The AC controls are on a capacitive touch display below the main one so you have no idea what you're doing unless you're looking at it. There are also multiple controls with almost no tactile feel at the base of the drive select lever and seat climate controls mounted to the front of the center divider that just a few raised bumps on would go a long way to helping quickly identify them while pawing around there to turn the seat heat/cool. The infotainment does OTA but the maps updates require using a USB drive. You can do it at home though it is an incredibly clunky and antiquated process.

To be perfectly honest the only things about the Santa Cruz that I wish my car had as far as the electronics go is blind spot/camera feeds and modern media support (carplay). Other than that I strongly prefer my incredibly aged dash. My front and center is just a tachometer with a small dot matrix display that shows the current speed digitally with one more below that for a couple other things (I leave it on real-time fuel consumption.) That is it. I'd rather use my phone for maps (Standalone or via carplay) over anything built in to any vehicle I've ever driven.

It is ironic that a lot of the gun control laws conservatives rail about in California are a direct result of Reagan’s time as governor with the intent largely to suppress and allow enforcement against black people having guns.

If only. So much of the constant churn in big corporations is killing units that are profitable but just aren’t profitable enough.

So the person who says their Dyson works great is a liar but also their opinion is invalid because it is expensive.

Your Land Rover is good because it’s expensive but you like it.

Reading several of your comments on this thread are a real whirlwind. If you just flat out reject anyone’s experience that doesn’t reflect your own or that of your mother then I don’t know why you’re even responding to anyone.

I bought just about the cheapest toilet possible and it works identically to the one it replaced that was probably 15 years old. Maybe EU regulations are truly onerous and mad but the standards that have now been thrown in the garbage in the US have not been a problem for me literally ever. Anyone who needs to flush the toilet 10 times is doing something wrong.

I dunno what kind of cats your mom has but I’ve got 2 cats and 4 dogs and I haven’t had a problem with either a modest Shark or a (refurbished) Dyson.

Who defines what counts as a riot?

The people who have the state-sanctioned monopoly on violence are the ones who get to decide when a protest becomes a riot or unlawful assembly.

I’m not saying they’re always wrong but when only one group gets to pull the card that allows them to shut down protest it creates perverse incentives.

I couldn’t possibly disagree more. I’ve always worked with end users and I can say with confidence that the majority of people wouldn’t change it or more accurately wouldn’t feel like putting in the effort/dealing with the hassle of changing it, minor as it may be. Also a non-trivial segment of the population most likely wouldn’t be aware of that it is even an option.

The power of the default is just that, they it is the default.

Also Apple themself has only one incentive which is to get the best deal for themselves. Is Microsoft willing to offer more money than Google? The evidence points to no.

Migraines are the absolute worst. On average I would get 6-8 a year. My triggers are primarily not eating frequently enough, bright lights and constant loud sounds. Knowing that, I mostly am able to avoid them and I can usually tell early enough when one is coming on to course correct. I never really explored any medication with my doctor because it was infrequent enough that I didn't really think of it. Then I had the worst migraine of my life. Typically I would vomit some as it starts to get really bad. Usually at that time I'm already laying on the bathroom floor because there are no lights of any kind in my bathroom that aren't tied to the switch. Also I rapidly alternate between being freezing cold and burning up so the cold floor is ideal (I also bring a blanket.) If it has hit this point I'm often in there for 4-6 hours before I can at least move to the bedroom.

The worst one, however, I spent 8 hours in the bathroom and for that entire 8 hours I never stopped vomiting. Well, I did, but only because there was nothing left inside of me. Dry heaving for that amount of time is not fun and it is even worse when combined with the terrible pain of the migraine. I never want to have that happen again. I genuinely don't know how people who get Migraines once a week or even more often can do it. If I got migraines like that every few days I would have blown my brains out a long time ago.

I try to avoid my triggers as best as possible but I was also prescribed sumatriptan as a last resort to take if I know it is going to hit. It has its own side effects that suck but it sucks a lot less than the migraine it prevents.

I 100% agree the issue is more on the capital side. There probably shouldn’t be people who have more money than God who can afford to thrown hundreds of million dollar darts at a wall and see what sticks.

But I still think the downstream effect is an attitude in many SWE that divorce them from reality. Most people don’t get paid incredibly large sums of money on work that amounts to a gamble, with high risk and high reward. The failure rate for small businesses isn’t trivial but they’re not playing in the same part of the casino as tech. Tradespeople aren’t afforded the luxury of building entirely speculative things that are going to be dead within a year or two. People expect their homes and the things in them to have a much longer shelf life.

My point about seeing some of the things Google/Amazon/Apple folks have said regarding the homeless is that those are very much people working in the industry that made Seattle/SF impossible for “normal” people to afford to live in. There are many reasons people become homeless and why they stay that way but being literally priced out of a place you may have been born and raised in and lived for decades is a very special kind of fucked.

That said, if the capital side of things wasn’t the runaway nightmare monster it was, SWE probably would and should be making less than they do now on average.

It costs more to be poor. Closing the gap absolutely means raising the minimum standard of living but wealthy inequality absolutely goes both ways and it isn’t going to get better unless things contract on both ends. Raising things up at the bottom does mean lowering things at the top. The impact isn’t linear though.

Obviously the real world has other ideas but there should be less people with more money than God and that does mean less money for SWEs. But the face value of money and the absolute value of money aren’t the same either.

But I also don’t things are going to be getting better anytime soon so it’s somewhat of a moot point. The incentives aren’t aligned and unfortunately the people who are playing an idle game are going to squeeze every last cent out of the people who can still afford to buy food to feed their family, but only just.

You say that but I don’t think it’s entirely fair. The tech industry is often living in an entirely different world. Hearing SWEs in places like SF and Seattle who are personally bothered and upset because homeless people have the gall to exist and they have to see them makes me want to scream.

Also SWE often just have the worst attitudes and egos to rival surgeons who think they’re gods. Real talk: a lot of them are working on shit that doesn’t matter to anyone and is a solution looking for a problem. SWE are very often not producing anything of value to anyone. The entire startup industry is predicated on the hope that you’ll exist long enough to get a giant payday from the big boys.

The person who fixes your toilet did real work with a tangible benefit. The person who takes care of your grandmother by cooking/bathing/shopping for her is doing real work that has a tangible benefit. They don’t get paid anything comparable to a SWE who is making Uber for dogs or the 15th messaging system that Google will shut down after a year.

Maybe SWEs are overvalued for their output compared to other people.

The GP isn't making a statement about how voters feel disillusioned in the electoral process in general. They are making a statement about how one of the two political parties has spent 4 years telling their supporters that the 2020 election was stolen because of rampant voter fraud.

It doesn't even matter if you agree with the claims that were made about voter fraud, I can't think of any good faith argument by literally anyone on the political compass that it didn't cause people to lose faith in electoral process.

It’s kind of funny and reminiscent of the AMD bulldozer days where they had a ton of cores compared to the contemporary Intel chips, especially at low/mid price points but the AMD chips were laughably underwhelming for single core performance which was even more important then.

I can’t speak to the Intel chips because I’ve been out of the Intel game for a long time but my 5700X3D does seem to happily run all cores at max clock speed.

Nah, just hooked up via aux. It isn't specific to me being in the car, that is just where I mostly need to use hands-free.

I use it mostly while driving to request specific songs. It is insane that in multiple cases, it has shown the song I asked for on the lock screen, changing from the previous track so I know it understood what I asked it for, and then plays something entirely random that I have never heard before and is not in my library. I don't know how that even happens, but it has happened multiple times. Siri is truly awful and they certainly don't need an LLM to make Siri functional but anything that drives it forward is welcome relief.

Specific example of Siri seemingly recognizing exactly what I said, but playing something totally different. (In this case it is another song from my library, but I'm not usually in a position to take a screenshot or record the screen when I'm driving.) https://i.imgur.com/t9dnoTx.png