advisedwang

> the first line of customer service can be a profit center

Are you suggesting that they'll be charging for customer service? That seems even worse. (or do you just mean that it's so good that people positively want to use the brand because of their customer service?)

I had a AI customer service interaction (it was explicit about being AI, used fin.ai iirc). At first I was amazed! It was doing email as fast as IM! And the first response seemed really knowledgeable and put me at ease.

But it failed to do a key step (generating a shipping label for me). I went back and forth over 21 messages trying to get it to do it. Then I wrote "escalate to a human" and an hour later someone replies with a shipping label directly.

I would much rather have had a slow but correct response than a fast but confidently-wrong response.

One particular sentence reads particularly human to me:

> It is rare to get feedback that tells us exactly what is broken and how to fix it. AI doesn't remember from one conversation to another, so probably can't say how rare something like this is at Ocado (although admittedly it could learn that it's generally rare in fine tuning). I also expect AI to be trained not to compare feedback with other people's feedback.

I really have one big question about connected vehicle privacy: do you provide the data to insurance companies? This website is opaque enough that I can't even find the answer to that question. What a joke to be celebrating your privacy principles when that isn't even answerable.

I had to ditch my powerline network after an electrical upgrade to arcfault circuit breakers (which my city's code requires - there are AFCI breakers that work with powerline networking but I'd have needed to replace my entire electrical panel). I suspect that's going to be very common in future as AFCI becomes require more.

These kinds of product are great for disaster recovery. E.g. your day to day use is software encrypted with a key bound to a TPM and stored in a central crypto store that verifies devices state before giving it out etc etc but then what do you do when all that shit breaks? Having the root key material on a hardware encrypted device on a safe is a great way to be able to restore from failures.

> why would VLC or any online company stay in France?

IIRC all the people involved with VLC are French and live in France. They might want to stay in their native country where they speak the language, have families, have the right to remain and vote etc etc.

Yeah the headline is a bit glib and misleading. But the point still stands. Statins are dirt cheap too.

Google's SRE was always about building infrastructure to make things reliable, and started in a world where LAMP on bare-metal + DNS load balancing was common. It makes sense to have a separate org/team/role responsible building real load balancing with health checks and failover, figuring out how to do zero-downtime updates, etc.

When these problems because largely solved with off-the-shelf software SRE became either a bureaucracy (ensuring reliability through policy and enforcement) or just deploying other people's code and holding the pager.

Fighting in the US war of independence was a crime too, but those people are considered patriot heros.

Are there actual national security concerns though? Or is that just an excuse for protectionism? I suspect the latter, and in europe politicians may make the calculation that cheap cars > car manufaturing jobs.

The people upvoting the slop may not be the same people complaining about slop. With no downvoting, a subset of the population that doesnt' like a topic doesn't necessarily bury it.

Additionally, even those that dislike slop may still upvote a security issue that they think is important.

> Google highlights that it “prioritize[s] surfacing authoritative election information directly within results” including “direct links to official resources.”

A reasonable policy. Perhaps all search results should be in the form of links to sources.

very VERY few people judge tools like this by the language used to develop them.

Wyden is the ranking D member of the intelligence committee (ie would be chair under a D senate). He's not some maverick bucking his party, this is the expression of the party position.

They don't want the public to see the big green "APPROVED" rubber stamp that the FISC uses.

The article talks about classification but this isn't really about classification or national security. It's about who has the fundamental rights over the documents after all that is sorted out. It's about can congress or the public force documents that embarrass or incriminates the president (after sufficient time and declassification has happened)

Is this supposed to be highlighting poor quality of modern data presentation?

What do "regular" writing systems do when different dialects use different sounds for the same word? Do different people write the same word differently? Or are people forced to confirm to a standard dialect? Both seem bad.

The DA can file the charges and drop the case right before (or even during) trial. No loss on their books

The redfin stuff is in the text of the article, which certainly was written by a journalist.

How does a client know what public key to expect for a given domain, then?

If they key is distributed by DNS, then you need to secure DNS, e.g. with DNSSEC. Well, with DNSSEC the TLDs and root basically have the same status as CAs (although it does cut down the huge number of CAs that can issue certs).

You can also monitor if they show up in certificate transparency logs. Which won't catch all fraudulently issued certs, but might show up some, especially if it's being widely abused.

I don't think journalists (or even the AP) get cash for this. Usually it's more that companies can give the journalists an easy story by giving them a pre-packaged story in a press release. I can't see any such connection here, though.

What is with the "listed on Redfin" gumpf? It was listed by a broker on MLS, AFAICS this is just Redfin posting the MLS data as it is wont to.

The penalty was not damages, it was a statutory per-count penalty. This was not a tort case at all, and tort reform has nothing to do with it.

The article says this was a statutory $5k per infringement * 43M counts, then reduced by the court. This was not a jury award.

Time for a browser extension that requests pages with a few user-agents and alerts you with the diff

Their point is that the mechanism that is used here could also be used to influence other chat bots without knowledge of users.

There's lots of ways to make handling such things safe: climate control, inert atmospheres, (in cases like this were degradation is involved) rotating out material, compartmentalization, automatic fire supression etc. The problem is that these are very expensive compared to the dirt cheap methods used in commercial fisheries