I completely understand why some projects are in whitelist-contributors-only mode. It's becoming a mess.
Their email responses were broadly all like this -- fully drafted by GPT. The only thing i liked about that whole exchange was that GPT was readily willing to concede that all the details and observations I included point to a service degradation and failure on Microsoft side. A purely human mind would not have so readily conceded the point without some hedging or dilly-dallying or keeping some options open to avoid accepting blame.
Reminds me of an interaction I was forced to have with a chatbot over the phone for “customer service”. It kept apologizing, saying “I’m sorry to hear that.” in response to my issues.
The thing is, it wasn’t sorry to hear that. AI is incapable of feeling “sorry” about anything. It’s anthropomorphisizing itself and aping politeness. I might as well have a “Sorry” button on my desk that I smash every time a corporation worth $TRILL wrongs me. Insert South Park “We’re sorry” meme.
Are you sure “readily willing to concede” is worth absolutely anything as a user or consumer?
We need a law that forces management to be regularly exposed to their own customer service.
No, it is not better. I have spent $AGE years of my life developing the ability to determine whether someone is authentically providing me sympathy, and when they are, I actually appreciate it. When they aren’t, I realize that that person is probably being mistreated by some corporate monstrosity or they’re having a shit day, and I provide them benefit of the doubt.
> At least the computer isn’t being forced to lie to me.
Isn’t it though?
> We need a law that forces management to be regularly exposed to their own customer service.
Yeah we need something. I joke about with my friends creating an AI concierge service that deals with these chatbots and alerts you when a human is finally somehow involved in the chain of communication. What a beautiful world where we’ll be burning absurd amounts of carbon in some sort of antisocial AI arms race to try to maximize shareholder profit.
I haven’t had the pleasure of one of these phone systems yet. I think I’d still be more irritated by a human fake apology because the company is abusing two people for that.
At any rate, I didn’t mean for it to be some sort of contest, more of a lament that modern customer service is a garbage fire in many ways and I dream of forcing the sociopaths who design these systems to suffer their own handiwork.
The exceptions are generally when people are scared, and sadly some people are scared all the time.
People require empathy and compassion; we need others to mirror our emotions and indeed to share them with us. We are social creatures and it is not normal, healthy or effective to experience (strong) emotions alone. Connecting emotionally with others is not a luxury or weakness, and certainly not "bad"; it's how humans naturally and essentially function.. Yes, it can be done badly and you don't need to be powerless - if your partner comes to you terrified about a cancer diagnosis, acting terrified yourself isn't helpful; but accepting their emotions, seeing them, and responding with genuine emotions appropriate to the situation is essential.
Many highly analytical people - to use a vague, undefined term - tend to think that anyone who comes to them with a problem must want their problem analyzed and solved - if you have a big hammer then all problems are nails, I suppose. Sometimes that is desired but certainly not always, and it can work against what people really need.
My last comment was intended to be read in that context too, not about interacting with the people you're close to.
I still think you can have empathy on support calls; I'd even say it's important for the customer to be satisfied. They may be panicked, frustrated, exhausted, etc. Ignoring people's emotion gets bad results; it feels rude.
Of course there are limits, especially time; long stories are inappropriate. Still, I've had many empathetic, brief conversations with strangers on trains (literally) and elsewhere.
I'm glad you appreciate actual sympathy. But that's not what the conversation was about. You're getting mad at the wrong thing.
Also, putting aside everything else, an actual human response burns way more carbon than an AI response.
The company can't have it both ways. Either they have to admit the ai "support" is bollocks, or they are culpable. Either way they are in the wrong.
As someone who takes pride in being thorough and detail oriented, I cannot stand when people provide the bare minimum of effort in response. Earlier this week I created a bug report for an internal software project on another team. It was a bizarre behavior, so out of curiosity and a desire to be truly helpful, I spent a couple hours whittling the issue down to a small, reproducible test case. I even had someone on my team run through the reproduction steps to confirm it was reproducible on at least one other environment.
The next day, the PM of the other team responded with a _screenshot of an AI conversation_ saying the issue was on my end for misusing a standard CLI tool. I was offended on so many levels. For one, I wasn’t using the CLI tool in the way it describes, and even if I was it wouldn’t affect the bug. But the bigger problem is that this person thinks a screenshot of an AI conversation is an acceptable response. Is this what talking to semi technical roles is going to be like from now on? I get to argue with an LLM by proxy of another human? Fuck that.
You are still on time, to coach a model to create a reply saying the are completely wrong, and send back a print screen of that reply :-)) Bonus points for having the model include disparaging comments...
Sites like lmgtfy existed long before AI because people will always take short cuts.
This is a peer-review.
> "Peer review"
no unless your "peers" are bots who regurgitate LLM slop.
Let me slop an affirmative comment on this HIGH TRAFFIC issue so I get ENGAGEMENT on it and EYEBALLS on my vibed GitHub PROFILE and get STARS on my repos.
It was a mess before, and it will only get worse, but at least I can get some work done 4 times a day.
That repo alone has 1.1k open pull requests, madness.
The UI can't even be bothered to show the number of open issues, 5K+ :)
Then they "fix it" by making issues auto-close after 1 week of inactivity, meanwhile PRs submitted 10 years ago remains open.
It's definitely a mess, but based on the massive decline in signal vs noise of public comments and issues on open source recently, that's not a bad heuristic for filtering quality.