The Room 101 thread - for things you hate or just having a bloody good moan

[Drarok]

Yep, same. There are things these LLMs are good at, and many many things they are not. Endless shitty implementations of shitty things they're bad at is exhausting. Smells a bit like Bitcoin and NFTs at the moment, they're bloody everywhere and also horribly useless and wasteful.

[Snowy]

Ahhh, spleen venting of a Saturday morning, now you are talking.

Fuck AI.

Volkswagen has introduced ChatGPT to its latest model cars. Why? What possible advantage can that confer? Again we see the wanton cramming in of tech for no other reason than it exists.

I can barely move at work for people wanking themselves into a lather at how AI is going to revolutionise everything and unfortunately as I work in IT that is going to mean I do nothing but work to make it happen. I asked our CIO at a recent meeting (and just call it a meeting ffs, it is not a "town hall") that given we are also trumpeting our net zero goals at every opportunity how mass adoption of AI can possibly align with them? Surely a technology that nobody actually needs, which requires huge amounts of energy to power the immense computing requirements, and which generates heat as a by-product, is plainly just another nail in the coffin of the planet. I was handed back some platitudes, the managerial equivalent of a pat on the head and "sit down and STFU".

I mean we want the seas to stop warming, so surely having server clusters on the sea bed to save on cooling costs is a fucking stupid idea.

From an earning a living perspective, how is anyone fooled? AI use for 'better customer outcomes' actually means AI doing lots of our jobs. Woo, mass unemployment.

Fuck AI.

[Raid]

I feel the AI industry just has very good marketing people. They're managing to sell these "products" to managers that have no idea what their underlings' workload actually entails using buzzwords and promising what it's capable of without ever actually demonstrating that. I've been working for a university for 18 months now, and we've had three or four big departmental get-togethers where our higher-ups present AI as a way around the current issues of funding in the higher-education sector that'll make our workloads lighter and faster, but I can only think of one actual practical example we've been given of what that looks like (using it to summarise legal documents for laymen, something I absolutely would not trust current AI to do). Sure, it's going to save us time or money, but how? What tasks are we going to give it and how much do we trust the results? What am I, the end user, actually going to do with it day-to-day? Stop abstracting and give me specifics. I'm willing to bet those specifics don't exist.

I'm not strictly opposed to the development of AI as a tool in theory, but at the moment it's being deployed as a nonsense technology with serious environmental concerns and tons of mis-use options. Its use in creative fields is utterly gross, as all it does is regurgitate other people's stolen work with no credit given and currently no legal recourse for the artists it's ripping off. It's being shoved into everything providing features that nobody seems to actually wants or asked for. It feels like a solution searching for a problem.

[Wrathbone]

It's Monday and I'm in a ratty mood, and the target of my ire this morning is the constant demand for feedback from any business you've interacted with even slightly.

I bought some trousers last week, so Next want to know if I'd recommend them. No, I would not, because I don't go round recommending clothes to people.

I used Viber to make a call. Now Viber want to know what the call quality was like, as if there was anything tangible they could or would do to change that.

I had a Dominos last night, which even at 50% off was obscenely expensive. As well as wanting me to rate the pizza, the delivery, the ordering process and who knows what else, they had the gall to email me and ask if I'd like to give them a tip. No I wouldn't, you fucking vampires!

Every time I buy something from Amazon, they want to know how the delivery went. I actually responded a couple of times in the past when the delivery went terribly (i.e. they left an expensive whisky on the doorstep, a few feet from the pavement in full view of anyone walking by, and didn't even knock on the door), and nothing has changed. Do my otherwise persistent non-responses not clue them into the fact that it's a pointless endeavour, their endless ignored emails piling up on the heap of technological futility?

The icing on the cake is that I've been given a date for my annual review, where feedback I didn't ask for will be given to me by my boss, who I'm sure doesn't want to give it. It's a total waste of time - we both know if either of us have a problem, we'll raise it as and when needed, but HR demands a feedback process and so onwards we tread to the avail of nobody. This is how society will die: a constant loop of everyone diminished to either asking for feedback that they don't know what to do with, or having to give feedback and not understanding why, until everyone just lays face down on the floor in despair.

[Animalmother]

How would you rate you're experience creating this post?

[eny]

Tip re Dominoes: try the other offers regularly, 40% off is nearly always cheaper than the 50% offer...purposely like that too, fuckers. That Korean chilli one at the moment is nice though.

Agreed on all these devices, Amazon especially, meaningless to the customer, Pointless "customer support" structure, "how was your order" (2 options, both being "we don't actually care") and their process for delivery problems is infuriating, again, because they'd rather not care.

[Raid]

God yes, this. I can sorta understand it if a tiny business wants you to leave feedback, because their customer base will be equally tiny and they probably don't get many reviews, but what exactly do Dominos get out of it? I don't believe for a second that it's about improving the experience, I think it's more likely that the positive stuff is discarded and they use the bad to punish their employees and screw them out of any perks they'd otherwise get, or more likely dismiss them.

In my past life working for the bank, I was on the receiving end of these feedback surveys, and all they did was force our managers to try to have them removed because the customer would always rant about the bank in general rather than my own performance. Saying "The person I spoke to was lovely and helpful but I don't like how HSBC money launders" and giving 1 out of 5 just meant that I had a 1 out of 5 review against me. It's a bafflingly useless metric of employee performance.

[Sly Boots]

Before he retired, my dad's last job was on the customer service desk for a BMW dealership, and their annual bonuses were directly related to their customer feedback score - anything less than 100% positive and it meant reduced pay, effectively. Throw in the fact that many BMW owners are entitled pricks, and that meant that nobody ever hit 100% positive feedback. Absolutely scandalous system.

And agreed on the constant demands for feedback, my Hotmail is basically unusable now because I get dozens of useless messages every week from the likes of Amazon, Asda and multiple other services I use semi-regularly, constantly asking me to rate my experience or review something. I can barely spot the actually relevant emails from family or the like amid the morass of shit.

[Animalmother]

I had a similar experience when I bought a couple of T-shirts online. Constant requests for feedback and special offers (it was nearly one a week). I eventually marked it as spam then started getting more emails asking me to delist them from spam please. That went into the spam folder as well and I'll never buy anything off them again.

I assume it's all to feed an algorithm in a neverending cycle of bullshit.

[Raid]

I eventually marked it as spam then started getting more emails asking me to delist them from spam please.

Wow, I can't think of a more certain way that I'll hate your company than you trying to tell me how to manage my own inbox. How do they even know?

[Alan]

Just to be a slight contrarian. My internet went down last week and the lass that came and fixed it was brilliant. Stayed 30mins after the end of her shift to work it out and get me back up and running. She said I might get a feedback form and I've been gutted that I didn't because I really wanted to shout her praises! I wouldn't even have minded if she had said it's the end of my shift I'll come back tomorrow and fix it but maybe she understandably didn't want to see me twice -_- I do love having reasons to tell someone they're brilliant.

Essentially the wires going into the main box for our block had all been mislabeled and mine had somehow been disconnected as a new connection was installed.

[Wrathbone]

See, that's the difference - when it's an actual person you can reference and give direct positive feedback to for a job well done, that's great, I have no problem with that at all. My local Evri guy defies the company standards by being friendly, careful with packages and always on time, so I make a point of thanking him and giving him personally a 5 star rating for what I expect is a pretty thankless job most of the time.

What pisses me off is the automated feedback crap that has no context and just feeds some backend figures that someone may glance at and then manipulate to fit whatever corporate argument they're trying to make at any given time. It's soulless mulch data.

[Alan]

Oh my Evri guy is great! My yodel guy won't climb a staircase and just leaves it just inside the entry door, sometimes at the bottom of the stairwell if he's feeling like working up a sweat. Welcome back to 101 ¬_¬

[Rusty]

Exactly this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosedive_(Black_Mirror)

[Raid]

Generally speaking if I'm dealing with an actual human for more than 15 seconds and they say I may receive a survey, they get 5 stars and a very positive comment unless they somehow manage to do a wretched job. With those sorts of surveys being a part of my life for ten years, I understand the pressure they're under to receive good ones. If someone does do a wretched job, then I'm probably just not going to respond at all (unless they're clearly doing something wilfully negligent) because we all have bad days and I'm not going to add fuel to a hideous corporate HR practice I don't agree with.

Exactly this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosedive_(Black_Mirror)

I really ought to get around to watching Black Mirror. I think I watched the first two episodes back when they were reasonably recent, and found them so depressing that I didn't continue, but I'm in a better headspace these days so should give it another try.