Whilst you can argue that services may have improved in some respects, the action towards resolution to problems is carefully monitored to help as least as possible and insulate accountability within a blanket of 'help' agents.
Infuriating as it is, this is still better than with the bad old days of taxis, which usually had even worse resolution and accountability. It sounds like people don't quite grasp just how bad the taxi experience was.
To be clear the happy path for taxis for me was fine. When things worked things were quite smooth. But this thread is primarily about when things went off the happy path. If a taxi didn't show up, I'd usually have a disinterested dispatcher to talk with who might be able to send another in a half hour. If a taxi intentionally went the long way around to charge more, I'd have to have an argument with the cabbie about this and maybe things would go well maybe they wouldn't. While I didn't personally experience harassment from cabbies I definitely know people who have. So on and so forth. In all of these cases off the happy path the usual recourse back then was worse than the recourse today with e.g. Uber.
Again the overwhelming majority of my taxi rides were fine. The overwhelming majority of my Uber rides are also fine. But when things go wrong they definitely went wrong worse with taxis than Uber rides for me.
I can share an example of a trip we just did to South America to two countries. Four out of four taxi rides were scams. Things are better to the extent there were controls in place, like taxi meters and an app. There the scam was less but still involved scams. Too long to detail in a comment here.
I should also mention we tried to use their version of Uber (DiDi), but I suspect there was some kind of price-fixing attempt there because no taxis would come for the price that they suggested. We had the option of upping our price until someone came and then I gave up on the service.
My other experiences were some years back in upstate New York, where there were also questionable practices, and you really had to look over the driver’s shoulder. They tried to control scams with payments based on zones, and the drivers would bend the rules when possible.
I feel these tools are destined to be mostly used as content generators - I'm happy to be proven otherwise but they've been around a while now and aside from a few pop videos I've not seen stuff that seems to be infused with the outer edge of quality art direction - perhaps because the model data limits it or perhaps it's the way they're used.
I think over the years local models have fairly consistently been ~7 months behind frontier performance. Local models are hugely important but I don’t see the calculus changing. I can imagine it’s certainly the case for many tasks that there will be diminishing gains for performance improvements or reliability pass some threshold, in which case you don’t need frontier performance and you can certainly use local models or at least cheaper tiers of proprietary models if local is too much of a hassle. Plus of course use cases where local is necessary or the pros of having local models or on device models outweighs that of frontier.
Maybe things will change though, I would assume through basically government subsidies from China etc, to undercut existing frontier labs, but you can always spend more (better data more compute etc) for better performance and that I can imagine will always have a selling point.
I read it that strong emotions have a signature that's processed differently in the context of data points vs the context of human interaction in meatspace.
It feels to me like an intro to a deeper insight that's missing the main body of the piece.
Yes, removing ambiguity can trim too much away. If we could describe what that is, it would not have been thrown away.
That is an interesting idea because we see this loss everywhere even in writing, photographs, etc. long before we ever considered "data points". It's such a profound loss that when an artist manages to capture even a tiny glimmer of emotional ambiguity they are hugely celebrated.
We are all starving for this while the world we build insists on throwing more and more of it away.
One of the things that I've noticed is there's an aversion to people noticing their emotions, companies analyzing that data, "men sharing their feelings" and the way that I've come to process these things is that at the end of the day they're all signals.
For example the gentlemen that we crossed. His rage, contempt, anger, disgust, whatever it may be, was a signal and the way that we interreacted had a profound impact on the other signals that came to surface.
I believe when we look at these signals from a functional perspective and truly consider the "subjective" nature of the signals, then it makes sense that they are some of the most important signals we have.
You put your hand in hot scolding water, most people immediately take note of the signal and act accordingly.
There's been a lot of devaluation on the actual supportive and objective nature of our own emotional and cognitive signals.
The mere idea that a corporation is tracking emotional data becomes absurd because at the end of the day, we're all kind of doing that ourselves. The tone of how we associate is a bit dysfunctional if you ask me.
I'm an adult with a fairly balanced view of AI and I find it difficult to learn coding without occasionally using AI to help me navigate to the most relevant bits of MDN or help me check if my thinking on an approach is correct (it's all entry level stuff so should be well represented in the training data).
I find it easy to to into a long chat with an LLM about some project I'd like to try and what's involved with it. I find it easy to get into a chat with an LLM about a lot of things as a kind of unproductive excursion that my brain tells me at the time is 'useful'. I'm of average will, so I dread to think how this will work out with children who get to 'partner up with AI to assist them' or whatever marketing speak is used to obfuscate their goals. Then combine that with social developmental issues or below average focus.
It's bleak because the more entangled they get with the system the more they'll seek to push back regulations.
My partner was working at an event and a co-worker had prepared a poster using AI - a teenage kid at the event pointed out how the poster "has AI smudges".
You know how your parents are weirdly shitty at recognizing obvious photoshops? Kids are constantly surprised that we adults can't recognize obvious AI images.
We use Teams at work and when you choose the icon it takes you to a screen that has a large icon of a door with a rope in front of it. From there you get to choose Teams on web or Teams the app. The point of the door is to tell you that Teams classic is no longer available, which is a huge part of the visual hierarchy. It's very strange - Teams classic was phased out long ago, but they still tell you this, and the negative connotation of a door with a rope in front of it resides in your mind as you move forward. This is one of the many operating quirks one sees from day to day.
I also took it that the benefit of being a good photographer and not using digital is that you take less photos and may end up more efficient as a result. I could be wrong but it's cumbersome when wedding photographers share up a 7GB folder of photos with previews that are 128 pix wide, within which there are runs of photos from the same angle in their dozens which require you to full screen load a 4000+ px wide image, to see which one has the best smile or whatever. It just feels like this is too much storage and admin to me.
I've often mused about how people get irritated by others being optimistic about change when the observers have tried change in the past and not been able to maintain it. I feel that the experience of that can lead to a position of cynicism that is defined by ones own limitations rather than the constraints of the system. They'll even suggest that people should be stronger in their resistance against the proven stickiness of platforms that use huge data to keep people in their ecosystems.
As someone who has eaten way too much sugary food I think my gut-brain coupling may have had enough of this. A few weeks ago I had a sugar binge one night and the cognitive effects were impossible to ignore the next day. Fortunately after 2-3 days I was back to normal but of my sample size of one, and in my condition (which is pre-diabetic) I observed a clear link.
It was a good experience as it's prompted me to get more serious about cutting back sugar, implemented as long term, achievable habit change.
