Libra00

That’d be a hell of a thing. I’m with you on that one. Too bad this country is by, for, and about the rich and we don’t really… do consequences for the rich.

No, I use duckduckgo which is powered by Bing’s API. Hence why I said other privacy-focused search engine.

I looked at it briefly, the only free option I saw was 100 free searches, which will not last your average user anywhere near 30 days. Shit that might not last me 3 days depending on what I’m doing.

No, but companies are made of individual people who get more or less greedy with time, like most other attributes of people. Which is why I said ‘people got greedy’.

Capitalism - and I am the last person to defend it - didn’t used to be like this, or at least not as bad. shrug I could probably tolerate capitalism if, say, no company was allowed to employ more than say 15 people.

Streaming was different for years and years. But then people got greedy.

They want the old cable TV days, but worse, and filling their pockets instead.

There’s a word for that: enshittification

Netflix will what now? Sorry, I was busy canceling my netflix account.

Kidding, I canceled it ages ago when the $10 version became SD-only with ads.}

Why do we keep paying people like this to enshittify everything?

What’s the alternative? I guess you can use chatgpt or whatever as a sort of search engine? shrug

Is that something built into the browser? i dropped Brave when I heard Google was forcing the adblock-gimping shit in Manifest V3 into Chomium. Also I was never entirely keen on their crypto-hawking bullshit.

Yeah I’m far too used to getting my search for free to pay for it. I’ll fuckin’ use chatgpt before I pay a subscription fee for that shit, even if it is a substantially better option.

Yeah, paying someone else to tell you what to do with your business when they will bear none of the consequences for the things they tell you to do are is just mad.

What’s odd is that it’s not in the Wired headline either, this is a direct copy of their headline.

Also because that lump sum is all there is. If you take the annuity they put the lump sum into an investment account and then pay you out of the proceeds (from which they take a cut, of course), and you can get the same returns they get, without losing their cut, doing it yourself.

So, your bog-standard ‘we’re improving the company by making everyone do the work of 2 people on the salary of 1’ routine. :P

it makes sense to guide the customer through the most common solutions first, as that will likely solve the problem.

And this why you have to suffer through those lengthy recordings that tell you about a bunch of shit that generally doesn’t apply to your situation before you can even use the menu, much less talk to a person. I am disabled, I have had to be on the phone with the Social Security Administration, Medicare, my insurance company, and various state benefits agencies probably 15-20 times a year for the past ~14 years, and I can count on one hand the number of times those ‘common solutions’ were even remotely applicable. I don’t even need fingers to count the number of times they have actually contained the solution to my issue, because it has literally never happened.

Once you get to a person who can make an assessment about what’s going on it makes sense for them to cover a few basics (I used to do tech support, I know how much time a simple, ‘Are you sure it’s plugged in?’ can save), but replacing customer service with AI means you’re pretty much stuck in those recordings for your entire call. Now to be fair this can be done better than most places do it. I shop on amazon a fair bit (can’t drive so I order most things online) and when I have issues I honestly prefer dealing with the livechat AI than calling because it’s a much faster and smoother experience and they can quickly bump you over to an actual agent when there’s a weird thing going on that’s outside of its scope. But most companies don’t have Amazon’s customer service budget to do shit like that well, so usually what I get is ‘If you’re calling about XYZ, hang up and dial this number. Did you know that if your birthday is on an odd-numbered day blahblah-ad-blahblah? If the crescent moon is waning and the distant hills are draining and the watchful eye is straining…’ etc.

They had to invest how much money into AI to realize this thing that literally anyone on the street would’ve happily told them for free? And they probably paid some consultant even more money to tell them it was a good idea. sigh.

Shiiit, I really don’t want to go back to Google and all their sponsored/AI/tracking bullshit. Any other privacy-focused search engines out there that don’t rely on this?

Something something money.

AI is just the latest hype train they’re hopping in the hopes of making more money.