And then Einstein clapped the Baby Jesus’s ass and all the harpies cried at the wave after wave of baby bald eagles flying over. Amen.

Understatement, I know, but I find this so annoying, and it certainly feels malicious.

I was just commenting the other day how ridiculous it is that google search results literally serve up malware to people via paid ads. My neighbor was running into issues where her computer kept getting “infected” and a full screen scam would take control, blaring out a loud message that her computer was infected with a virus, that it was infecting microsoft’s servers, and she had to call them now to fix it.

After investigating, I found out that these types of scams are stored as blobs on Microsoft’s cloud service, but the links are spread via ads in google search. When I tried searching for the exact search terms my neighbor was using on my own devices and my own network, I found out that google was serving me the exact same ads, aka sponsored links. They look like legitimate results for things that people search for, like showing what appears to be a link to Amazon when searching for a product, even the links will say “www.amazon.com”.

Obviously I told my neighbor not to use Chrome and suggested some browser alternatives. I installed uBlock on all the browsers (including chrome) just to be safe. Then I showed her how to tell when things are ads, even when they are deceiving, and to never click on ads or sponsored links under any circumstances.

But it’s definitely infuriating that they are serving up malware in their ads, don’t respond to reports in a timely manner, are getting people caught in scams that they allow to advertise on their network but then somehow object to people managing those risks by blocking ads from untrustworthy sources, like google.

I mean aren’t numbers invented by Arabics anyway? What’s the point at ending with 9 and 10 when they could go full 9 and 11? /s

HTML CSS XML JSON SQL CRAYONS

Okay, it’s starting to add up.

RULES FOR THEE, NOT FOR ME.

♪ You’re so pretty. ♪

♪ Oh, so pretty. ♪

♪ You are pretty and witty and GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY. ♪

I feel this in my soul. If I were independently wealthy or had a sizeable amount of passive income, I probably would give up the corporate life and just do something like farming.

But in reality, most of the farmers in my area either have to make do with very little or they end up having to work a full time job to supplement the farm income, build a retirement fund, and to have decent health insurance. Kind of takes the joy out of it if I know I’m either going to have to compromise further on healthcare & retirement, or if I’m going to have to continue working another job either way.

In a way, I’m glad people are slowing starting to come around and pay attention to this. For years, any time I would publicly complain about Amazon customer service online, it was very common for people to be completely dismissive or even blame me. I’d hear statements like “sure Amazon sucks, but they have great customer service” and I’d think to myself, just wait until it’s your time to find out that the customer service isn’t what you think it is.

Long story short, the item came with a broken part. Should have been quick and easy to rectify (send a replacement part, send a replacement unit, or refund the purchase). The seller was completely unhelpful. Amazon customer service would not intervene and insisted that I continue fruitlessly corresponding with the vendor, even though they had an “A-to-Z” money back guarantee if something goes wrong. It literally took months of back and forth between me, the vendor, and Amazon customer service before things were finally refunded in full.

So, basically I gave them another chance and they showed that things hadn’t improved a bit.

I can’t speak to growing or shrinking in terms of number of users and I try not to bring “feels like” into this since that’s subjective. However, anecdotally speaking, I’ve been noticing signs of a down turn over the past month or two. Perhaps just a seasonal thing, perhaps due to some other cause such as the upgrade to 0.19.X.

The most telling thing to me is that I’m seeing fewer comments during my active hours. One of the ways I browse for active discussions on Lemmy is to sort by "New Comments’ and switch to the view that shows comments instead of posts. So, I do the sort/filter, view the results, looking to see if there are any interesting comments or topics.

Historically speaking, other than a weird bug that would seem to pin some slightly older posts to the top of the list, everything on the first page would be somewhere between seconds to several minutes old. It was incredibly unusual to see anything over 5 minutes old on the first page and also very unusual to see any of the same comments if I refreshed the page.

More recently though, it’s more common to see comments that are 5+ minutes old on the first page of new comments list. It’s also much more common for me to reach the bottom of the page, hit refresh, and then see some of the same comments in the list after it refreshes. And I don’t exactly speed run through this page – I check out the post titles, if it’s an interesting topic, I’ll often click through and read more in the post, sometimes I’ll even respond to comments directly, then return back to the new comments, etc.

As I mentioned, it could just be a seasonal slowdown. Perhaps the 0.19 upgrade results in a slowdown or backlog of things that show up on the new comments list, I know other things have changed like the fact that I can no longer view anything except the first page of results. Others have suggested there are fewer posts/posters, but that what gets posted “feels like” it’s higher quality, but I’d counter that with the fact that what I “feel like” is that’s not actually the case based on what I’m seeing in the new comments list.

Ow, my balls!

I’m thankful that in all my years of working in retail, I never had a gun pointed at me. Having said that, random people get so bent out of shape about the most ridiculous, inconsequential things and it can be close to impossible to predict who it’s going to be or what is going to set them off.

Based on my experiences, if a customer is being indignant even after explaining that I was helping them out, I would apologize and remove the discount or ring the order up differently (if it was in my power to do so). More often than not, they calm down after they get what they want, even if it’s to their own detriment. Granted, after calming down, a not insignificant number of these folks will realize their mistake and then they have to figure out a way to save face so they can ask for the discount to be reapplied.

What’s more likely, someone at reddit fucked up an analysis, or these ads are 14x better than Google or 31x better than FB?

What’s most likely is that you misread or misinterpreted what was stated. It says the new format outperforms other types of ads by 28%, not that they get 28% CTR.

In 2024, I feel like we should have the power to create images that aren’t fuzzy, overcompressed, and hard to see messes, yet here we are.

Anecdotally speaking, I’ve been suspecting this was happening already with code related AI as I’ve been noticing a pretty steep decline in code quality of the code suggestions various AI tools have been providing.

Some of these tools, like GitHub’s AI product, are trained on their own code repositories. As more and more developers use AI to help generate code and especially as more novice level developers rely on AI to help learn new technologies, more of that AI generated code is getting added to the repos (in theory) that are used to train the AI. Not that all AI code is garbage, but there’s enough that is garbage in my experience, that I suspect it’s going to be a garbage in, garbage out affair sans human correction/oversight. Currently, as far as I can tell, these tools aren’t really using much in the way of good metrics to rate whether the code they are training on is quality or not, nor whether it actually even works or not.

More and more often I’m getting ungrounded output (the new term for hallucinations) when it comes to code, rather than the actual helpful and relevant stuff that had me so excited when I first started using these products. And I worry that it’s going to get worse. I hope not, of course, but it is a little concerning when the AI tools are more consistently providing useless / broken suggestions.

In the USA at least, any time you buy alcohol, tobacco, or any number of other random things that the retailer decides to flag as requiring ID, then you’ll need assistance from a cashier. Random things include razor blades, compressed air, some herbal supplements, spray paint, butane torches, or any of dozens of other items. Any time you accidentally scan something twice, you’ll need a cashier’s assistance. Any time something rings up the wrong price or any time the UPC doesn’t scan, you’ll need a cashier’s assistance. Also, if you’re buying gift cards, you may need a cashier’s assistance.

Also, different stores have different machines and different machines work better than others. Many places have ridiculously sensitive machines that freeze up if so much as a fruit fly farts on it. Some places use “AI cameras” to detect theft, which basically the algorithm for that seems to be “If (customer scanned something OR customer didn’t scan something) then (theft, so freeze and call cashier for assistance)”.

So, the frequency is highly variable. For some stores, I can usually manage to get by with almost never needing assistance. For others, it’s practically every visit.

Personally, I don’t think the technology is a failure. It’s the implementation that’s the pain point.

I’m no fan of Walmart, but the local store has the lenient self checkout machines that don’t make you place and leave your items in the bagging area. And there’s a hand scanner for each machine. The hand scanner is pretty close to instant, so I can literally scan an entire cart full of items in under a minute (with caveats) and you don’t even have to take things out of the cart to scan them (with caveats). Sometimes there are hiccups and obviously some items are sold by weight, so that’ll slow things down.

But even with all that, the implementation is the pain point because they’ll only have 1 person running the machines, so if they have to run off to help a customer or multiple people need help at the same time, you just have to wait. Also, the particular store I go to shuts down half the machines ridiculously early in the evening. When the machines break, they stay broken for weeks or months. And they have some kind of ridiculous system where some of the machines are cash-only, some are card-only, but the majority will accept either – this adds to a lot of inefficiency because a lot of customers don’t know which machines are which and if you mess up and pick the wrong one then things get tied up while you wait for a cashier to come and transfer you over to a different one so you can pay.

The other big factor is that customers were trained on the old shitty style self checkouts where you had to scan each item one at a time, place it in the bagging area, leave it there until you pay, and if so much as a speck of dust landed in the bagging area or a piece of onion skin fell off, it would freeze up. So even with the new lenient hand scanners, people still do it the old and slow way.

I cancelled Amazon Prime awhile ago when the customer service took a nose dive and I realized too many of the 3rd party vendors were using Amazon as their defective products outlet.

But I actively and permanently skipped out on an Amazon Prime subscription because they refused to give me a pro-rated refund on the remaining 8-9 months of service after I cancelled. They literally told me that they start with the pro-rated amount, then subtract out the cost of all the “free” movie/show/music rentals as well as all the “free” shipping on orders during the time you’ve had prime, and you only get whatever remains (if anything). Within the first 3 -4 months, I had already accrued enough “free” $5.99 shipping and $3 - $4 rentals that it exceeded the $100 or whatever cost of a prime membership was back in those days, so I got no refund. Bunch of crooks.

No surprise, I’m completely on board with folks kicking Prime to the curb.

There’s a theory that certain emails scams are so obvious and easy to spot because that acts as a self-selection mechanism. A person who sees the obvious scam and immediately recognizes it as such was probably never going to fall for it. The ones that respond in spite of all the signs tend to be easier or more lucrative targets.

I could see forcing people to download an app just to see the content as operating on a similar (but not 100% analogous) principle. The type of person who willingly installs the app to see the content (without knowing if it was worthwhile/relevant beforehand) may be exactly the type of person that they prefer to join their site. Perhaps they are easier targets for marketing, less likely to understand /complain about the ramifications of changes to the site that are user adverse, care less about privacy, etc and that makes them more lucrative?

an Achilles heel is the fact that AI can’t come up with enough believable unique names for all the posts you want your AI bots to make

That seems counterintuitive to me in the context of modern AI approaches. I’m wondering if you could elaborate on that a bit more.

It could be incompetence. Lemmy.world has similar and significant issues with sorting as well and I presume you’re not also implying that paid content has anything to do with lemmy sorting.