I had to look this up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Ooh ooh I know this one! Google doesn't care. Google really doesn't care. Locked out of your account? They don't care. They have billions of other suckers giving them piles of email, location and phone data to mine and advertise on. You are not even a rounding error. It is better for their bottom line to ignore you. I went through all this when they cancelled my AdWords account due to "suspicious activity." Yes, I went through all the online documentation. I filled in their "appeal" form a couple of times. No response and the account remains locked.

It has taken a couple of years but I am almost 100% google-free now. I have an old legacy Gmail account but all my new emails use Proton and my ISP. The phone is on KaiOS so there's probably some legacy google crap on there too, but I hardly use it and the cell service is so shit where I live that Google would have trouble exfiltrating any useful info anyway.

But yeah, I'll repeat it one more time. Google doesn't care about you, me, or any of the peons who feed their advertising engine. If you spend a lot of money paying Google to advertise stuff, Google might care about you.

The Commonwealth Bank is cited in the article. They have been shutting down their physical bank branches for decades. At their remaining physical locations, they literally have an employee at the door whose job it is to make customers go away. They ask what the customer wants (duh, they want to do some banking) then tell the customer "you should use our app instead." The Commonwealth Bank has been enshittifying since before Cory Doctorow coined the word. Then they have the gall to blame the customers for being scammed. If the bank had allowed granny to talk to a human instead of forcing her to use an "app," then granny wouldn't be feeding her life savings into a bitcoin ATM to some scammer in Transnistria.

The article cites the Commonwealth Bank. They have been openly hostile to their customers for decades. They definitely don't want to "help" anyone except the guys in suits in the big office in Sydney. For decades they have had an active policy of shutting down retail bank branches, and what branches are left literally have a person at the door telling customers to go away. I'm not even joking. They stand there all day telling customers who have queued to speak to a human to "use the app." all the while charging every customer a monthly fee for the privilege of the bank making it hard for that person to get their own money. It's even worse in indigenous communities. There have been multiple government inquires into the their practices and the outcome is always that the bank is truly awful: https://treasury.gov.au/public...

Then absolutely nothing gets done and the bank comes up with new ways to squeeze their customers. So if the Commonwealth Bank has embraced some new tech, this is a sign that it is solely to improve short-term gains and has nothing to do with actually helping customers. The Australian banking cartel means that banks don't have to compete for customers, so there is no penalty for treating them like shit.

Many retired people have shares in the Commonwealth Bank and in conversation they say with a straight face "oh, they're terrible, but they pay a good dividend" like the rest of us should forgive them for profiting from the misery of others. The other big owner of Commonwealth shares is the various superannuation funds. So working Australians also aren't too upset when the bank does more evil, because they have been sold the fiction that superannuation will give them a comfortable retirement, and definitely isn't a slush fund for a whole generation of finance bros.

Like many on here, I did my share of tech support back in my early years. "Asking the right questions" is the hardest part. Just because the last three customers had a firewall problem, doesn't mean the current customer does. A good script of questions can help, but a bad script will just get you stuck in a loop. And customers have been conditioned to expect the helpdesk to be useless, so by the time they give and phone for help they are already probably upset, so you have to first convince them that you really do want to help.

It's not always an easy job and doing it well costs money. Most businesses don't want to spend the money so they don't do the job well, and this taints all "help desk" jobs as low quality. Using LLMs sucks but probably won't make it any worse. I have found the text-based chatbots to generally be better than a phone call. I think these generally have human supervisors each supervising a few instances of the chatbot. So when the chatbot script breaks down, the human can intervene. There is no long "hold" at the start, and there is no trouble with accents or bad audio.

I live in Australia. I am a grown up. I haven't given ID to anyone online since this ban. It hasn't affected my grown-up life one bit. I can still bank, do business, read the news and communicate with people online just like I have always done.

Can't it be both?

It can always get worse. In .au we have "AI" cameras that automatically send fines for things like "incorrect" seatbelt use by passengers: https://www.abc.net.au/news/20...

This guy even got a fine for doing a manual gear change because the authorities thought he was holding a phone: https://www.canberratimes.com....

I don't know what the system does if you happen to routinely drive with a comedy rubber phallus in your lap. Hopefully a few (thousand) public-spirited citizens are trying this out right now.

It would be an interesting graph to see which ruins the toilets more: fewer passengers for a long flight, or many passengers for a shorter flight.

I'll will pay money to watch this movie in a cinema. That is rare.

Since we're sharing anecdotes here, I had a (fairly expensive) Dell XPS laptop a few years ago which was the worst laptop I've ever owned. The only things that didn't break were the screen and the CPU. The card reader broke, the optical drive broke, the hard drive broke, even the shitty plastic/chrome trim broke.

I don't abuse computers. I keep them cool. I don't use them while the vents are blocked by blankets or paperwork. I don't throw them around. Hell my old Gateway from 2006 is in better shape than the Dell from almost a decade later. As is the MSI that replaced the Dell and the Thinkpad that replaced the MSI. I've used a lot of brands, and only Dell is on my "do not buy again" list*.

*Not brand-specific but anything with soldered memory or battery is also on that list.

The trouble with this is that then only rich kids would be able to study these courses. So it would become another way to filter society based on wealth. Instead of rich people only doing business with other rich people they know from their annual skiing vacations, they would also do business with other kids from their underwater basket weaving degree. ...though now I write all that down, it's pretty much what already happens with graduates of any rich school, or alumni of particular rich fraternities. OK, I don't know what the answer is.

Meta's platform for sharing pictures and videos from Meta's hardware has started blocking their own users from posting content. So Meta is admitting that their product sucks and their users are jerks? This seems like a pretty big admission.

I would fly on this airline.

I get it, but there must be a bunch of heavy wiring and inspection items there. I can imagine there being a strong incentive to rip it all out and save weight/time/money.