Managers are always saying they want end results, but insist on those idiotic day to day metrics to measure it.

I already have. It isn't silly prejudice. You really do your best to make visitors feel unwelcome on arrival.

At least for me and many others I spoke to.

Go and use books to train AI.

Just don't fucking destroy them afterwards! Many of these are out of print, impossible to replace! How much of a douchebag do you have to be to destroy them ?

I'm all for keeping a nice environment, but whenever someone trots out the word 'sacred' I want them to fuck all the way off.

You know what should be sacred? Science and discovery. Even before it had a name and was formalized, science was advancing humanity's state. It's the reason we're not still wandering the savannahs and forests of the world in small groups, subject to every random whim of Nature.

It's a bad time to invest in anything knowledge-based in the US anyway.

You are so wrong. The country I live in now has it. It's not called the same, but it amounts to the same. Near impossible to sue the police here.

I'm pretty sure most countries have something similar on the books.

It would be interesting to know what the numbers look like in terms of schools that are actually doing something at least modestly Apple-specific vs. ones basically reusing chromebook-focused plans on Apple hardware.

Anything you hand out is going to be 'a platform' and normalize it for the students(not necessarily a point in its favor; people tend to resent the deliberate limitations of hardware that IT has been told to at least try to make less useful for porn and cheating); but there is a potential difference in versatility and vendor flexibility between people actually adopting some macOS stuff and people concluding that chromebooks have been getting more expensive at an alarming clip, without feeling any less cheap, so Apple is now genuinely competitive even if you are just going to slap managed chrome on there and reuse your existing, chromebook focused, IT and curriculum stuff.

I had some business reasons to have an account and participate in a few niche subs. The subs were niche enough to mostly be enthusiastic friendly people, but it didn't take long to notice the patterns of the same ideas making the rounds.

Then one of my posts was removed for reasons I don't understand (and didn't try). Whatever the mod was thinking, I just gave up, deleted my historical posts and removed my account. Not worth the effort.

Up to that point, old.reddit.com was working (with or without signing in, mobile or desktop) despite the threat to shut that down. I wouldn't use the new interface unless you paid me a decent wage to do so.

I've quit Reddit before - it's very toxic overall - but now it's not even worth it for business. I doubt they'll ever lure me back again.

Hopefully of course, the AIs will be given the leeway to ignore the scripts (not the actual script items, just the forced structure). I worked in a tech support call center many years back at this point and I always got pretty low marks on the metrics because I didn't follow the scripts and I also had long call times because I just solved their problems and didn't pull every dirty trick in the book to punt them and get them to call back like the agents with good metrics. The scripts, of course, are always stupid. Anyone with a half decent handle on the problem has already covered most of the script with their initial description of the problem, so being forced through steps they have already taken, etc. can be very difficult. You do have to be able to figure out whether or not they actually did some things they said they did of course, but most support is done via remote now anyway, and an AI can check logs and so forth to figure that out pretty easily and quickly.

Honestly, can't say I disagree with this as a solution for first tier at least at this point. As others have pointed out, this can potentially end phone menu trees. Not to mention that they will likely allow the AI, as an expert system, to actually not use ridiculous call center scripts. I still absolutely think that you need human problem solvers to escalate to, but the first people you usually get on the phone are often not problem solvers. I was on the phone for support with a fast charging station the other day, we were past half an hour on the phone call after many, many "please wait a moment sir" and long silences interspersed with requests for basic information that should have been gathered in the first minute (it was at least 20 minutes in before they bothered to establish my location, the name of the charging port I was at, etc.). Basically, by the time they actually got to the point of actually wanting to try something, I had just gotten a text from my family to come and pick them up. My guess is that, aside from having no idea what they were supposed to be doing, they were also probably overloaded like many call center workers. Probably answering not only chats as well as phone calls, but also quite possibly handling multiple phone calls at once as well.

AIs can handle multiple calls at once without making you wait on hold, and they can get to the point pretty quickly and, if they have the right training data, they aren't clueless about what their job is. So, a well done AI is going to be vastly better than most of the humans you encounter at many call centers. Of course, that's no substitute for the experienced human that you can eventually get after dealing with a clueless human for a while, but the AI can still escalate you if it can't help.

Then, there's the communication issues. AI voices these days tend to be more understandable than humans. Not just because they can be made to speak pretty much any language or assume an accent that is clearly understandable to the listener. I don't just mean because of foreign language speakers either, people with heavy regional accents who speak your own language can be just as hard to understand sometimes over the phone. Not to mention, the AI has no need to constantly put you on hold and off (during which humans are usually cutting off parts of their own message), it doesn't have background noise, it isn't using a microphone that might not work well, and just in general, there are less physical, electrical, and digital layers involved in getting their voice to you. Then going the other way, we have gotten to the point where, though AI might not be better at picking out what you are saying than the best human, it's better than the average human.

All that said, AI is definitely not ideal at this point. It's just probably better than the average call center frontline human if it's properly prepared.

I'm fairly sure at least one entire department at MS is tasked with making sure people don't switch to other formats, that despite on-paper "open" XML it remains incompatible and no competitor software can flawlessly read and write it.

So no, unless you can hire a dozen people full-time to counter that, you don't have a chance to break through that.

Qualified immunity is a reasonable concept that I agree is needed for police work.

It's just being completely overdone, used to cover up clear abuse. The basic idea of "when in doubt, police still needs to be able to act" is sound. The actual practice "unless you can prove to criminal standards and beyond, that the police officer knew at that exact moment, that what they were doing was totally definitely illegal and they intentionally decided to break a law. That's quite a bit too much of "err on the side of caution".

What a complete and utter surprise... to the three people who are so high their brain stopped working but miraculously didn't kill them.

For everyone else, this was literally the first thing we thought about, right? Please tell me I'm not the last sane person on planet Earth. Nobody expected that this would NOT be abused in such ways, right?

Even if you live somewhere with good cops, they're still human beings and will often put themselves above duty.

Only the fear of consequences drilled into them during training followed by robust monitoring and security audits will keep it under control (note I didn't say 'prevent entirely').

The range and payload penalties will be enormous.

If you can build an enclosed habitat that can keep a population alive for 1000 years in deep space, you'd find it a lot easier to do the same on Earth. And if that's not an option, Mars, or the asteroid belt. Places where there are resources to exploit to resupply and repair, or even expand.

And that's before you think about how your destination is an entire alien biosphere - you might know the air, water temperature and gravity are all fine... but you won't have any idea if you can digest the locally available flora and fauna, if it'll be toxic, or if it'll be digesting you.

Interstellar colonization is for when your star is cold and all the rocks around it are used up.