I must be living under a rock. I didn’t even realize it was outdated! :-)

I made the switch from a Pixel 2XL to a 7 last year, and dang, the 2XL was better in most every respect. Fingerprint access with the 2 worked 99% of the time on the first try vs. about 10% (probably being generous) on the 7.

And voice-to-text is just as broken. I did side-by-side tests, and if you’re in perfect conditions, facing the phone directly, with no background noise (i.e., never), then the 7 performed okay, but it would fail horrible in any other case. The 2XL performed quite well, relatively. I even replaced the 7 thinking there was an issue, but the new one did the same thing.

Unfortunately, lack of updates means the 2 is no longer usable for many purposes.

Ironically, the doorbell was the thing that wasn't an Amazon product and wasn't disabled. ;-)

And yes, I recanted on the 'firing" part, but I still feel that Amazon's "resolution" here was weak-sauce compared to the "extreme" action taken in the first place. At this point, I'm guessing they wish they'd offered the customer some minor token (say 2 years of free Prime at a minimum) compensation in return for an NDA on the topic. 20/20 hindsight ;-)

Okay, "firing" might be too strong, but that policy of "tolerating mistakes" (as long as it doesn't happen twice and lessons are learned) seems to have created a corporate culture where (if this story is true, and it seems to be confirmed):

- A customer can be mistakenly called a racist

- Their home automation systems they bought and paid for disabled

- Any digital content (Kindle books, Amazon Prime Video purchases, Audible books, etc.) they bought (sorry, "licensed") revoked.

- It takes more than a week to resolve after being provided with clear evidence of the company's mistake. I mean, good grief, at least the manager/executive should have reactivated the customer's account during the review process, but they opted for "guilty until we've taken our sweet time reviewing the evidence and make sure they're innocent".

- After all that, the customer isn't even offered an apology, much less compensation.

This isn't just a "mistakes and failures happen" situation. Failures and mistakes occurred at multiple points in this process and along the decision chain, and apparently no one involved had the common sense to break out of the resulting insanity-loop.

It's a separate video on his channel which is probably a better listen than this one. This one is a bit of conjecture, perhaps true. The other has been validated by multiple sources, AFAICT.

Short summary - Someone had tied in most of their home automation to Alexa and found their account cancelled suddenly one day. They went through the automated recovery systems and were told to contact support, which they did. Support ended up transferring them to an Amazon exec (let's assume "manager") who told them their account was disabled because an Amazon delivery driver reported that someone said something racist to them over their video doorbell (which wasn't a Ring, ironically).

Upon investigating, checking cameras, logs, etc,, the owner determined that (a) no one was home at the time of the delivery, (b) the driver was wearing headphones, (c) the doorbell had done an automated, "Hello, how can I help you?" response to the driver as they were walking away (presumably ring-and-dash or drop-and-dash delivery, as usual).

The driver had apparently, with the headphones on, completely misunderstood.

It took over a week to get Amazon to review all the evidence and reactivate the account. No apology at that point (although I believe I saw they subsequently have).

That's a bad look for Amazon, and the Youtuber makes a valid point that it's a bad idea to trust control of your home to a company that will make such boneheaded decisions.

IMHO, the only correct response for Amazon here is firing at least two people involved in the debacle, apologizing publicly, and promising to review and adapt their policies in response to the incident. Any halfway decent PR department at anything other than a mega-monopoly would be scurrying to do exactly that, but not Amazon apparently.

"Code working" isn't necessarily black-and-white. For a new user (the one asking the question), the code may appear to solve the problem, but may have corner-cases or even security risks. That's entirely possible with user-generated code as well, of course, but GPT/AI allows it to be produced at a much higher rate, with the person who posted the answer often not being capable of (or not caring to) validate or correct it.

Sure, but if you try it out, you pretty quickly realize it's a hallucination. Unfortunately the type of GPT content we're now getting on Stack Overflow and its sibling sites is mostly unvalidated GPT hallucinations.

Agreed - That's the basis of my "responsible use of AI on SO" post at https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/389675/902710

Agree with the middle part - At the moment, the policy implemented by corporate is "Don't ask; don't tell". If someone says they used GPT or other AI for their answer, it's disallowed. If they try to hide the fact, there's not much the community can do to get it removed.

And while I'm not a moderator, as just a user I've flagged over 1,200 answers on Stack Overflow (and several of the smaller communities like Ask Ubuntu) that were subsequently removed. Automatic detection was never the sole criteria that was used to determine if it was AI - It's entirely possible to spot GPT content using multiple methods. I don't publicly talk about most of these, since we do have a group of users (sometimes spammers) who attempt to hide their use and make it more difficult to detect. See some of my additional notes on the topic on https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/389674/902710

And there's the problem on SO. Previously, we could do exactly that - Flag the content for a Mod to review. Now Mods are pretty much prevented from taking any action when we (the community members) and they believe it is a bot.

I saw one user yesterday post 10 lengthy, detailed answers in an hour, in 3 different programming languages. But the Mods aren't allowed by SE to consider that (or pretty much anything) to be an indicator that it's AI-generated.