brobdingnagians (u/brobdingnagians)

brobdingnagians commented on Bank forced to rehire workers after lying about chatbot productivity, union says arstechnica.com/tech-poli... · Posted by u/ndsipa_pomu

taylodl · 2 days ago

How many times has a chatbot successfully taken care of a customer support problem you had? I have had success, but the success rate is less than 5%. Maybe even way less than 5%.

Companies need to stop looking at customer support as an expense, but rather as an opportunity to build trust and strengthen your business relationship. They warn against assessing someone when everything is going well for them - the true measure of the person is what they do when things are not going well. It's the same for companies. When your customers are experiencing problems, that's the time to shine! It's not a problem, it's an opportunity.

brobdingnagians · 2 days ago

I had a chatbot attempt to answer an issue I had with setting up a Shopify site yesterday. All of the information was correct, but I had already done it. A customer support rep was able to retrigger the TLS query. The chatbot knew that needed to be done, but couldn't actually do it. It suggested ways of doing it which didn't exist in the UI, which was even more frustrating

brobdingnagians commented on 95% of generative AI pilots at companies are failing – MIT report fortune.com/2025/08/18/mi... · Posted by u/amirkabbara

WD-42 · 5 days ago

I just finished implementing a chatbot in a box for a clients sass. What problem does it solve? None that I can tell, other than now the sass “has ai”.

I still have access to the OpenAI dashboard. I can confirm nobody is actually using it.

brobdingnagians · 5 days ago

We recently got a customer support request asking if we were going to "implement AI" on our website and then saying we could use it in our marketing if we did. No suggestion as to why they would find it useful, or what feature could be augmented with it. It's crazy that the hype is so high that random non-tech users suggest adding AI for marketing.

brobdingnagians commented on "This question has been retired" learn.microsoft.com/en-us... · Posted by u/1970-01-01

colpabar · 17 days ago

There's another post on hn about how 19% of california homes are owned by investors, and when I saw that I thought to myself "wow, the free market really produced an optimal outcome there."

brobdingnagians · 17 days ago

California housing market is not an example of a free market.

brobdingnagians commented on That Dropped Call with Customer Service? It Was on Purpose theatlantic.com/ideas/arc... · Posted by u/dustincoates

brobdingnagians · 2 months ago

I once had a nightmare series of phone calls with Timer-Warner Cable. I had to cancel because I was making an emergency move out of the apartment and area on the east coast. My call would get dropped on every call; I probably made a dozen calls, explained the situation, waited forever, then transferred or call dropped. At one point a rep transferred me to another call center guy in Chicago, he was totally confused about why I would be transferred to him almost a thousand miles away. Instead of focusing on the emergency for why I was moving out, I was messing around with their horrible service. Swore off ever using them again.

brobdingnagians commented on Hacker News now runs on top of Common Lisp lisp-journey.gitlab.io/bl... · Posted by u/Tomte

mdaniel · 3 months ago

Apologies that may have come across as more accusative than I intended. I was just surprised that whatever missing(?) feature or behavior that would cause one to move off of Racket wouldn't be of interest to other Racket users

brobdingnagians · 3 months ago

My assumption is that creating a compiler and runtime to match sbcl isn't in scope for racket, so it wouldn't be polite to request racket to do so :) there were probably other benefits of similar orthogonal features, where racket users don't necessarily need it, but another language/runtime already has it because that's where people who need that go

brobdingnagians commented on Show HN: Goboscript, text-based programming language, compiles to Scratch github.com/aspizu/goboscr... · Posted by u/aspizu

femto · 3 months ago

It sounds like you want the ability to instantiate a scratch block that contains a text box, which in turn contains the function body for the block? It would then be possible to incrementally write as little or as much as desired in text.

Getting fancy, that block could use a backend interpreter/compiler of choice, so the language could be Squeak, Python, C, an LLM generator, ...

brobdingnagians · 3 months ago

I know this is probably a bit more advanced, but this suggestion reminds me of Blueprints w/ magic nodes in Unreal Engine. There is a plugin for Magic Nodes (https://forums.unrealengine.com/t/magic-nodes/121220) where you can enter C++ into a blueprint node that integrates into the blueprint system. Similar kind of UI could work well

brobdingnagians commented on Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup pcworld.com/article/26517... · Posted by u/airstrike

geekifier · 4 months ago

I use Mail.app on macOS as my daily these days, and it’s somehow even worse than this. Especially the search function, which works in even more bizarre ways.

It’s truly amazing that we have seemingly regressed in basic desktop functionality since the early 2000’s.

brobdingnagians · 4 months ago

I am genuinely confused why search is so bad in the major email webapps/clients. Search is a well studied feature, and it seems like it's something that should just work but I can never find the thing I'm searching for in my email (especially O365). Knowing the date and then scrolling often seems to be the most accurate way of finding things...

brobdingnagians commented on The cultural divide between mathematics and AI sugaku.net/content/unders... · Posted by u/rfurmani

feoren · 5 months ago

> Do they think they will simply be wealthy enough that it won't affect them much, they will be insulated from it?

Yes, partly that. Mostly they only care about their rank. Many people would burn down the country if it meant they could be king of the ashes. Even purely self-interested people should welcome a better society for all, because a rising tide lifts all boats. But not only are they selfish, they're also very stupid, at least in this aspect. They can't see the world as anything but zero sum, and themselves as either winning or losing, so they must win at all costs. And those costs are huge.

brobdingnagians · 5 months ago

Reminds me of the Paradise Lost quote, "Better to rule in Hell, than serve in Heaven", such an insightful book for understanding a certain type of person from Milton. Beautiful imagery throughout too, highly recommend.

brobdingnagians commented on Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools danieldelaney.net/chat/... · Posted by u/cryptophreak

taeric · 7 months ago

I'm growing to the idea that chat is a bad UI pattern, period. It is a great record of correspondence, I think. But it is a terrible UI for doing anything.

In large, I assert this is because the best way to do something is to do that thing. There can be correspondence around the thing, but the artifacts that you are building are separate things.

You could probably take this further and say that narrative is a terrible way to build things. It can be a great way to communicate them, but being a separate entity, it is not necessarily good at making any artifacts.

brobdingnagians · 7 months ago

Similar thing I've run into lately, chat is horrible for tracking issues and tasks. When people try to use it that way, it becomes absolute chaos after awhile.

brobdingnagians commented on Google is making AI in Gmail and Docs free, but raising the price of Workspace theverge.com/2025/1/15/24... · Posted by u/lars_francke

belval · 7 months ago

Right now at Amazon we are going through the annual feedback cycle where you have to write strengths and growth areas for your colleagues. You will usually have to do ~12 of those.

I don't use ChatGPT for those, but it is the epitome of what you are describing, people will take a single sentence, ask some LLM to blow it up the correct length and in the process make it a complete waste of time for everyone.

My guess is that with long-form text losing value due to LLMs, we will see a return of very succint 1-2 lines employee feedback.

brobdingnagians · 7 months ago

I hope it drives a cultural revival in appreciation of laconicism.