Readit NewsEither Klarna is really good at pulling strings to get media coverage, or mainstream media does not fact checking themselves. About a year ago, the company was everywhere in the media when its CEO announced that it created an AI bot that is doing the equivalent of 700 fulltime customer service folks.
I did what seemingly no other publication reporting on it did: signed up for Klarna, bought one item and used this bot.
I was... not impressed?
Klarna's "AI bot" felt like the "L1 support flow" that every other company already has in-place: without AI! Think like when you have a problem with your UberEats order and 80% of cases are resolved without a human interaction (e.g. when an item is missing for your item.)
I walked through the bot's capabilities [1] and my conclusion was that pretty much every other company did this before (automating the obvious support cases.) The real question should have been: why did Klarna not do it before? And when it did, why did it build a wonky AI bot, instead of more intuitive workflows than other companies did?
My sense is that Klarna really wants to be seen as an "AI-first tech company" when it goes public, and not a "buy now pay later loan company" because AI companies have higher valuations even with the same revenue. But at its core, Klarna is a finance or ecommerce-related company: an not much to do with AI (even if it uses AI tools to make its business more efficient - regardless of whether it could use non-AI tools to get the same thing done)
gregdoesit commented on North Korean IT workers have infiltrated the Fortune 500 yahoo.com/news/thousands-... · Posted by u/cwwc
If you think the issue of devs using fake identities is a problem limited to the Fortune 500: I talked with a 6-person startup who very nearly hired a person who could have been from anywhere else than they claimed, including North Korea. All they know is the candidate used an AI filter to make them look like a Polish person [1] - and this startup recorded when they caught this faker.
This is a full-remote startup and they have now added a mandatory in-person interview to their recruitment loop.
Amusingly, in their case, using local job boards did not help: they got candidates pretending to from Poland or Serbia, yet not speaking the language.
A little sad to see how each episode like this casts more doubt and uncertainty into full-remote interviewing.
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gregdoesit commented on Atlassian announces end of support for Opsgenie atlassian.com/blog/announ... · Posted by u/anurag
The most bizarre OpsGenie story was how in 2022, this tool was down for 2 weeks for hundreds of unlucky companies that were Atlassian customers. This was at a time when JIRA had an outage impacting a small percentage of their customer base - but still in the hundreds of organizations (with around tens of thousands of users.)
While most companies can operate for some time without JIRA: losing your paging service means you're flying in the dark. And yet, Atlassian did not prioritize restoring OpsGenie.
I covered the details at the time [1]. To this date, this incident is a real head-scratcher and makes me wonder if Atlassian has internalized how much more critical an incident alerting software is, compared to a ticketing software (JIRA) or wiki (Confluent).
[1] https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/i/52148641/what-atl...
I dont want software development to become the oil and gas industry.
More specifically, if software devs aren't creating capital assets, then what exactly is being bought during an acquisition? Don't we tell ourselves our work is building an asset that can be reused and sold. The operational aspect of our job still seems to be treated as opex.
Our entire industry is built on the belief our software is an asset. This feels like big tech wiggling for a tax break but disguised as some grass roots effort to help small tech.
I am strongly against this as the ethics feel very wrong. Our industry doesn't need tax welfare.
From the legislation:
“ Section 174(c)(2) provides that the required § 174 method does not apply to any expenditure paid or incurred for the purpose of ascertaining the existence, location, extent, or quality of any deposit of ore or other mineral (including oil and gas).”
Is there an explanation how software developers creating software for oil and gas companies are different than for any other industry?
Or can we assume that the oil and gas industry managed to (yet again!) have its lobbyists where it mattered?