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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • Two ways to process voice, on device or on server. Device-based solutions either are very basic and just detect differences between words or need training data based on your voice or they need lots of processing power for more generalized voice recognition. So is your battery draining and phone is often hot because an app is keeping the mic on and keeping the phone from slowing the processor? Other option is to stream the data to the server. This would also increase battery usage as the phone can’t sleep, but might not be as noticeable, but more evident would be your phone using a lot more bandwidth than is reasonable while you aren’t actively using it.



  • It’s just how HR does stuff in the US. Most applications have to go through an automated system for filtering before reaching a person, unless it’s a pretty small company. That system usually requires very specific criteria to get through. Like I remember applying for a seasonal job at Target, around the end of 2010 when I was laid of, and having to fill out a really detailed application online and take a bunch of personality tests. Turns out I scored too high on leadership and had too much professional experience to be a stock person/cashier, so I was rejected before it was sent to the store manager.

    It’s not an accident or unintended consequence kind of thing either. It’s how they can have a job position “open” and have hundreds of applications, but still be understaffed and thus force workers to work what should be extra people’s jobs for no extra pay. It’s just how the mega-corp culture is in the US for the most part.

    As for the software and some other very technical industries, it’s a similar cultural thing, but on top of that, most recruiters are not technically literate and so don’t know how to judge a technical person, but are made to filter applications before passing then on. My last job had a position open the entire 10 years I worked there and there were no interviews at the hiring manager or team level in all that time. It was an analyst position and I would have hired basically anyone who had the one bit of specialized knowledge if it was up to me. But I did the job of two people the whole 10 years and was never able to move up I the company because of it.

    Only reason I didn’t leave sooner was that I didn’t have the funds to get a degree when I was younger and fell into a time when the crazy unsecured loans were not as much of a thing, and most companies filter out software related candidates without a degree up front, regardless of experience. Finally got a degree when I found a program that I could handle while also doing two peoples’ worth of work.


  • If it’s just one job post, then automating it is not going to be very useful. I don’t think OP meant that. Seemed like they want to give a general CV/resume and then feed it each job posting and get customized versions for each posting. Many HR departments have keyword filters necessary to clear before it gets to a person. Otherwise, it takes only a few minutes to customize one time and would be much better to do manually anyway.

    Problem is, these days it usually takes 50-100 job applications per interview depending on industry. In the software industry (in the US anyway), that’s about average. Last job took me about 500 applications and that led to 3 third-round interviews and 2 of them gave offers. Total I probably had around 8-10 first round interviews, not including the many 5-10 minute phone calls with headhunter recruiters that contacted me based just on my resume on LinkedIn and various other sites.


  • Not exactly. I just think trying to apply a single threaded, cyclical processing model on a process that is neither threaded nor executed in measurable cycles is nonsensical. On a very, very abstract level it’s similar to taking the concept of dividing a pie between a group of people. If you think in terms of the object that you give to each person needing to be something recognizable as pie, then maybe a 9-inch pie can be divided 20 or 30 times. Bit if you stop thinking about the pie, and start looking at what the pie is made up of, you can divide it so many times that it’s unthinkable. I mean, sure there’s a limit. At some point there’s got to be some three dimensional particle of matter that can no longer be divided, but it just doesn’t make sense to use the same scale or call it the same thing.

    Anyway, I’m not upset about it. It’s just dumb. And thinking about it is valuable because companies are constantly trying to assign a monetary value to a human brain so they can decide when they can replace it with a computer. But we offer much different value, true creativity and randomness, pattern recognition, and true multitasking, versus fast remixing of predefined blocks of information and raw, linear calculation speed. There can be no fair comparison between a brain and a computer and there are different uses for both. And the “intelligence” in modern “AI” is not he same as in human intelligence. And likely will never be with digital computers.


  • Regardless of how you define a “bit”, saying 10 in a second when most people easily process hundreds of pieces of information in every perceivable moment, much less every second, is still ridiculous. I was only using characters because that was one of the ridiculous things the article mentioned.

    Heck just writing this message I’m processing the words I’m writing, listening to and retaining bits of information in what’s on the TV. Being annoyed at the fact that I have the flu and my nose, ears, throat, and several other parts are achy in addition to the headache. Noticing the discomfort of the way my butt is sitting on the couch, but not wanting to move because my wife is also sick and lying in my lap. Keeping myself from shaking my foot, because it is calming, but will annoy said wife. Etc. All of that data is being processed and reevaluated consciously in every moment, all at once. And that’s not including the more subconscious stuff that I could pay attention to if I wanted to, like breathing.


  • I just skimmed it, but it’s starting with a totally nonsensical basis for calculation. For example,

    “In fact, the entropy of English is only ∼ 1 bit per character.”

    Um, so each character is just 0 or 1 meaning there are only two characters in the English language? You can’t reduce it like that.

    I mean just the headline is nonsensical. 10 bits per second? I mean a second is a really long time. So even if their hypothesis that a single character is a bit we can only consider 10 unique characters in a second? I can read a whole sentence with more than ten words, much less characters, in a second while also retaining what music I was listening to, what color the page was, how hot it was in the room, how itchy my clothes were, and how thirsty I was during that second if I pay attention to all of those things.

    This is all nonsense.




  • The monkey’s typing and generating Shakespeare is supposed to show the ridiculousness of the concept of infinity. It does not mean it would happen in years, or millions of years, or billions, or trillions, or… So unless the “AI” can move outside the flow of time and take an infinite amount of time and also then has a human or other actual intelligence to review every single result to verify when it comes up with the right one…yeah, not real…this is what happens when we give power to people with no understanding of the problem much less how to solve it. They come up with random ideas from random slivers of information. Maybe in an infinite amount of time a million CEOs could make a longterm profitable company.


  • That was the whole point of the DMCA, though. Prevent bad publicity by claiming copyright infringement and companiea have to take down the content before they investigate any response. Any time a company doesn’t do that they are risking their own necks. So usually they only ignore it if they know for sure it’s bogus which requires that they spend the resources on a person reviewing every notice before the required time expires.


  • That might be the case if you got to talk to someone with the ability to do anything about it. Customer service is just able to tell you what happened, not really make any change. You can file an appeal, but you can’t really ask for much during that process. It’s mostly automated and the people who process those have very specific criteria for overriding an initial decision and have a very short period of time they’re allowed to spend on each appeal.

    So the only way you’d get to someone who might be able to access any of this information is through a lawsuit. Trying to intimidate a worker with no power, no access to information, and a very high quotas is unlikely to have much effect. And these companies all have more lawyers on staff and/or retainer than any of us could afford in a hundred lifetimes. And those people aren’t going to give that information anyway. Nor would they give it to any lawyer you might hire in most cases. Proprietary information has way more legal protections than consumer rights, even in healthcare. You’d need to get a judge to order that release of confidential information about an employee or proprietary algorithm in most states, unless you convince someone to sacrifice their job, their freedom, and possibly their life to become a whistleblower.

    So unless your claim is in the hundreds of thousands at least, it’s unlikely you’ll spend less on lawyers just to get your case in front of someone who can answer these questions much less compelled them to give it. Otherwise, they’d have an incentive to pay claims in good faith in the first place. So there’s no intimidation felt on their end by things like this. It just makes them get I to a defensive posture if anything, and likely reduces your likelihood of getting an appeal approved in a timely manner.

    Your best bet if your claim is denied and appeal fails and you actually have a case is to hope you live in a somewhat progressive state that funds their insurance commission and has more consumer-friendly laws, and go to them for help. Federal laws aren’t going to help much unless you have evidence of fraud or you understand all the details of the case and can point to specific contract language or laws they violated already. But in that case the appeal should be all that’s needed.


  • irotsoma@lemmy.worldtoMildly Interesting@lemmy.worldFor the Americans, might help.
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    7 months ago

    Good luck getting them to give you an answer at all to any of those questions. You’re going to need to get a lawyer and spend a lot of money and time getting any response at all from anyone who actually works for the company, since the customer service doesn’t have access to any of that information and they wouldn’t be allowed to reveal it even of they did. It’s an insurance system, not a social service system where you have some kind of rights.

    Insurance companies are designed to find any reason possible not to pay a claim, whether it’s homeowner’s insurance, liability insurance, or any other type of insurance. And they have plenty of lawyers on staff so they’re happy to make the lawsuit take long enough to cost you more than the claim is worth to you and it barely costs them anything.


  • One problem is the push by conservatives towards individualism. The “I don’t have enough to give handouts.” while ignoring the fact that those “handouts” would help them as much as everyone else. Combined with the “American Dream” lie that says “you could be one of those rich people abusing everyone else as revenge.” which goes back to the social concept of “paying your dues” or the Christian ideal that “suffering is holy”. And so they think if they just suffer long enough, that they will eventually be the ones on top making others suffer to serve them. Plus the political setup that keeps it a two party system of lesser evil choice rather than actually having the ability to choose something good. And the prevalence of modern “conservative media” which is just fascist and oligarchical propaganda designed to empower the hateful, murderous minorities among the poor to keep many just trying to not be murdered for being female and daring to get raped, non-christian and daring to be in the country, black and daring to not be a slave, transgender and daring to use the “correct” public bathrooms that shouldn’t exist as gendered in the first place but because the stalls are so revealing end up seeming like they need to be kept in private rooms, though the stalls could just be actual private rooms like in many other places, eliminating the whole need, or whatever demonized group of the month they want people hating to keep them distracted from economic issues and focused purely on survival. It’s not unique to America or setting new, it’s been getting better over time if looked at in terms of centuries or so, but the current version is especially rough, even compared to times like the great depression. But at least technology has made it slightly more survivable than then.


  • It’s complex. If there was a method for collective bargaining, maybe, but illegal union busting is extremely common and the government agency that enforces that stuff is purposely kept underfunded, so enforcement rarely happens, and because the fines are less than the money they save by union busting, it’s still worth it. Not to mention, there just have never existed unions in “professional” industries like tech. A few have started to pop up but they have had very little luck taking hold due to the union-busting efforts and propaganda. There really is very little middle class in the US anymore, so most people live paycheck to paycheck and missing one or two checks can leave you homeless. And there are very limited safety net programs in most of the US.

    So, companies constantly create cycles of layoff and over-hiring that are coordinated across industries either with direct collusion or just because companies know that when the stock market in their industry goes down, that all the other businesses will be doing the same thing. So, people who have just been laid off are desperate to survive and when you just lost your ability to pay for rent and food, plus lost your medical coverage, and are no longer able to contribute to retirement which social security and Medicare programs no longer are guaranteed to be around in a decade, and there’s only a few months of unemployment benefits which give only a percentage of your pay which was already not enough to afford rent, assuming that the companies don’t illegally pretend that your layoff was actually “for cause”, which has happened to me, and thus making unemployment benefits unavailable, then people are willing to accept less pay each time they change jobs. And most employers no longer offer annual raises that keep up with inflation, so even if you stay with a company for a long time, you end up making less and less over time. And if you quit to go find another job, you have no safety net at all in most states.

    Add to that the extreme un- and under-employment in the country which is not tracked because people who are unemployed for more than a certain period of time are assumed to not want work and drop off the statistics and underemployment is not really tracked. But gig-work is so common now that underemployment is extremely common. So, the competion for jobs that are full time is extremely high.

    Then look at the extreme homelessness issues that people see constantly and fear becoming. And then consider that publicly traded companies are pressured by the system to increase short term profits at the expense of long-term growth, so there’s no incentive to keep a loyal, experienced workforce and every incentive to treat employees as “replaceable cogs”. And the fact that many companies have policies against or at least generally consider it to be a fire-able offense (even if not on paper) to tell coworkers how much money you are paid, so without collective bargaining, there’s often no way to know what you’re being paid less than fairly.

    All of this, and several other factors lead to a job market that generally has every incentive under capitalism to not pay fairly across the board. Sure there are a lot jobs that pay well in tech, finance, etc., but they are the exception that everyone is competing for. So the companies have the power without collective bargaining in place as individuals have very little control over how much jobs pay.

    Anyway, it’s complicated, but workers in the US generally have very few options for employment and have relatively unstable jobs that they rely on to survive. Plus little to no enforcement of the few regulations there are around employment mean that the vast majority of workers take what they can get just to have food and shelter.


  • That’s just how tech is in the US among several other industries like finance and healthcare, etc. This guy just happens to be being honest about the abuse much like Elan Musk has been for years.

    But many companies expect you to work unlimited hours when you’re a salaried employee. Problem is that the minimum pay for a salaried, “professional” employee until this year was only $684/week, though it finally got raised to $1,128 per week starting next year assuming that doesn’t get reversed by the incoming administration as conservatives are very against minimum wage regulation and have been promising to eliminate it. But with median rent being over $3,000/month in San Francisco, that’s not a lot of money.

    It’s just that office work culture has been devolving back to this idea that employers should own their employees time entirely if they’re paid on a salary basis. It’s not as bad as places like Japan, but its getting there. But if you want to get out of poverty, it’s one of the few ways to move up by “paying your dues” so you can then abuse other young people when you move up (another social concept I despise).