The Seven Voyages Of SteveI don’t understand the attraction of being able to talk to computers using breezy casual conversational language; I’ve been telling these little digital bastards what to do for decades using extremely precise formalised language and they still get it wrong
Oh no this toot has gone viral, my first on Masto 🫣 If you need me I’ll be under a blanket
Emil "AngryAnt" Johansen
Ben Ramsey
Tom Forsyth
Morten Hilker-Skaaning
Tom Riley
dr 🛠️🛰️📡🎧
Morgunin
Aurin Azadî
Gabriele Svelto [moved]@TomF @sinbad since attribution was clipped I feel obliged to link to the author's excellent page, Dominion Media Television: https://www.facebook.com/DominionMediaTV
basisbit 🦈🇪🇺🇺🇦@gabrielesvelto @TomF @sinbad
If you want to provide attribution, please mention the authors of Star Trek and Terminator.
If you want to provide attribution, please mention the authors of Star Trek and Terminator.
curiousbear
NeoFox
curved-ruler
Blame_Canada_@sinbad I feel like people visiting are always slightly disappointed in our smart-home setup.
Like they expect a conversional computer with touch displays and what we actually installed is just slightly more useful buttons.
Bornach
Landa 
@sinbad probably the same people who think they could casually outwit a malevolent djinn offering them 3 wishes
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Marco Bresciani
Andreas K@yacc143 well, are you willing to bet your continued existence as a human instead of a mustard-filled pretzel halfway down the Challenger Deep on it? ;)
Josh@sinbad The extremely precise, formalized language is _exactly_ why I like computers in the first place! Yes, including the frustrations when I don’t express something in the exact way I needed to
Simon LucyI just talk to the mouse.
Martin Vermeer FCD
Darwin Woodka@sinbad Back in the early days of AI I worked with a woman who wrote a book called "Getting computers to talk like you and me" and my instant reaction was "Why the hell would we want to do that?"
Ricardo Tavares@sinbad It’s the attraction of only finding out what you wanted to ask after some answer has been given.
tonnydourado@sinbad you just crystalized in a paragraph everything I felt since Siri was released.
gkrnours@sinbad @skamille I guess there is the idea from non-technical people in position of power that it's the technical people who don't understand what they are told/ are too lazy to do it in a timely fashion and if they can just talk to the machine, things will be done just as they imagine and much faster
Greg@sinbad This way when the computer does the wrong thing I can blame it for misunderstanding instead of myself for being bad at specifying ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
@GregMorenz @sinbad xddddd try chat GPT
Andrew Zonenberg@sinbad I really hope that this whole LLM / chatbot craze goes the way of NFTs soon.
I'm already having problems with websites where you can't call support directly, you have to interact with a chatbot in order to convince it that your problem is actually worthy of human assistance. If these become more prevalent it's only going to get worse.
LisPi@azonenberg It used to be, at least on older chatbot generations, that you could simply tell the bot you want to talk to a human.
@lispi314 yes but the whole point of them is to avoid paying salaries to human support staff because they cost money.
This is why phone robots etc are so hard to get around. They want you to solve your issue entirely via the robot without ever interacting with an (expensive) human.
@azonenberg I did suspect as much, but fairly often the bot is useless for anything not already documented somewhere else.
@lispi314 Yes, but apparently there's enough users who don't read the FAQs - or management thinks there are - that it's cost-effective to add all of these hoops before the actual support staff.
It's already painful enough going through level 1 support; almost any time I call a vendor it's because I tried basic troubleshooting steps and I need something that level 2 or service can provide.
Which is why I love dealing with industrial/B2B folks instead of consumer oriented companies because they tend to offer actual functional support.
@azonenberg Yeah, I feel that pain.
Tier 1 tends to always just be a repeat of the document troubleshooting steps, it's a waste of time for everyone involved.
Because the assumption is that the average user is an illiterate idiot.
@lispi314 I would love if these vendors would provide a "professional user" account tier - even if it cost a bit more - that gave you direct phone access to level 2 support.
Never gonna happen but would be awesome. Some years ago it took months of repeated calls and site visits to convince Comcast that the intermittent outages I was having were the result of a cable plant issue upstream and not something on premises.
FINALLY someone way too smart to be working in tier 1 support decided to pull logs from my neighbors' modems and noticed any time I had an outage, they did too. Sent a tech out to climb the pole and found a splice that was just friction-fit, no crimp, and would wiggle loose whenever the wind hit it right.
Esme Ciredutemps@azonenberg @lispi314 maybe there are a lot of people who don't read the FAQs ?
And you're not statistically representative of a user ?
And you're not statistically representative of a user ?
tessarakt@azonenberg @sinbad Give the task to your own chatbot :-)
Kevin McCurley@sinbad The nice thing about computers is that you can beat the hell out of them when they misbehave. Unlike kids and colleagues.
maegul@sinbad Reminds me of how I encountered older/boomer/non-tech people in 90s telling me that computers will only “happen” when they have a voice interface (like Star Trek).
Of course, that doesn’t make sense because talking out loud to do your work would be very weird and distracting and prob slow. Then you realise it was because they sucked at typing and navigating the formalised interface.
Gretchen Anderson@sinbad it’s like when a genie offers a wish…beware
Lafncow 
@sinbad Before it took hours for me to craft unfathomable mistakes by misunderstanding the computer. Now IT misunderstands ME! Much more efficient!
Alex Zani@sinbad Learning and remembering commands is hard and boring. I think that's what it all boils down to.
Arnan de Gans@sinbad exactly!
Cogito ergo mecagoendios@sinbad I always compare voice commands a vr interfaces to "powerpoint transitions". They are things that make you FEEL like they are supposed to make work easier the first time you learn about them or when you are not familiar with the field, but you will inevitably disable them in your work setup as soon as you have tried them for 5 minutes, because you actually accomplish tasks faster without those fancy purely aesthetic decorations.
Oggie@sinbad I actually respected that in star trek they tended to have an extremely stilted and affected manner when addressing the computer. There wasn't ambiguity, it was 'this tone/way of speaking'.
I get some minor value in being able to verbally address a computer ( not for me. Never for me. I mumble to myself all the time and want none of that shit recorded, and I don't trust companies), but the most I can see wanting is it knowing 'max' and 'maximum' are probably the same.
James Davis Nicoll@sinbad Ah, memories of tabletop roleplaying games and vaguely-worded wishes.