@geerlingguy techno tim certainly escalated the youtube ai violence with his new content, don't buy in to the big tech ai hate instead take a divergent jesuit course based in intellectual curiosity and find out how great things really could be - my 2c

the caveat being i think Tim did great with what he has but he needs more nvram or maybe unified memory scheme like ualink or cxl - maybe even an apple machine running bsd or linux and block device?

@geerlingguy They weren't much better for high dollar business accounts, even years ago. Automated responses blamed it on your CPE, which often took hours if not days of level 5+ escalation to get any attention whatsoever. Every now and then the decision was rip and replace with a new circuit from a different backbone provider and LEC.

I try to not blame employees personally for stuff like this though. They're all overworked and underappreciated. AT&T is not alone in this regard either.

@geerlingguy I've had one positive chatbot / phone bot interaction over the years and it was with my ISP. We changed over, everything worked fine with my own router except the phone wouldn't work.

Called the support line and my heart sank when the robot voice came online. But it reset something and presto it worked.

Of all the interactions with bots, that has still been the only one that solved an issue. Everything else has been frustration.

@geerlingguy Funny, I've had this argument with Vodafone, they could not get it through their thick heads that I'm not using Wifi. I think it's a training issue, as even stating using cable, they kept defaulting to the usual playbook of thick walls and moving the computer.

(Issue was somewhere between the ONT and the Cabinet)

People can be equally stupid sometimes.

I once reported to an ISP that I am sending router solicitations, but I am getting no router advertisements back from you.

Eventually they sent a technician to look at the fiber box (even though evidence suggested a 99.9% probability the flaw was on their side of the connection).

The technician disregarded everything I had reported about the problem, hooked up his own laptop to the fiber box, and ran some speed test, and then concluded everything is working.

So I stated something along the lines of: I don't know what you are doing on your laptop, and I don't really care either. What I care about is that you are not sending any packets whatsoever when I hook up my laptop.

So he called somebody and I ended up talking with somebody else on the phone and explained again that I was sending router solicitations, and they were sending no packets back to me at all.

And now we get to the point where it took a turn for the worse: The guy on the phone now claimed he could see that my laptop had never sent any packets to them in the first place. I said then he is looking in the wrong place, because I can see the packets being sent.

So he asked me if my MAC address was (read out the correct MAC). And I confirmed. And he then said, yeah, we haven't received any packets from that MAC address. So I politely explained to him, that obviously they have, because otherwise he couldn't know my MAC address.

And he proceeded to make up some story about their equipment being able to see the MAC addresses of devices even if they never sent a packet.