Understatement, I know, but I find this so annoying, and it certainly feels malicious.

I was just commenting the other day how ridiculous it is that google search results literally serve up malware to people via paid ads. My neighbor was running into issues where her computer kept getting “infected” and a full screen scam would take control, blaring out a loud message that her computer was infected with a virus, that it was infecting microsoft’s servers, and she had to call them now to fix it.

After investigating, I found out that these types of scams are stored as blobs on Microsoft’s cloud service, but the links are spread via ads in google search. When I tried searching for the exact search terms my neighbor was using on my own devices and my own network, I found out that google was serving me the exact same ads, aka sponsored links. They look like legitimate results for things that people search for, like showing what appears to be a link to Amazon when searching for a product, even the links will say “www.amazon.com”.

Obviously I told my neighbor not to use Chrome and suggested some browser alternatives. I installed uBlock on all the browsers (including chrome) just to be safe. Then I showed her how to tell when things are ads, even when they are deceiving, and to never click on ads or sponsored links under any circumstances.

But it’s definitely infuriating that they are serving up malware in their ads, don’t respond to reports in a timely manner, are getting people caught in scams that they allow to advertise on their network but then somehow object to people managing those risks by blocking ads from untrustworthy sources, like google.

I would truthfully and happily go back in time and tell people not to waste with the fucked up bullshit technology of the past. I mean Angular 1, what the hell was that? Twitter integration? Fuck you 2010. Zend Framework? You should be hanged. HANGED.

Will be interesting to see how many dozens of comments we get here tonight.

♪ You’re so pretty. ♪

♪ Oh, so pretty. ♪

♪ You are pretty and witty and GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY. ♪

Nobody brings that much marinuanans to an elementary school and even if they did they aren’t giving that shit away free to the kids. Shit costs money.

Could be that he’s the type to shoot the messenger, and nobody wanted to be told “You’re fired” for letting him know he’s got tp on his feetsies.

But there have been more hurricanes per season, and we’re getting hotter summers and colder winters.

There have also been recessions and pandemics. I only bring them up because they’re specifically mentioned in the Gay Agenda, article 69, section 666, paragraph 13.

In a way, I’m glad people are slowing starting to come around and pay attention to this. For years, any time I would publicly complain about Amazon customer service online, it was very common for people to be completely dismissive or even blame me. I’d hear statements like “sure Amazon sucks, but they have great customer service” and I’d think to myself, just wait until it’s your time to find out that the customer service isn’t what you think it is.

Long story short, the item came with a broken part. Should have been quick and easy to rectify (send a replacement part, send a replacement unit, or refund the purchase). The seller was completely unhelpful. Amazon customer service would not intervene and insisted that I continue fruitlessly corresponding with the vendor, even though they had an “A-to-Z” money back guarantee if something goes wrong. It literally took months of back and forth between me, the vendor, and Amazon customer service before things were finally refunded in full.

So, basically I gave them another chance and they showed that things hadn’t improved a bit.

Translated for the hard of hearing:

Master Lock closed down. I used to use Master Lock all the time when I was a little child.

I take mashter-lacka goomp een naste lots a naste liddum puzzles yah puddum.

OH NO So what’s a good way to cook edamame for people who aren’t used to eating it?

Florida voters. Does it need any more of an explanation? You don’t get a shot because you’re not in the “in” group (assumption based on the fact that you’re posting here and asking that question specifically). Unfortunately, it could be worse. Much, much worse. But that’s irrelevant.

What’s more likely, someone at reddit fucked up an analysis, or these ads are 14x better than Google or 31x better than FB?

What’s most likely is that you misread or misinterpreted what was stated. It says the new format outperforms other types of ads by 28%, not that they get 28% CTR.

Anecdotally speaking, I’ve been suspecting this was happening already with code related AI as I’ve been noticing a pretty steep decline in code quality of the code suggestions various AI tools have been providing.

Some of these tools, like GitHub’s AI product, are trained on their own code repositories. As more and more developers use AI to help generate code and especially as more novice level developers rely on AI to help learn new technologies, more of that AI generated code is getting added to the repos (in theory) that are used to train the AI. Not that all AI code is garbage, but there’s enough that is garbage in my experience, that I suspect it’s going to be a garbage in, garbage out affair sans human correction/oversight. Currently, as far as I can tell, these tools aren’t really using much in the way of good metrics to rate whether the code they are training on is quality or not, nor whether it actually even works or not.

More and more often I’m getting ungrounded output (the new term for hallucinations) when it comes to code, rather than the actual helpful and relevant stuff that had me so excited when I first started using these products. And I worry that it’s going to get worse. I hope not, of course, but it is a little concerning when the AI tools are more consistently providing useless / broken suggestions.

Odds are slim they’ll survive to 2025 drinking at that pace.

BECAUSE I CAN’T SEE WHAT I TYPE OTHERWISE HONEY I LEFT MY GLASSES IN THE BATHROOM AND MY KNEES WON’T GET ME BACK THERE ANY TIME SOON

I’m not here just to be a contrarian, but I really don’t fully agree with some of the hot takes in these comments. So here’s my perspective:

I’m in a rural area and because of this type of funding, I have decent high speed internet. The same can be said for my neighbors, some of whom didn’t have internet until very recently because the options weren’t really viable or reliable.

I get that this is a wonderful opportunity to sling vitriol at the government AND businesses. I get that there were spectacular failures in the past. But the reality is, like usual, more nuanced than that.

A lot of this type of money has, and likely will be, used to support building infrastructure for rural areas that would otherwise not be economically viable for companies to provide that kind of service to. Living in a rural area, I’m not convinced that many/any people are going to change their vote to Biden because they suddenly have access to (or promises of future access to) fiber internet. I’m also not convinced that Biden and his administration would have any reasonable expectation otherwise.

Additionally, I’m sure some of this money will go to the big corporations and directly into the pockets of the top execs. However, it does provide work and jobs for regular “commoners” as well. It’s also the case that the big players aren’t always the ones getting that money. A lot of this type of money is going to replace copper infrastructure with fiber, and a lot of the work is being done by smaller / regional companies because they’re the ones who have been operating these areas all these years while the big players focused on the most profitable areas with the higher returns on investment.

Of course, feel free to aimlessly hate on the entire system, but at least do so knowing that this type of thing IS helping real people and that if/when they see these types of comments, it’s pretty clear that folks are being unrealistic and dogmatic.

Stranger even than a live armadillo in the anus?

In the USA at least, any time you buy alcohol, tobacco, or any number of other random things that the retailer decides to flag as requiring ID, then you’ll need assistance from a cashier. Random things include razor blades, compressed air, some herbal supplements, spray paint, butane torches, or any of dozens of other items. Any time you accidentally scan something twice, you’ll need a cashier’s assistance. Any time something rings up the wrong price or any time the UPC doesn’t scan, you’ll need a cashier’s assistance. Also, if you’re buying gift cards, you may need a cashier’s assistance.

Also, different stores have different machines and different machines work better than others. Many places have ridiculously sensitive machines that freeze up if so much as a fruit fly farts on it. Some places use “AI cameras” to detect theft, which basically the algorithm for that seems to be “If (customer scanned something OR customer didn’t scan something) then (theft, so freeze and call cashier for assistance)”.

So, the frequency is highly variable. For some stores, I can usually manage to get by with almost never needing assistance. For others, it’s practically every visit.

Personally, I don’t think the technology is a failure. It’s the implementation that’s the pain point.

I’m no fan of Walmart, but the local store has the lenient self checkout machines that don’t make you place and leave your items in the bagging area. And there’s a hand scanner for each machine. The hand scanner is pretty close to instant, so I can literally scan an entire cart full of items in under a minute (with caveats) and you don’t even have to take things out of the cart to scan them (with caveats). Sometimes there are hiccups and obviously some items are sold by weight, so that’ll slow things down.

But even with all that, the implementation is the pain point because they’ll only have 1 person running the machines, so if they have to run off to help a customer or multiple people need help at the same time, you just have to wait. Also, the particular store I go to shuts down half the machines ridiculously early in the evening. When the machines break, they stay broken for weeks or months. And they have some kind of ridiculous system where some of the machines are cash-only, some are card-only, but the majority will accept either – this adds to a lot of inefficiency because a lot of customers don’t know which machines are which and if you mess up and pick the wrong one then things get tied up while you wait for a cashier to come and transfer you over to a different one so you can pay.

The other big factor is that customers were trained on the old shitty style self checkouts where you had to scan each item one at a time, place it in the bagging area, leave it there until you pay, and if so much as a speck of dust landed in the bagging area or a piece of onion skin fell off, it would freeze up. So even with the new lenient hand scanners, people still do it the old and slow way.

The theater folks I used to know back 15+ years ago were pretty vocal about the fact that Maher is pretty nasty to work for and that he’s a giant asshole. I don’t know if that’s common knowledge or common experience, but seeing these folks’ passionate distaste for him left an impression on me.