Everyone in tech has used the phrase “Garbage In, Garbage Out” at one time or another. It’s the notion that if your programs use garbage input as their source of truth, you are going to get garbage out. Meaning incorrect results that users are expecting or think are correct.
I see an even bigger problem with AI. It’s not just “Garbage In, Garbage Out”, we are heading towards “Nothing In, More Garbage Out or ALL Garbage Out”. In the age of AI, its training on existing data and the folks putting up “GOOD data” on the Internet is becoming less and less. Not to mention more incorrect data and false data is being posted.
Take a look Stack Overflow as an example where AI is for the large part getting its training data from for coding. Stack Overflow and very GOOD data, or at least it did in the early days because the site was curated by HUMANS which led to very high quality correct answers. But back in 2022, when ChatGPT was launched, traffic to Stack Overflow dropped by 20-30% and was down more like 40-50% by 2024. In 2023 Stack Overflow was allowing AI answers but mostly the answers ended up being wrong code, plausible sounding nonsense, and hard to detect hallucinations. The moderators were overwhelmed by low quality incorrect AI answers and wanted less AI content or AI banned altogether. Unfortunately Stack Exchange leadership made the opposite decision and wanted more AI content. That led to pretty much the death of Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange altogether. There likely hasn’t been much in the form of GOOD data there in the past couple of years. So one can forget AI training on any recent GOOD code as Stack Overflow was probably the main place or only place that sort of code was found.
This isn’t just technology and coding. The same erosion to GOOD data is happening everywhere. Take a look at reliable, fact based, investigative news journalism. It hardly exists anymore. Replaced 90% by mostly lies, BS, intentionally misleading made up nonsense all with zero facts or truth. This is what AI is training on now.
The list goes on and on.
Don’t get me wrong, AI is very useful in many cases especially if the model is based on GOOD data. There are already 100’s of specialized models that train on very specific topics / data so I expect those to fair well. But any sort of general AI model pulling data from the Internet is heading down a dark deep hole.
I lifted the following image from this post which reminded me to write this in the first place https://lnkd.in/g7tCqYrF
This is a quote by Evans Hankey is absolutely untrue. In fact I find the band selection EXTREMELY limiting. So much in fact that I was disgusted attempting to find a band that I could even buy. Take for example the Sports Loop. Apple doesn’t even provide a solid color whatsoever. And their color choices are TERRIBLE.
Even the older style (which they do not sell anymore), which were almost a solid color except for small runs along the sides where not great either.
So if there are thousands of potential combinations how come I can’t find 1 solid color??!!!!
Quote: “an unbelievable number of potential combinations, well into the thousands”
Well this doesn’t look good for Google at all. No surprise though:
To be clear Google still does a lot of interesting and popular stuff, but it’s pretty damn clear that the ethics and bravery that guided the company originally were obliterated some time back.
I have to think that revelations Google was paying wireless carriers and smartphone manufacturers to not compete with it will likely fuel several different antitrust inquiries and court cases. Maybe wireless carriers would have always failed to develop compelling app stores of their own thanks to innate incompetence, but it’s harder than ever for that to happen when Google is paying you billions of dollars to not even try. And then, should those competing app stores succeed, paying handset makers not to carry them anyway, even if they happen to become popular.
I bought a couple of Nanoleaf products at the end of last year mostly because I saw they were being sold on Apple’s website and saw articles about them in the past year.
Nanoleaf sells various lights that work with HomeKit and other such home automation systems or just directly with your mobile phone.
Although the products themselves seem pretty decent (and cool) I’m not even going to link to any of them because I highly recommend for people to stay away from their products. A company with such absolute TERRIBLE (ie. pretty much non-existent) customer service should be avoided at all costs.
I am going to get Apple’s attention on this as well as I don’t think Apple would want to be associated with a company with such terrible customer service.
For the most part the products work as they should except one of them is supposed to have touch gesture support so that I can turn on / off the lights by just touching the lights. But that wasn’t working at all no matter what I did.
Following is a log of how support has gone so far on getting some help from Nanoleaf on this:
Jan 2: Submitted a request via their website that the touch gestures were not working. This seems to be the only way to contact support.
Jan 22: Didn’t hear anything back AT all other than an automated reply that said the request would be handled. So I sent a followup asking if I will hear anything back at all from anyone.
Jan 22: Received a response back with an apology basically saying that a recent firmware update is set to fix this issue. They asked for a serial number so they can run a test and update if its needed.
Jan 22: I responded and asked if there was a way of checking the firmware of the device. Since its mounted on the wall and taking it down is NOT an easy thing just to get the serial number. I also mentioned I’m on the latest firmware according to their app. I already did this well ahead of time. I also responded with the version of the firmware the device was at.
Jan 28: Some bogus email about the issue being merged into a new issue without an explanation. No explanation as to why or what this is about. Totally irrelevant and no answer or response to anything about the issue really.
Jan 28: Another email asking what account I use to login to Nanoleaf. I told them I didn’t setup an account and don’t plan to. I don’t need my devices reporting anything back to their company. I asked again since they know the firmware should it be fixed. If they claim its fixed in a certain firmware release then just confirm if it should be fixed.
Feb 7: I still haven’t heard back so I sent another email summarizing things and telling them that they need to do much better with their support.
Feb 8: I get an automated email that their team needs additional info. I’ve already provided everything they would need but they refuse to answer any of my questions etc.
Feb 11: I get an automated email that the issue is in a pending state and will auto-close in 4 days.
Feb 11: I send an email asking if this is a joke that they are going to close the issue.
Feb 12: I get another automated email similar to Feb 8th.
Feb 12: Another email asking me for serial number (not provided due to not wanting to take the thing off the wall), Firmware (already provided probably twice at this point), Nanoleaf App version (already provided), asked to DISABLE the touch gesture to see if issue persists (so, if I disable the touch gesture how do I test if it works????????). And they asked if I was using Android or iOS (likely provided the very first time or at least a couple of times since the beginning).
Feb 13: Just to please these clowns I answered all these questions (5 of them) in a followup INCLUDING the serial number since I found I could see it through the app. But they couldn’t even tell me that and kept saying I’d have to look at the back of the device.
Mar 7: STILL NO RESPONSE, over 2 months later!!!!
I’ve pretty much given up with this and will just go out of my way to make sure people do NOT buy from this company.
If anyone in the press wants to contact me please do so through this website. And those of you who I know at Apple, please make sure someone there sees this. I’ll be sending in additional correspondence to Apple on this.
Anyone from Nanoleaf that wants to contact me, DON’T BOTHER. At this point its too late.
So, Slack claims they have 100% uptime even though they had a major outage yesterday. Because they were never honest with this uptime claim in the first place they try to give a reason why its likely better than one would think by making some claim that its “an average derived from the number of affected users”. Whatever that means. So they can probably say, well, we had an outage and 12 million users MINUS 1 were not able to use slack but there was 1 that was able to use it so we are 100% up.
Outages started around 10:14 am on Jan 4th, 2021 according to their status history page. They actually continued in some manner with some of their services until about 12:05 am on Jan 5th.
They admitted to a full blown outage at 11:20 am.
At 12:29 pm they said that some customers may see improvements connecting to Slack. We all know that most of us had issues for at least part of the afternoon.
But lets be really conservative and say that for at least an hour their services were completely out for ALL of their users. We know its much longer for a large portion of users and at least a good number of users.
So their uptime “for the quarter” should be no better than 98.5833333% for the 4 days in the quarter so far. Again, that is being super conservative.
BUT obviously the calculation they are using isn’t a calculation whatsoever. Its just a hardcoded 100% value there no matter what the situation is!!! Lets just be honest with what is being shown here.
