I have no doubt that a ML chatbot is perfectly capable of being as useless as an untrained human first level supporter with a language barrier.
And the dude in the article basically admits that's what his call center was like:
Suumit Shah never liked his company’s customer service team. His agents gave generic responses to clients’ issues. Faced with difficult problems, they often sounded stumped, he said.
So evidently good support outcomes were never the goal.
The example the article gives is pretty extreme to me:
[Greg] McBride, the Bankrate analyst, walked MarketWatch through a hypothetical car-buying scenario for an average-priced new car that cost $48,000. Taking into account the trade-in value of your existing vehicle, let’s say you knock some money off the sticker price and finance a $40,000 purchase price at 7.5% for five years. That’s an $801 monthly payment — which means you would need to make $96,100 a year if you wanted that payment to be 10% of your income.
I don't think I'd ever want to spend half a yearly income on any single purchase. An investment in a house being the only exception.
An OTDR sends pulses of laser light into a fiber optic cable and records the minute reflections that occur at every point of the cable over time. The time of arrival of the reflections corresponds to the position of where it was reflected. This way you can record the attenuation of an entire cable just from shining in pulses from one end. Good for checking if a new cable was properly installed, or for finding the location of issues in existing cables for debugging.
Recently a supplier of ours announced that we could finally host their shitty java app on Linux instead of paying fucking Oracle for Solaris. So we were eager to hear the requirements. It was RHEL 8.4 or something, a version that was already EOL at the time.
I don't know that just sounds like a fake concept. I have no idea what an inner child is supposed to be. Sometimes I'm more serious sometimes more playful but that's just mood.
An omnidirectional mic 20 cm downwards from the persons mouth is supposed to sound better than a little boom mic right in front of them? That's not very convincing.
OTDR measurement results in like XML or whatever open self documenting format, just not SOR. Or even just in actual standards compliant SOR, if that's all I can get.
I happen to know one hardware project coming out of CERN that is under an open license, specifically their own CERN OHL.
That's a pretty interesting example I think.
It does seem to work to a certain degree. We know of four suppliers who build switches according to that projects spec, although there is at least one trying to add proprietary bits in a second product line they push harder.
Swiss Post did that too, you used to be able to buy "stamps" (well codes you would write on the envelope serving the same function as stamps) over plain old SMS. They they stopped that since they have that new whatever service. That service works on a PC browser, but on the phone browser the function is not available, no there you need the app. For fucking no reason at all.
Click the first link in the article, in the older post they talk about their stboot bootloader. It does what you suspect, loads the OS image from a different computer which has signed base images.
During the period of writing my master's thesis, about three years ago. I felt like a lazy piece of shit one morning because I wasn't far enough along and had procrastinated too much. So I ended up crying in the shower.
Empire Earth! I don't think it was lacking for its time, but a remaster akin to Age of Empires Definitive Edition would still help a lot.