Oh it gets worse. Apparently Comcast is now using a voice-changing AI - it's a real (probably Latin or Asian) person getting their voice replaced on-the-fly to sound "American."
I know it's more trendy to bash them for this... but I honestly struggle a lot to understand call center people with thick accents from other countries, and I often find myself wondering "am I racist for wanting to speak to a native right now" just because I cannot make out what they are saying.
The cadence was extremely robotic and consistent. Only thing that makes me think it wasn’t AI was the very end when they repeated a confirmation code and didn’t use the NATO names for the letters the second time around.
Agreed. I suppose they'd have slightly less credibility by saying "we hacked <unnamed company>" but it strikes me as far classier than naming & shaming.
I'm not sure this is "naming and shaming" because I don't seen an intent to shame. They disclosed the vulnerability privately, waited months for patches, and were commended by the organization with the vulnerabilities.
There's no shame here, this was a mistake, probably made by a human, and ultimately corrected. Nobody seems upset by the outcome!
Fable feels less cumbersome to work with, but it is SO DAMN ANNOYING with the refusals that I'm leaning more and more on Sol, and very much looking forward to GPT6. Just seems like Anthropic is trying their hardest to ruin their reputation and user experience.
Yeah I feel like I'm living in a different dimension than these people. I wonder what they're working on. I've literally never had it refuse everything and I max out my 20x plan every week
Can I ask which country you're in? I have a theory that the safeguards differ depending on the user's country.
I'm in Australia, and Fable downgrades to Opus when testing for bugs in memory in a legacy C code base. If Fable starts taking initiative and writes a test case that involves writing to a null pointer, that's the end of the conversation.
As one random example, today I had it hit a refusal loop when adding a country selector dropdown to a form, presumably because it contained a “bad” country name? I hit refusals at least 2-3 times per day, sometimes many more. The worst part is it is often right in the middle of a multi-stage task, so the only option is really to switch to Opus 5 and let it defecate its absurdly verbose comments all over the rest of the edits in the turn and hope it doesn’t go on one of its tangents, then have Sol do damage control. Oh and I got approved for their “cyber verification program” blessing, which comically does absolutely nothing for Fable.
Fun one: Costa Rican addresses are still often relative to a landmark. I used to have a subcontractor there, and his address was something like "500m north of the old church" (which IIRC wasn't even there anymore). It was kinda hard to figure out how to get this into the DHL website, but it always made it there.
I remember in San José and maybe other Costa Rican cities with a street number system where even/odd were used for the cardinal directions. Calles (streets) run N/S, Avenidas (avenues) run E/W, and odd is east or north. So Calle 8 Avenida 7 is in the northwest. I also remember finding it helpful in theory but not very helpful in practice since the rest of the addressing wasn't normalized. I also recall more than one Latin American city where they ran the numbers up one-by-one, and this didn't scale over the decades or centuries, so they renumbered... just meaning that every house had two numbers, and people used both.
I learned about this when standing at the customs counter in San Jose at two in the morning. I had an address for an AirBnB but the address as given didn't come up in google maps, or the system used by customs. They wanted to know where we were staying, and it was a bit of a sticking point. Eventually we were able to whatsapp the host and got a different way of addressing it that worked. Quite a memorable encounter.
I don’t have time to check flight logs but I personally landed at LGA coming from MDW on Sunday. And I also know people who got diverted within the hour coming back to LGA that night. 30-40 minutes doesn’t seem accurate. That aside, if you’ve ever done operational staffing, you’d know that you should probably have at least one redundancy. When there is any chance of emergency or two events happening simultaneously, you should have more than one person.
One last meta point. We live in the wealthiest country in the history of the world, and the highest air travel prices (some part is a function of longer distances I know). We should expect that we have ample coverage, if not over-coverage, at all times for one of our major metropolitan airports. Pay them.
12am-5am is very quiet, at about 1 per hour. But the accident happened during the 10pm-12am time slot, which is not as busy as other times of day, but can still have workload spikes as evidenced by this situation.
In this case there were two arrivals within 4 minutes of each other and two departures, in addition to the emergency plane that had just aborted takeoff.
Which is a completely reasonable amount of traffic for one controller to handle. This wasn't the controller's fault. The firetruck received a clearance, had that clearance revoked, and either didn't hear the revocation or ignored it.
If you have ever spent time listening to LiveATC you will realize that like everyone, "tunnel ear" is a real thing - if United 1002 has received the clearance/instructions they expect, read them back, and are proceeding it can be moderately difficult to get their attention again, even with perfect verbiage.
The controller was not guilty of malfeasance, but clearing the trucks onto the runway with an airliner on short final was a mistake, no matter whatever else one could say about it.
Same as if the radios stopped working or otherwise communication fails. Execute the planned procedures (which vary).
Often Approach will take over the "tower" and operate in crippled mode (no clearances to cross active runways, you must go down to the end kind of thing).
Some airports are uncontrolled at various times and would revert to that. Some airlines would require the pilot execute a missed approach and deviate to a towered airport, others may allow them to land.
Please be satire