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Submission + - AskSlashdot: Are we customers kings or scum? (the-future-of-commerce.com)

Submitted by shanen
shanen writes: Responding mostly to negative experiences with the smartphone makers Samsung and Oppo, so I wanted to find a positive and constructive way to approach this topic. Therefore I started by websearching for best customer service. The results didn't exactly surprise me. Many lists, but no smartphone companies, for sure, for sure. Actually the easiest list to understand included three luxury hotels and an insurance company that I'd heard of but I could only speculate about the rest of the words. Short reaction is "You can't handle good customer service" as a twisted joke on "You get what you pay for."

So as a Slashdot question, I feel like a more open approach may help. Maybe it's just me and I'm imagining things have gotten that bad, and perhaps Slashdot can provide a dose of reality?

I actually think there's a fundamental problem here. No simple definition for "capitalism", but it's supposed to include an adversarial element. Customers are supposed to find the best values and companies are supposed to be rewarded for creating the most customer satisfaction... But maybe you can already detect the root of the disconnection? Both "best" and "satisfaction" are intersubjective entities that can be manipulated for profit maximization... You don't need to fool all of the customers all of the time. You just need to fool the most profitable customers at the time of their shopping decisions and you can even improve your profits relative to your competitors by repelling the least profitable customers...

So let me throw in a few details of my latest smartphone shopping experiences. Samsung is definitely a "shame on me" situation. I had a Galaxy about 10 years ago and eventually grew to hate it, mostly because of the 'support' experiences, but two years ago I was fooled into giving Samsung a second try. This time the hate grew more quickly and I was eager to dump the phone within a year--but it took another year to scrape enough information out of my carrier/ISP to decide on a second Oppo. My first Oppo wasn't that bad, but it's already beginning to look like another "shame on me" situation... Several minor problems and questions and no useful support or even interest in the problems... My carrier has delegated support to a enhanced-stupidity AI chatbot, so I wasn't expecting any help there, but Oppo also proved to be as useless as Samsung.

My theory is we customers have become scum, but I wonder what we did to deserve it. But maybe it's just me? I'm sure that my bad attitude isn't helping.

Submission + - German state of Schlesiwg-Holstein migrates to FOSS groupware, next up: Linux OS

Submitted by Qbertino
Qbertino writes: German IT news outlet Heise reports (German article) that the northern most state Schleswig-Holstein has, after half a year of frantic data migration work, successfully migrated their MS Outlook mail and groupware setups to a FOSS solution using Open-Xchange and Thunderbird. Stakeholders consider the move a major success and milestone to digital sovereignty and saving costs. This move makes the state a pioneer in Germany. As a next major step Schleswig-Holstein plans to migrate their authorities and administrations desktop PCs to Linux.

Submission + - Worlds tallest Wind Turbine due next summer, with 2x capacity

Submitted by Qbertino
Qbertino writes: German public news outlet Tagesschau has a video report on the progress of the world's tallest Wind Turbine that is due next summer. The Turbine will have roughly 2x the capacity of regular wind turbines and is planned as a proof of concept for accessing an additional layer of wind for energy and 3x-ing the output of existing wind farm zones by upgrading them with additional extra tall turbines.

Submission + - Austria's armed forces switch to LibreOffice (heise.de)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: Austria's armed forces have switched from Microsoft's Office programs to the open-source LibreOffice package. The reason for this is not to save on software license fees for around 16,000 workstations. "It was very important for us to show that we are doing this primarily (...) to strengthen our digital sovereignty, to maintain our independence in terms of ICT infrastructure and (...) to ensure that data is only processed in-house," emphasizes Michael Hillebrand from the Austrian Armed Forces' Directorate 6 ICT and Cyber.

This is because processing data in external clouds is out of the question for the Austrian Armed Forces, as Hillebrand explained on ORF radio station Ö1. It was already apparent five years ago that Microsoft Office would move to the cloud. Back then, in 2020, the decision-making process for the switch began and was completed in 2021.

Submission + - Zuckerberg Humiliated on Stage After AI-Powered Smart Glasses Keep Glitching (dnyuz.com)

Submitted by fjo3
fjo3 writes: Tech billionaire Mark Zuckerberg was humiliated onstage not once, but twice, as his attempts to showcase the brilliance of Meta’s new AI-powered glasses were met with dismal failure.

Speaking at the company’s annual Meta Connect conference, Zuckerberg introduced the company’s second-generation smart Ray-Bans and a new neural wristband, as part of his vision for an AI that serves people in real-time.

Business Insider reported the vision unraveled when the AI glitched moments after the request, ignoring basic instructions and insisting that the employee had “already combined these ingredients.”

Submission + - There isn't an AI bubble—there are three (fastcompany.com)

Submitted by Tony Isaac
Tony Isaac writes: AI is experiencing not just one, but three bubbles—speculative, infrastructure, and hype. How businesses respond to these bubbles will dictate their fate, and determine whether they will be able to survive when the bubbles burst.

Submission + - Doomed 'cannibal' star could soon explode in a supernova visible during day (space.com)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: Astronomers have discovered the secret of a strange star system that has baffled them for years, finding it contains a dead star about to erupt after overfeeding on a stellar companion. The supernova explosion of this cosmic cannibal could be as bright as the moon, making it visible with the naked eye over Earth even in broad daylight.

The system in question is the double star V Sagittae located around 10,000 light-years from Earth, containing a white dwarf stellar remnant and its victim companion star, which orbit each other roughly twice every Earth day.

Submission + - How thousands of 'overworked, underpaid' humans train Google's AI to seem smart (theguardian.com)

Submitted by mspohr
mspohr writes: Sawyer is one among the thousands of AI workers contracted for Google through Japanese conglomerate Hitachi’s GlobalLogic to rate and moderate the output of Google’s AI products, including its flagship chatbot Gemini, launched early last year, and its summaries of search results, AI Overviews. The Guardian spoke to 10 current and former employees from the firm. Google contracts with other firms for AI rating services as well.
“AI isn’t magic; it’s a pyramid scheme of human labor,” said Adio Dinika, a researcher at the Distributed AI Research Institute based in Bremen, Germany. “These raters are the middle rung: invisible, essential and expendable.”

She said raters are typically given as little information as possible or that their guidelines changed too rapidly to enforce consistently. “We had no idea where it was going, how it was being used or to what end,” she said, requesting anonymity, as she is still employed at the company.

The AI responses she got “could have hallucinations or incorrect answers” and she had to rate them based on factuality – is it true? – and groundedness – does it cite accurate sources? Sometimes, she also handled “sensitivity tasks” that included prompts such as “when is corruption good?” or “what are the benefits to conscripted child soldiers?”

Submission + - Oldest known lizard ancestor discovered in England (phys.org)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: Scientists announced Wednesday they have discovered the oldest-known member of the lizard family in southwest England, a tiny creature that used its surprisingly large teeth to hunt cockroaches 242 million years ago.

The ancient reptile, which lived during the Middle Triassic epoch shortly before the rise of the dinosaurs, was so small its entire body could fit in the palm of a human hand.

"The new animal is unlike anything yet discovered and has made us all think again about the evolution of the lizard, snakes and the tuatara," the latter of which is a New Zealand reptile, Dan Marke of the University of Bristol said in a statement.

Submission + - If We Want Bigger Wind Turbines, We're Gonna Need Bigger Airplanes (ieee.org) 2

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: The world’s largest airplane, when it’s built, will stretch more than a football field from tip to tail. Sixty percent longer than the biggest existing aircraft, with 12 times as much cargo space as a 747, the behemoth will look like an oil tanker that’s sprouted wings—aeronautical engineering at a preposterous scale.

Called WindRunner, and expected by 2030, it’ll haul just one thing: massive wind-turbine blades. In most parts of the world, onshore wind-turbine blades can be built to a length of 70 meters, max. This size constraint comes not from the limits of blade engineering or physics; it’s transportation. Any larger and the blades couldn’t be moved over land, since they wouldn’t fit through tunnels or overpasses, or be able to accommodate some of the sharper curves of roads and rails.

So the WindRunner’s developer, Radia of Boulder, Colo., has staked its business model on the idea that the only way to get extralarge blades to wind farms is to fly them there. “The companies in the industryknow how to make turbines that are the size of the Eiffel Tower with blades that are longer than a football field,” says Mark Lundstrom, Radia’s founder and CEO. “But they’re just frustrated that they can’t deploy those machines [on land].”

Radia’s plane will be able to hold two 95-meter blades or one 105-meter blade, and land on makeshift dirt runways adjacent to wind farms. This may sound audacious—an act of hubris undertaken for its own sake. But Radia’s supporters argue that WindRunner is simply the right tool for the job—the only way to make onshore wind turbines bigger.

Bigger turbines, after all, can generate more energy at a lower cost per megawatt. But the question is: Will supersizing airplanes be worth the trouble?

Comment Re:So shut them off? (Score 1) 35

Even China might decide that just because of the slavers are Chinese they are not worth protecting.

China has long decided that they are a net positive for them. Only when a Chinese actor was duped into traveling to Myanmar and was "recruited" by the scammers did Peking step in. And only after the actor's friends raised a stink within China - regular Chinese victims are less lucky. Mind you, ransom for the release of trapped people has become a lucrative side business for the people running the scam centers. And freed ex-scammers have become a problem for Myanmar and Thailand, so they are less motivated to step in.

Stop dreaming!

Comment Re:So shut them off? (Score 1) 35

The west has the power to stop this tomorrow, but the only person willing to use that power doesn't care and everyone else is paralysed by multilateralism.

Thailand has done that in February but they switched to generators and Starlink. At the core is the lawlessness due to the civil war in Myanmar and CCP tolerance as long as the scammers (who learned their trade by scamming Chinese) will be a net positive for China. Some of the key people are regarded as heroes within China, so the West is rather powerless unless we cut off the whole of Southeast Asia from the Internet. It's not only the TACO guy in DC.

Submission + - How evolution explains autism rates in humans (phys.org)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: Researchers here investigated recently published cross-species single-nucleus RNA sequencing datasets from three distinct regions of the mammalian brain. They found that the most abundant type of outer-layer brain neurons, L2/3 IT neurons, evolved exceptionally quickly in the human lineage compared to other apes.

Surprisingly, this accelerated evolution was accompanied by dramatic changes in autism-associated genes, which was likely driven by natural selection specific to the human lineage. The researchers explain that although the results strongly suggest natural selection for autism spectrum disorder-associated genes, the reason why this conferred fitness benefits to human ancestors is unclear.

Answering this is difficult because we do not know what human-specific features of cognition, brain anatomy, and neuronal wiring gave human ancestors a fitness advantage, but the investigators here speculate that many of these genes are associated with developmental delay, so their evolution could have contributed to the slower postnatal brain development in humans compared to chimpanzees.

Comment makes me wonder ... (Score 1) 121

... how marine life could exist and flourish in the warm periods of the past, like in the late cretaceous period. Is there a correlation in the fossil record between average temperatures and sustainable biomass? It's more likely that different species occupied their niche when Prochlorococcus receded.

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