With all the AI rollout in customer support, I’ve essentially built up a habit of almost immediately trying to get in touch with a human if the bot doesn’t give me what I’m looking for right away. My experience is that in most cases, the bot will try to walk me in circles, recommending that I try stuff I’ve already tried (that’s why I’m contacting support). In all those cases, the bot isn’t saving the company any time, it’s just wasting my time and making me irritated.

In some cases it does save them support capacity, if only because I eventually give up on getting any support and just quit the service.

Thanks! I very much enjoy my profession, but I can also clearly understand that it’s not for everyone. My major impression after lecturing for different engineering courses is that chemistry differs from most in that you need (even) more basics before things start getting cool. Most of the other engineers can start doing actual cool projects in first or second year, while the chemists don’t really get to the good stuff before third or fourth year. On the other hand, I’m very glad I pulled through to the cool stuff at the other side :D

Dude… y u so mad?

Someone who actually believes in their own message, and honestly believes that the political agenda they’re working for are important, to the point of putting this things ahead of themselves.

When you lose, you can choose to lie down and give up, or you can pick yourself up and keep fighting. I’m not an ardent critic of Harris, but she clearly chose the former. The same goes for Hillary Clinton. Both these people had/have huge platforms that they could use to front politics and help build up other candidates for future elections, not only presidential, but local, senate and house elections too. They have chosen to disappear from politics instead.

I seem to remember reading that the guy who invented the Rubik’s cube (Rubik?) thought for quite a while that it was impossible to solve until he uncovered the first algorithms for solving it by essentially just messing around.

EXACTLY! I can’t believe that I’ve basically forgotten how the function of “social media” at a point in the not-too-distant past was actually to help real people stay in touch and organise real social events… how did we even end up where we are now? There was a golden age for a couple years where stuff like facebook brought a net positive to the world. Just makes me sad to think about where we ended up…

Tbh, to me, a replacement for facebook is what I’m looking most for. I used to use facebook a lot to organise stuff with different friend-groups, and now that most people don’t ever use it, that’s a lot harder.

Facebook was the de-facto primary communication channel for organising events or coordinating hobby groups. It honestly makes me sad that they broke it to the point where I have a hard time inviting old friends that live out of town to a summer party or something. Likewise, I have a hard time being invited to stuff because I practically never check facebook.

Friendica may take over facebooks role at some point, but it’s nowhere close yet. I made an account just to be on there for if/when it starts taking off. I hope the gap is filled sooner rather than later.

“Wisdom”: You’re a sorcerer with a long beard. “Intelligence”: You’re the annoying engineering type that breaks the DM’s beta in creative ways.

I’m a chemist, and I lecture in some engineering-related courses (mostly thermodynamics and mathematics)

It can be legitimate to ask “why do you want to do X” so that you can help find a solution to the underlying problem. Saying “you shouldn’t do X” without knowing what the underlying problem is is the epitome of unhelpful and overbearing.

It’s literally a meme that devs have some obscure problem, and the only online resource they find is a forum post with one of

• nvm, I fixed it (no further explanation)
• Marked as duplicate (link to question about something different but related)
• “You shouldn’t do this, here’s how to do something else” (cannot do Y, that’s why I’m trying to do X)

I remember as a student when I couldn’t understand how professors could “just see” the solutions to problems. I’ve been reflecting after teaching a bit that I’m becoming that person, and how it just feels natural now, and that it’s really just because once you’ve seen enough problems in your field everything kind of just fits together, so new problems don’t really look that new anymore. It feels good to be honest, but I have a hard time thinking of it as wisdom, more just accumulated experience (then again, what is really “wisdom”?)

The question isn’t who exclusively has a landline, or why OP needs to call a landline. They’ve stated that they need to be able to call a landline: It’s safe to assume that they are aware of the existence of smartphones and internet-based calling services, and have concluded that it doesn’t serve their needs, which is why they’re asking for help calling a landline. Responding that they don’t need to call a landline reads like the classic stackoverflow response of “you don’t need to do <thing the question asks how to do>”.

This reads like a good old stackoverflow answer:

I want to do X, can anyone help?

X is dumb, and you shouldn’t do it. Here’s how to do Y.

I was just basing myself off OP’s scale, where 10 was “average” and 30 was “world class”, which I interpret as shifting the scale compared to how it would be in a dnd-game, such that the whole scale applies to actual humans.

In that spirit, I think it’s fair to put a talented engineer at 20 int, and an absurdly talented polymath at 30 int. My personal experience is that engineers with some years of field experience are often more “intelligent” (i.e. better at general problem solving) than most PhD’s.

I’m fun at parties, please believe me!

Follow up question: You say that 10 is average and 30 is world class, but what kind of distribution are we talking about, and what is the variance?

If I’m the strongest guy in a randomly selected group of 100, I’m far above average, but still miles away from being world class, but does that put my strength at closer to 15 or closer to 20? (Please note: I would not be the strongest in a random group of 100, unless all the other 99 happen to have severe muscle atrophy)

If 10 is average then anyone above the mean is above 10? Strongmen, Olympic lifters etc. are close to 30 str, since that is “world class”.

I would guess that a lot of “ordinary” people have at least one stat where they are above average, just based on how low “average” is for a lot of stats, and how most people are decently good at something.

Edit: This depends on the distribution of course, but stuff like strength, IQ, etc. are typically close to normally distributed, in which case about half the population is above average in any given stat.

When you look at how strongly obesity correlates with everything from back- and knee pains to weakened immune response to sleep issues and cardiovascular disease…

When a severely obese person has any of the above, it’s reasonable, scientifically backed diagnosis/prescription to say “these issues will probably go away by themselves if you lose weight”. This is about treating the cause and not the symptoms: When severely obese people are heavily over-represented among those with a certain disease or problem, you can try treating the symptoms, but should expect that they return rather quickly.

Of course, there are cases where the issues come from something else, but no matter who goes to the doctor with health issues, their first response will be to try to treat the post probable cause.

I definitely have a hangup on students I teach saying something along the lines of “I don’t know how to get started on this, I asked GPT and…”. To be clear: We’re talking about higher-level university courses here, where GPT is, from my experience, unreliable at best and useless or misleading at worst. It makes me want to yell “What do you think?!?” I’ve been teaching at a University for some years, and there’s a huge shift in the past couple years regarding how willing students are to smack their head repeatedly against a problem until they figure it out. It seems like their first instinct when they don’t know something is to ask an LLM, and if that doesn’t work, to give up.

I honestly want shake a physical book at them (and sometimes do), and try to help them understand that actually looking up what they need in a reliable resource is an option. (Note: I’m not in the US, you get second hand course books for like 40 USD here that are absolutely great, to the point that I have a bunch myself that I use to look stuff up in my research).

Of course, the above doesn’t apply to all students, but there’s definitely been a major shift in the past couple years.

Yeah, I guess that sounds like a better description, I’ve never really considered that there’s a significant difference between the two. Happy to learn :)

Ok, sounds like this is my inexperience showing: I’ve only ever been on multi-pitches where we used half-ropes, so we we use what’s called a “hylsebrems” in Norwegian (the standard friction break with two holes). Regarding hauling equipment, that’s not very common here, we climb with a backpack if we need one. I’ve heard that hauling equipment is much more common in the US though.