Shopify employee breaks NDA to reveal firm replacing laid off workers with AI • Hacker News Board

Re: Shopify employee breaks NDA to reveal firm replacing laid off workers with AI

#511

Post by moonchrome » Sun, Jul 23, 2023, 9:06 AM UTC

jiggawatts wrote: post #440

gumballindie wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> esp. those in the tech community It’s a vocal minority of the tech community that shares that opinion. The silent majority knows it’s just fud marketing. Personally when i encounter a customer support chat bit i immediately assume low quality services and products. When i meet a software engineer blown away but chatgpt’s “coding skills” i assume that engineer is not particularly competent. There are valid use cases…

Few people are "blown away" by the absolute skill level of ChatGPT. It's more that there exists an AI that can do this at all . This just wasn't a thing three years ago, and the first truly capable version (GPT 4) only become publicly accessible this year . Some things I've seen GPT 4 do is "as good as human", often better than average. For example, spotting bugs or reverse-engineering code and then writing doc comme…

By the time you run enough iteration loops to chunk things up and summarize + context size it's neither cheap nor fast when you account for the effort it takes to get it there. I could see tech support eventually being profitable but in my experience even GPT4 is just so randomly unreliable - it's not there yet.

Re: Shopify employee breaks NDA to reveal firm replacing laid off workers with AI

#512

Post by thdespou » Sun, Jul 23, 2023, 9:09 AM UTC

If it's true I see that as a prime example of Ruthless Capitalism. It only serves to make businesses profit.

Re: Shopify employee breaks NDA to reveal firm replacing laid off workers with AI

#513

Post by martin8412 » Sun, Jul 23, 2023, 9:19 AM UTC

fragmede wrote: post #483

martin8412 wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All you need to do is to speak the magic codeword, charge back.

And then you can't use Uber, or Doordash, or Instacart. It works for single transaction merchants, but for platforms that having become critical to functioning in today's modern society, it's unfortunately not the magic password.

I don't care about any of those services.

Re: Shopify employee breaks NDA to reveal firm replacing laid off workers with AI

#514

Post by nverno » Sun, Jul 23, 2023, 9:34 AM UTC

antisthenes wrote: post #348

nverno wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do hope to end up there eventually, but I think the government ended homesteading back in the 80s sadly.

Homesteading is a lifestyle. Government can't "end" it any more than it can end partying. If you're talking about the ability to live off the land you don't own and owning land without paying taxes, that's a different story.

The US government passed Homestead Acts back in the 1800s where they gave away plots of land, called homesteads, (like 10% of the country) for free. It's a lifestyle, for sure, but living off land you don't own isn't what I was referring to. I think the last homesteads (free land) were given away in the 1980s.

Re: Shopify employee breaks NDA to reveal firm replacing laid off workers with AI

#515

Post by inertiatic » Sun, Jul 23, 2023, 9:55 AM UTC

speleding wrote: post #509

dreamcompiler wrote: post #446

After a recent horrible experience with JetBlue customer service, it has become obvious to me that the true purpose of all "customer service" at major companies is not "solve the customer's problem" but "make the customer go away." This seems to be true regardless of whether humans or robots are involved. If humans are involved they will be low-paid hourly workers on the other side of the planet, staring at the same…

As someone who's worked in customer service: you would not believe the number of people who contact customer service with "I've lost my password", even though there is a "lost password" link right on the login page. These people are helped by the service agent following a script and clicking the link on their behalf. This is what the AI will replace. For many businesses it's not profitable to serve customers whose is…

>an average call center employee can cost $30 for a complex customer question

How? I've worked in a call center where big companies outsource their customer support in Eastern Europe, and we were paid 3-4 euro an hour. Even if a "complex customer question" takes an hour (which doesn't happen often at all), what sort of overhead can there be?

> So if you have a question that someone with HN-level IQ cannot resolve themselves then customer service cannot profitably help you.

How is it a question of intellect? Customer service might have access to more information not in the public, might have access to other instances of the same problem where they had to find out how to interpret the rules and disambiguate, and most importantly, they usually have the power to take action (untick a box somewhere, offer a refund, whatever).

And how would that be profitable long term? Just by virtue of the fact that in a market with actual competition, leaving your customer dissatisfied is not profitable.

Re: Shopify employee breaks NDA to reveal firm replacing laid off workers with AI

#516

Post by chmod775 » Sun, Jul 23, 2023, 9:59 AM UTC

fragmede wrote: post #504

chmod775 wrote: post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You want to trust that thing to review your code? It will often give you eloquent explanations, trying to convince you that code has a certain bug, while completely missing the actual bug. You'll be gaslit into chasing down dead ends, distracted from actual issues. Example: "In JS, create a Promise that is resolved with some emitted value from an EventEmitter, or rejected if an 'error' event is emitted first. Write t…

Interesting. When I tried it (using GPT4), and told it "but won't that leak memory because we're not removing the other listener?", it gave me: const EventEmitter = require('events'); let eventEmitter = new EventEmitter(); function eventPromise(eventEmitter, eventName) { return new Promise((resolve, reject) => { const successHandler = (data) => { eventEmitter.off('error', errorHandler); resolve(data); }; const errorH…

Kind of: The point is making it find and correct the mistake itself, instead of spelling out the fix. We want it to replace a competent coder who can do code reviews by themselves, rather than just being a fancy input method that turns English into code.

That said, sometimes you can even get it to write correct code on the first try. It's completely random.

Re: Shopify employee breaks NDA to reveal firm replacing laid off workers with AI

#517

Post by jiggawatts » Sun, Jul 23, 2023, 10:16 AM UTC

donmcronald wrote: post #465

jiggawatts wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

90-95% of programmers I've worked with can't "grok" asynchronous or multi-threaded programming, and when forced to write async code it is littered with bugs. ChatGPT doesn't need to find 100% of bugs in 100% of code out there. Think of it as a "better linter". It's cheap, and finding just 50% of bugs would be an enormous step up for quality in most code bases.

> Think of it as a "better linter". No way. A linter is deterministic. ChatGPT is all over the place and, for me, it’s wrong almost every time I ask it anything. I wouldn’t trust it to tell me the ingredients in a pepperoni pizza. I’m definitely not letting it give me programming advice.

Ironically, I had a lot of trouble with a particular recipe (pan-fried gyoza with a crispy bottom), and it was only GPT 4 that gave me a working recipe!

The lack of determinism can be considered a type of strength. Run it multiple times! It might find different bugs each time.

Humans are the same, by the way. If you show a random set of programmers random snippets of code, you'll get a non-deterministic result. They won't all find all of the bugs.

Re: Shopify employee breaks NDA to reveal firm replacing laid off workers with AI

#518

Post by jq-r » Sun, Jul 23, 2023, 10:28 AM UTC

LoganDark wrote: post #452

dreamcompiler wrote: post #446

After a recent horrible experience with JetBlue customer service, it has become obvious to me that the true purpose of all "customer service" at major companies is not "solve the customer's problem" but "make the customer go away." This seems to be true regardless of whether humans or robots are involved. If humans are involved they will be low-paid hourly workers on the other side of the planet, staring at the same…

> After a recent horrible experience with JetBlue customer service, it has become obvious to me that the true purpose of all "customer service" at major companies is not "solve the customer's problem" but "make the customer go away." Exactly. As far as I'm aware, the purpose is to prevent them from reaching the rest of the company- not to make them happy about it. Customer service is a layer of protection designed to…

Right on. Exactly my experience dealing with AWS ("premium") support.

TAM (technical account manager) usually uses every trick in their book to do just that. First they take a while to answer, if they answer, they ask if we've opened a ticket. If the ticket has been openened they will "prioritize it". That means they'll won't do anthying about it.

The answers you receive from that L1 support are usually pages of garbage filled with: have a look at this blog post, have a look at this doc which is mostly irrelevant to the problem you're having.

Then you want to get ahold of TAM again. They'll usually answer in the last hour of that working day so that conversation will have to wait till tomorrow. Want a meeting? Sure! Lets talk in couple of days over that garbage called Chime. Oh, our engineer couldn't make it, we'll schedule the meeting next week. Can you please upload 60GB of your logs to this S3 bucket which is configured in such a way that you can only do it using GUI? Oh, you've split the 60GB files into multiple ones? Can't do that, we have no idea how to read those. Can you reupload?

Want to talk with someone about EKS? After 2 days of radio silence: oh yeah sure! We can schedule a meeting in 3 weeks time. etc etc

All of this makes it even more infuriating is that we've been paying for the support almost 1 million USD per year. And in 9/10 cases we get absolutely nothing out of it, just a waste of our time. For $1M they should have a dedicated tech actually working for us every single day. AWS is a fucking racket.

Re: Shopify employee breaks NDA to reveal firm replacing laid off workers with AI

#519

Post by orra » Sun, Jul 23, 2023, 11:03 AM UTC

imran-iq wrote: post #450

mvncleaninst wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a pretty good trick to dealing with this (I've found): just call up the credit card company and tell them that you tried contacting the merchant, then ask them to bounce the charge

But what if it is the credit card company you are dealing with? For example I wanted to cancel one of my credit cards. There was nothing in their FAQ's that mentioned anything around "canceling". There was nothing under "Account options" or any logged in setting menu. There was no chat/support on their webpage. They only have a phone line you can call. The phone line is completely automated, and has 2 menus to go bac…

> But what if it is the credit card company you are dealing with?

In general, I find dealing with any big company in writing, much easier than the telephone nightmare you describe. Your call is important to us! Due to unusually high [sic] volumes, the waiting time is half an hour!

Also, in writing, they don't accidentally forget previous conversations. If it has to be escalated to e.g. arbitration, then you have a good record.

If they don't do online messaging, send a tracked letter to their head office. Obviously, that's a pain these days (don't misplace the proof of postage). Thankfully there are companies who print and post letters as a service.

Re: Shopify employee breaks NDA to reveal firm replacing laid off workers with AI

#520

Post by LoganDark » Sun, Jul 23, 2023, 11:13 AM UTC

jq-r wrote: post #518

LoganDark wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> After a recent horrible experience with JetBlue customer service, it has become obvious to me that the true purpose of all "customer service" at major companies is not "solve the customer's problem" but "make the customer go away." Exactly. As far as I'm aware, the purpose is to prevent them from reaching the rest of the company- not to make them happy about it. Customer service is a layer of protection designed to…

Right on. Exactly my experience dealing with AWS ("premium") support. TAM (technical account manager) usually uses every trick in their book to do just that. First they take a while to answer, if they answer, they ask if we've opened a ticket. If the ticket has been openened they will "prioritize it". That means they'll won't do anthying about it. The answers you receive from that L1 support are usually pages of garb…

> For $1M they should have a dedicated tech actually working for us every single day. AWS is a fucking racket.

Do they not assign you a dedicated account manager like everyone else does?? For $1M a year you should really have a real person assigned to you whose number you can call directly at any time. Last time I checked, GCP does this. Not that I'd recommend switching, but still, that sounds insane.