Dog: Yeah, you see the problem is it’s already in my mouth. If you would have asked a bit sooner, this could have turned out differen – SQUIRREL OH MY GOD SQUIRREL DID YOU SEE THAT SQUIRREL IMMA MUNCH IT

In a way, I’m glad people are slowing starting to come around and pay attention to this. For years, any time I would publicly complain about Amazon customer service online, it was very common for people to be completely dismissive or even blame me. I’d hear statements like “sure Amazon sucks, but they have great customer service” and I’d think to myself, just wait until it’s your time to find out that the customer service isn’t what you think it is.

Long story short, the item came with a broken part. Should have been quick and easy to rectify (send a replacement part, send a replacement unit, or refund the purchase). The seller was completely unhelpful. Amazon customer service would not intervene and insisted that I continue fruitlessly corresponding with the vendor, even though they had an “A-to-Z” money back guarantee if something goes wrong. It literally took months of back and forth between me, the vendor, and Amazon customer service before things were finally refunded in full.

So, basically I gave them another chance and they showed that things hadn’t improved a bit.

Ya’ll listen up up here’s the story about a little guy that lives in the blue world.

Anecdotally speaking, I’ve been suspecting this was happening already with code related AI as I’ve been noticing a pretty steep decline in code quality of the code suggestions various AI tools have been providing.

Some of these tools, like GitHub’s AI product, are trained on their own code repositories. As more and more developers use AI to help generate code and especially as more novice level developers rely on AI to help learn new technologies, more of that AI generated code is getting added to the repos (in theory) that are used to train the AI. Not that all AI code is garbage, but there’s enough that is garbage in my experience, that I suspect it’s going to be a garbage in, garbage out affair sans human correction/oversight. Currently, as far as I can tell, these tools aren’t really using much in the way of good metrics to rate whether the code they are training on is quality or not, nor whether it actually even works or not.

More and more often I’m getting ungrounded output (the new term for hallucinations) when it comes to code, rather than the actual helpful and relevant stuff that had me so excited when I first started using these products. And I worry that it’s going to get worse. I hope not, of course, but it is a little concerning when the AI tools are more consistently providing useless / broken suggestions.

Personally, I don’t think the technology is a failure. It’s the implementation that’s the pain point.

I’m no fan of Walmart, but the local store has the lenient self checkout machines that don’t make you place and leave your items in the bagging area. And there’s a hand scanner for each machine. The hand scanner is pretty close to instant, so I can literally scan an entire cart full of items in under a minute (with caveats) and you don’t even have to take things out of the cart to scan them (with caveats). Sometimes there are hiccups and obviously some items are sold by weight, so that’ll slow things down.

But even with all that, the implementation is the pain point because they’ll only have 1 person running the machines, so if they have to run off to help a customer or multiple people need help at the same time, you just have to wait. Also, the particular store I go to shuts down half the machines ridiculously early in the evening. When the machines break, they stay broken for weeks or months. And they have some kind of ridiculous system where some of the machines are cash-only, some are card-only, but the majority will accept either – this adds to a lot of inefficiency because a lot of customers don’t know which machines are which and if you mess up and pick the wrong one then things get tied up while you wait for a cashier to come and transfer you over to a different one so you can pay.

The other big factor is that customers were trained on the old shitty style self checkouts where you had to scan each item one at a time, place it in the bagging area, leave it there until you pay, and if so much as a speck of dust landed in the bagging area or a piece of onion skin fell off, it would freeze up. So even with the new lenient hand scanners, people still do it the old and slow way.

And so much more: Like burning away the hair growing out of your ears without also burning your fingers!

realistically no one reading this post is influencing global events on any significant scale.

I’m not really sure where influencing global events comes into play with my prior comment, but I agree with you. However, when I posted my comment, I really mostly only saw people discussing relative and personal changes they’d make, so I’m also sort of thinking that global events are mostly irrelevant.

Especially if you’re just doing normal kid stuff. A random kid ordering spaghetti instead of chicken nuggets is meaningless in the grand scheme of things. The same goes for just about any choice you’d likely be presented with.

If you’re focused on the ramifications of any one specific choice, then I feel like you’re missing the forest for the tree (to coopt a popular idiom).

Every choice you make and everything you do differently will change things in some way, even if only to an imperceptible degree. From the moment you arrive back at your 6 year old self, you will constantly be making different decisions and doing things differently, whether you want to or not. The cumulative effects of these minute changes over time will make things increasingly more unpredictable and the new timeline and old timeline will necessarily diverge.

Then consider that some things in life are literally a cumulation of everything that you’ve done and everything that happened to you up to that point. Even small changes will have an impact. For instance, think of someone with biological children who goes back in time. The children they end up the second time around will be completely different people because of how random the process is that leads to two specific gametes being involved in the fertilization process. Literally eating spaghetti as a 6 year old could affect the outcome there, let alone the millions/billions/trillions of different actions that person would make over the decade(s) leading up to their child/childrens’ conception. Perhaps having completely different kids is still inconsequential, but that’s literally just one example, so I wouldn’t get too hung up on the specifics.

Ten million USD in 2024 is more than enough for me and my family to live out comfortable lives, to be honest. I’d just take that, live off the interest. It will present its own problems, of course, but I’m sure I can figure those out.

Going back in time with any specific goal or intent (like making lots more money than ten million dollars by 2024) is almost certainly going to end up being its own kind of hell in this situation and especially so when there’s no guarantee that I’ll actually be successful in that pursuit. No guarantee that I’d arrive at the new 2024 with more than ten million dollars, no guarantee I’d be able to “fix” anything without causing worse problems for myself and others, no guarantee that I’d get here alive again, sounds like quite a bit of a risk.

Plus, once I go back to age 6 and start making different decisions, a different future will necessarily emerge. Think about it this way, in order to not change the future (until you’re at a point where you can reasonably execute a plan to reach your goals), you’d have to make exactly the same decisions you did when you were 6. Pretty much nobody has that kind of memory/recall, so it would literally come down to sheer luck. And the further along in time things progress, as you make more and more different decisions than you did originally, the more uncertainty it would introduce to the new future. Eventually, you may even find that you basically have no more ability to recall/predict the future than you would have otherwise.

So if you’re in it for the money, just take the guaranteed money.