Same thing Evri does with its bots!

2 days ago: Ebay Uses Bots (Slop) to Give Users a Lot of Work

This has impacted many people, and one of them wrote:

Following on from my last post. Yesterday, I received a message
from Ebay with apparantly-good news:

Thanks again for reporting the listing(s) you found. We wanted to
let you know that we closed your report for the below referenced
listing(s). These listings have not been removed.

[With the listing I'd appealed the removal of listed below]

Well it’s a bit weird, my “appeal” has become a “report”, which
makes it sound like I’d reported myself for a voilation in the
first place. But I’m getting used to really weird uses of English
these days so the final statement “These listings have not been
removed” sounded good enough.

Only it was wrong! If I go to the listing link, it still returns
their 404 page “We looked everywhere!”, and when logged in it still
shows as being hidden as a “listing with issues”, with the option
to “appeal” still greyed out since my first appeal/”report”.

So it seems I’ve got the old beaurocratic “Bugger off!” after only
my first complaint to them. Yet they’re preventing themselves from
making ~$40 in fees if they’d just let the transaction go ahead on
Ebay, when I never suggested anything different anyway. It’s
basically costing them $40 just to piss me off for no reason.

But the message does at least admit to coming from the kind of
intellect I suspected was behind this complete insanity:

This determination was made using automation or artificial
intelligence.

I have an image in my mind now of going to Ebay HQ in the USA just
to find all the doors locked, and peeking through the dusty windows
to see endless rows of abandoned office cubicles, the only life
being the lights flashing from long rows of server racks hastily
installed in the corner of the room. Of course it’s probably really
all in some anonymous datacentre, costing a fortune for a net
result that’s barely distinguishable from cats walking over the old
human staff’s keyboards. Meanwhile their main competitor, Amazon
(which I refuse to even buy things from), is one of the companies
actually running such datacentres and selling AI.

Of course like Ebay’s old human staff, the AI still won’t let
anyone talk back.

Please don’t reply to this message. It was sent from an address
that doesn’t accept incoming email.

I’ve got to wonder how AI still took six days to respond to my
appeal though. Is it really now not even any faster than an
office full of over-worked humans, or just trying too hard to
emulate them?

Anyway the case with the keyboard seems settled, albeit
senselessly. Unless the buyer does contact me directly by email
before the end of the week I think I’ll give up and use it myself.
Mind you the way things are looking with all this devolving
technology and political/economic instability I’m increasingly
tempted to make the most of society while it still functions and go
off on a long break, driving around rural Australia spending my
money before it all becomes worthless in the aftermath of the
impending societal breakdown. But that’s probably an overreaction.

– The Free Thinker

Animations that are simple work, the plot/story matters more than CG brute force

t is midnight now, so tomorrow is our anniversary and we plan to watch an old film in the weekend. We’ll be busy celebrating until Monday. Our life is simple, so we enjoy simple things; a simple life must not be conflated with a lack of productivity.

It’s sad that the “modern” and “digital” society (consumption oriented) wants us to think that the more gets wasted, the better it’ll be.

This is a fallacy.

Keep calm and fix your laptop

don’t understand why Garrett is being so open about his misery. It gives away stupidity and professional incompetence. For instance, it does not sound like he is even remotely aware of how to diagnose/debug/fix a laptop (it’s evident from his comments about it). This narcissistic know-it-all cannot bear fair criticism (he never could) and he keeps showing he’s not a Computer Scientist. “So much for spending the money to make proprietarization funny eh MJG,” someone wrote in IRC a while ago, linking to this article from 2023. MJG (Garrett) thought it would be “funny” to sue people with barely any money. My best friend in Manchester told me last month, “it sounds like he actually lost” (his words, not mine) and I didn’t disagree, I’d just say that love won.

Garrett is “broke as fuchs ain’t wanna fix that laptop,” someone said in IRC. MinceR responded: “i guess what mjg (Garrett) did wasn’t valuable enough for his backers…”

As expected, they used him, then threw him away. He was disposable to them.

In the latest and not last part I alluded to the actual, measurable outcomes. Garrett seems to have thrown a tantrum/had an “acute” nervous breakdown over this. He went ballistic only seconds/minutes after I had published it. He not only read what was published a few minutes earlier but finished reading it and then wrote about it. He’s clearly (chronically) refreshing Techrights instead of working to fix the laptop (to get actual work done) while deflecting all of the issues raised in the installment. So it is 1) true; 2) hurtful.

In many lawsuits everywhere in the world, not just in civil litigation, both parties end up broke. Garrett was warned this would happen. He was warned about it five years ago. So he’s just bitter, he refuses to accept a mistake was made. He’s not even respectful enough to show up in Court.

He hides the severity of his current predicament because he’s fully aware that trying to discharge his own debt (he borrowed money) would immediately result in foreclosure. In the US, foreclosure is extremely painful and merciless.

Carrick at United with a contract is not the Carrick under ‘probation’

think United will be under a lot of fire tomorrow in the press. After losing at home to a 10-men City they lose again at home in their first cup match of this season.

We’re not United fans, we are City fans, but we still want United to do well. It attracts positive attention (to the city) when United approaches or touches ‘past glory’.

I don’t know if Michael will stay a head coach in United for a lot longer; Enzo at City, on the other hand, started very well.

A quick break

inutes from now several matches will commence and today we’ve had a pleasant, calm day. I even managed to get a 2-hour afternoon nap.

So lately we started a news series concerning slop in Linux, the kernel. See yesterday’s posts [1, 2].

It’ll last quite some time as we have lots to show/share. The overall structure isn’t decided yet. There’s no clear outline, mostly lists of points to cover.

We’ve named (and feed) only 4 at the moment

think that Edwin came indoors about 4 times today, more than in prior days. He was looking for seeds, he reckons he can get more of them when he gets close to me. Sometimes he sits on the doorknob, hoping to get my (or Rianne’s) attention.

Edwin is always last and sometimes first. Even in late September he’d stay until almost 7PM (6:57 today) and he can show up the following day at around 6-7AM.

The birds are good companions and they’re clean as long as they don’t do their “dirt” indoors.

Another bird, still unnamed, likes to sit on the window at the front and has zero fear of humans. It insists strongly on getting a jar of seeds.

I’ve not been writing much about birds lately. Tomorrow we plan to feed 70+ of them in the park. Weather permitting.

Some things would not happen to technology (tech) experts because they know how things work and what to expect (or watch out for)

N the past 2+ decades I did not lose data. Prior to that I only lost things I did not value, like old and mostly meaningless E-mails from the 1990s (not MP3s, I had those backed up). I make regular backups, I keep a spare machine in case the main one fails, and I maintain the hardware to make sure it works or be fully aware when it is about to fail. When my storage device finally failed in January 2023, for example, I had already prepared for it for about 12 months because there were warning signs. I no longer stored on it anything essential. Likewise, in 2020, I moved away from “ted” when it was giving some warnings, so when “ted” (used by me since 2013) finally died nothing of value was lost and no time wasted. I also keep external backups and we have fire extinguishing kits just in case.

People who have been around in tech for a long time and properly understand tech prepare for disasters in advance. So they don’t become disasters at all, they just involve a bit of work (to get fully back to speed).