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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • Another reason is brand identity.

    Using ‘.tech’ or ‘.flights’ or .sports’ for your site feels too “on the nose” and gives vibes of like browsing some directory where things are categorised and sorted. Even worse it implies there are other sites under the same category, and those other sites may be competitors, and this dilutes strength of brand.

    lt also suggests strongly what the business does, and while that might seem desirable at first it actually isn’t from a corporate perspective because it means the company becomes tied to their business area and can’t expand and grow out of it into other things.

    I think this is a major part of why descriptive TLDs continue to be less preferred over ‘meaningless’ two letter TLDs, because companies want the focus to be on the main part of the domain, not the TLD.













  • That Cloudflare were justifiably unhappy with the situation and wanted to take action is fine.

    What’s not fine is how they approached that problem.

    In my opinion, the right thing for Cloudflare to do would have been to have an open and honest conversation and set clear expectations and dates.

    Example:

    "We have recently conducted a review of your account and found your usage pattern far exceeds the expected levels for your plan. This usage is not sustainable for us, and to continue to provide you with service we must move you to plan x at a cost of y.

    If no agreement is reached by [date x] your service will be suspended on [date y]."

    Clear deadlines and clear expectations. Doesn’t that sound a lot better than giving someone the run-around, and then childishly pulling the plug when a competitor’s name is mentioned?


  • I wouldn’t expect it’s because there’s a server call - I’m sure the developers are smart enough to have all the analytics and tracking be async in the background.

    Instead it’s likely because these days every aspect of the TV is implemented in software running on the TV’s CPU. With pre-smart devices, changing inputs would just activate some discreet on-board electronics to switch the signal over with no latency. Now you have to wait for the processor to get around to it, and it’s probably busy loading up a bunch of app launchers and other crap you don’t need, and doing some fancy whoosh-in animations, all of which is just getting in the way of what you actually want.


  • I agree that’s 100% what happened in this specific case. The customer had absolutely no reason to suspect the information they were given was bad, and the airline should have honoured the deal.

    A top-level comment on the post was also mine, by the way, in which I expressed the same and said “Shame on Air Canada for even fighting it.”

    Air Canada were completely and utterly wrong in this case - but I haven’t been talking about this case! At least, I wasn’t intending to!

    If it seemed that way I can understand now why people were so vehemently against me.

    My comments in this chain have all actually been trying to discuss how to determine, in the general case, which party is “in the right” when things like this happen.

    There are cases like this Air Canada one where the customer is obviously right. We can also imagine hypothetical cases where I personally believe the customer would be in the wrong - for example if the customer intentionally exploited a flaw in the system to game a $1 flight - which is again obviously not what happened here, it’s just an example for the sake of argument.

    My fundamental point at the start of this comment chain was that I don’t actually think we need any new mechanisms to work this out, because the existing mechanisms we already have in place to determine who is right between a company and a customer all still apply and work exactly the same regardless of whether it is AI or not AI.

    And that mechanism is, fundamentally, that the customer should generally be considered right as long as they have acted in good faith.

    That’s why I’m very pleased with the ruling that Air Canada were wrong here and they cannot dodge their responsibilities by blaming the AI.

    I’m honestly glad I can put the stress of this days-long comment chain behind me, since it seems we weren’t even arguing about the same thing this whole time!


  • Apologies if my comments appeared to be moving the goalposts. I am not trying to talk about morality in a wider sense. If I was, this would be a whole different argument because I believe that corporations are generally unethical as all hell, and consumers are usually within their moral right to exploit them as hard as possible, because that barely even scratches how badly companies exploit their customers or damage wider society. But this is - as you point out - not about that.

    The aspect of morality I was interested in from the perspective of defining law is the very restricted aspect of whether the customer is acting in bad faith, knowing that they are getting a too-good-to-be-true deal, or whether they believe the offer made is legitimate.

    You ask what makes a human customer service representative so special, in comparison to a bot, and my answer there is simply that they are human

    Remember that my argument here, and the deciding factor, is specifically about whether or not the customer believes the price they are being offered is genuine.

    Humans agents are special in that regard because they have a huge amount of credibility in reassuring and confirming with the other person that the offer is genuine and not a mistake. They strongly reinforce the belief of an offer being legitimate.

    The law itself already (at least in the UK) distinguishes between prices presented (e.g. on a web page or the price on a shelf sticker) and direct agreements made with a person, recognising that mistakes are possible and giving the human ultimate authority.

    Really, this entire argument comes down to answering this: Should information given by a chatbot be considered to have the same authority and weight as information given by a person?

    My personal argument has been: Yes, if it reasonably appears to the recipient as genuine, but no if the recipient might have probable cause to suspect it is a mistake, knowing the information was provided by a computer system and that mistakes are possible.”

    For most people in this thread however, it seems (based on my downvotes) their feeling has been “Yes, it has the same authority always and absolutely”

    I can accept that I’m very much outvoted on this one, but I hope you can appreciate my arguments.