snek

snek , 3 months ago

The latest count on Al-Jazeera was 109 with over 800 wounded, and reports of 40 bodies bulldozed away that no one can reach. They did shoot at a crowd of thousands.

snek , 3 months ago

Waiting for the average Zionism defender saying:

• That’s just a report!!!
• You’ve clearly been tricked since Hamas told them to go stand there!!!
• The IDF were not even there, okay? Didn’t you hear their side of the story?
• Probably Hamas members were there, surrounding themselves by innocent civilian zombies who clearly have no free will and just do as Hamas tells them even when they are about to lose all 6 children of theirs.

snek , 3 months ago

In high-school and university it always disappointed me that Palestinians didn’t have enough representation and a platform in global media. During this war on Gazans, I’ve seen every conceivable human rights organization involved criticize Israel and report on its crimes. I’ve seen the CNN write detailed investigate reports about the victims of the Israeli terror state. I’ve seen world leaders demand a ceasefire… and I thought to myself, "surely this time things are better! we are in the media, countries support us (sometimes as people, sometimes as governments, sometimes as both)… now we have all these amazing Palestinian voices speaking on television and in university lectures and media and film festivals… surely this time things will change."

But no, it turned out to worse than the Nakba. 🙂 Turns out lack of representation and media coverage wasn’t the only issue plaguing Palestinians.

So tell me, what is it that makes Palestinians so unimportant in the eyes of Biden? So unworthy of human rights?

Reminds me of that into to that song by DAM (YT, Piped, lyrics in English):

وين ما اروح باشوف حدود ساجنه الأنسانيه

ليه أطفال العالم حره وأنا ما الي حريه ؟

“Wherever I look, I see borders that jail humanity. Why are all the children of the world free but there is no freedom for me?”

snek , 3 months ago

Wordpress? What the fuck.

snek , 3 months ago

with the virtual assistant earning customer satisfaction ratings at the same level as human agents.

Citation needed? We’re going to take Klarna’s word for it?

snek , 3 months ago

@Lmaydev exactly this in the comment above!

When Klarna says “customer ratings of the AI are the same as for human workers”, what on earth do they mean?

It also contradicts the experiences people have been having with GPT powered chatbots recently. A model that takes a few prompts to start hallucinating is better than a living breathing human being? Really? I’d be curious to give it a try.

I worked for large companies before, and I even interviewed for Klarna (they have been hiring lots recently, maybe for different tasks/positions), and they always lie. Always.

At one company I worked at before, some KPI was calculated incorrectly and had been for years. When we informed the relevant person of this, they got very defensive and refused to change it. Only our team knew the calculation was total BS. It was become success/money was at stake for him. This person continued to send the fake KPI calculations to everyone every week.

I got laid off from the company where I work with absolutely ZERO motivation as to how me being laid off would increase “efficiency” (even though that was their claim — they are slimming down the company to increase “efficiency”). The company ignored every piece of evidence I provided to show that me and my team are completely overworked and that they should probably cut jobs elsewhere if they don’t want all of our data ingestions and ML models to collapse.

I don’t think companies have enough to motivate such a layoff if they can’t solidify their numbers and make then transparent to the public. I’d certainly like to see the union fights Klarna will have with the Swedish worker unions now. I have never been to such a meeting though, but I’ve provided motivation for the union to use to oppose layoffs in such meetings - my understanding is that it’s a bit of a shit show.

snek , 3 months ago

🤣 yeah true

I feel like customer service has been on a decline for the past 10 years or so. I owe it to being underpaid and treated badly as an employee. .

snek , 3 months ago

So now we have to explicitly go into each ticket and mark it as dissatisfied, since they don’t take into account how long the ticket was open, how many meetings had to be called over the ticket, etc. just whether it was closed without clicking the extra “we’re dissatisfied” button

That sucks. A rigid KPI that is never open to change and only made to show some BLING in meetings, it will always lead to failure.

And when the KPIs are bad, they blame us. We had lots of failures in streaming videos on our platform and it was growing across a range of mobile OSs and devices, and they would just say, very sternly, “We need you to deliver better results!”. Meanwhile, they had us do a huge migration and rebuild the entire UI across all devices all while maintaining the legacy systems that are sometimes riddled with bugs. Fucking idiots! They shouldn’t expect X performance with Y² the number of tasks (I would have said 2*Y if it was “double” the work… it was more like being on steroids, it was Y² the work, everyone was burnt out, people barely took the summer off). We met those KPIs by a margin previously, and we’re not about to meet them now unless they hire more staff or give us more time until their new UI launch. Spoiler: the launch did not go well.

snek , 3 months ago

So “customer service” (the bastard child of huge companies and low wages) is actually just a really bad product to start with, and now Klarna has just replaced it with something that functions just as bad? Yeah I think that makes sense.

snek , 3 months ago

700 people deserve some kind of study at least before their livelihood is cut off.

snek , 3 months ago

I’m sure your blind trust in Klarna is totally reasonable.

snek , 3 months ago

It’s not blind trust to think companies probably try to make the most money out of the available resources. It’s sorta what they do

Okay, just to be clear here, we’re talking about the belief that Klarna has sufficiently motivated this decision to lay these people off and actually has good KPIs that measure the performance, specifically that of customer care agents… not that companies make money with resrouces.

Usually people with this kind of opinion like yours maybe haven’t experienced work at a large company or maybe don’t understand that office politics are alive and kicking. But I’d still like to hear why… Let me ask you, what makes you think Klarna is being honest about their measurements?

snek , 3 months ago

You don’t think a big company like Klarna has metrics to follow the efficiency of their workers? Even small businesses where I live that and every single big corporation. What makes you think Klarna would be different?

I never said they have no KPIs. What I said is their KPIs are likely broken, just like almost every other large company in existence.

You misunderstood. I said try to make most money out of the resources, so efficiency. That’s what we’re talking about…

I think you’re the one who misunderstood. So for reference again, I am talking about this: about the belief that Klarna has sufficiently motivated this decision to lay these people off and actually has good KPIs that measure the performance, specifically that of customer care agents…

I don’t see why or how I would want to discuss that a company is an entity that makes money through products from resources… think that’d be a bit too basic, no?

Lol.

?

It’s not very hard to believe what they’re saying here and they’d be the ones to have those metrics. So simple 1+1.

But can you explain what makes you trust them? What gives a company like Klarna a high trust ratio in your eyes? They don’t seem to have provided those metrics in any way, just spelling it out in words. So how can we trust them?

It’s not very hard to believe what they’re saying here

Maybe not for you, but the rest of us are skeptics and would like to know what exactly makes this easy for you to believe. Thanks for explaining in advance.

snek , 3 months ago

I just explained why their claim isn’t hard to believe. You even quoted it??

Sorry, let’s pretend I’m a total idiot, could you quote it for me?

snek , 3 months ago

Easy to believe them when the claim itself is easy to believe and they’d be the ones to have those metrics. So you take the easy to believe claim (1) and you take them being in the position to have those metrics (another 1, but let’s call it 2 to differentiate) so simple 1+2.

Ummm, sorry but how is this an explanation?

“Why are they easy to believe?”… “Oh, it’s just not very hard to believe, they have the metrics, they said so! 1+1!”

It’s easy to believe because they are a big company and big companies have metrics?

But, what about the trust part? How does that make you trust them? What part of that is “enough” evidence for you to rationalize that they have a good motivation for laying off 700 people?

snek , 3 months ago

Hmmm, okay, but let’s take this one step further, what makes you believe that an AI can replace 700 customer care agents?

Yeah, I can see that happening. I’m honestly not sure why you are having such hard time with this.

I have skepticism about all large companies, especially having worked for many, and especially having seen how far they will go with lies to lay people off. Klarna lays off hundreds of employees as a frequent occurrence.

In my opinion, both as an ML professional and as a chatbot professional who has built such systems or finetuned them for such tasks, it’s extremely unlikely that chatbots would be able to replace 700 employees unless those employees were just doing simple zombie tasks.

The only sentence we get from Klarna in the article is this:

with the virtual assistant earning customer satisfaction ratings at the same level as human agents. Klarna

But nothing to elaborate. What was the satisfaction rating prior? No idea. So excuse my doubt when I don’t want to believe a large company that lives to make money.

The idea of AI fully replacing a large workforce seems to be a bunch of BS driven forth by big companies like Klarna. Others in the field seem to be more careful about what AI can “help in” vs “replace”. Have they A/B tested this? What is their KPI? Can we trust that KPI?

You’ve been the only one talking about trust.

I invite you to read the rest of the comments under the thread. I think you’re wrong.

snek , 3 months ago

Simple job + having ton of examples of it already + it’s just another case of automation taking jobs that has been a thing for centuries + predictions from 4 years ago that automation would take away one third of jobs by the end of the decade and so on.

Okay, thanks. I think I understand your opinion better now.

The number doesn’t really matter if they’re fine with just achieving the same result with less workers (less money). Customer care especially in English is already dogshit so AI achieving dogshit results is not hard to believe.

I guess we disagree here. If the number doesn’t matter, then they could just make it all up and move on. Seems like Klarna had no real number to share anyway, and depend on people believing that “it’s easy for AI to take over any such job”.

It’s customer care we’re talking about. Chatbots have already replaced a lot of it.

Yeah, but only to its detriment. Tricky problems go unsolved and chatbots are used by companies to create a wall between themselves and their clients. Revolut is one example that comes to mind. If customers cannot ever even reach a human being to tell them what’s going on, then there’s no problem!

I suspect Klarna is doing a similar thing. I also suspect that the worker unions in Sweden will not be satisfied with this reason for layoffs. Not sure if these layoffs are taking place globally or in Europe.

snek , 3 months ago

I would really appreciate it if anyone could share some video or article or something that explains the relation between stocks and layoffs.

snek , 3 months ago

Mind you, if these were 700 highly professional workers fluent in English (or whichever language we’re talking about) with deep knowledge of the problems their customers face and high social and problem solving skills, it’s a harder claim to believe that the ratings would be the same.

But they probably are… or a large chunk of them. I disagree with that customer service is a useless job with no skill set.

Here’s another article on the same topic btw:

gizmodo.com/klarna-ceo-ai-chatbot-customer-servic…

Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski bragged on Tuesday that his company’s new OpenAI-powered customer service chatbot was doing the work of 700 people—nearly two years after Klarna laid off about 700 people.

Specifying the number of human jobs that could be done by AI didn’t seem to be a good decision on Siemiatkowski’s part, however. Fast Company quickly pointed out that Klarna just so happened to have laid off approximately 700 people in 2022, which raised questions over whether the company had replaced those workers with AI.

To his credit, Siemiatkowski also pointed this out in his post on X, though he did not explain why the company felt the need to equate AI work to human work or how it made its calculations.

Seems like they decided this KPI two years after laying people off lol

To me, it looks like Klarna is just full of shit.

snek , 3 months ago

Wish I understood what drives the yearly layoffs tide

snek , 3 months ago

Often companies have layoff packages that pay workers X months of pay as a severance agreement, doesn’t that mean they would be paying triple wages for some number of employees? Wouldn’t that bring their costs up?

snek , 3 months ago

Thanks for the explanation

snek , 3 months ago

I see the denial is kicking in even stronger. The uglier Israel’s crimes are, the more pathetic your excuses and analysis.

snek , 3 months ago

Anyone call this a Holocaust level genocide is an absolute moron.

What about these guys?

Holocaust survivors who are anti-Zionist:

• Hajo Meyer

  Meyer repeatedly argued that there are parallels between the Nazi treatment of Jews leading to (but not including) the Holocaust, and Israel’s dehumanization of Palestinians.

• Marione Ingram

  Ingram says experiencing anti-Jewish hate, losing family members to the Nazi killing machine and surviving the Allied bombing of Hamburg as a child all inspire her to speak out for peace. “What Israel is doing will not end this conflict. It will only exacerbate it,” says Ingram.

• Tal Frieden, grandchild of a Holocaust survivor

  The rally was loud in its claim that Israel has the unconditional support of the U.S. government. But the U.S. people do not support Israel’s attack on Gaza, which Holocaust scholars have deemed a genocide.

• Elliot Kukla, another grandchild of a holocaust survivors

  My father was also deprived of medical care as a child, and that legacy scarred him for life physically and psychologically. While he was in hiding, he got sick with whooping cough; the sound of his coughing threatened his own life and the life of the family who sheltered him from Nazis. To spare everyone, he was taken to a Catholic orphanage in the countryside of Belgium.

• Seven other holocaust survivors likening the treatment of Palestinians to the treatment of Jews by Nazi Germany. I’m excluding Hajo Meyer since I already listed him and Gabor Mate because somehow him being only 1 year old during the holocaust and not a resident of Israel makes him “not real enough to comment on such issues” for some people

snek , 3 months ago

Enough fucking Musk spam, we already know this. We didn’t need some rich jackass to validate this.

snek , 3 months ago

Sorry, isn’t this like, a fallacy? I couldn’t help but post to be honest.

But like, so they support what you believe in, what does that mean? Does that make you correct? Does that make them correct?

snek , 3 months ago

Preserving democracy in the Middle East = Indiscriminate bombing of civilian families

snek , 3 months ago

We gotta admit that a large portion of the IDF are just a bunch of indoctrinated teens who had no choice. They are victims of Israel too.

I’m surprised she’s the first woman to be jailed for this… really thought this was more common than that. I would totally do months of even a couple of years of prison or whatever just so not to kill X number of civilian men, women, and children on Gaza… simply because that’s not something I’d be able to live with.

snek , 3 months ago

just a bunch of indoctrinated teens

But yes, I absolutely agree.

snek , 3 months ago

Ah, I understand.

You’re right, choosing prison over killing innocent civilians requires first understanding what is going on, something which indoctrination is meant to hinder. I think what I meant to say is that it’s weird not more people have been able to escape this indoctrination and choose prison instead of service. Then again, Israel has been successful at this genocide thanks to their incredible propaganda machine, so I shouldn’t underestimate the effect it has on people.

snek , 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

us comparatively free thinking westerners

For myself, I grew up with the Islam kool-aid in the Middle East in an Islam-majority country and though the journey was troublesome, I very much managed in the end to shed religion and tradition off my shoulders and unlearn all the crap I was indoctrinated to believe in, including layers of anti-semitism. I felt like I lived in a similar kind of propaganda machine and managed to find my way out. If I can do it, hopefully, anyone can do it given the right opportunities, support, and time.

snek , 3 months ago

You largely can choose the provider of this service,

Really? I’m from the Middle East, took me fucking ages to “change the provider”.

If you’re in a country with compulsory military service, make yourself interesting for other countries and leave.

Literally not an option for 99% of people.

snek , 3 months ago

… so this isn’t really a viable solution.

snek , 3 months ago

You might be right. I found this: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omer_Goldman

snek , 3 months ago

And I say I don’t even know this person and he should just stfu and leave those kids alone.

snek , 3 months ago

Good for him. I like Nvidia and use one, but I have the rest of his company to thank for that.

I think for me it was a combination of:

< Name of person I don’t know > says < big unhinged sweeping generalization > for < reason that makes no sense to anyone in the field >

My first instinct is not to click stuff like this altogether. I also think that anyone trying to preach what kids should or shouldn’t do is already in the wrong automatically by assuming they have any say in this without a degree in pedagogy.

snek , 3 months ago

GPT4 (the preview) still produces code where it adds variables that it never uses anywhere… and when I asked one time about one variable, it was like, “Oh, you’re right, let me re-write the code to put variable X into use”, then just added it in a nonsensical location to serve a nonsensical purpose.

snek , 3 months ago

What is this from?

snek , 3 months ago

Money is making them say this.

snek , 3 months ago

I don’t like Hamas, but just a reminder that it’s very legal to fight against an illegal occupation.

Either he was taking some really strong drugs or he was just plain stupid cause a leopard never changes its spots.

Neither, it seems. I don’t think he was taking any drugs. His plan was clear: divide Palestinians then conquer their lands.

snek , 3 months ago

No, seems like an overall okay place. But this particular article seems like propaganda. I think that’s what that person meant.

snek , 3 months ago

Do you really have a degree in criminology? What kind of lawyer are you exactly?

snek , 3 months ago

Israel is starving the population and you are a mouth piece keeping the blame off of their backs.

People like you have no regards for the starving thousands, all just to support a non democratic ethnostate practicing apartheid in their own laws and courts. Of course let’s not forget that you have no proof they are democratic. Maybe some idiot told you 30 years ago and you never ask questions.

snek , 3 months ago

Broad international support??? Where???

snek , 3 months ago

@JustZ sorry, no response on this yet??? Is this also an “opinion piece” from “Qatari run state media”? Or is this just another piece of reality that you want to ignore?

I have lots more btw. You don’t like the NYT? no problem, I got the same piece of news from a lot more outlets spread over many dates.

snek , 3 months ago

You have tried to block me?

Did you try going to my account from the web interface and clicking “Block User” shown in the top right? Otherwise, tell me what app you’re using and I can google a method for you.

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/578b9592-bbba-4c24-a210-7ad5c3fac626.png