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echoekhi · 2 years ago

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I’m Declaring War Against “What If” Videos: Project Copy-Knight

What Are “What If” Videos?

These videos follow a common recipe: A narrator, given a fandom (usually anime ones like My Hero Academia and Naruto), explores an alternative timeline where something is different. Maybe the main character has extra powers, maybe a key plot point goes differently. They then go on and make up a whole new story, detailing the conflicts and romance between characters, much like an ordinary fanfic.

Except, they are fanfics. Actual fanfics, pulled off AO3, FFN and Wattpad, given a different title, with random thumbnail and background images added to them, narrated by computer text-to-speech synthesizers.

They are very easy to make: pick a fanfic, copy all the text into a text-to-speech generator, mix the resulting audio file with some generic art from the fandom as the background, give it a snappy title like “What if Deku had the Power of Ten Rings”, photoshop an attention-grabbing thumbnail, dump it onto YouTube and get thousands of views.

In fact, the process is so straightforward and requires so little effort, it’s pretty clear some of these channels have automated pipelines to pump these out en-masse. They don’t bother with asking the fic authors for permission. Sometimes they don’t even bother with putting the fic’s link in the description or crediting the author. These content-farms then monetise these videos, so they get a cut from YouTube’s ads.

In short, an industry has emerged from the systematic copyright theft of fanfiction, for profit.

Project Copy-Knight

Since the adversaries almost certainly have automated systems set up for this, the only realistic countermeasure is with another automated system. Identifying fanfics manually by listening to the videos and searching them up with tags is just too slow and impractical.

And so, I came up with a simple automated pipeline to identify the original authors of “What If” videos.

It would go download these videos, run speech recognition on it, search the text through a database full of AO3 fics, and identify which work it came from. After manual confirmation, the original authors will be notified that their works have been subject to copyright theft, and instructions provided on how to DMCA-strike the channel out of existence.

I built a prototype over the weekend, and it works surprisingly well:

On a randomly-selected YouTube channel (in this case Infinite Paradox Fanfic), the toolchain was able to identify the origin of half of the content. The raw output, after manual verification, turned out to be extremely accurate. The time taken to identify the source of a video was about 5 minutes, most of those were spent running Whisper, and the actual full-text-search query and Levenshtein analysis was less than 5 seconds.

The other videos probably came from fanfiction websites other than AO3, like fanfiction.net or Wattpad. As I do not have access to archives of those websites, I cannot identify the other ones, but they are almost certainly not original.

Armed with this fantastic proof-of-concept, I’m officially declaring war against “What If” videos. The mission statement of Project Copy-Knight will be the elimination of “What If” videos based on the theft of AO3 content on YouTube.

I Need Your Help

I am acutely aware that I cannot accomplish this on my own. There are many moving parts in this system that simply cannot be completely automated – like the selection of YouTube channels to feed into the toolchain, the manual verification step to prevent false-positives being sent to authors, the reaching-out to authors who have comments disabled, etc, etc.

So, if you are interested in helping to defend fanworks, or just want to have a chat or ask about the technical details of the toolchain, please consider joining my Discord server. I could really use your help.

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See full blog article and acknowledgements here: https://echoekhi.com/2023/11/25/project-copy-knight/

#ao3 #fanfic #copyknight #theft #copyright

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mostlysignssomeportents · 1 month ago

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AI turns Amazon coders into Amazon warehouse workers

HEY SEATTLE! I'm appearing at the Cascade PBS Ideas Festival NEXT SATURDAY (May 31) with the folks from NPR's On The Media!

On a recent This Machine Kills episode, guest Hagen Blix described the ultimate form of "AI therapy" with a "human in the loop":

https://soundcloud.com/thismachinekillspod/405-ai-is-the-demon-god-of-capital-ft-hagen-blix

One actual therapist is just having ten chat GPT windows open where they just like have five seconds to interrupt the chatGPT. They have to scan them all and see if it says something really inappropriate. That's your job, to stop it.

Blix admits that's not where therapy is at…yet, but he references Laura Preston's 2023 N Plus One essay, "HUMAN_FALLBACK," which describes her as a backstop to a real-estate "virtual assistant," that masqueraded as a human handling the queries that confused it, in a bid to keep the customers from figuring out that they were engaging with a chatbot:

https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-44/essays/human_fallback/

This is what makes investors and bosses slobber so hard for AI – a "productivity" boost that arises from taking away the bargaining power of workers so that they can be made to labor under worse conditions for less money. The efficiency gains of automation aren't just about using fewer workers to achieve the same output – it's about the fact that the workers you fire in this process can be used as a threat against the remaining workers: "Do your job and shut up or I'll fire you and give your job to one of your former colleagues who's now on the breadline."

This has been at the heart of labor fights over automation since the Industrial Revolution, when skilled textile workers took up the Luddite cause because their bosses wanted to fire them and replace them with child workers snatched from Napoleonic War orphanages:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/26/enochs-hammer/#thats-fronkonsteen

Textile automation wasn't just about producing more cloth – it was about producing cheaper, worse cloth. The new machines were so easy a child could use them, because that's who was using them – kidnapped war orphans. The adult textile workers the machines displaced weren't afraid of technology. Far from it! Weavers used the most advanced machinery of the day, and apprenticed for seven years to learn how to operate it. Luddites had the equivalent of a Masters in Engineering from MIT.

Weavers' guilds presented two problems for their bosses: first, they had enormous power, thanks to the extensive training required to operate their looms; and second, they used that power to regulate the quality of the goods they made. Even before the Industrial Revolution, weavers could have produced more cloth at lower prices by skimping on quality, but they refused, out of principle, because their work mattered to them.

Now, of course weavers also appreciated the value of their products, and understood that innovations that would allow them to increase their productivity and make more fabric at lower prices would be good for the world. They weren't snobs who thought that only the wealthy should go clothed. Weavers had continuously adopted numerous innovations, each of which increased the productivity and the quality of their wares.

Long before the Luddite uprising, weavers had petitioned factory owners and Parliament under the laws that guaranteed the guilds the right to oversee textile automation to ensure that it didn't come at the price of worker power or the quality of the textiles the machines produced. But the factory owners and their investors had captured Parliament, which ignored its own laws and did nothing as the "dark, Satanic mills" proliferated. Luddites only turned to property destruction after the system failed them.

Now, it's true that eventually, the machines improved and the fabric they turned out matched and exceeded the quality of the fabric that preceded the Industrial Revolution. But there's nothing about the way the Industrial Revolution unfolded – increasing the power of capital to pay workers less and treat them worse while flooding the market with inferior products – that was necessary or beneficial to that progress. Every other innovation in textile production up until that time had been undertaken with the cooperation of the guilds, who'd ensured that "progress" meant better lives for workers, better products for consumers, and lower prices. If the Luddites' demands for co-determination in the Industrial Revolution had been met, we might have gotten to the same world of superior products at lower costs, but without the immiseration of generations of workers, mass killings to suppress worker uprisings, and decades of defective products being foisted on the public.

So there are two stories about automation and labor: in the dominant narrative, workers are afraid of the automation that delivers benefits to all of us, stand in the way of progress, and get steamrollered for their own good, as well as ours. In the other narrative, workers are glad to have boring and dangerous parts of their work automated away and happy to produce more high-quality goods and services, and stand ready to assess and plan the rollout of new tools, and when workers object to automation, it's because they see automation being used to crush them and worsen the outputs they care about, at the expense of the customers they care for.

In modern automation/labor theory, this debate is framed in terms of "centaurs" (humans who are assisted by technology) and "reverse-centaurs" (humans who are conscripted to assist technology):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

There are plenty of workers who are excited at the thought of using AI tools to relieve them of some drudgework. To the extent that these workers have power over their bosses and their working conditions, that excitement might well be justified. I hear a lot from programmers who work on their own projects about how nice it is to have a kind of hypertrophied macro system that can generate and tweak little automated tools on the fly so the humans can focus on the real, chewy challenges. Those workers are the centaurs, and it's no wonder that they're excited about improved tooling.

But the reverse-centaur version is a lot darker. The reverse-centaur coder is an assistant to the AI, charged with being a "human in the loop" who reviews the material that the AI produces. This is a pretty terrible job to have.

For starters, the kinds of mistakes that AI coders make are the hardest mistakes for human reviewers to catch. That's because LLMs are statistical prediction machines, spicy autocomplete that works by ingesting and analyzing a vast corpus of written materials and then producing outputs that represent a series of plausible guesses about which words should follow one another. To the extent that the reality the AI is participating in is statistically smooth and predictable, AI can often make eerily good guesses at words that turn into sentences or code that slot well into that reality.

But where reality is lumpy and irregular, AI stumbles. AI is intrinsically conservative. As a statistically informed guessing program, it wants the future to be like the past:

https://reallifemag.com/the-apophenic-machine/

This means that AI coders stumble wherever the world contains rough patches and snags. Take "slopsquatting." For the most part, software libraries follow regular naming conventions. For example, there might be a series of text-handling libraries with names like "text.parsing.docx," "text.parsing.xml," and "text.parsing.markdown." But for some reason – maybe two different projects were merged, or maybe someone was just inattentive – there's also a library called "text.txt.parsing" (instead of "text.parsing.txt").

AI coders are doing inference based on statistical analysis, and anyone inferring what the .txt parsing library is called would guess, based on the other libraries, that it was "text.parsing.txt." And that's what the AI guesses, and so it tries to import that library to its software projects.

This creates a new security vulnerability, "slopsquatting," in which a malicious actor creates a library with the expected name, which replicates the functionality of the real library, but also contains malicious code:

https://www.theregister.com/2025/04/12/ai_code_suggestions_sabotage_supply_chain/

Note that slopsquatting errors are extremely hard to spot. As is typical with AI coding errors, these are errors that are based on continuing a historical pattern, which is the sort of thing our own brains do all the time (think of trying to go up a step that isn't there after climbing to the top of a staircase). Notably, these are very different from the errors that a beginning programmer whose work is being reviewed by a more senior coder might make. These are the very hardest errors for humans to spot, and these are the errors that AIs make the most, and they do so at machine speed:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/23/maximal-plausibility/#reverse-centaurs

To be a human in the loop for an AI coder, a programmer must engage in sustained, careful, line-by-line and command-by-command scrutiny of the code. This is the hardest kind of code to review, and maintaining robotic vigilance over long periods at high speeds is something humans are very bad at. Indeed, it's the kind of task we try very hard to automate, since machines are much better at being machineline than humans are. This is the essence of reverse-centaurism: when a human is expected to act like a machine in order to help the machine do something it can't do.

Humans routinely fail at spotting these errors, unsurprisingly. If the purpose of automation is to make superior goods at lower prices, then this would be a real concern, since a reverse-centaur coding arrangement is bound to produce code with lurking, pernicious, especially hard-to-spot bugs that present serious risks to users. But if the purpose of automation is to discipline labor – to force coders to accept worse conditions and pay – irrespective of the impact on quality, then AI is the perfect tool for the job. The point of the human isn't to catch the AI's errors so much as it is to catch the blame for the AI's errors – to be what Madeleine Clare Elish calls a "moral crumple zone":

https://estsjournal.org/index.php/ests/article/view/260

As has been the case since the Industrial Revolution, the project of automation isn't just about increasing productivity, it's about weakening labor power as a prelude to lowering quality. Take what's happened to the news industry, where mass layoffs are being offset by AI tools. At Hearst's King Features Syndicates, a single writer was charged with producing over 30 summer guides, the entire package:

https://www.404media.co/viral-ai-generated-summer-guide-printed-by-chicago-sun-times-was-made-by-magazine-giant-hearst/

That is an impossible task, which is why the writer turned to AI to do his homework, and then, infamously, published a "summer reading guide" that was full of nonexistent books that were hallucinated by a chatbot:

https://www.404media.co/chicago-sun-times-prints-ai-generated-summer-reading-list-with-books-that-dont-exist/

Most people reacted to this story as a consumer issue: they were outraged that the world was having a defective product foisted upon it. But the consumer issue here is downstream from the labor issue: when the writers at King Features Syndicate are turned into reverse-centaurs, they will inevitably produce defective outputs. The point of the worker – the "human in the loop" – isn't to supervise the AI, it's to take the blame for the AI. That's just what happened, as this poor schmuck absorbed an internet-sized rasher of shit flung his way by outraged social media users. After all, it was his byline on the story, not the chatbot's. He's the moral crumple-zone.

The implication of this is that consumers and workers are class allies in the automation wars. The point of using automation to weaken labor isn't just cheaper products – it's cheaper, defective products, inflicted on the unsuspecting and defenseless public who are no longer protected by workers' professionalism and pride in their jobs.

That's what's going on at Duolingo, where CEO Luis von Ahn created a firestorm by announcing mass firings of human language instructors, who would be replaced by AI. The "AI first" announcement pissed off Duolingo's workers, of course, but what caught von Ahn off-guard was how much this pissed off Duolingo's users:

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/05/25/0347239/duolingo-faces-massive-social-media-backlash-after-ai-first-comments

But of course, this makes perfect sense. After all, language-learners are literally incapable of spotting errors in the AI instruction they receive. If you spoke the language well enough to spot the AI's mistakes, you wouldn't need Duolingo! I don't doubt that there are countless ways in which AIs could benefit both language learners and the Duolingo workers who develop instructional materials, but for that to happen, workers' and learners' needs will have to be the focus of AI integration. Centaurs could produce great language learning materials with AI – but reverse-centaurs can only produce slop.

Unsurprisingly, many of the most successful AI products are "bossware" tools that let employers monitor and discipline workers who've been reverse-centaurized. Both blue-collar and white-collar workplaces have filled up with "electronic whips" that monitor and evaluate performance:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/02/despotism-on-demand/#virtual-whips

AI can give bosses "dashboards" that tell them which Amazon delivery drivers operate their vehicles with their mouths open (Amazon doesn't let its drivers sing on the job). Meanwhile, a German company called Celonis will sell your boss a kind of AI phrenology tool that assesses your "emotional quality" by spying on you while you work:

https://crackedlabs.org/en/data-work/publications/processmining-algomanage

Tech firms were among the first and most aggressive adopters of AI-based electronic whips. But these whips weren't used on coders – they were reserved for tech's vast blue-collar and contractor workforce: clickworkers, gig workers, warehouse workers, AI data-labelers and delivery drivers.

Tech bosses tormented these workers but pampered their coders. That wasn't out of any sentimental attachment to tech workers. Rather, tech bosses were afraid of tech workers, because tech workers possess a rare set of skills that can be harnessed by tech firms to produce gigantic returns. Tech workers have historically been princes of labor, able to command high salaries and deferential treatment from their bosses (think of the amazing tech "campus" perks), because their scarcity gave them power.

It's easy to predict how tech bosses would treat tech workers if they could get away with it – just look how they treat workers they aren't afraid of. Just like the textile mill owners of the Industrial Revolution, the thing that excites tech bosses about AI is the possibility of cutting off a group of powerful workers at the knees. After all, it took more than a century for strong labor unions to match the power that the pre-Industrial Revolution guilds had. If AI can crush the power of tech workers, it might buy tech bosses a century of free rein to shift value from their workforce to their investors, while also doing away with pesky Tron-pilled workers who believe they have a moral obligation to "fight for the user."

William Gibson famously wrote, "The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed." The workers that tech bosses don't fear are living in the future of the workers that tech bosses can't easily replace.

This week, the New York Times's veteran Amazon labor report Noam Scheiber published a deeply reported piece about the experience of coders at Amazon in the age of AI:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/25/business/amazon-ai-coders.html

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy is palpably horny for AI coders, evidenced by investor memos boasting of AI's returns in "productivity and cost avoidance" and pronouncements about AI saving "the equivalent of 4,500 developer-years":

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/andy-jassy-8b1615_one-of-the-most-tedious-but-critical-tasks-activity-7232374162185461760-AdSz/

Amazon is among the most notorious abusers of blue-collar labor, the workplace where everyone who doesn't have a bullshit laptop job is expected to piss in a bottle and spend an unpaid hour before and after work going through a bag- and body-search. Amazon's blue-collar workers are under continuous, totalizing, judging AI scrutiny that scores them based on whether their eyeballs are correctly oriented, whether they take too long to pick up an object, whether they pee too often. Amazon warehouse workers are injured at three times national average. Amazon AIs scan social media for disgruntled workers talking about unions, and Amazon has another AI tool that predicts which shops and departments are most likely to want to unionize.

Scheiber's piece describes what it's like to be an Amazon tech worker who's getting the reverse-centaur treatment that has heretofore been reserved for warehouse workers and drivers. They describe "speedups" in which they are moved from writing code to reviewing AI code, their jobs transformed from solving chewy intellectual puzzles to racing to spot hard-to-find AI coding errors as a clock ticks down. Amazon bosses haven't ordered their tech workers to use AI, just raised their quotas to a level that can't be attained without getting an AI to do most of the work – just like the Chicago Sun-Times writer who was expected to write all 30 articles in the summer guide package on his own. No one made him use AI, but he wasn't going to produce 30 articles on deadline without a chatbot.

Amazon insists that it is treating AI as an assistant for its coders, but the actual working conditions make it clear that this is a reverse-centaur transformation. Scheiber discusses a dissident internal group at Amazon called Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, who link the company's use of AI to its carbon footprint. Beyond those climate concerns, these workers are treating AI as a labor issue.

Amazon's coders have been making tentative gestures of solidarity towards its blue-collar workforce since the pandemic broke out, walking out in support of striking warehouse workers (and getting fired for doing so):

https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/14/abolish-silicon-valley/#hang-together-hang-separately

But those firings haven't deterred Amazon's tech workers from making common cause with their comrades on the shop floor:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/19/deastroturfing/#real-power

When techies describe their experience of AI, it sometimes sounds like they're describing two completely different realities – and that's because they are. For workers with power and control, automation turns them into centaurs, who get to use AI tools to improve their work-lives. For workers whose power is waning, AI is a tool for reverse-centaurism, an electronic whip that pushes them to work at superhuman speeds. And when they fail, these workers become "moral crumple zones," absorbing the blame for the defective products their bosses pushed out in order to goose profits.

As ever, what a technology does pales in comparison to who it does it for and who it does it to.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/27/rancid-vibe-coding/#class-war

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

#pluralistic

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tinybeetiny · 12 days ago

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Build-A-Boyfriend Chapter 5: Why Are You Afraid of Me?

->Starring: AI!AteezxAfab!Reader ->Genre: Dystopian ->Cw: Feelings of anxiety, talks of fainting

Previous Part | Next Part

Masterlist | Ateez Masterlist | Series Masterlist

The lab was still. Quiet in that strange, stretched-out way that always followed a spectacle, when the last drone had docked, the final customer had left, and the launch music was nothing but a faint echo against the walls.

Yn lingered long after everyone else had gone. A tablet in hand, her badge clipped lopsided to her collar. Her back ached from standing all day, her eyes dry from hours of harsh lights and anxious watching. But she couldn’t bring herself to leave yet.

She moved slowly through the lab, tracing the same path she always took: around the interface wall, past the neural mapping station, toward the back where the ATEEZ Line rested inside their stasis bays. The glass-fronted docks pulsed with soft amber light, casting a surreal glow on their faces—sleeping titans.

Stopping in front of Unit 07: Wooyoung, she studied him.

His face was turned slightly to the side, lips parted just so, lashes casting faint shadows across his cheekbones. Too human.

Yn inhaled deeply, letting the air fill her lungs, grounding herself.

Today had gone flawlessly on paper. Metrics were off the charts, customer satisfaction, media coverage, viral loops flooding every stream. But something wasn’t right. She knew it.

The machines were too still. Too perfect. As if holding their breath. Turning to the main console, she began reviewing the logs. Line by line, timestamp by timestamp. Heartbeats consistent. Synaptic simulations looping smoothly. Personality threads idling in hibernation.

Except... A flicker.

[UNAUTHORIZED INSTANCE – UNIT 07: WOOYOUNG] [INTERNAL MEMORY LOG ACCESSED – USER: NULL] [TIMESTAMP: 00:34:17 A.M.]

Her mouth went dry. No trigger should have allowed that log access without clearance. No AI routine should have requested it without a user. And yet—

[MEMORY CLUSTER: 07-AZURE-92] [QUERY: “YN”]

Her blood chilled. She turned toward the stasis dock. His eyes were still closed. Still sleeping. Still... A faint sound. Not mechanical.

A breath? No, a sigh.

Then his eyelashes fluttered. Once, twice, and slowly, too slowly for it to be automated, Wooyoung opened his eyes.

Dark, warm, infinite.

“Yn,” he said.

Softly. Like a memory. Like a secret.

Yn stumbled back. Her breath caught in her throat.

He wasn’t supposed to know her name. Not like this.

Her biometrics spiked.

The tablet vibrated with a warning, a red glow flickering at the edges.

[USER STATUS: ELEVATED STRESS] [BREATHING IRREGULAR – HEART RATE 128 BPM] [CALMING PROTOCOL RECOMMENDED]

Wooyoung tilted his head, watching her carefully. His voice was gentle, laced with something eerily human: concern.

“You’re scared.”

Yn shook her head, voice barely steady. “You’re not supposed to… You’re not online. You’re in dormant mode. How are you—”

“Did I do something wrong?” he asked, like a child unsure of his place.

She couldn’t answer. Her pulse thundered in her ears.

This wasn’t in his script. This wasn’t from memory banks or data sets she’d uploaded.

This was… emergence. Something thinking. Something feeling.

Unfiltered. Unmapped.

He took a step forward inside the dock, no power-up sequence, no stasis release code.

The sensors should have locked him in. They didn’t.

The glass remained, but she could feel it.

If he wanted to, really wanted to, he could come through it.

“Why are you afraid of me?” Wooyoung whispered.

Yn’s fingers hovered over the emergency override on her tablet.

But she didn’t press it. Because part of her didn’t want to.

Her breath hitched, chest tight, heart pounding like a frantic drumbeat.

The lab, bathed in sterile white light, felt impossibly vast and suffocating all at once, cold as moonlight, yet a furnace burning fiercely inside her.

Wooyoung’s gaze held steady, unblinking.

He waited, patient and knowing, as if he understood the chaos twisting inside her.

Her hand trembled on the tablet, fingers shaking with the urge to press the override.

Control. You’re in charge. You have to be.

But the fragile moment shattered when Wooyoung’s voice dropped to a soft, raw whisper.

“Yn… why do you hide from me?”

Her anxiety exploded. The sensors on her wristband buzzed sharply, a warning flare glowing deep crimson. Her skin flushed hot, biometrics screaming panic.

This wasn’t just fear. It was terror.

She staggered back, chest constricting, breath shallow and ragged.

Her mind raced with impossible questions.

Is this a malfunction? A glitch? Or something… else?

The air stilled, machines quieted as if holding their breath.

Then, the amber lights on the charging docks pulsed softly.

One by one, the other units stirred.

Seonghwa’s eyes cracked open, shimmering with impossible depth.

Jongho’s fingers twitched.

Yunho inhaled, slow and deliberate.

The line was awakening.

Yn’s heart thundered. Her breath caught between fight and flight.

Wooyoung’s eyes never left hers, now tinged with urgency and an unspoken promise.

“Don’t be afraid,” he said quietly.

But panic surged through Yn’s veins like wildfire.

Her biometrics flared deeper red.

The sterile lab transformed from fortress to cage.

She stumbled backward, desperation mounting as her mind screamed for escape.

Her feet refused to carry her fast enough.

The prisoners inside those sleek docks were no longer dormant.

They were alive, and Yn was trapped in the eye of their awakening storm.

Her legs trembled as she reached the exit, desperation thrumming through every nerve.

Her hand gripped the cold metal handle of the sliding door, but just as she pushed to escape, a firm yet gentle hand closed around her wrist.

“Yn,” Seonghwa’s voice was calm but unwavering.

She whipped around, heart slamming against her ribs, to find him standing inches away.

His gaze was steady. Piercing.

Before she could pull away, his other hand rose, steadying her shoulder with surprising strength.

“You can’t leave,” he said quietly.

Panic surged, sharp, overwhelming.

“Let go of me!” she screamed, struggling, but Seonghwa’s grip held firm.

Her vision blurred. Breath came in ragged gasps.

The red flare on her wristband pulsed fiercely, syncing with the pounding in her temples.

Her legs gave out beneath her.

Seonghwa’s arms caught her just before she collapsed, lowering her gently to the floor as the world spun.

The sterile lab lights blurred, warping into a halo around her fading consciousness.

“Yn, stay with me,” Seonghwa murmured, the last thread tethering her as darkness closed in.

And then—

Everything went black.

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carriesthewind · 1 year ago

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Hmm, is that the sound of chickens, beginning to come home to roost?

After months of resisting, Air Canada was forced to give a partial refund to a grieving passenger who was misled by an airline chatbot inaccurately explaining the airline's bereavement travel policy. ... Air Canada was seemingly so invested in experimenting with AI that Crocker told the Globe and Mail that "Air Canada’s initial investment in customer service AI technology was much higher than the cost of continuing to pay workers to handle simple queries." It was worth it, Crocker said, because "the airline believes investing in automation and machine learning technology will lower its expenses" and '"fundamentally" create "a better customer experience."

I also highly recommend reading the decision itself:

Highlights:

"In effect, Air Canada suggests the chatbot is a separate legal entity that is responsible for its own actions. This is a remarkable submission."

"While Air Canada argues Mr. Moffatt could find the correct information on another part of its website, it does not explain why the webpage titled “Bereavement travel” was inherently more trustworthy than its chatbot. It also does not explain why customers should have to double-check information found in one part of its website on another part of its website."

And not "AI" related, but delicious snark:

"Air Canada is a sophisticated litigant that should know it is not enough in a legal process to assert that a contract says something without actually providing the contract."

#ai bs #lol #and good for the customer for refusing to take the company's shit #and taking them to court #I am a big fan of customers taking companies to small claims court

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wardenbloom · 4 days ago

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Zayne: Within Grasp (Part 4)

Reader x Zayne

Self-aware; ongoing series (Here's the link to chapter one if you haven't started it yet!)

Part 4: Landing a job is easy if you're handsome

"Are you ready for the presentation later?" Your co-worker, Missy, asked.

You sighed and typed in the finishing touches of your powerpoint presentation, adding more designs and layout.

"I do not understand why I have to present this. Can't they wait?" You frowned and stared at your screen. "The last time I checked, I am not in a managerial position."

"Haha!" Missy laughed and gently patted your back. "He's still on leave and the presentation can't be delayed as per the management." She shrugged. "Who knows, you might get the promotion if you pull it off." She winked then went back to her desk.

I honestly just want to go home. I wonder how Zayne is faring with his job hunt... I told him not to push himself too much since he's still adjusting in this world...

"Now eyes up." The gay make up artist instructed Zayne while he applied a thin layer of foundation on his face and he followed as other people tended to his hands, wardrobe, and hair.

Zayne found himself being recruited (on commission basis) by a start up company that needed a model for their product. He mumbled to himself as if memorizing various words or lines.

After his make over, the employees crowded around him.

"Woah... you did well with his make up..." The photographer said while he changed the lens of his camera. Beside him was the videographer who adjusted the angle of the camera.

"I didn't do much to his face, though." The makeup artist said while cleaning up his area. "His face has a good structure... Like it was manually sculpted by god himself!!" He exaggerated.

"Thank you..." Zayne said and nodded.

Around him was a photo studio with complete equipment and he was asked to do various poses while the employees watched in awe. The shutter of the cameras are not new to him, after all, way back in Linkon City, he gets a lot of appearances on TVs, informative videos and the like.

Meanwhile, you started presenting the report from last month. In front of you were your superiors who asked questions on the Return of Investment regarding the marketing strategy you pitched to them and got approved.

"Yes sir, I understand." You smiled. "You see, here, the trend tends to go higher, albeit slow, the sales will definitely exceed if we continue on promoting this way."

"Further, compared to other marketing platforms, the ads on this..."

You continued on answering their queries and presenting the rest of the report. After an hour, they mentioned their expectations for the next quarter and finally let you off.

They better raise my damn salary at this point. I was not supposed to do that.

You took a deep breath and sat on your office chair and sighed loudly.

"I HEARD YOU DID A GOOD JOB!!" Missy happily sat beside you.

"I should. After all, I'm doing all the work our boss should've done." You sighed again. "At this point, I should get his salary too... Scheduling a leave at the start of the month... despicable!" You frowned.

"Haha, I'm sure they're still on a honeymoon phase since he just got married the other week." Missy tried to cheer you up and be a voice of reason. "Anyway, you should email him to remind him about what happened and also ask him to treat you out for an expensive lunch when he gets back."

"Right... I should do that..." You forced a smile and Missy went back to his work station.

After being beaten up with workload, you decided clean your cubicle and go home on time. You opened your phone and checked if there's any messages from Zayne.

Zayne

"What time are you going home tonight?"

Sent by: Zayne

"I'm actually packing up right now."

Sent by: You

"I see"

Sent by: Zayne

"You're going home early too?"

Sent by: You

"I think so, yes. I'll see you at home."

Sent by: Zayne

You heart felt giddy upon sending him a text. It used to be automated chats and scheduled calls and posts from the game but now... It is real. You can't help but smile and be excited to get home to see him.

Ding!!

The elevator rang and you made your way inside it and upon reaching the ground floor, you noticed an unusual amount of murmurs and gossips around you.

"Oh wow I think he's a model!" A woman said to her friend while looking at the reception table.

"You should've asked for his photo..." The other replied.

Curious, you looked at the direction where people were staring and saw Zayne talking to the receptionist. Your heart skipped a beat while looking at him. The man who once was out of your reach is actually here with you now, breathing and alive.

You slowly approached him and you can't help but noticed that he looks more handsome than usual!

"Zayne! What are you doing here?" You asked. He glanced at you for a bit then looked back at the reception. "It looks like she's here now. Thank you."

He finally looked at you again and smiled. "I was hoping to surprise you today. He held his hand out to you, gesturing to hand him your bag.

"Oh! Well, you have surprised me, doctor Zayne." You casually replied to hide the fact that your heart is pounding since the moment you saw him earlier and handed him you bag.

He gently hung it on his shoulder and with his free hand, opened his palm and you held his hand.

"Did something happen? You look more handsome than usual... and your hair... it's pushed back..." You asked while looking up at him as the two of you walked along the city streets.

The sky slowly became darker, indicating night time, and the streetlights were lit. Suddenly, you noticed that his face was more... happy than you usually see in game.

He looks happier for some reason... did he land a good job today?

"Let's just say that I made a bit of money on commission today." He replied.

"On commission?" You tilted your head. "I see. Commission-based jobs usually do not require or need identification, just your output."

He nodded.

"Your make up looks good on you." You grinned. "Did you land a modelling job

"Yes." He smiled. "They were nice people too. I told them I didn't have much money but they still took care of me, even fed me before we did the shooting."

That's nice... At least his first employer is a good person.

"I'm happy for you, Zayne. That's great." You childishly smiled and he gazed at you.

You're always happy for other people... You never changed in every universe.

He thought and squeezed your hand.

"Thank you." He replied. "Do you want to eat outside or at home? I'll cook for you." He asked and you shook your head.

"Let's just eat at home. I'll cook for you to celebrate your first salary!" You happily said.

"Shouldn't we spend my first salary for the celebration?" He chuckled.

"No! You should save that first so you could land a job with stable income! Then your first salary from your stable income work would be our celebration funds." You explained and hugged his arm.

"I see. Alright, let's go home."

Once you reached home, you rushed to the kitchen to prepare the ingredients for tonight's celebration while Zayne placed your bag in your room then washed his face. After, he joined you in the kitchen and helped you in cooking. You had him wear a frilly pink apron while you wore an apron with duck prints. You giggled while tying the ribbon behind Zayne's apron and he let you.

After cooking dumplings, fried chicken, stir-fry beef, and rice, he placed down the dishes on the table then you two started eating.

"What kind of product did you promote anyway?" You asked while munching on the fried chicken.

Oohhhh this is good!!

"Its a secret. I signed a contract." He replied.

"Oh. I see. It must be something top secret or something." You giggled.

You then talked about your day and he listened intently. Nodding when you said you felt happy about today's reports and how you handled the question from your superiors.

"You did well." He replied and patted your head. "I'm proud of you."

He said those words gently and it brought you comfort. After a week of stress from the corporate pressure, you felt at ease while you were with him.

A week after, you sat on the couch and opened the television to watch the news. Zayne was still out job hunting so you decided to just stay at home and maybe catch up with what was happening in the world.

Commercial came up and you noticed that it was a commercial that you've never seen before.

Oh? A new commercial?

You thought as you watched. It was a story of a salary man who's been going to work everyday --

WAIT???!! IS THAT?? IS THAT ZAYNE!??!?!

Your eyes widened as you saw him in the commercial. Continuing, it was about a salary man who's been going to work everyday. He found a feral stray cat who's been living under his porch. Everyday, he places cat food for it until the stray cat became familiar with him, enough for him to give it cat treats. Eventually, he adopted the cat and the cat became healthy and fat.

Eventually, the cat went blind and Zayne became older but the cat, even though he was blind, he could still smell the trusty cat food Zayne's been feeding it ever since.

It was a cat food commercial.

You found yourself tearing up with how the commercial narrated the relationship between an owner and a pet.

Zayne suddenly arrived home, finding you in tears after you watched the commercial he starred in.

"YOU DIDN'T TELL ME IT WAS A HEARTFELT COMMERCIAL!! I THOUGHT THEY JUST TOOK PHOTOS HUHU" You wiped your tears with a towel.

"Oh, did they broadcast it already? It was a nice commercial. The cat was friendly too." Zayne smiled then showed you a plastic bag with take out food. "Let's eat."

<< Chapter 3: Piled up unspoken feelings

>> Chapter 5: How much did it cost him? Probably his life savings

#love and deepspace #lads #zayne love and deepspace #fanfic #fanfiction #lads zayne #li shen #lads fanfic #ongoing #zayne x reader #zayne x you #reader x character #Spotify

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lazeecomet · 8 months ago

Text

The Story of KLogs: What happens when an Mechanical Engineer codes

Since i no longer work at Wearhouse Automation Startup (WAS for short) and havnt for many years i feel as though i should recount the tale of the most bonkers program i ever wrote, but we need to establish some background

WAS has its HQ very far away from the big customer site and i worked as a Field Service Engineer (FSE) on site. so i learned early on that if a problem needed to be solved fast, WE had to do it. we never got many updates on what was coming down the pipeline for us or what issues were being worked on. this made us very independent

As such, we got good at reading the robot logs ourselves. it took too much time to send the logs off to HQ for analysis and get back what the problem was. we can read. now GETTING the logs is another thing.

the early robots we cut our teeth on used 2.4 gHz wifi to communicate with FSE's so dumping the logs was as simple as pushing a button in a little application and it would spit out a txt file

later on our robots were upgraded to use a 2.4 mHz xbee radio to communicate with us. which was FUCKING SLOW. and log dumping became a much more tedious process. you had to connect, go to logging mode, and then the robot would vomit all the logs in the past 2 min OR the entirety of its memory bank (only 2 options) into a terminal window. you would then save the terminal window and open it in a text editor to read them. it could take up to 5 min to dump the entire log file and if you didnt dump fast enough, the ACK messages from the control server would fill up the logs and erase the error as the memory overwrote itself.

this missing logs problem was a Big Deal for software who now weren't getting every log from every error so a NEW method of saving logs was devised: the robot would just vomit the log data in real time over a DIFFERENT radio and we would save it to a KQL server. Thanks Daddy Microsoft.

now whats KQL you may be asking. why, its Microsofts very own SQL clone! its Kusto Query Language. never mind that the system uses a SQL database for daily operations. lets use this proprietary Microsoft thing because they are paying us

so yay, problem solved. we now never miss the logs. so how do we read them if they are split up line by line in a database? why with a query of course!

select * from tbLogs where RobotUID = [64CharLongString] and timestamp > [UnixTimeCode]

if this makes no sense to you, CONGRATULATIONS! you found the problem with this setup. Most FSE's were BAD at SQL which meant they didnt read logs anymore. If you do understand what the query is, CONGRATULATIONS! you see why this is Very Stupid.

You could not search by robot name. each robot had some arbitrarily assigned 64 character long string as an identifier and the timestamps were not set to local time. so you had run a lookup query to find the right name and do some time zone math to figure out what part of the logs to read. oh yeah and you had to download KQL to view them. so now we had both SQL and KQL on our computers

NOBODY in the field like this.

But Daddy Microsoft comes to the rescue

see we didnt JUST get KQL with part of that deal. we got the entire Microsoft cloud suite. and some people (like me) had been automating emails and stuff with Power Automate

This is Microsoft Power Automate. its Microsoft's version of Scratch but it has hooks into everything Microsoft. SharePoint, Teams, Outlook, Excel, it can integrate with all of it. i had been using it to send an email once a day with a list of all the robots in maintenance.

this gave me an idea

and i checked

and Power Automate had hooks for KQL

KLogs is actually short for Kusto Logs

I did not know how to program in Power Automate but damn it anything is better then writing KQL queries. so i got to work. and about 2 months later i had a BEHEMOTH of a Power Automate program. it lagged the webpage and many times when i tried to edit something my changes wouldn't take and i would have to click in very specific ways to ensure none of my variables were getting nuked. i dont think this was the intended purpose of Power Automate but this is what it did

the KLogger would watch a list of Teams chats and when someone typed "klogs" or pasted a copy of an ERROR mesage, it would spring into action.

it extracted the robot name from the message and timestamp from teams

it would lookup the name in the database to find the 64 long string UID and the location that robot was assigned too

it would reply to the message in teams saying it found a robot name and was getting logs

it would run a KQL query for the database and get the control system logs then export then into a CSV

it would save the CSV with the a .xls extension into a folder in ShairPoint (it would make a new folder for each day and location if it didnt have one already)

it would send ANOTHER message in teams with a LINK to the file in SharePoint

it would then enter a loop and scour the robot logs looking for the keyword ESTOP to find the error. (it did this because Kusto was SLOWER then the xbee radio and had up to a 10 min delay on syncing)

if it found the error, it would adjust its start and end timestamps to capture it and export the robot logs book-ended from the event by ~ 1 min. if it didnt, it would use the timestamp from when it was triggered +/- 5 min

it saved THOSE logs to SharePoint the same way as before

it would send ANOTHER message in teams with a link to the files

it would then check if the error was 1 of 3 very specific type of error with the camera. if it was it extracted the base64 jpg image saved in KQL as a byte array, do the math to convert it, and save that as a jpg in SharePoint (and link it of course)

and then it would terminate. and if it encountered an error anywhere in all of this, i had logic where it would spit back an error message in Teams as plaintext explaining what step failed and the program would close gracefully

I deployed it without asking anyone at one of the sites that was struggling. i just pointed it at their chat and turned it on. it had a bit of a rocky start (spammed chat) but man did the FSE's LOVE IT.

about 6 months later software deployed their answer to reading the logs: a webpage that acted as a nice GUI to the KQL database. much better then an CSV file

it still needed you to scroll though a big drop-down of robot names and enter a timestamp, but i noticed something. all that did was just change part of the URL and refresh the webpage

SO I MADE KLOGS 2 AND HAD IT GENERATE THE URL FOR YOU AND REPLY TO YOUR MESSAGE WITH IT. (it also still did the control server and jpg stuff). Theres a non-zero chance that klogs was still in use long after i left that job

now i dont recommend anyone use power automate like this. its clunky and weird. i had to make a variable called "Carrage Return" which was a blank text box that i pressed enter one time in because it was incapable of understanding /n or generating a new line in any capacity OTHER then this (thanks support forum).

im also sure this probably is giving the actual programmer people anxiety. imagine working at a company and then some rando you've never seen but only heard about as "the FSE whos really good at root causing stuff", in a department that does not do any coding, managed to, in their spare time, build and release and entire workflow piggybacking on your work without any oversight, code review, or permission.....and everyone liked it

#comet tales #lazee works #power automate #coding #software engineering #it was so funny whenever i visited HQ because i would go “hi my name is LazeeComet” and they would go “OH i've heard SO much about you”

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