Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youā€™ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutā€™nā€™paste it into its own post ā€” thereā€™s no quota for posting and the bar really isnā€™t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many ā€œesotericā€ right wing freaks, but thereā€™s no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iā€™m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged ā€œculture criticsā€ who write about everything but understand nothing. Iā€™m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyā€™re inescapable at this point, yet I donā€™t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnā€™t be surgeons because they didnā€™t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canā€™t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)

    • Mii@awful.systems
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      2 months ago

      Am I understanding this right: this app takes a picture of your ID card or passport and the feeds it to some ML algorithm to figure out whether the document is real plus some additional stuff like address verification?

      Depending on where youā€™re located, you might try and file a GDPR complaint against this. Iā€™m not a lawyer but I work with the DSO for our company and routinely piss off people by raising concerns about whatever stupid tool marketing or BI tried to implement without asking anyone, and I think unless you work somewhere that falls under one of the exceptions for GDPR art. 5 Ā§1 you have a pretty good case there because that request seems definitely excessive and not strictly necessary.

      • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systems
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        2 months ago

        They advertise a stunning 95% success rate! Since it has a 9 and a 5 in the number itā€™s probably as good as five nines. No word on what the success rate is for transgender people or other minorities though.

        As for the algorithm: they advertise ā€œAIā€ and ā€œreinforced learningā€, but that could mean anything from good old fashioned Computer Vision with some ML dust sprinkled on top, to feeding a diffusion model a pair of images and asking it if theyā€™re the same person. The company has been around since before the Chat-GPT hype wave.

        • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems
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          2 months ago

          Given thaty wife interviewed with a ā€œdigital AI assistantā€ company for the position of, effectively, the digital AI assistant well before the current bubble really took off, I would not be at all surprised if they kept a few wage-earners on staff to handle more inconclusive checks.

    • gerikson@awful.systems
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      2 months ago

      I donā€™t see the point of this app/service. Why canā€™t someone who is trusted at the company (like HR) just check ID manually? I understand it might be tough if everyone is fully remote but donā€™t public notaries offer this kind of service?

    • Steve@awful.systems
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      2 months ago

      Our combination of AI and in-house human verification teams ensures bad actors are kept at bay and genuine users experience minimal friction in their customer journey.

      whatā€™s the point, then?

      • rook@awful.systems
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        2 months ago

        One or more of the following:

        • they donā€™t bother with ai at all, but pretending they do helps with sales and marketing to the gullible
        • they have ai but it is totally shit, and they have to mechanical turk everything to have a functioning system at all
        • they have shit ai, but theyā€™re trying to make it better and the humans are there to generate test and training data annotations