Understatement, I know, but I find this so annoying, and it certainly feels malicious.

I was just commenting the other day how ridiculous it is that google search results literally serve up malware to people via paid ads. My neighbor was running into issues where her computer kept getting “infected” and a full screen scam would take control, blaring out a loud message that her computer was infected with a virus, that it was infecting microsoft’s servers, and she had to call them now to fix it.

After investigating, I found out that these types of scams are stored as blobs on Microsoft’s cloud service, but the links are spread via ads in google search. When I tried searching for the exact search terms my neighbor was using on my own devices and my own network, I found out that google was serving me the exact same ads, aka sponsored links. They look like legitimate results for things that people search for, like showing what appears to be a link to Amazon when searching for a product, even the links will say “www.amazon.com”.

Obviously I told my neighbor not to use Chrome and suggested some browser alternatives. I installed uBlock on all the browsers (including chrome) just to be safe. Then I showed her how to tell when things are ads, even when they are deceiving, and to never click on ads or sponsored links under any circumstances.

But it’s definitely infuriating that they are serving up malware in their ads, don’t respond to reports in a timely manner, are getting people caught in scams that they allow to advertise on their network but then somehow object to people managing those risks by blocking ads from untrustworthy sources, like google.

♪ You’re so pretty. ♪

♪ Oh, so pretty. ♪

♪ You are pretty and witty and GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY. ♪

In a way, I’m glad people are slowing starting to come around and pay attention to this. For years, any time I would publicly complain about Amazon customer service online, it was very common for people to be completely dismissive or even blame me. I’d hear statements like “sure Amazon sucks, but they have great customer service” and I’d think to myself, just wait until it’s your time to find out that the customer service isn’t what you think it is.

Long story short, the item came with a broken part. Should have been quick and easy to rectify (send a replacement part, send a replacement unit, or refund the purchase). The seller was completely unhelpful. Amazon customer service would not intervene and insisted that I continue fruitlessly corresponding with the vendor, even though they had an “A-to-Z” money back guarantee if something goes wrong. It literally took months of back and forth between me, the vendor, and Amazon customer service before things were finally refunded in full.

So, basically I gave them another chance and they showed that things hadn’t improved a bit.

Anecdotally speaking, I’ve been suspecting this was happening already with code related AI as I’ve been noticing a pretty steep decline in code quality of the code suggestions various AI tools have been providing.

Some of these tools, like GitHub’s AI product, are trained on their own code repositories. As more and more developers use AI to help generate code and especially as more novice level developers rely on AI to help learn new technologies, more of that AI generated code is getting added to the repos (in theory) that are used to train the AI. Not that all AI code is garbage, but there’s enough that is garbage in my experience, that I suspect it’s going to be a garbage in, garbage out affair sans human correction/oversight. Currently, as far as I can tell, these tools aren’t really using much in the way of good metrics to rate whether the code they are training on is quality or not, nor whether it actually even works or not.

More and more often I’m getting ungrounded output (the new term for hallucinations) when it comes to code, rather than the actual helpful and relevant stuff that had me so excited when I first started using these products. And I worry that it’s going to get worse. I hope not, of course, but it is a little concerning when the AI tools are more consistently providing useless / broken suggestions.

Personally, I don’t think the technology is a failure. It’s the implementation that’s the pain point.

I’m no fan of Walmart, but the local store has the lenient self checkout machines that don’t make you place and leave your items in the bagging area. And there’s a hand scanner for each machine. The hand scanner is pretty close to instant, so I can literally scan an entire cart full of items in under a minute (with caveats) and you don’t even have to take things out of the cart to scan them (with caveats). Sometimes there are hiccups and obviously some items are sold by weight, so that’ll slow things down.

But even with all that, the implementation is the pain point because they’ll only have 1 person running the machines, so if they have to run off to help a customer or multiple people need help at the same time, you just have to wait. Also, the particular store I go to shuts down half the machines ridiculously early in the evening. When the machines break, they stay broken for weeks or months. And they have some kind of ridiculous system where some of the machines are cash-only, some are card-only, but the majority will accept either – this adds to a lot of inefficiency because a lot of customers don’t know which machines are which and if you mess up and pick the wrong one then things get tied up while you wait for a cashier to come and transfer you over to a different one so you can pay.

The other big factor is that customers were trained on the old shitty style self checkouts where you had to scan each item one at a time, place it in the bagging area, leave it there until you pay, and if so much as a speck of dust landed in the bagging area or a piece of onion skin fell off, it would freeze up. So even with the new lenient hand scanners, people still do it the old and slow way.

I cancelled Amazon Prime awhile ago when the customer service took a nose dive and I realized too many of the 3rd party vendors were using Amazon as their defective products outlet.

But I actively and permanently skipped out on an Amazon Prime subscription because they refused to give me a pro-rated refund on the remaining 8-9 months of service after I cancelled. They literally told me that they start with the pro-rated amount, then subtract out the cost of all the “free” movie/show/music rentals as well as all the “free” shipping on orders during the time you’ve had prime, and you only get whatever remains (if anything). Within the first 3 -4 months, I had already accrued enough “free” $5.99 shipping and $3 - $4 rentals that it exceeded the $100 or whatever cost of a prime membership was back in those days, so I got no refund. Bunch of crooks.

No surprise, I’m completely on board with folks kicking Prime to the curb.