Zero chill, & not much I, either

Oh, bwahahaha!

It turns out that Microsoft’s inability to read the world around it isn’t limited to its CEO sticking his foot in his mouth in front of very large crowds of tech women. Because they launched a chatbot on social media platforms that so misfired they had to shut it down in a matter of hours.

Tay was styled “the AI with zero chill” and was apparently supposed to “learn” what to say through interactions with her target audience, the 19-to-24-year-old set. This was an attempt to seem more with-it in terms of customer service. Because those young ‘uns just can’t tell the difference between a human and a robot, generally speaking.

Apparently it occurred to no one on Microsoft’s Technology and Research and Bing teams that social media positively swarms with trolls, most of whom don’t really like any type of corporate PR efforts, which they rightly equate with scamming attempts. Therefore, they didn’t give poor little Tay any filters when it came to repeating whatever she heard out on the wild, wild web.

I mean, she's the ultimate blonde.

So in less than 24 hours, Tay was a full-blown racist, Hitler-loving potty mouth, inviting people to fuck her without apparently any sense of sarcasm. Viz.:

How is it that they couldn’t have foreseen this? It’s like they’re completely unaware of the troll feeding frenzies that always swirl up whenever one of these bloated corporations tries to appear “transparent” via social media. I mean every damned time. There is no escape from this.

And I seriously don’t know what’s up with Microsoft—they just don’t seem to be able to learn anything from their constituency. I ask you: where's the intelligence, artificial or otherwise? 

They just keep spitballing crap they think is going to make them look trendy without having any sense of how idiotic they actually do appear. They’re like a 45-year-old growing a soul patch and wearing a hipster hat. With his Dockers and Birkenstocks.

As for me, I’m going to make another bowl of popcorn and wait for what’s next out of their chute.

Most interesting

Oh, dear—seems The Most Interesting Man in the World has suddenly become…less interesting. At least to his employer.

Dos Equis (owned by Heineken) announced a couple of weeks ago that they were cutting Jonathan Goldsmith, 77, loose and replacing him with someone more in tune with the brand’s customer base.

That means a Millennial, who will, by definition, be hip and trendy.

Goldsmith started his gig with the Mexican beer company in 2007, so he’s had a good run, as these things go. TMIMITW was modeled on Hemingway in appearance and terse, banal dialog, and never seen with a woman who was within 20 years of his age (even his apparent age). Clearly, he was the dream of every male over 40.

They gave TMIMITW a testosterone-fueled send-off in a final commercial, in which he blasts off for a one-way mission to Mars. With a female astronaut about 50 years younger. If ya gotta go, it’s nice to go first class, I guess.

I shudder to think what the casting call for his replacement will be, because imagining the Millennial personification of “staying thirsty” makes me throw up a little in my mouth.

But if he shows up wearing a hipster hat, there will be blood.

Charlie pleura

I have only a couple of things to say about yesterday’s attacks in Brussels.

The somewhat detached observer/analyst in me is thinking that, in terms of return on investment, the bombing of Zaventem airport and the Maelbeek metro station would please any VC. The vermin who planned these attacks—like the ones in Paris last year—are really quite clever, achieving maximum impact for the minimum of investment.

Think about it—for the price of a few mindless (but fervent) fuckwits and the latest in plastic explosives (available pretty much at any convenience store in certain parts of the world), you kill a few dozen ordinary infidels (because everyone who doesn’t subscribe to your particular belief set is an infidel), close down the airport and transport system for some indeterminate time, and then you sit back and watch your enemies do the rest of your work for you.

You get them to impose more and more authoritarian and intrusive measures while chasing their tail looking for you. And the ordinary people get less sleep, expend more energy looking over their shoulder and generally live their lives bowed under the weight of fear.

And it’s working. They don’t have to defeat armies, they can go straight to the hearts and minds of the people. Costs a few of their own followers—but they’re cheap, disposable and replaceable. Eat all you want; we’ll make more.

Their goal is to make the cities of the West look like Ramadi, Mosul and Derna. In every possible respect.

That said, the human being in me is just bone tired of all of it.

 

 

 

Take me Bach

Yesterday was the 231^st anniversary of the birth of Johann Sebastian Bach. You know, the granddaddy of classical music.

It was also a spectacularly bad day for me at work, wasting hours while IT tried download after interminable download to solve the problem of why I wasn’t getting Ethernet connectivity in my new office (which I can also use to do a little side business of growing mushrooms).

There was another perfect storm involving facilities and a non-installed keyboard tray (which has ratcheted me up to an 8 on the pain scale), and trying to find a doctor using what my health insurer is pleased to call a provider directory. (Hint: you lose credibility if you tell me the data was updated last week, but one of the providers you list closed his office and moved to Pittsburgh last year.)

Anyhow, it was Bach’s birthday, and a genius of that magnitude deserves more than a single day. Here’s the “Cello Suite No. 1” in G. This sucker can talk me off the ledge most days.

Gratitude Monday: Not rose-colored Windows

I have to preface my Monday gratitude with stating unequivocally that I am not in the least grateful that Microsoft saw fit to mess with their Windows and Office interfaces so as to give the appearance (as opposed to the substance) of a better user experience. So far, my UX with Win10/Office 365 is that they suck on every level.

(How bad could it possibly be, you ask? So bad that two different individuals, both techies, advised me to bag the Outlook “desktop client” and just use Gmail webmail, which I don't much fancy. I liked the old desktop client; it felt substantial. This one offers all the crappiness of webmail, but layers on more complexity.)

However, I’m deeply grateful that my trusty Samsung Series 9 laptop lasted for a good year longer than every Dell I’ve ever had, & that I can still use it as a backup if I ever decide to dropkick this one with all its Windows-y annoyance straight into the pool.