A better Customer Service bot would be one that's trained on data other than what's publicly available. A support bot that has read and "understands" the code itself may be able to offer suggestions, or confidently determine there is in fact a bug, and either report it or fix it. Imagine a customer speaks to HelperBot and says the sorting is broken, and as a matter of fact it is. The sorting broke when the last change to SomeApp was shipped. Don't fear, HelperBot has rollback authority. "One second, I'll see if we can get that working for you..."
Working at SaaS companies I've seen countless "somewhat fluid" exchanges of information between customer -> support -> product -> developer -> support -> customer -> support -> dev, etc. The different modes of communication and long round trip times make things slow, bug reports take minimum of hours, up to weeks to absorb and resolve.
This is just one case but there are boxes drawn everywhere. Every level of intelligent organization within the society, including it's artifacts, has assumptions baked in. Now that the unit economics of applying `intelligence()` is being shifted by orders of magnitude, there's all sorts of stuff that's ripe for recrafting.
Disclaimer: Don't give HelperBot launch authority to offensive weapons etc. You know, make decisions consistent with a world line where the continuation of the civilization is pretty darn likely. Unless of course your project is to replace the current civilization, ... I don't know. Just don't do what Donny Don't does.
This guy is doing a public service. He admittedly loves public infrastructure and civil engineering and does an amazing job of balancing the technical details and gist of the underlying physics and engineering constraints with the context of the real world applications.
Sometimes the topics are almost comically mundane, but I jumped into them and found it thoroughly interesting. One example is his 10-minute explainer "What is a Culvert"[1]. It's the perfect debunking of something seeming "trivial" to the casual observer. In another video he comments on why on construction sites you see so many folks "just standing around".
He has videos you can watch with your kids about things you might ordinarily just wave your hands about, like "How Water Towers Work"[2]. And then bigger more much involved explanations on topics you certainly have heard of but never bothered to look into, like "What Really Happened During the 2003 Blackout?"[3].
lol I feel like I sound like a advertisement but I really just love his work and thoroughly recommend having this channel in your repertoire. He's also just earnest, not unnecessarily dire or animated, and often gives what feel like fair and balanced perspectives on some of the social issues surrounding these topics.
What about ones perception of being able to improve their life? What of opportunity? hope? These are human beings after-all, they perceive such concepts as integral to their reality.
In the post-war period prior to the 70s, it was (more) common and reasonable for a high school educated factory worker (in the US) to have optimism in their ability to work in that role and improve their state of affairs. Afford to buy a home, pay off the mortgage, buy a car, provide for a couple of kids, send one of them to college, drive to a national park for an annual vacation.
Nowadays, one can be both lucky in terms of their upbringing and be highly educated (post secondary or even advanced degrees), and yet very easily find themselves in a position where the above "life staples" (house, car, family without poverty) are meaningfully out of reach. And in many cases, not even conceivably within reach.
It's not merely that housing in major cities is objectively less affordable, it's that the stage upon which life is lived has changed in it's nature. It's a perpetual sunset rather than sunrise, optimism is either for suckers or for those who mischaracterize a certain degree of background luck as merit.
I'm in the lucky category. But I think when we boil down the collective subjective experience of hundreds of millions (billions?) to broad metrics and indicators, our models lose the fidelity they need for the subjects to feel they are being taken seriously. I understand why we have these models and tools for better navigating the civilizational state-space, but they're obviously imperfect, and they're of little comfort when serious concerns go unacknowledged (let alone unaddressed) for decades.
Now it's possible that CEO pay is orthogonal to all of this. Perhaps as a measure it's one of the metrics that loses too much descriptive power in it's generalization... but it certainly does reek of something.
The reduction of the communication overhead is definitely non-trivial. Though many businesses don't seem to measure the internal performance of their systems when the programs are running on and between humans. So if it works to some vague, hand wavey degree, "fine".
By relying on the idea that back/front is "just" a way of splitting a system, one could say that SRE/Front is a way of splitting a system, or Sales/Support, or Finance/HR, and so on. We're of course talking about ways of splitting the system(s) involved.
I think the spirit of the original idea is that roles are defined by boundaries. The boundaries are definitely "made up" but they aren't arbitrary. The degree of expertise and volume of knowledge needed to operate effectively (or expertly) within a role, and the ease or difficulty of obtaining those requirements, should be acknowledged when a company describes a role they are hiring for. If the bulk of your roadmap is back-end work but you want to hire full-stack devs because its nice to have everything, this seems like sloppy practice (though totally accepted).
On the other hand there are plenty of full-stack jobs that really just mean "back-end but not going to throw a contract in our face when you have to drop into the browser debugger to solve a problem". This is the kind of full stack I am. I wouldn't be okay with being asked to work on our frontend for the next year but I'm perfectly comfortable with debugging, making recommendations, doing some front-end work if it means filling a gap when resources are constrained.
I see comments saying that he may be interfering with actual operations against NK or that now that he has done this they are more likely to patch their systems and be more secure, contradicting his own intentions.
It's also entirely possible that this action, including the WIRED article and it's high visibility, is part of a broader effort and strategy. In reality we just won't know in this type of situation.
Any casual judgement that talks about how obviously naive this is may be a little too shallow.
A colleague asked me what I meant by this - what use would a WIRED article have? etc.
Targets (individuals, interior or gapped networks, etc) can be difficult to identify or locate and are even more difficult to get access to. Consider that it may be easier to run an operation where you intentionally pseudo-identify a security researcher engaging in his own attack to draw attention. Better yet, this researcher is known to be in possession of valuable tools, after all, the article says so.
Maybe P4x exists or is a fiction, but either way there's a difficult yet traversable route of information that leads to "his" network. Somewhere there's an encrypted volume that presumably holds his cherished tools and information. But P4x knows that the encryption he's using suffers from undisclosed 0day. In fact, the 0day was developed by P4x et al and released into the wild to be found and used in just this kind of situation. The tools that appear to be protected by researcher P4x are actually compromised themselves, meant to be taken. He schedules an interview with WIRED, he talks shit and trashes NK operations, and plays the cocky and justice hungry hacker trope. He chums the water.
There are countless ways that misdirection and narrative can be layered to draw your adversary into a worldview that is the creation of your own. It's not _just_ floors of camo-clad cyberoperaters phishing management types and looking for document dumps.
Working at SaaS companies I've seen countless "somewhat fluid" exchanges of information between customer -> support -> product -> developer -> support -> customer -> support -> dev, etc. The different modes of communication and long round trip times make things slow, bug reports take minimum of hours, up to weeks to absorb and resolve.
This is just one case but there are boxes drawn everywhere. Every level of intelligent organization within the society, including it's artifacts, has assumptions baked in. Now that the unit economics of applying `intelligence()` is being shifted by orders of magnitude, there's all sorts of stuff that's ripe for recrafting.
Disclaimer: Don't give HelperBot launch authority to offensive weapons etc. You know, make decisions consistent with a world line where the continuation of the civilization is pretty darn likely. Unless of course your project is to replace the current civilization, ... I don't know. Just don't do what Donny Don't does.