Do not try to prevent me from copying the text on your website. I will get it anyway. All you are doing is annoying me.

I’m the kind of person that just assumes customer service is going to be bad. I gird myself whenever I have to call a company and just deal with their gauntlet with patience, knowing the trick is to outlast them. It costs them money every time you call. I’ll often tell them I know that and assure them I will continue calling until the matter is resolved. It’s not fun, it’s just the way things sadly are.

My old man, however, still feels some kind of righteous indignation when he spends his hard earned money and doesn’t feel he’s getting what he paid for. He loves to give a piece of his mind to the companies that mistreat him, and he always says “And I hope my comments are being recorded for quality assurance!”

The new feature of the iPhone where you can put a phone tree on hold until a person answers is very nice. I had a kerfuffle with Delta airlines along with a few thousand other people some days ago. I had to hold for 2.5 hours, but I spent it catching up with my dad and then my phone rang when the CSA was ready for me. I was so fresh and bright on the call I got an upgrade pretty much just for not being a bitch.

Does that actually work reliably? I’m going to use that next time I have to call an insurance company.

It reliably worked for me exactly 1 time I used it, so 100% success rate with unknown variability.

I get it. I also know customer service is a pretty low paying job for something that involves being yelled at all day

I get as frustrated as anyone, but it’s not the fault of the person whose job it is to take my call.

I remember once on the phone with Comcast I just explained the situation and jokingly said look, if it helps, feel free to tell ‘em I’m yelling and screaming. The guy laughed. An engineer called me an hour later with a firmware update for my modem.

Sometimes there’s no winning. But sometimes it helps if you can put people on your team

Yep. When I’m frustrated on the phone with a rep, I always make sure to say something like “I understand this isn’t your fault, but I’m very frustrated with X.”

It seems to ease the tension a bit, anyway.

Angry customers aren't at fault. If all customers are mad as hell when they call, then the company will have to start paying better wages to keep customer support staff from quitting, and they'd rather fix the problem before doing that.

It amounts to telling it: “Stop doing that thing you can’t stop doing.”

Mammals converged on systems that satisfy the same fluid-mechanics.

Substantive issues with this submission aside, it’s a mistake to have such long conversations with an LLM. The longer they go, the more likely they are to accumulate errors. The latest models all claim to be able to handle long conversations, but in my experience they still don’t do as good a job as just pasting your conversation into a new thread.

Does a “pledge” have more or less weight than a pinky promise?

Depends, were their fingers crossed behind their backs or not?

I’ve always been skeptical of niche archival formats, even ones as robust as this. Even if the technology itself is sound, companies go out of business and formats go obsolete. I’ve been using plain old mirrored spinning hard drives for years. And for parts of my archive, I give copies to friends and family for added redundancy.

FWIW I mainly go with offline HDDs and SSDs. And I basically now keep one source of truth, which I synch everywhere, for backups (and I verify the backups and make sure that my main source of truth ain't corrupted).

> I’ve always been skeptical of niche archival formats ... and formats go obsolete ...

The format is supported by Linux, that's never gonna be an issue. Not only can modern version of Linux read DVD or BluRay formats, should the support disappear, there's not a world in which in 30 years I cannot run an older version of Linux. There are, for comparison, people running Commodore 64 and Amiga hardware, today. You'll always be able to run the software, either on bare metal or emulated.

The issue is: will you find a drive in 30 years? As they are still built today and as many DVD readers from 25 years ago are still working today, I take it it's going to not be that hard to find a BluRay drive in 30 years and hook up to a machine running Linux.

And even on a BluRay, you simply do not store that much.

If one doesn't want to only rely on HDD/SDD and online storage, it's still probably a safer bet to go with tapes: you can store much more data, newer readers can read (up to limit) older tapes and these are battle-tested, supported for a long time, available, reliable. Because, well, it's not consumer tech but enterprisey.