I’ve finally got a bit of space in my head.
This morning at Imperial they absolutely had to choose today to throw the weirdest exam at me to invigilate. Half online with laptops where chat GPT is allowed, half on paper, closed book. Thankfully the students are, by definition, intelligent. Often they have no common sense, but today they all did, thank god, and even with no time to prepare adequately it was smooth as you like and I was home in plenty of time.
Then I had to totally shift my brain. Helping train a cohort of brilliant international youth on flipping ZOOM. I honestly can’t bear Zoom but I made it happen, largely. My fear was that we would run out of content but the opposite was the case. We were still going strong at the end.
My tech was all over the place. I had to buy a webcam even though my laptop is supposed to have a camera built in. Even then my laptop wouldn’t display the new camera through any natural hardware or software routes. Thank God for being the teenager I was, hacking and ripping. I worked around it by running a screengrab tool that captured the image. I made the tool my view and patched the sound through the camera so it would sync. Supernerd workaround. The only thing it would have changed from their perspective is that rather than being a reverse image it made it into a mirror image. And it ran my processor ragged and recorded countless gigabytes of unnecessary screen capture, but it looked like I had functioning hardware and the session was fine apart from the fact I couldn’t read my notes and capture my screen at the same time. Demonstrating tech while being old school with tech. Hi kids.
Good lord though. What a piece of software. I will certainly use it for my growing businesses and it will certainly make them better, and the free tier is good enough for now. Their model is to provide a free tier, get people into it, make it logical to pay for an upgrade.
It’s a free CRM. I didn’t know what such a thing was yesterday morning. Now I’ve done this I know that I’ve become deeply frustrated with CRMs as a customer many many times on many levels. There was one business that made me give them so much information before I got a quote out of them that I put in the final “comments” section “I just want a fucking quote ffs”. I then rang them five minutes later and was told by some bored human that they weren’t providing the sort of thing I was looking for anyway, after I gave them my life story and my credit card details and the location of my first kiss to within three meters.
Anyway, used better it’s the future, and it’s a familiar enough model for us customers now – we can and must go through these hubs before we speak to anyone. I used to always say “no” to data collection. But I noticed one of the people training me yesterday instinctively clicked “decline” on a cookie popup without considering it and I knew they were my people. Even though these days they’re trying to trap us. There are loads of websites I won’t use any more because of the new “data collection or pay” model. Even the Grauniad does it for some of its articles.
At least there’s no AI pretending to be human yet on this CRM. That’s the thing I hate the most. That would require me finding the precise location of their head office so I could go and fart in the lift after a curry.
Their CEO is pushing quotes about how humans are best at things because they’re human, which is important and great but of course it opens the door to thinking that there’s another possible route. Everything being automated. The coming storm? Or a bunch of nerds trying to sell the idea that these information aggregator LLMS are somehow genuinely gonna start to be able to understand context. I used to throw my phone down when the recorded lady said: “I’m sorry for the delay.” “NO YOU AREN’T! YOU DON’T KNOW ABOUT IT! YOU’RE JUST SAYING WORDS ON A SCRIPT!”
These LLMs will of course have better empathy than their creators, these oxen in silicone valley. But they won’t have better empathy than real people.
AlBarclay 