URLs. Contemporary sizzling URLs.
Air Canada Has to Honor a Refund Coverage Its Chatbot Made Up [Ashley Belanger/Wired] – Air Canada’s chatbot gave a buyer incorrect details about bereavement fare insurance policies, and a court docket held the airline accountable. Unclear whether or not the chatbot was actually LLM powered – or by whom – nevertheless it’s a enjoyable piece of case legislation now (a minimum of in Canada) for GPT hallucinations.
The chatbot supplied inaccurate info, encouraging Moffatt to e book a flight instantly after which request a refund inside 90 days. In actuality, Air Canada’s coverage explicitly said that the airline is not going to present refunds for bereavement journey after the flight is booked. Moffatt dutifully tried to comply with the chatbot’s recommendation and request a refund however was shocked that the request was rejected.
The perfect founders don’t care if an investor is “founder pleasant” [Harry Glaser/Modelbit] – Repeat founder Harry Glaser needs a couple of issues from his VCs however “founder pleasant” ain’t one in all them [disclosure: we’re investors in his ML deployment startup ¯_(ツ)_/¯ ].
Founders need to win so badly they put themselves in an all-in place. The traits an investor can show that make them irresistible to founders are: (1) A observe report of profitable, (2) a deeply-held, thoughtfully-justified perception that this enterprise can be a winner, and (3) an unbroken historical past of high-integrity habits when the chips are down.
An old-school Las Vegas bookie takes on a brand new period of sports activities betting [Danny Funt/WaPo] – All the time love a ‘these guys are nonetheless doing it the way in which it was’ piece. South Level, one of many final household run inns in Las Vegas, does 3/4 of its sports activities betting enterprise IRL and nonetheless takes extra motion than another establishment within the state.
Requested about some nationwide sportsbooks profiting as a lot as $30 for each $100 wagered whereas the South Level holds about $5 for each $100, Gaughan instructed a narrative from early in his profession. Many riverboat passengers, he seen, spent a lot of the journey sitting round glumly after going bust on slots. Gaughan lowered slot maintain percentages so prospects solely ran out of cash as their boat was docking.
The dying (once more) of the web as we all know it [Noah Smith/Noahpinion] – Feeds, enshittification, AI slop and disinformation is making the patron net a large number. However perhaps the fashionable web must die? Or a minimum of remodel itself.
So the web as we all know it — social media websites and the Internet — is turning into a usually worse place to hang around. Wading via oceans of commercials, algorithmic randomness antisemitic Russian bots, Tiktok-poisoned shouters, AI slop, and deepfakes is simply not a enjoyable technique to spend anybody’s valuable restricted lifetime.
Higher, maybe, to easily withdraw from the general public web — to spend one’s time chatting immediately with pals and in small teams, having enjoyable offline, and perhaps watching TV or studying a e book or a Substack. That type of human interplay labored superb earlier than the web, and it’ll most likely work simply superb at the moment. Which is why even if all the traits I discussed are unfavorable, I’m optimistic about the way forward for our digital communications and our media eating regimen. Possibly sometime historians will look again on the period after we lived our lives on social networking websites as a short anomaly.
An Investor’s Perspective on the Worth of Common Test-Ins [Charles Hudson/Precursor Ventures] – Going past the one:many electronic mail replace for why fast however ongoing conversations might be mutually useful.
As an investor, I don’t know, ex-ante, which of the 10-12 conferences per 12 months with a given firm can be impactful. My expertise is that neither I nor the corporate can consider the worth of any of these conferences in actual time; the worth is usually solely identified after the very fact with the good thing about hindsight. Often, 2 or 3 conferences every year will deal with selections materials to the corporate’s final result. The opposite conferences enable us to get to know one another and (hopefully) construct mutual belief and a shared understanding of the issue the founders are tackling.
