Notices by Dave Rahardja value 71 (drahardja@sfba.social)

It begins…

“Ford Motor Co. took an unusually human approach to fixing its stubborn quality problems: It brought back what it calls “gray beard” engineers to help train younger staff and to reprogram the artificial intelligence tools that weren’t getting the job done.”

…

“Mistakenly we thought that by just introducing artificial intelligence and ingesting the design requirements that we had, that that would produce a high-quality product,” Poon said. But “we recognized that for us to enhance some of our automation and machine learning and artificial intelligence tools we needed to ensure that they were trained by the most experienced individuals.”

PS: I wouldn’t make the connection between rehiring and Ford’s quality improvement *quite yet*. One thing I can conclude from this article is at least Ford hardware engineering is having buyer’s remorse over replacing people with AI.

#AI #slop

“Ford Has Been Rehiring Quality Inspectors After AI Fell Short”

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-25/ford-has-been-rehiring-quality-inspectors-after-ai-fell-short

https://removepaywalls.com/https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-25/ford-has-been-rehiring-quality-inspectors-after-ai-fell-short

Apparently Hasbro has begun demanding that CHILD ACTORS in their cartoon series like Peppa Pig sign over the rights for the company to use #AI to clone their voices for future commercial use.

CHILD ACTORS are being asked to sign away control of their voices.

I think this should be illegal. Parents should not have the legal right to sign away their child’s voice or likeness to be turned into corporate assets forever.

https://deadline.com/2026/06/peppa-pig-hasbro-child-actors-ai-backlash-1236967142/

RE: https://c.im/@cdarwin/116788973294249115

The “peace deal” didn’t even last a weekend.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@RonSupportsYou/116756401696997571

Trump is using the DOJ to go after his political rivals. Again. This crosses a red line, even if it doesn’t seem like it after all the red lines Trump has crossed.

@zzt Hear hear. There seem to be so many FOSS folks who seem to think that the ONLY possible answers to product issues are: “Our way (good)” and “The way of corporate fascist pigs (bad)”—and failing to see that “Our way (bad)” is also possible. These uncurious people are a big part of the problem, and they incessantly get in the way of FOSS adoption.

Y’all know self-driving rideshares are rolling surveillance machines, right?

You think they’re not going to operate license plate/facial recognition readers on these rolling camera outfits? There’s money to be made selling video footage and search access into this data to “law enforcement”. Selling #surveillance is how these things will continue to make money even without passengers inside.

If they haven’t monetized this access already, they will. There is zero reason to expect that they won’t. Because money. Because it happens every time.

Will we regulate this? Will we prevent abuses? Or will we let it roll out like we let every other privately-owned surveillance tech roll out until the public lashes back?

#cars #robotaxi

Article from 2022: https://sfist.com/2022/05/12/report-sfpd-already-using-surveillance-video-from-self-driving-cars/

As an aside, people claiming “intelligent design” have never pondered the unnecessarily complex, inefficient, stochastically-accreted, hacked-together design found in basically every form of life on earth.

Looking at the design of living organisms is evidence *against* intelligent design. @kravietz https://agora.echelon.pl/objects/8294dfc1-b02c-4b22-a734-bcb97dcd43f6

PS: huh, the post won’t load in a browser. Here’s the image in that post…

This story about #Meta #AI from Wired is brutal.

Apparently 6500 employees were “drafted” (i.e. given the choice to agree or quit) to form an AI training squad, and they were required to make software puzzles for their AI to solve, over and over again. It looks like the mind-numbing work was so brutal and meaningless that an employee hijacked an internal meeting to curse executives out in front of thousands of internal viewers.

https://www.wired.com/story/mark-zuckerberg-meta-employee-meeting-interrupt-ai/

RE: https://mastodon.social/@mercedesallen/116702996141084339

You don’t hate billionaires ENOUGH.

I saw something encouraging last weekend. I went to a large event that had food trucks in a dining corral. One of the food trucks sold seafood burritos, and they used a large #AI poster to show their menu. Everything in the menu was #aiSlop, including “pictures” of the food. People looked at the poster and were visibly disgusted and/or confused, and most left without buying anything. And no wonder—the poster’s pictures looked alien and generic and did nothing to show customers what they were buying.

The food truck next door sold tacos. They had a menu with just text, and a bunch of laminated photos of their food across the ordering window. They had a good line of people ordering, including me.

That was pretty good to see.

I am asking people once again to stop describing #AI using human words and attributes.

AI doesn’t answer—it regurgitates plausible output that happens to be right.
AI doesn’t hallucinate—it regurgitates plausible output that happens to be wrong.
AI doesn’t have agency—it regurgitates plausible output that is consumed by a computer program.
AI doesn’t think—it regurgitates plausible output that is fed back into itself to try again.
AI doesn’t create—it regurgitates a mixture of its training data.

Remember: the robot is not a person.

When even Milli Vanilli has backed out you know you’ve entirely lost the game. @AltAltNPS https://noc.social/@AltAltNPS/116660765987235170

RE: https://hachyderm.io/@felipeB/116660441916977649

There goes the neighborhood

@SuperDicq That’s…not what I said, but ok

@SuperDicq Because they can be manufactured with more control over dimensions, with thinner walls/lighter weight, and can be made disposable.

IMO bamboo straws are great for repeated use! But most straw applications are in retail and the bulk of bamboo straws would be a net negative if they were going to be thrown out after one use anyway.

@SuperDicq The best non-plastic straws I’ve used were these ones made out of sugarcane: https://thesugarcanestraw.com — they are sturdy, don’t get soggy, and don’t have any offensive taste or odor to them.

I think cellulose-based straws hold a lot of promise!

Santa Clara County #sfba #california DA Jeff Rosen refused to shake his opponent Daniel Chung’s hand after their debate, and appeared to have deliberately stuck out his leg to trip Chung.

Jeff Rosen isn’t getting my vote.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOZkvrr1iHc

We ordered some items using #DoorDash. One of the items delivered—a pack of instant coffee—was incorrect. No problem, we use the app to ask for a refund or replacement.

The app says “take a picture of the wrong item”. Sure, no problem. I take the photo of the box.

Rejected.

What? Why was the photo rejected?

I take another photo, against a plain background.

Rejected.

Then it dawns on me—DoorDash is using an image classifier to pre-validate the photo. The description said “coffee”, so I theorize that the image classifier must be looking for a CUP OR BOTTLE of coffee.

So I pose the box next to a plastic cup filled with milk tea that we happen to have in the fridge. I take the picture and…

Voilà. Picture accepted.

How is ANYONE supposed to figure this out if they aren’t neck-deep in computer stuff?

@ErikUden omg

@ErikUden Nice!

#google #advertising