Or more cynically they reach their level of competence, go one level further and stay there to keep them from ruining the productivity of the people doing the work...
Dealing with Google is a nightmare. I'm one of the volunteer sysadmins for https://forum.buildhub.org.uk/, a DIY and self-build forum. For 10 years it ranked very well on Google, particularly in the UK, and then on 28 December 2025 it disappeared from Google's index.
Nothing has helped, the Google forums are tumbleweed and there's no one to reach out to for what could be an algorithm change or something gone wrong. I'm a paying Workspace customer and it's made me think I need a backup plan in case I'm ever suspended. Reports like this don't encourage.
> Nothing has helped, the Google forums are tumbleweed and there's no one to reach out to for what could be an algorithm change or something gone wrong.
The own-brand forum (Google, Microsoft, Apple) seem to be infested by netizens from lower-income countries trying to build online customer support portfolios by providing utterly useless answers.
That, or trying to game the system and getting shortlisted for a free trip to Google HQ for one of their contributor summits.
I am genuinely curious if anybody knows of a non-trivial problem being solved on one of these forums, at least for a huge company that’s palming off customer support. It just feels like screaming in to the void, only for someone to (deliberately?) misinterpret your question and give you some generic advice.
It depends on what you call "non-trivial". I found answers on how to circumvent dumb macos bugs on Apple forums at least twice in the last 6 months. One related to displays, I was about to return a new USB-C monitor which wouldn't turn on. A silly issue, but it's a bug on my book, I wouldn't find the answer on the docs.
That counts! I suppose I’m lucky enough to know of more reliable resources (macadmins.org Slack is an excellent community), and so I turn to them after reading more than a couple of threads on the Apple Support Community. Perhaps it has improved or I never dig deep enough.
I’d be at a complete loss for any obscure Windows issue though.
Might be something specific to my and my colleagues' systems, but it breaks the TUI. It needs git authentication, which fails, and the TUI stops accepting input reliably
Can anyone enlighten me how having a coding harness when for most customers you say "we won't train on your code" helps you do RL? What's the data that they rely on? Is it the prompts and their responses?
It doesn't matter what your privacy setting is, with any savvy vendor. Your data is used to train by paraphrasing it, and the paraphrasing makes it impossible to prove it was your data (it is stored at rest paraphrased). Of course the paraphrasing stores all the salient information, like your goals and guidance to the bot to the answer, even if it has no PII.
That's an interesting accusation there! You're essentially accusing every "savvy vendor" of large-scale fraud... DOn't suppose you'd have any actual citations or evidence to back that up?
Eg, When a prompt had a bad result and was edited, or had lots of back and forth to correct tool usage that information can be distilled and used to improve models.
And now imagine if you are focused on this for weeks you can likely come up with other ideas to leverage the metadata to improve model performance.
> std::slop is a persistent, SQLite-driven C++ CLI agent. It remembers your work through per-session ledgers, providing long-term recall, structured state management. std::slop features built-in Git integration. It's goal is to be an agent for which the context and its use fully transparent and configurable.
Hi @tabbott I've been meaning to pass this feedback on for 5 months, and I hope it comes across in the spirit it's meant.
I tried Zulip (cloud offering) with some techie/designery friends, so we should have been right at home but... the desktop app on macOS and the web app was visually unappealing and clunky, and we ended up going back to a paid Slack plan.
I looked for docs on how to theme Zulip (so I could contribute), or for existing theme packs that would soften the transition but found neither.
tl;dr: The functionality was good (Love the threading!) but the UI feels like the 2000s came calling. Some UI polish would go a long way.
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