I think most big tech companies are like this and it's just going to get worse as AI adoption increases internally.
2 days ago I tried to create new gmail account and Google insisted that my phone number was used too many times. Fine, I'll pay for a new workspace account... Submit my billing information, that same that I use on other accounts but now there is an extra validation step that requires my ID and copies of my bank statement. Wasn't happy about that but tried it anyway. They expected my entire checking account number to appear on my bank statement. My bank account number is for my entire account and not just the checking portion but even if they were the same my bank redacts parts of the number so that if anyone gets my statement they can't just start drafting money.
The additional information section where I explain things is obviously ignored because the auto generated responses are sent pretty fast.
I can't decide what the saddest part is, the fact that their "give us a moment" emails that are send immediately after submitting still say they need extra time to process the request due to limited staffing because of covid or the fact that Gemini was brutal in criticizing them when I asked if it was normal to expect complete account numbers on the statement.
Similar to OP, the embedded help chat got in a loop of telling me I needed to speak to a rep to fix the issue and when attempting to connect me it would deny the request because I wasn't a paying customer yet.
The sad part is that you gave your information and kept trying to give them money despite all of this hassle? What is exactly you are looking for? If it's email, there is tons of providers out there who will be happy to take your money.
the only thing I can think that would make it imperative that you get a gmail instead of other email provider is that google provides the ecosystem of apps and google apps script to automate them, if you have built up a lot of tooling for automating things it can be a pretty sweet platform to do things in.
> I think most big tech companies are like this and it's just going to get worse as AI adoption increases internally.
Welcome to UB, at scale, in every language.
Everyone loves to complain about C (and C++) UB; well, now, you have that in every language.
We're at the point now that my manually written (non-trivial) projects C hits fewer undefined behaviour than even trivial projects constructed with an LLM and human "review".
The arch nemesis of software engineering. The exceptionally exceptional exception. It doesn’t throw, it glides. It festers. It waits until production day. It rears its head from the dead. The demon with 1000 names…
That's bad for you don't have the account yet but at Google, once you're a paying customer --and hence you're not the product anymore--, there are actual people helping you on the phone when you call them. Of course the catch-22 here is that you don't have the Workspace account yet, so you may sorry out of luck.
Big tech might ahead of the rest of the economy in this experiment. Microsoft grew headcount by ~3% from June 2022 to June 2025 while revenue grew by >40%. This is admittedly weak anecdata but my subjective experience is their products seem to be crumbling (GitHub problems around the Azure migration for instance), and worse than they even were before. We'll see how they handle hiring over the next few years and if that reveals anything.
Ease of recycling is not prioritized during design or manufacturing because there is no monetary incentive (for the manufacturer) to do so it most cases. It would eat into profits. Simple as that.
Unless a component is expensive to manufactory and recycling/reuse could save the manufacturer money it won't happen. The only real solution are laws requiring it.
At some point, sockets add enough failure modes that making components switchable increases the amount of waste. And it's not a far, theoretical point; it's one we often meet in practice.
Any regulation about that has to be detail-focused and conservative.
What do you see as the alternative here? Conductive epoxy is way less repairable than solder. Sockets are… components; and tend to be more expensive and higher failure rate than what’s socketed in them, except for extreme cases of very large ICs. Press fit requires special tooling, so repairability is much worse… what’s left?
The full cost of recycling things should be part of the cost of the product at the time of sale.
What you would find quickly, is that there is little to no profit on the manufacturing and sale of new devices and the value of repairs and reuse would skyrocket.
Right now companies are allowed to steal money from the future by ignoring the problem of what happens to these devices once they leave the factory. The truth is that they become hazardous waste, and lock away valuable resources inside of trash.
The reality is that there is no real economic benefit to the current model of ever increasing sales of new goods. But the capitalists, as ever, have been extracting money out of it by making the unpleasant, expensive parts someone else's liability. Namely ours.
Riches built from value extraction and arbitrage against the future. And most of us cannot conceive of it being any other way.
I'd argue the question was wrong, it's not that big companies can copy you easier now. They could have always invaded your space and destroyed your business. As other pointed out it was always picking up the pennies that they didn't want until those pennies became dollars.
The concern now is that other small team or solo developers can rebuild what you have very quickly. This happened in the mobile space with all the decompiled and repacked (with min changes) apps that showed up in the stores.
The moat for SaaS startups was that the code is hidden. Now that matters less because people use AI to try and reverse engineer your backend from the API or even UI screenshots.
You have to pick up the pace to keep ahead of them and make sure you don't cause problems for customers while doing it.
Discouraging higher education, IMO, isn't a bad thing. Academia is too much of a walled garden that is too easy to enter.
This resulted in higher ed becoming a defacto requirement for many professions that could have been open to professionally trained or experienced people. Employers need to draw their baseline requirements somewhere and if expensive credentials are too ubiquitous, it's understandable they rather select from those who achieved them than from those who didn't (or couldn't afford to).
And it's frankly disgusting how many doors remain closed to yourself unless you got access to an .edu email. More people with academic interests not having acquired one might open the door to many more who discovered their academic interests later in life but can no longer find a way to enter that garden.
Kids and preteens don't care about the experience being better in one environment vs another. That age group has less patience than older age groups, all they want to do is to see the movie NOW. They don't want to go to the theater, they want instant gratification. If a movie also released on streaming they'd be watching it before you could get them in the car for a trip to the theater.
I found that logging into the cable modem itself and getting the signal levels and modem event logs helps. The poster seems to just be logging IP reachability. You have to keep repeating that modem logs show the problem is outside of my house until they send a technician. Then you hope the tech knows what he is doing enough to verify the issue and call the right person.
It took about 2 months and 5 visits to get my outages fixed. I also had to get some of my neighbors to report the outages.
What used to be very useful was to get the signal to noise ratio. When I had problems it was because they had installed amplifiers at various parts of the line and it eventually added up to a problem with amplifying too much noise.
gotta ask, just because i went through this with spectrum recently.
have you grabbed an extension cord and tried connecting the modem outside at the drop for awhile?
i hear you that your neighbor has the same issue. but if youre in. say a development by the same builder, or were all part of a comcast upgrade at roughly the same time ..
and well… you both recently upgraded to 1.2(?) because that would be the latter case
after my gig upgrade and a few tech visits i ended up finding a splitter that only goes up to 800mhz or so (if that) inside a wallplate.
TLDR:
you might have a 5-1000mhz splitter. thats widely used by comcast still.
MORE:
OFDM is 1008mhz or so and you wouldnt notice the problem under, or maybe just UP TO gigabyte speeds (eg: downgrading to 500mb might mysteriously “fix” it).
but you WILL notice this at 1.2gb.
spectrum is future proofing and using 5-2500mhz splitters
ANECODTAL:
my modem locked with the 800mhz splitter, but it dropped , cycled and had horrible upload speeds.
techs never tried or thought of this . the final boss tech took photos and even took the splitter back to show his boss. i guess multiple units had tickets after the gig upgrade and they had an “aha” moment.
TECHNICAL:
i would expect something more like multiplexing errors in this situation. forgive me because im 20 years out of the game (was an RF/install tech on analog CATV , and cable modems when those were brand new to Charter) and had to look it up but i think docsis 3.1 is dependent on 957–1151 MHz or 1008–1152 MHz
its that 1008+mhz where now your splitter is acting like a 5-1000mhz filter.
its not perfect like okay maybe 4-1003mhz gets through the filter maybe even more permissive if its a cheap one. but thats NOT a clean signal for that frequency band its more like bleed-through.
sort of similar to traps (the little barrels theyd screw onto your line to block you from getting pay channels in the olden days) and how you STILL could sort of see and hear. a little bit of what was going on on cinemax at 3am and at least get the IDEA. :>
I had an old 15+ year old line when I moved in. Helped my neighbor cut a few hundred of his monthly by getting xfinity and they ran a brand new drop for him. Then just recently they "upgraded" my line. But I don't have any splitter or filter its just a connector with a ground that attaches my home cable to the drop cable.
the reason id suggested connecting your modem at the outside drop would also cover any and all inside wiring issues. and that could be anything. frayed end. a nail through it. moisture.
i think my inside wiring was done no earlier than 1991 , but maybe redone once since then and it looked pretty good but i found this on the back of a wallplate , just yesterday:
the easiest thing to do is check it at the box and then if nothing else thats ammo for dealing with customer service “look, i connected at the drop and have the same issue its NOT my inside wiring.”
everything from that point back is their problem and they owe you bill credits until its fixed, so get the proof and go back with it.
in my case my modem worked perfectly at the drop :D so i unfortunately had some digging to do
its not practical to suggest someone on the internet go ripping open all their wall plates and checking every inch of inside wire or maybe even running a new one. unless it passes the drop test, and then yeah, thats what needs to be done.
but plugging into the drop will 100% prove whose problem this is. youre california so thats also good ammo for a PUC complaint, that you did that and proved its not your inside wiring and now theyre refusing to deal with it. maybe that will get it to the right person on comcasts end faster when they review it.
This seems pretty likely, but shouldn't a tech roll have included sampling the signal strength/snr at these frequencies? Or would the tech tools be likely to be on old frequencies too?
Tech should plug the meter into where the modem is too, though, right? And if the SNR looks good at the dmarc and not at the modem, there's your problem... Tech can peace out if you don't have inside line coverage.
Not just social media postings but past real estate listings can probably provide floor plans.
And if you don't have those, a lot of buildings have common patterns. Its very much in the realm of possibility to train a model using exterior and interior information so that you could have AI generate a floor plan using only exterior data.
Combine that with a small drone that could fly around a building and take different wifi signal readings to triangulate access point positions.
Once you have all that don't you have everything you need to detect movement in the building based on signal disruptions?
Yes, seems like a bit of work but it absolutely seems like the type of effort some governments would put effort into.
> Not just social media postings but past real estate listings can probably provide floor plans.
I regret even engaging with the floor plan debate.
It doesn’t matter if they have a floor plan. That’s not enough information to characterize the RF environment of a house and how it responds to people moving through it.
A floor plan won’t tell you the position of all the WiFi devices, obstructions, and how the environment responds to moving those around. It won’t even tell you where the router is with any precision or if it’s next to a big chunk of metal like a computer case that’s blocking half the house and causing reflections.
>Combine that with a small drone that could fly around a building and take different wifi signal readings to triangulate access point positions.
That seems like all you'd need anyway, skip the rest of this. Small autonomous drones with simultaneous location and mapping capability will absolutely revolutionize warfare (and firefighting, but I digress) whenever they stop being sci-fi.
2 days ago I tried to create new gmail account and Google insisted that my phone number was used too many times. Fine, I'll pay for a new workspace account... Submit my billing information, that same that I use on other accounts but now there is an extra validation step that requires my ID and copies of my bank statement. Wasn't happy about that but tried it anyway. They expected my entire checking account number to appear on my bank statement. My bank account number is for my entire account and not just the checking portion but even if they were the same my bank redacts parts of the number so that if anyone gets my statement they can't just start drafting money.
The additional information section where I explain things is obviously ignored because the auto generated responses are sent pretty fast.
I can't decide what the saddest part is, the fact that their "give us a moment" emails that are send immediately after submitting still say they need extra time to process the request due to limited staffing because of covid or the fact that Gemini was brutal in criticizing them when I asked if it was normal to expect complete account numbers on the statement.
Similar to OP, the embedded help chat got in a loop of telling me I needed to speak to a rep to fix the issue and when attempting to connect me it would deny the request because I wasn't a paying customer yet.
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