Snapchat sees spike in 1-star reviews as users pan the ‘My AI’ feature (opens in new tab)

I'm not so sure. I'm completely unable to keep in mind the amount of companies that get my data and what data they are getting, when they are getting / using it, and how.

It's not just out of control, but impossible to even imagine.

Also, the whole “know where your money is going” is a highly ideological argument. I know where my money is going when the highly publicized tax rates are changed in a budget. In most countries news organizations will spend weeks every year, if not months, discussing the expected changes in the budget.

In the meanwhile, I have absolutely 0 idea what percentage of the money I’m paying to buy a coke is going to pay lobbyists and politicians to ensure they can continue using HFCS, and preventing proper labeling from being implemented, or what percentage of the money goes into advertising to ensure kids (and I stay hooked onto Coke), or what percentage of my money goes to ensure they get primary access to all the water in a region already suffering from drought, etc.

From an article published in the Canadian Tax Journal, written by an attorney [1]: "The GST was introduced in 1991 as a 7 percent VAT, replacing the federal sales tax (FST). The FST was a manufacturers’ sales tax, which applied at 13.5 percent at the wholesale level to a limited number of goods and which was almost entirely invisible to consumers.

"The GST applies to most supplies of property and services in Canada, and is imposed on the purchaser. The key feature that makes it a VAT is that most businesses can claim refunds, by way of input tax credit, for most or all of the GST that they pay on purchases."

In addition, a Government of Canada publication also explains that GST does not apply to exports, in contrast to its predecessor [2]:

"The GST is a sales tax which applies to final consumption at a fixed rate of 7%. Whereas the former FST was a hidden tax on the manufacture of goods, including those exported for foreign consumption, the GST is a visible tax on the value added at each stage of production and distribution of goods and services – which makes it a multi-stage tax – and applies only to consumption within Canada."

~~

In summary, there were other differences between GST and its predecessor. GST has applied to only consumption within Canada, whereas the former FST also applied to exports.

Also, GST was paid directly by customers, rather than by companies (who had the option of making customers pay). It's possible that in many cases, customers ended up paying the same total amount after GST's introduction—in cases where companies may have lowered their prices to offset the new final total price due to the GST. But in other cases, it's plausible that companies kept their prices the same or didn't lower prices completely offset the tax, leading to increased prices on necessary goods and services for customers.

In the end, according to analysts and newspaper columnists years later [3] [4], people with backgrounds in economics concluded that GST was good for Canada's economy, as the change provided a simplification of the taxation system that encouraged investment.

But this positive effect is a bit different, though related to your comment: it looks like the positive effects of GST were largely based on encouraging investment, rather than based on the principle of transparency to consumers. These were interesting reads, though; thanks for raising the discussion.

~~

Sources:

[1] Canadian Tax Journal: https://ctf.ca//ctfweb/Documents/PDF/2009ctj/09ctj4-policy.p...

[2] Government of Canada: https://publications.gc.ca/Collection-R/LoPBdP/BP/prb0003-e.....

[3] The Globe and Mail: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/the-gst-hated-by-man...

[4] CBC News: https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/gst-not-all-that-bad-say-ta...

Kinda crazy how quickly data spreads and how quietly companies share data and how little control users really have (without becoming luddites).

It implicitly acknowledges that it's a bad feature that people might actually pay to get rid of.

Also there's a second support article which also currently contains that same quote but used to read: "Only Snapchat+ subscribers can remove My AI from their Chat feed at this time." [1]

[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20230419122413/https://help.snap...

It's why I can never get into stuff like Mastodon or Misskey with how they are today, it's extremely difficult to just naturally find people to follow.

Given their stagnant/declining stock price since IPO (covid tech bump aside) I would say it does matter in the single place it matters most to a public company. Potentially because to get that revenue and users they had to spend so much money that their net loss was 65% of their total revenue in 2019.

https://www.macrumors.com/2018/05/11/snapchat-rolls-back-des...

Infact, most of capitalism is glomming on to this model.

Hooking whales is expensive in the beginning, cause you basically need millions of users and some underlying psychological or pathological business use case.

Once you know the whales in the barn, you can do a lot of treeshaking as long as your $ metrics are accurate.

I have a good group of friends who keep me grounded - we all went to my average state school alma mater, and none of them are in tech.

Not one of them has brought it up, no one uses it or cares about it, and only two of them even know what it is beyond having seen some headlines.

The playoffs have gotten about 200 texts recently, AI 0. This is closer to the reality on the ground.

I'd venture almost all of the hype is students and kids who are excited to see what mischief it can help them achieve, techies who just like playing with new things, and companies trying to cash in. All of those are non-durable.

Right now, almost nobody have an interest in AI chat bots. Even fewer want to have it in SnapChat. And honestly I really don't want an AI bot for customer service, especially at the current stage of tech dev, because the AI bots are completely unreliable and hallucinate and lie regularly. (Which is to say that I heartily doubt your assertion that current AI tech would enable customer service bots that are useful. They produce wonderful prose, but semantics and action are not there, and we don't have training datasets yet to enforce accuracy in prose or action)

So let's say they become useful, great. But today they are still a VR headset, something that's fun to experience for a bit, but which I don't want to be part of my daily experience. It's a novelty, not a useful tool, for nearly everyone out there today.

Make it useful, attractive to most people, and we are in a different regime, and forcing features like this on all your users might be seen as a positive rather than a negative.

It either does not have it or it is lying. Clearly snapchat is lying here. No wiggle room. None.

Snapchat, is using the software to tell snapchat customers deliberate lies.

Normally that sort of thing brings the lawyers but this is "with a computer" so does that mean it's somehow ok?

There's also the "snap map" which for some reason doesn't freak normies out, and they have location services enabled for that as well.

I cut down a few invasive trees recently (Norway Maples). If you inoculate the branches and logs with spores of a mushroom that you want (in my case, shiitake) during the first few weeks after cutting, it will fruit with that for a few years. It's a fun DIY project, and a way to reuse trees.

To prevent unwanted mushrooms from the environment from colonizing, you seal the holes you drill, as well as the end the ends of the logs, with cheese wax - which I had heated in a crock pot, hence the need for cleaning that up.

Word to the wise: go to the thrift store and pick up some old pots and spoons before attempting this.