pthr

Despite all enthusiasm I hear around me (at work mostly) and read online, I've noticed on many occasions the responses I get are really just useless.

This recent encounter illustrates that well. It's a simple coding task, where I couldn't by reading the manual figure out in 1 minute whether or not I could get something done with a given project. Hence I asked the following question at phind.com, MS Co-pilot, MS M365 Chat, Llama 3.1 70B (via the Huggingface web interface), chatgpt-o1 preview:

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I have a recent BMW electric vehicle. I want to programmatically list all charging sessions: I need the charging session's start and end time, with the amount of kWh charged.

I found the bimmer_connected Python module, which may be able to do what I want. Can you check whether that indeed allows to obtain such a list, and if so, suggest some sample Python code.

Be brief, I'll read the code and don't need much explanation.

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Observations:

  - all of them except from chatgtp-o1 preview told me the functionality existed (which, from reading the manual, is not the case; I guess BMW doesn't store extended history and hence doesn't offer an API to obtain such info)
  - they all returned code examples with functions that in reality don't exist in the said module
  - chatgpt-o1 told me the functionality didn't exist in bimmer_connected, but suggested another Python module named 'MyBMW'. As I couldn't find that easily, I asked the follow-up question where I should find it: the response was that no such Python module existed.

This is really representative for my experiences so far.

What are your thoughts and experiences?

I'm in some big multinational. I didn't get my salary of last month; thought I'd give it a couple of days. Then HR contacts me, asking whether I really did not get my salary? What turns out:

  - someone with some personal email address (which didn't contain any part of my name) contacted HR with my name, asking to change my bank account details
  - HR did (!), without at least asking to re-send from the professional mail account, preferably even signed and encrypted (as is nicely integrated in our email solution).
  - At pay day, HR transferred the salary to this new bank account
  - This scammer contacted them again, saying the salary was not  received; could they please transfer it again?
  - HR sent them some proof of payment, revealing some data related to me (legal entity of my employer with address, exact salary of that particular month)
  - After that, HR thought to probably ask me, at which point the fraud became clear.

HR tells me they'll transfer the salary 'soon', so I'll be kind to them and give them a couple of days.

What makes me feel bad particularly, is the data related to myself that leaked to this scammer in the process.

What would you do? Simply express how uncomfortable I am with that and forget?

I don't want to 'punish' the HR person that eventually made the mistake. But I also am upset that they leaked this data.