I don't know, I just want to tell you about the time that my mom was sprinkling cayenne pepper on all her tulips to try and stop the deer eating them, and my little dog was following along behind her licking the pepper off the flowers.
He was a weird dog. A weird dog that loved spicy food.
This makes me sound like a total wanker but I reread my favorite Charles Dickens and Jane Austen. I find them both very comforting because generally nice people end up happy in the end.
A few of the chatbots I worked on, back when I did that, were actually good. Those companies had actually looked at their support traffic and figured out that like 95% of it was people asking the same 20 or so questions that had specific answers. Or at least that you could get to a specific answer with 1-2 followup questions. Like, a huge number of people just want to know how to pay their bill, and the answer is "go to this webpage or call this number".
It's kind of a waste of human time and effort to have a human answering all those questions, so the chatbot dealt with those (and tbh it was 50-50 whether those people even knew they were talking to a robot) and the actual hard shit got a warm transfer to a human agent who got the chat transcript.
Honestly the companies it worked best for, either their online documentation was a total shitshow so the chatbot was your best hope of actually finding anything, or a huge proportion of their customer base were total luddites who just didn't want to use a website and wanted to talk to someone. (We had to make our chatbots support Internet Explorer 11. In 2021. Because for some of our clients IE11 was like 30% of their traffic. I don't even fucking know.)
I used to design and maintain chatbots for a living, for a company that among other things sold bespoke chatbots to corporate clients, and I can tell you that the companies KNOW that customers don't want chatbots for customer service. They don't care. THEY want chatbots for customer service because chatbots are orders of magnitude cheaper than hiring customer service representatives.
A chatbot is gonna cost what it costs them to employ 1-2 customer service reps, but it can handle basically infinite traffic for that price. The GOOD ones handle the simple questions (your "how do I pay my bill"s and your "what are your hours"s) and then forward the difficult ones ("why is my bill fucked up?") to a human agent. But I absolutely worked with some clients (who I will not name because I do not want to get sued) that explicitly wanted to avoid letting customers get access to a human agent by whatever means possible.
Also a side note but basically no one lets people cancel accounts via chatbot. They inevitably want THOSE requests to go to a human rep so they can try to talk them out of it.
Not really. They put dogs under for xrays because they need the dog to be still for the xray. If your dog was elderly or had some specific reason that anesthesia was high risk, I'm sure they'd consider alternatives.
I've never heard of pets being anesthetized for microchips and I've had chipped pets since the late 90s.
My parents' dog is terrified of fireworks and the only thing that helps him is a xanax prescription from his vet.
It's my puppy's first 4th of July so I made sure he had a busy, fulfilling day and I'm getting lots of enrichment activities ready for him to put out when the sun goes down. We've got the windows closed and I'm going to put on music for him. When there are fireworks he and I are going to hang out and play BoomCookie -- he hears a boom, he gets a cookie. Hopefully he'll decide it's not that big of a deal. (But I don't have high hopes because his breed are meant to be watch dogs and he's an alert barker... 😬)
I genuinely am not fussed enough about audio quality when I'm on the go for it to be worth it for me. If I'm listening to music on a portable device I'm probably someplace super noisy (in a car, on the bus, in a cafe, on a plane, whatever) so the increased audio quality over streaming on my phone doesn't really matter. Also my really good headphones are mostly big and/or heavy so they generally don't leave my house. I tend to have plenty of storage on my phone, so if I'm going to be away from wifi for a while I download a bunch of music in advance.
I used to have an old ipod nano that I used for long trips to save my phone battery, but then battery packs got super cheap.
Honestly super hot take but I got a set of Master & Dynamic wired MH-40s on sale for like half off years and years ago and they're not the most comfortable but they're still my favorites. I also love that they're virtually indestructible -- everything on them is made of metal or leather. And they just sound fun to me.
Sony MDR-7506 are the classic beater headphone -- I've had mine for like 12 years and have beat the stuffing out of them and the only thing I've had to do is replace the earpads because the pleather was flaking. No mic, though. I wish Sony would do ones with a removable cable so you could slap a mic cable on them.
I quit a PhD program in a social science and this is absolutely true of basically any field about which you cannot say "You need a degree in X to get that job".
Additionally, colleges and universities are increasingly not hiring tenure-track professors and instead relying on adjuncts to teach their classes. Adjuncts make almost no money, get no benefits, have no job security from one term to another, and often have to adjunct at multiple institutions simultaneously to make ends meet. It's basically the gig-ification of post-secondary education and it's awful.
I quit my PhD because I loved the field but it was very clear I wouldn't be able to live comfortably working in that field. Now I'm a programmer and I made more money at my first non-academic job than my PhD supervisor did with tenure and a decade of seniority.
TIL Beeper exists. Now I am on the wait list, and kind of sad I can't prepay for a year to skip the line.
No one else can tell you what you should pursue. I didn't know what I did or didn't like until I tried a few things and figured out what aspects of them I like and what aspects were not for me. For instance, I don't like frontend programming and I absolutely hate dealing with external clients. I do something more like data engineering, which a lot of people find deadly boring but I find perfectly satisfactory.
The other thing that's been really important to me is decoupling my career from my self-worth. My job is not the most important thing about me. My job is something I do so I can get paid enough to do the things I actually want to do. I don't need to LOVE my job. I need to like it enough to mostly not dislike having to do it 40 hours a week. For me this means I don't find the work boring, I work with nice people, I mostly don't have to do things I HATE (e.g. client presentations), and I'm not doing anything that conflicts with my values (e.g. I wouldn't work on blockchain, or law enforcement projects).