• Butterbee (She/Her)@beehaw.org
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    6 months ago

    “fax machines are at odds with a world embracing artificial intelligence.” So bring on the fax machines! MORE fax machines!

    • RobotToaster@mander.xyz
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      6 months ago

      I don’t see how that makes sense as a statement, an ai with access to a 56k modem can send a fax. It feels like they’re just using ai as a buzzword.

      • denial@feddit.de
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        6 months ago

        Of cause that is a BS reason. But they should have stopped using fax machines 20 years ago. How can any reason they give why they have to stop now be any other than BS.

      • smeg@feddit.uk
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        6 months ago

        It reads to me more just as a statement of contrast, as in ‘we’re in a world of incredibly high-tech new technology, we shouldn’t still be using something from the Victorian era!’

      • sweng@programming.dev
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        6 months ago

        The issue is not sending, it is receiving. With a fax you need to do some OCR to extract the text, which you then can feed into e.g an AI.

          • sweng@programming.dev
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            6 months ago

            At horrendous expense, yes. Using it for OCR makes little sense. And compared to just sending the text directly, even OCR is expensive.

                • Mongostein@lemmy.ca
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                  6 months ago

                  I wouldn’t do it on my phone. 🙄

                  What I’m saying is that it would probably be fairly easy to incorporate an already existing technology in to an AI.

            • DdCno1@beehaw.org
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              6 months ago

              I was about to say, you could do serviceable OCR on a 486, which illustrates just how little processing power is needed for conventional approaches compared to this hallucinating AI nonsense.

  • Lvxferre@mander.xyz
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    6 months ago

    I agree with the move; it reduces the unnecessary waste of time, space, and material. While some things should have physical copies, not everything needs to.

    Regarding the “AI” part: the author is simply highlighting that BRD is sticking to really old technology, in a world going further steps beyond. Don’t think too hard on that.

  • Kissaki@beehaw.org
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    6 months ago

    As part of a campaign calling on the government to reduce red tape, Alsleben has opened what he calls “the most German of German museums,” the Bureaucracy Museum.

    Genius move. I think it’s a worth move either way. Bureaucracy and the shape and history of it is worth preserving [information on].

    Among the objects on display is a 10-foot stack of files representing the paperwork needed to install one wind turbine. Another is a photograph of a mailbox with the label: “Please deposit online forms here.”


    Looks like it’s a 3 month limited activity, unfortunately.

    Here’s a video tour/intro of the Bureaucracy Museum.

    • Ð Greıt Þu̇mpkin@lemm.ee
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      6 months ago

      Worst part of that 10 ft stack is that it’s actually just a single paragraph that makes reference to like 50 obscure german legal concepts that are named with contractions of like 180 words apiece.

    • BougieBirdie@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      6 months ago

      “Red tape” is a pretty common idiom here. It’s similar to bureaucracy, but it’s more like the useless stuff you have to deal with in order to do something.

      Say you want to update your driver’s license and you need to bring in some ID and fill out a form. That’s regular bureaucracy.

      If you want to feed the homeless so you have to get a permit for an event, prove your volunteers have food-handling training, fill out forms for your volunteers, notify the police that there will be a public gathering, schedule an inspection of the facility, etc, that’s red tape.

      Another way to look at it might be that Bureaucracy describes the system in which offices communicate with each other, and Red Tape are the tasks/forms/whatever you have to complete in order to get what you want approved.

    • BCsven@lemmy.ca
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      6 months ago

      Looks like high usage in UK and USA and Canada (as colonies) since it refered to the red tape used To bind legal documents closed. As a UK to Canada resident. i can say I just knew what the term meant from hearing it so often in conversations or on the news, but never though to look up where the term came from. TIL

    • Ð Greıt Þu̇mpkin@lemm.ee
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      6 months ago

      It refers to bureaucracy but specifically in a negative way, as in unnecessary and obstructive bureaucracy that just serves as busy work between people and getting what they want or need from the government in terms of services or approvals.

  • Kissaki@beehaw.org
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    6 months ago

    four out of five companies in […Germany] continue to use fax machines and a third do so frequently or very frequently

    I didn’t expect it to be this high… But I guess it’s not unrealistic. My job doesn’t expose me to them at all.