xela | Self-propagating typo (Reply)

I wonder if AI is good enough at this point that organizations could offer a public bug reporting facility to their customers, and rely on an AI to bring only those reporting something real to a human's attention?

What brings this to mind is a minor — it probably started life as a typo — data bug I came upon today. The interesting thing about it being that I stumbled upon it in Amazon's data, where I barely noticed it. But then I went to Google Play to check their price — and they had the exact same data bug. Which reveals a detail about how both companies populate their public product databases that they might have preferred to keep private. (Or might not — but it seems to me a company would prefer not to say "we populate our store inventory with regular data dumps from foo, then apply our pricing algorithm and publish it.")

The bug, if you're interested: I was watching a Youtube video of a conference presentation, the speaker showed a slide that intrigued me, captioned with a barely legible credit: Gary Gruver. So I Googled the guy, and found my way to an Amazon page for a book Amazon called — in both in the headline on the page and (sans particles) the Amazon URL — Start and Scaling Devops in the Enterprise. But on the accompanying photo of the book's cover, the title is Starting and Scaling Devops in the Enterprise (emphasis added). At some point in the past few years I stopped dismissing books and articles out of hand for having "enterprise" in the title, and I (for probably no good reason) feel less trapped buying an e-book from Google than Amazon, so I thought I'd see what Google was charging. And found the exact same typo, with the same photo of the cover and the same variant in the URL.

<caption>Amazon above; Google below.</caption>