The argumentative method of rather than saying and doing what you believe and instead doing and saying what you are opposed to, is always weak and usually a great way to shoot yourself in the foot.
That being said. I agree 100% with making Meta Employees feel uncomfortable with their own products.
But that lets companies that aren't colluding to catch up technologically and maybe sell their services for a lower cost. How is that anti-competitive?
They slow down model releases, but don't slow down research and model development. They're not suddenly going to tell their army of researchers to go home. (In fact they can then focus/spend more on research, instead of the engineering needed to keep churning new models for production.)
This protects them from continuous model distillation by inferior models. So they only release a new model when a 3rd competitor catches up to their public production models' capabilities.
And the public gets a new model in 6 months or a year instead of every few months. But the new model would be a (1) gigantic leap in undisputed capabilities, (2) catastrophic in terms of job losses/replacements worldwide and they've had a year to prepare for the politics of it, and (3) the public would have access to the "tiny/medium/..." models while the big money/gov clients get the real super juice hidden behind the gates.
> they've had a year to prepare for the politics of it
There is little to no political will for preventative measures. Conversely, there is an overabundance of political will to react to disasters.
Thus, there are preventionists whose plan B strategy is to write legislation and wait for a disaster to leverage newfound will to get it passed. Better late than never.
All that said, there's no political will to prepare for the politics of AI. It doesn't exist. The best we can accomplish is to be ready with a plan for when disaster hits.
That experience actively drives me towards other retailers.
I want to buy what I want to buy, and I will never buy things that I do not want to buy. If the time ever comes that I am tricked into buying the wrong thing from Amazon, then I'm sending it back on their dime.
If that means that only 3 things fit, then I only want to see exactly 3 things. If that means that 0 things fit, then 0 is also a valid result. In response to these results, I can then elect to soften my constraints at my own volition.
But an Amazon search typically results endless pages of vaguely-related products that represent a jumbled mess of things largely do not fit or only-sorta fit the broad concept of what I intend to purchase.
When I want a 4300 Kelvin D2S HID headlight bulb for my car, then that's all that I want to find when I search for it. I do not want results for LEDs. I do not want selective yellow bulbs. I do not want 5000k or 6500k or 10000k. I do not want an "upgrade" kit, nor D2R bulbs, nor D3S. None of those things are useful to me.
The list of things that I do not want is infinite, and when Amazon presents a seemingly-infinite list of them then that represents the opposite of usefulness.
I only want to peruse listings that match. I require no more and no less than this in order to be satisfied. There is no possible amount of additional noise that can ever dissuade me from seeking the thing that I very specifically desire.
A modern LLM can weed out and separate the bad results from the good ones and give me an easier time of making a purchase decision, but it can only do so when it is not blocked from the start.
That ship has long since sailed for every search product. Companies have long-since learned that intent-based results are much more profitable (why show an empty result page when you can show something for people to buy or click on?), but it is also often genuinely useful when your search is not perfect or what you want doesn't actually exist. I agree that it is annoying when you really truly do only want something very specific and the ranking prioritizes the wrong things (e.g., sponsored results, more profitable items, etc.) over exact matches, but can you honestly and truly say you've never found any value from intent search algorithms?
I very often truly only want something very specific. I'm not apologetic about that at all.
When I want oolong tea bags and I search for "oolong tea bags," then I definitely don't want to be shown bulk green tea instead.
If I want to find any kind of tea instead of specifically oolong -- if, perchance, I wish to peruse the broader market of available tea -- then I'm very capable of removing "oolong" and/or "bags" from my search prompt.
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I can look around and observe that the ship has sailed, but that doesn't mean I'll ever be happy with the outcome or accepting of any notion that the situation is anything other than hostile.
Can you recognize that it gets between me and my willingness to spend money?
You mean if they falsify the search for both sides they make more money, as ironically spelt out in Google's original paper "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine":
“We expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.”
“advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results.”
“the better the search engine is, the fewer advertisements will be needed for the consumer to find what they want. This of course erodes the advertising supported business model...”
Note: they even explain why advertising funded search makes things worse for customers and for advertisers. Worse search finds more ads and thus more dollars, resulting in both worsening search results over time AND less value for ad money over time.
Amazon is only an interface to purchase products made by other companies (except for Kindle devices).
Your alternative interfaces exist and have always existed: Go to a physical store, order by phone, order through the OEM website, order through an Amazon competitor, etc.
"you can already build [Dropbox] yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem."
For all the complaints, it's nice to see HN hasn't changed that much.
Yes, you're right. It's almost impossible to purchase from a physical store or from competitors to Amazon (who many times are much bigger than Amazon in their country).
On the next episode of Oppressed Hackers: We get a load of a guy who had the nerve to say that it was possible to drink a glass of water.
The point wasn't that there are no alternatives, but that calling Amazon "only an interface to purchase products made by other companies" is reductive to the point of being completely wrong.
It used to be that the US tortured people until they said what the US needed to justify a war. Now the it uses LLMs: just keep chatting until it hallucinates what's needed.
I can't supply you a reference. It was... maybe 4 to 6 months ago? Border Patrol was doing something more than 100 miles from the border, and a reporter asked them what their justification was for being active that far inland, and the Border Patrol spokesperson said "international airport".
I mean, that could have been just one person's attempt to justify them operating outside their legal authority. Or it could have been what they were told to say, meaning it was somewhat more official policy (or at least official smokescreen du jour). At any rate, it has been claimed, at least once, not in court but to the press.
If so this was an individual claim, it’s not known to be official policy, the law doesn’t support it, and it hasn’t been used as a successful argument in court. This claim comes up regularly but it’s a misinterpretation/rumor. People should stop repeating it or it will become one of those “folk truths” that eventually becomes accepted and real.
It's not a folk truth that I saw it, in a mainstream news report, said by a Border Patrol employee to justify their actions more than 100 miles from the border. That's not a misinterpretation; that really happened. At least once.
I would be delighted for it to not have been an actual administration claim, ever.
Fair, I have no doubt that someone has falsely claimed it in order to do an illegal search, but it still is a false claim and (based on current understanding of the law) would not hold up in court.
As it is the 100 mile zone sweeps in most of the population.
I gave up on my Oura ring 6 months into use. The event that really convinced me their crap: I sat down at my desk at work, told Oura I'm starting a bike ride. One hour later it said my average HR was over 100. I have bradycardia so my heart rate never got over 60 for that hour.
BS AI hallucinations.
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