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People regret buying Amazon smart displays after being bombarded with ads

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Re: People regret buying Amazon smart displays after being bombarded with ads

#121

Post by jopsen »

HiPhish wrote: post #59
zuhsetaqi wrote: post #3

I wonder what they expected when buying such a device from Amazon.

I think a lot of normies still think that when they buy a smart appliance they are buying an appliance like from yesteryear, except with more features. In reality they are buying a computer shaped like an appliance of yesteryear. Your smartphone? That's not a phone, it's a computer shaped like a phone. Smart TV? Computer shaped like a TV. Smart watch? Computer shaped like a watch. This brings with it all the advantag…

Don't get me wrong, I'm not a fan of the trend.

But one could argue that a computer is just a cheaper implementation of the yesteryears discrete electronics. Which was itself a cheaper implementation of old school mechanical gears, switches and timing wheels, etc.

A locked down computer, could have been mechanical for all the user cares.

Fixing a dishwasher a while my dad told me that back in the day, they operates with a timing wheel that switched between different stages, and they had a lot of wires.

Todays dishwashers are cheaper and have fewer mechanical control parts (if any).

Re: People regret buying Amazon smart displays after being bombarded with ads

#122

Post by dreamcompiler »

> the company is working to improve the ad experience on Alexa devices

There is one and only one way to "improve the ad experience" and we all know what it is but for some strange reason the companies showing the ads never seem to figure it out.

Re: People regret buying Amazon smart displays after being bombarded with ads

#123

Post by dpark »

JCM9 wrote: post #111

People will study the Amazon devices downfall for decades to come. Amazon managed to get these things in everyone’s home and people generally liked them. The stage was set for Amazon to knock it out of the park on AI and then they completely blew it. Like epic once in a generation missed the boat. Now it’s an annoying device that shows ads. Everyone I know is tossing these things in the trash now.

I have an echo show I bought years ago and it sits in a drawer. The constant ads are just too obnoxious and it doesn’t do enough useful to justify putting up with it.

I still have a bunch of standard echo devices and they seem to be getting worse and worse over time. They completely missed the AI boat despite being positioned to be the ones to bring it to everyone’s homes and even the basic stuff seems to be getting worse. The devices misunderstand and fail to hear queries entirely more than they used to.

I’m honestly very tempted to switch to Google home at this point. I’d consider switching to Apple but I have one HomePod specifically for some home automation integration and it seems even worse whenever I try to use it.

Re: People regret buying Amazon smart displays after being bombarded with ads

#124

Post by dreamcompiler »

JCM9 wrote: post #111

People will study the Amazon devices downfall for decades to come. Amazon managed to get these things in everyone’s home and people generally liked them. The stage was set for Amazon to knock it out of the park on AI and then they completely blew it. Like epic once in a generation missed the boat. Now it’s an annoying device that shows ads. Everyone I know is tossing these things in the trash now.

Somebody sent me an Echo as a gift. Don't even know who. I buried it in the back yard. Didn't even take it out of the box. Fifty years from now some kid of the family that buys my house will find it and ask his parents what it is. They won't know. They'll have to go on the Interslop to find a "technological anthropologist" to figure it out. Then they'll try to donate it to the Smithsonian Museum of Bad Ideas but they will refuse it because they already have 1000 of the things back in their Indy Jones warehouse.

Re: People regret buying Amazon smart displays after being bombarded with ads

#125

Post by dreamcompiler »

I was thinking just today how nice it would be if I had a private AI that I could just ask "What streaming network that I already pay for can I watch Superman on without paying extra for it or watching ads?" and have it simply answer "HBO."

And now, after reading this comment, somebody is on the phone setting up a meeting with VCs for Monday morning to pitch this idea. Only the VCs are gonna insist that the AI make me listen to an ad for rainbow sparkle toothpaste before it tells me "HBO." And this is why we can't have nice things.

Re: People regret buying Amazon smart displays after being bombarded with ads

#126

Post by bigiain »

rhetocj23 wrote: post #113
JCM9 wrote: post #111

People will study the Amazon devices downfall for decades to come. Amazon managed to get these things in everyone’s home and people generally liked them. The stage was set for Amazon to knock it out of the park on AI and then they completely blew it. Like epic once in a generation missed the boat. Now it’s an annoying device that shows ads. Everyone I know is tossing these things in the trash now.

Sounds like the vision for this stuff was playing into made-up numbers inputted into a financial model on a spreadsheet.

Yeah, Amazon jumped too early. The real business model that's winning the "made-up numbers inputted into a financial model on a spreadsheet" is LLMs marketed as "Just about to turn into Artificial General Intelligence and turn the world into a post scarcity utopia" with the widely known but unacknowledged understanding that what they really mean is post scarcity for people who are already billionaires, not for the people we intend to put out of work -and that they don't need to create AGI for that, just to win the extractive rentseeker race to own the entire economy's productive labour.

Re: People regret buying Amazon smart displays after being bombarded with ads

#127

Post by boldlybold »

pixelmelt wrote: post #63
Andrex wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They got me by the balls with Kindle. Someone(/me if I had enough time) should make some kind of LLM scraper extension for Amazon's Web Reader. Run it on your own ebooks while you're signed in and you get the EPUBs. Maybe this already exists... I know there was some kind of cutoff earlier this year for unDRMing your Kindle books, but I definitely missed that by a mile.

I've been working on exactly this! After buying a book and having an awful exerience in their native reader I realized they no longer let you download your ebooks. Thus began the war on their web reader, they have some interesting defenses on how they encode the book, its basically a bunch of SVG paths that render to letters that are mapped to IDs that change on every request to fetch book data (the most you can fetc…

Damn, that's an impressive obfuscation and debugging. If you get around to releasing it I would be interested.

Re: People regret buying Amazon smart displays after being bombarded with ads

#128

Post by boldlybold »

Andrex wrote: post #57
syntaxing wrote: post #49

I make an explicit decision not to get any Amazon hardware within my household. I don’t even trust the Eero brand.

They got me by the balls with Kindle. Someone(/me if I had enough time) should make some kind of LLM scraper extension for Amazon's Web Reader. Run it on your own ebooks while you're signed in and you get the EPUBs. Maybe this already exists... I know there was some kind of cutoff earlier this year for unDRMing your Kindle books, but I definitely missed that by a mile.

Buy the ebook, then download a beautiful DRM-free and guilt-free version from Anna's Archive? win-win.

Re: People regret buying Amazon smart displays after being bombarded with ads

#129

Post by boldlybold »

robomartin wrote: post #85

I see many comments that express the same level of disgust I have for modern TV's, of nearly every brand, having mutated into intrusive digital signage with integrated behavioral tracking in my home. The question is: Would you pay $1000 to $3000 more (depending on size, etc.) for a TV with none of that. Zero. I would.

"Good" TVs are so cheap these days, that premium wouldn't be acceptable in my mind. The fix the other posters mention about banning it from the internet and just using HDMI works well enough for me.

Re: People regret buying Amazon smart displays after being bombarded with ads

#130

Post by bigiain »

julianlam wrote: post #95
j-bos wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ironically advertising displays a pretty good.

I've read something like 5 or 6 HN threads about a dumb TV, and without fail _this_ is always one of the replies. Another benefit — advertising displays are also designed to be always-on and last much longer than consumer devices. The other side of the coin? Because of the first two points, they are also rather cost-prohibitive. Nevertheless, anyone know where I can pick up a good one?

> The other side of the coin? Because of the first two points, they are also rather cost-prohibitive.

Not if you steal one! Which has 3 great benefits, you get a free screen, wherever you stole it from no longer bombards passersby with intrusive advertising, and whoever though doing that was a good idea is now out the cost of their expensive screen.

> Nevertheless, anyone know where I can pick up a good one?

Your local shopping mall late at night...

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