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Amazon R&D spending is more than that of all companies and government of France

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Re: Amazon R&D spending is more than that of all companies and government of France

#151
post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I say I want to fly on Tuesday, 2/2/2029, with a departure between 8-11am, economy, and ask you to show me options sorted by cost (descending), you should show me exactly those results. You could offer me a flexible search option, as some sites do (+/- x days on flight times, etc.). Great! Now I can request that we search within a date range. Nice! That might be a good feature for some people! Offering a simple qu…

There are so many decisions other than just the dates that you implicitly make (or are made for you when you book your flight). Do you want insurance? Wi-Fi? Extra leg room? Turbo prop aircraft? Jets only? 2-3-2 seating? 3-3 seating? Logically, you should want to control each of these variables while searching for flights. If you are ready to trust a flight aggregator with these choices, some fuzziness in price seems…

I can kinda understand (though not always agree with) fuzzy matching in the case there are 0 results that match the given filters. Something like a heading entry "No matches found. Showing closest matches" or maybe even just always sticking them at the end of short results lists. I can't understand just assuming every match for any search should be fuzzy just because there might be a use case it helps for certain searches. Or even a "fuzzy match" type filter option, though I think you'd find extremely few people actually use it.

I.e. the UI needs to be there to efficiently help the user do what they ask not to try to be smarter than the user. Unless the user asks for fuzzy matches it doesn't make sense to make the response lead with them.

Re: Amazon R&D spending is more than that of all companies and government of France

#152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a software developer I also salute that law, As italian I always voted against governments who wanted to detax r&d, if its done and funded by governments for the collectivity, then it benefits everyone, but if a private company is going to r&d for the benefits of their shareholders, then they can also pay their fair share of taxes instead of leeching from the collectivity I always felt, from outside, that anti tru…

> I always felt, from outside, that anti trumpers just are against everything he does with simplistic explanation Sounds like quite a broad brush. As a former Trump voter (to my shame), I realized he's a broken clock that can be right once in a while; yet still such a profoundly net negative that I'd rather he be in jail than in office. In particular I'm most against his record of sexual assault, association with pre…

I realised after writing it that my thought was a bit out of touch, in Italy I had my Trump, in Berlusconi, and I hated everything he said, even if something made sense

Re: Amazon R&D spending is more than that of all companies and government of France

#153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems to me like products with entirely different use cases. Alexa's not so good at generative text content, but ChatGPT isn't very good at triggering kitchen timers and home automation shortcuts via voice command.

It's quite capable of doing so though: https://johnthenerd.com/blog/local-llm-assistant/ There is nothing technically stopping ChatGPT from hitting up endpoints with JSON other than OpenAI's forced limitations. It has excellent voice to text, excellent text to voice, excellent comprehension (it can understand vague commands like "set all the lights in the house to a Christmas color theme") and it knows how to generat…

For me, the pinnacle of smart home voice automation would be a fully local voice interpreter that runs on some low-power device that I already have (like, say, an Apple TV), that supports some fixed, explicit set of commands that are easy to reference and/or modify, that has rock-solid reliability and that runs deterministically.

To me, it feels like Siri/HomeKit (or even Home Assistant/Assist) has a much clearer path to that ideal than ChatGPT spitting out JSON.

Re: Amazon R&D spending is more than that of all companies and government of France

#155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's quite capable of doing so though: https://johnthenerd.com/blog/local-llm-assistant/ There is nothing technically stopping ChatGPT from hitting up endpoints with JSON other than OpenAI's forced limitations. It has excellent voice to text, excellent text to voice, excellent comprehension (it can understand vague commands like "set all the lights in the house to a Christmas color theme") and it knows how to generat…

For me, the pinnacle of smart home voice automation would be a fully local voice interpreter that runs on some low-power device that I already have (like, say, an Apple TV), that supports some fixed, explicit set of commands that are easy to reference and/or modify, that has rock-solid reliability and that runs deterministically. To me, it feels like Siri/HomeKit (or even Home Assistant/Assist) has a much clearer pat…

nothing says you can’t have both your set of explicit commands and inference for when the command has not been defined yet

Re: Amazon R&D spending is more than that of all companies and government of France

#158
post #118
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recognize names of well-known brands in search queries and filter (or at least prioritize) items by the associated seller? It's not exactly black magic.

What counts as a well known brand? What's an associated seller?

Those are questions for Amazon. I can give you all sorts of arbitrary criteria, but whatever they choose it would be ridiculous for Adidas to not be on the list.

Re: Amazon R&D spending is more than that of all companies and government of France

#159
post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

?

https://www.forbes.com/sites/katherinehamilton/2023/05/24/de...

I don't understand. How you decide to treat employees is quite different from what tax shenanigans your lawyers and accountants cook up.

Re: Amazon R&D spending is more than that of all companies and government of France

#160
post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The D in R&D literally stands for development. So 'software development' would fit.

It is research and development. Not 'or', though. I mean I work in a RnD dep. now and it honestly is some R but like 2% of my time.

Are you suggesting that a company that only does Research but no development (eg because they are selling the patents afterwards or so), should not be classified as doing R&D?

I took R&D as the bucket that we put both research and development into.

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