431–440 of 871 posts
The core issue is that Amazon envisioned Alexa as a product that would help it increase sales. Smart home features were always an afterthought. How convenient would it be if people could shout "Alexa order me Tide Pods" from wherever they were in their home and the order got magically processed? That demo definitely got applause from a boardroom full of execs. The problem is that consumers don't behave like that. Thi…
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It's ridiculous that I have to have a spreadsheet with pricing information and links for household goods just to spot check and make sure I'm getting the actual price per quantity that I want due to the multiple dynamic listings that change every day nightmare. Don't ask how many times I receive more or less than I thought I would or something came in 10 packages of 3 instead of 1 30x package.
It'd not even that I care much about small deviations--I just don't trust that something really crazy won't happen if I put it on autopilot. If I walk into Walmart and grab a big armful of Bounty I'm fairly confident things will be fine.
Although I detect it’s starting to drift as they switch to a “marketplace” approach similar to Amazon.
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Interesting. How much would one have to pay you to stop using it? Wondering what the use cases are (replace Google? Stack Overflow? etc).
I'd have to be paid probably at least $200/mo to stop using LLMs, they are a massive productivity boost for new projects and can replace google for simple things. As an example of replacing google (since I was writing C++ today and I haven't used it in ages): me: is there an issue with passing "hello" to std::string claude: Passing "hello" to a function expecting std::string is actually not an issue. C++ allows impli…
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Downstream impact is gamed internally at Amazon. People crucified Sears for making teams compete internally but that’s literally what’s happening at Amazon at a larger scale. Teams and orgs regularly push back against helping each other. Will not waste resources to help others. I don’t believe Amazon has a good outlook over 5 years unless they get lucky with random bets. They no longer innovate, they just copy and tr…
Amazon is the same as Google, Meta, Twitter, etc in the sense that they have a couple of wildly profitable products that enables the company to 'play' at running some other businesses that might turn a profit eventually after investing fifty billion. For Amazon it's the retail business and AWS. For Google it's AdWords. For Meta it's Facebook Ads. These businesses will never die, or even face a threat to their futures…
The core issue is that Amazon envisioned Alexa as a product that would help it increase sales. Smart home features were always an afterthought. How convenient would it be if people could shout "Alexa order me Tide Pods" from wherever they were in their home and the order got magically processed? That demo definitely got applause from a boardroom full of execs. The problem is that consumers don't behave like that. Thi…
Amazon could have that business model if they hadn't almost completely squandered any trust people had in their listings.
(I have seen people try this but it's immediately apparent that it's not hand-curated. I think selling that point needs to be priority.)
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Are there actually good juices on the public market? I'm pretty sure anything you don't squeeze yourself has been reconstituted from parts. I was chatting up a hotel chef recently and he told me the lil 8oz of 'proper' orange juice he gave me cost more to put on the table than the entire rest of the breakfast combined.
Not really. I was just using OJ as an example because for whatever reasons I've been paying attention to the pricing of different breakfast places OJ + grocery OJ since covid. I pay $7 for "fresh squeezed" from Einsteins, but Syrup a popular breakfast place next to me charges $8.99 for a cup about half the size of that. I made that mistake once . I was just hoping for healthier, zero/low sugar options of a lot more t…
Plus, if you're drinking fruit juice to help stay hydrated, you literally need sugars and salts to actually instigate the hydration process.
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That's irrelevant. Give me the total price, so I know how much something will cost. I don't care what percentage of it goes where. I only care about easily evaluating whether something is worth the price. Seriously. I don't care if the total price consists of 100% tax or 0% tax. I care only what it is. I don't ask to know how much you pay the cleaners, how much it costs to operate the pool, how much corporate profit…
Looks like I'm not the only European that has seen a price tag of $9.50 on a product I wanted, only to find out that the $10 bill in my pocket was only two thirds of the amount needed! Look at us poor Europeans with our metric-system money-math
The core issue is that Amazon envisioned Alexa as a product that would help it increase sales. Smart home features were always an afterthought. How convenient would it be if people could shout "Alexa order me Tide Pods" from wherever they were in their home and the order got magically processed? That demo definitely got applause from a boardroom full of execs. The problem is that consumers don't behave like that. Thi…
Something simple like “alert me if my door is unlocked” using a ring device is impossible.
The amount of awareness and integration with its revenue streams makes it a loss leader. It equally helps tie people into that ecosystem. So it's an underrated appreciated marketing budget more than a loss. Now they can and should have added functionality(worthwhile pay for add ons) earlier and then, Alexa does have some basic flaws in dialogue, like try and ask it for the wind direction without being subjected to a…
Alexa is one of those things that keeps Amazons presence in mind.
If Amazon (and Google and Apple) couldn’t figure out how to monetize a voice/chat ‘app’ after a decade of plowing money into it, how does the whole LLM market come to fruition? Genuinely curious as I see a similar trend: there is definite consumer interest, but just like ‘kitchen timers on Alexa’ what if the LLMs main use case is simply to generate funny memes and the most basic RAG? How does this manifest into a tri…