Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Alexa is in millions of households and Amazon is losing billions

wsj.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

661–670 of 871 posts

Re: Alexa is in millions of households and Amazon is losing billions

#661

Post by gregw2 »

nerdponx wrote: post #639
xp84 wrote: post #600

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The unit price labels here in the US are hilariously messed up. The items you want to compare will be say, a pack of 6 granola bars or a 10 pack. The unit prices will be like: #1: $0.37 / ounce #2: $6.50 / pound or even: #3: $1.82 / each (a price per item) This will even be common within the same exact brand too. The stores seem so bad at picking a consistent unit for a product category that it seems malicious, but i…

When money is at stake, never attribute to incompetence what could be attributed to greed.

Nice twist on the incompetence version of Hanlon's razor... does it have a name? "Nerdponx's razor" will have a hard time catching on...

EDIT: I see esmifra on Reddit said this six years ago... but not sure "esmifra's razor" would catch on either. https://www.reddit.com/r/wikipedia/comments/8itqf5/comment/d...

And I see there is a similar but less catchily-worded concept, "Hubbard's corollary" from 2020 mentioned in the Wikipedia entry for Hanlon's razor... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor

Re: Alexa is in millions of households and Amazon is losing billions

#663

Post by dwighttk »

paxys wrote: post #86

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…

It is funny… based on the way Coke (and Pepsi)prices their products (prices all over the place and near constant discounts) they seem to have a critical mass of people that buy their 12pack every time they go the the store no matter the cost.

Re: Alexa is in millions of households and Amazon is losing billions

#664

Post by kruador »

ethbr1 wrote: post #363
doubled112 wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like a UPC?

Are UPCs stable at scale and over time? It's been a minute since I was in retail, but I remember there being a bunch of asterisk-but's around them.

No, they aren't. GS1 - the organisation that administers retail barcodes - has rules about when to change the Global Trade Item Number for a product. The GTIN is what you probably mean by 'UPC' but GS1 now distinguishes between the abstract product number (the GTIN), and the concrete barcode symbology containing a 12-digit GTIN (UPC-A).

The Guiding Principles are:

* Is a consumer and/or trading partner expected to distinguish the changed or new product from previous/current products?

* Is there a regulatory/liability disclosure requirement to the consumer and/or trading partner?

* Is there a substantial impact to the supply chain (e.g., how the product is shipped, stored, received)?

- from https://www.gs1.org/1/gtinrules/en/guiding-principles

Re: Alexa is in millions of households and Amazon is losing billions

#665

Post by dwighttk »

pmontra wrote: post #580
mlsu wrote: post #553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a slog to do the “which one of these is least a ripoff” calculation, at the grocery store or online. I try to do the calculation nonetheless. But every time I just need to buy some ordinary staple, I’m up against the Relentless Spirit of Pure Deception, who attempts an ever evolving and always brand new form of trickery, at every engagement. Sometimes, I simply make the $1.00 donation to P&G or whoever just to a…

> It’s a slog to do the “which one of these is least a ripoff” calculation, at the grocery store Where I live price labels must carry the per liter or the per kilo price too. It's printed with a smaller font size but it's visible and it's often the only price I look at.

At my store they are free to choose their unit and they strive for unit heterogeneity within a specific product you might want to compare

Re: Alexa is in millions of households and Amazon is losing billions

#666

Post by jcynix »

netsharc wrote: post #659
asfodelsu wrote: post #611

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In many places in Europe: Normal price per item big letters, price per Kg small letters. Problem solved

I've seen the "unit price" be per 100g (Especially so you don't notice it's a ton of money per kg) so there's still some screwing around...

Sure but multiplying by ten to get the price per kilo shouldn't be the most complicated thing for even those folks that aren't math savy. It means to move the decimal point (or comma) one place to the right IIRC.

If you had to convert from arms to legs or feet like in certain areas of the world, that might be much harder, of course.

Re: Alexa is in millions of households and Amazon is losing billions

#667

Post by 9dev »

paxys wrote: post #86

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…

Add to that that ordering stuff without explicitly stating the total, final price to the customer is illegal in the EU, that was never even going to work everywhere at all...

Re: Alexa is in millions of households and Amazon is losing billions

#668

Post by dns_snek »

paxys wrote: post #86

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…

> I always want to see a page with the product details and price before I click "buy".

This is doubly true ever since they let shady sellers/scammers run free on their platform. I trust AliExpress more than I trust Amazon for any product that isn't explicitly "Sold by Amazon".

Re: Alexa is in millions of households and Amazon is losing billions

#669

Post by 39896880 »

phito wrote: post #640
ihkasfjdkabnsk wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly the FSTs themselves were actually really cool, it's very much GOFAI. It automatically creates lots of permutations, i.e. `play taylor swift`, `please play taylor swift`, play taylor swift now`. etc. And once the FST is built it always works deterministically. It's compiled to a graph and an incoming command is pushed through the state machine, if you get to an end state it "matched the fst" and some specific…

what do all these acronyms mean

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finite-state_transducer

https://medium.com/fetch-ai/classical-roots-of-ai-unpacking-....

Re: Alexa is in millions of households and Amazon is losing billions

#670

Post by 39896880 »

IshKebab wrote: post #610
rtpg wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this not actually kind of powerful? Having linguists write up a bunch of rules seems a lot more predictable than "rolling a bunch of dice and hoping that some LLM spits out a coherent set of steps". It feels very fractal but on the other hand if Alexa has only a specific gamut of responses it's not exactly a limitless state space right? Very curious about how those rules look like though

The problem is it's completely undiscoverable. You can tell Alexa "play some music" because you're pretty sure one of these linguists added a rule for that. But can you tell it "play me a song that lasts longer than 5 minutes"? Doubtful. The only way to know is to try it. The problem is the space of possible commands is waaaaay bigger than the space of commands you can manually handle, which means if you just randoml…

It’s worse than that. These systems can be adapted by looking at failed user commands, but people don’t really sit around trying out fun things and watch it fall on its face for longer than the first day or so. After that, the novelty wears off, so you’ve trained your users to accept the device’s limitations. Then, even when you do improve the functionality, your users won’t know! They won’t try it, and those commands will never get traction in the system or get more testing beyond the initial launch criteria. It’s a death spiral. The same thing happens with the tone of voice people use.
Post reply on HN