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Bot written to buy random things each month from Amazon

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Re: Bot written to buy random things each month from Amazon

#71

Post by rijoja »

tubelite wrote: post #69

You know what would be really cool? Write a mini-me program, with enough money that hosting can be funded on interest, with a little left over for gifts. Then, you die (painlessly, after a long and happy life, etc. etc.) The program keeps running, tracking your descendants over time and gives them little random, appropriate gifts from the ghost of great^n grandpa or grandma. I wrote about this in 2007 ( https://tubel…

Let's say that you save 10'000 $ in an account with 5% interest, then you'll have 500 $ a year to spend on presents. If every child has two children the amount children in a generation is 2^n. When they grow up we stop giving them presents for mathematical simplicity. Then it's possible to give every child in the 9th generation a $1 gift a year. Which is quite neat. If we have a generation length of between 25 and 30 years this will be between 225 and 270 years in the future.

Re: Bot written to buy random things each month from Amazon

#72

Post by tubelite »

rijoja wrote: post #71
tubelite wrote: post #69

You know what would be really cool? Write a mini-me program, with enough money that hosting can be funded on interest, with a little left over for gifts. Then, you die (painlessly, after a long and happy life, etc. etc.) The program keeps running, tracking your descendants over time and gives them little random, appropriate gifts from the ghost of great^n grandpa or grandma. I wrote about this in 2007 ( https://tubel…

Let's say that you save 10'000 $ in an account with 5% interest, then you'll have 500 $ a year to spend on presents. If every child has two children the amount children in a generation is 2^n. When they grow up we stop giving them presents for mathematical simplicity. Then it's possible to give every child in the 9th generation a $1 gift a year. Which is quite neat. If we have a generation length of between 25 and 30…

In the long run, it is highly likely that you will either be an ancestor of every single human, or none of them. (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-19331938) You don't need to give every single one of your descendants a gift. Give 2-5 gifts a year, randomized after filtering out undesirables using a naughty/nice algorithm.

Assuming total population remains roughly the same, if enough people did this, it would actually work. Most kids would get gifts from grand^n Santa.

Re: Bot written to buy random things each month from Amazon

#73

Post by unwind »

kevinpet wrote: post #64
cjfont wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding the bot creator - I'm unable to see a post where he explicitly says that he's an artist or his bit is an art project or that he's creating art. However, if he were to do so then I'd whole-heartily agree and then proceed to explore his creation from an art perspective. He does actually, in his "Address a criticism" post, he explicitly says he considers the budget for the bot's purchases as money for "art sup…

He isn't claiming it's art. He's saying that we wouldn't criticize the guy spending $50 a month on art supplies to spread on a canvas with their feet, so what's wrong with his hobby?

I read this sentence:

I am operating from a position of privilege where I can afford to spend money to make art.

As being exactly such a claim by the author of the script.

Re: Bot written to buy random things each month from Amazon

#74

Post by mseebach »

jlgreco wrote: post #24
mseebach wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but where do we draw the line? Somewhere around "If you have to explain to people that it's art, it's not."

Seems like a fuzzy line still. What if the artist doesn't really "explain" that it is art so much as he tells someone it is art? If, as a classic example, you submit a urinal on it's side to an exhibit, I don't think the act of submission would necessarily be an act of explanation. Of course you can go the other direction, and wonder who this explanation has to be directed to in order to disqualify something as art.…

Yes. An unfuzzy line would imply an objective definition, and I think it's clear a such doesn't exist.

But what I meant by "explain" was more the other way around - if the intended observer can't independently identify it as art, it's not. Mostly, really, I just tend to get a little upset over the pompousness of declaring something fairly trivial you've done "art", because you can construct some platitudes about it being a commentary on some social issue.

Re: Bot written to buy random things each month from Amazon

#75

Post by zaidmo »

tubelite wrote: post #69

You know what would be really cool? Write a mini-me program, with enough money that hosting can be funded on interest, with a little left over for gifts. Then, you die (painlessly, after a long and happy life, etc. etc.) The program keeps running, tracking your descendants over time and gives them little random, appropriate gifts from the ghost of great^n grandpa or grandma. I wrote about this in 2007 ( https://tubel…

However, the site will never keep the API's the same. The mini-program may stop functioning a few years after the person's death, and there will be nobody to change it

Re: Bot written to buy random things each month from Amazon

#76

Post by zaidmo »

tubelite wrote: post #69

You know what would be really cool? Write a mini-me program, with enough money that hosting can be funded on interest, with a little left over for gifts. Then, you die (painlessly, after a long and happy life, etc. etc.) The program keeps running, tracking your descendants over time and gives them little random, appropriate gifts from the ghost of great^n grandpa or grandma. I wrote about this in 2007 ( https://tubel…

However, the site will never keep the API's the same. The mini-program may stop functioning a few years after the person's death, and there will be nobody to change it

Re: Bot written to buy random things each month from Amazon

#77

Post by tubelite »

zaidmo wrote: post #75
tubelite wrote: post #69

You know what would be really cool? Write a mini-me program, with enough money that hosting can be funded on interest, with a little left over for gifts. Then, you die (painlessly, after a long and happy life, etc. etc.) The program keeps running, tracking your descendants over time and gives them little random, appropriate gifts from the ghost of great^n grandpa or grandma. I wrote about this in 2007 ( https://tubel…

However, the site will never keep the API's the same. The mini-program may stop functioning a few years after the person's death, and there will be nobody to change it

True. The specific APIs will go out of date. That is why the intent has to be captured at a higher level, while the implementation of the intent can be swapped out and replaced as APIs change. Many aspects of human behaviour have basically remained the same in hundreds of years - giving a gift, helping out in a good cause, though the specific mechanism of searching and giving of gifts has changed.

Organizations, trusts and even countries have been running for hundreds of years, based on a limited set of rules written in a programming language called LEGALESE, updated from time to time. One way to look at the mini-me program is as a "software trustee", whose parameters are monitored once in a while by a programmer-lawyer human. This approach yields the same scale-out/low cost/automation benefits of the cloud, letting a single programmer-lawyer maintain hundreds of trusts, in much the same way as a single admin can manage hundreds of instances in the cloud. It reduces the cost of creating and administering a trust to the point where such options are available beyond the top 1%.

Think of virtualization, emulators of old video game machines... they haven't been manufactured in ages, and yet, we find a way to faithfully run them inside emulators. I think we'll find a way to translate the Amazon APIs while remaining faithful to the original human's intent.

Re: Bot written to buy random things each month from Amazon

#78

Post by illuminate »

mseebach wrote: post #74
jlgreco wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like a fuzzy line still. What if the artist doesn't really "explain" that it is art so much as he tells someone it is art? If, as a classic example, you submit a urinal on it's side to an exhibit, I don't think the act of submission would necessarily be an act of explanation. Of course you can go the other direction, and wonder who this explanation has to be directed to in order to disqualify something as art.…

Yes. An unfuzzy line would imply an objective definition, and I think it's clear a such doesn't exist. But what I meant by "explain" was more the other way around - if the intended observer can't independently identify it as art, it's not. Mostly, really, I just tend to get a little upset over the pompousness of declaring something fairly trivial you've done "art", because you can construct some platitudes about it b…

"if the intended observer can't independently identify it as art, it's not"

Then what makes you think that you're always the intended observer for a particular piece?

Re: Bot written to buy random things each month from Amazon

#79

Post by gbvb »

elteto wrote: post #20
jaysonelliot wrote: post #19

If you look at what he's doing from an art perspective, he's engaging in Generative art, art that is created by process outside the control of the artist: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_art I usually think of John Cage when I think of generative art, and the way he let the environment or random events become part of his music. One of the coolest things I've learned about recently in this realm is Joseph Nech…

"If you look at what he's doing from an art perspective" What exactly is an art perspective? I buy stuff every month from Amazon to serve different purposes, so that they are pseudo-random if looked from outside without context. That doesn't make me an artist, at least not in my book. I don't want to start a modern art flame fest, but where do we draw the line? I mean, it seems like nowadays anything is or can be art…

IMO, Art exists for the sake of itself. It serves no other purpose. It has no intrinsic value. Whether you like it as is or not is a different question.

So, while anyone call anything art, If the random shopper is doing to have a surprise gift every month, it is not exactly art. But, he is doing to this to show the world how random materialism looks like, I guess he has a point. :)

Re: Bot written to buy random things each month from Amazon

#80

Post by jastr »

zdgman wrote: post #55

How is he actually completing the amazon purchase solely via a bot? I know there is no API to automagically buy an item from Amazon. Would love to see a write up of how this is accomplished. EDIT: Noticed he is using PhantomJS and running the process through a browser. Very interesting.

Apparently http://zinc.io does provide an API for placing orders on Amazon.
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