711–720 of 871 posts
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You bought an Alexa..... For the kids dorm room...? Wanna share with us your thought process?
Of the precious little Alexa can do reliably announcing that dinner is ready without having to yell is quite useful.
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I remember that around year 2000 a coworker from England told me that petrol pumps changed the prices from pounds per gallon to pounds per liter when the cost crossed the one pound mark. There is some malice in that too. Something like that could be the origin of using different units in those USA shops, not to cross some psychological threshold. It's been a long time since I went to the UK so I can't say if petrol i…
It is, and everything is required to be sold in metric units. Except for things like pipe fittings and screw sizes, but even those have to show the metric somewhere. There's an effort to switch car efficiency from mpg (higher is better) to "l/100km" (smaller is better), because the latter has more intuitive scaling as well as being properly metric. There were definitely people complaining about the price hike when th…
Gas pipes are imperial. I think they never changed to metric because of safety concerns or because the number of meters sold is lower than water pipes (gas pipes last forever) and it's not worth splitting the market in two. But it's just my suppositions.
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Amazon will accept returns, but not like Costco will or sears did. Sears would exchange any broken craftsman tool for a new one even decades after purchase. Costco is much the same. Used, year old stuff with missing parts will gladly be refunded in full.
To be fair to Costco you have to understand that the way they do that is they just send the item back to the vendor and deduct it from the next purchase. The vendors only option is to not sell stuff to Costco anymore.
I use to get requests to interview with Amazon monthly until the hardware head got let go....it was somewhat comical....
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To be fair, Amazon didn't create this. Even supermarkets position products at different height to steer their sales, and the majority of customers grab the laundry detergent from the mid-shelf with the most sensational pricing-tag. A specific book is also a far more unique product than i.e. "laundry detergent". To be comparable, you would have to compare laundry detergent to a genre of books, and maybe also the publi…
I wonder how true that is. I guess it’s your first time buying detergent it might work but most people I know have a specific detergent and they buy the same one no matter where on the shelf it moves.
The fact that the middle shelf of a supermarket is usually the first one to be empty is quite compelling evidence.
> I guess it’s your first time buying detergent it might work but most people I know have a specific detergent and they buy the same one no matter where on the shelf it moves.
Just to validate that assumption: Would you say this is the same for toilet paper? Soap? garbage bags? Sponges? Pencils? cooking-oil?
There are lots of commodity items I use where I don't know the brand, I cannot even tell how often I switched the supplier of them in the past year...
Subjectively, most people _I_ know buy out of a pool of detergent-brands, all looking quite similar (and most belonging to the same parent company). If they are bombarded with advertisement inside and outside of the shop, and maybe a stacked palette of a different brand of detergent, many of them will "try" this new product instead and end up expanding their pool of brands they will buy.
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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…
In many places in Europe: Normal price per item big letters, price per Kg small letters. Problem solved
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This a million times. I swear I will never understand why Amazon's supply, organization, and pricing for household goods is such a disaster. Because their experience for mainstream books is mostly perfectly fine -- there's a single listing for each book, and the price doesn't change much, just some discount from list. It works. But for things like paper towels or Tide or whatever, it's utter chaos. Multiple listings…
The crazy thing to me is that you’re confused about this. These companies make huge margin fooling consumers who aren’t paying attention. Nearly all the consumers I know are barely conscious, the first promoted link on Amazon is the one they buy. Losing customers like you who actually inspect the listed price is a pittance to the Amazon machine. How much time have you spent in physical stores observing the physically…
It leaves me wondering if you were able to connect with them on a personal level at all, or if perhaps you were also “barely conscious” during these interactions.
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…
As someone who knows folks that worked on Amazon Alexa (back in its earliest days), this was almost never the focus of Alexa. It might seem cool or trendy to constantly hate on Amazon here on HN, and then somehow tie that to some comment on free market capitalism, Amazon did in fact have very normal ambitions with Alexa, build a smart assistant. Bezos, particularly envisioned building some computer from star-trek as his inspiration.
Alexa in its early days was also quite impressive for what they managed to do. It was an example of early ML scaling. They rented hundreds of houses around Seattle, had voice actors talk in different locations in the houses, collected all that data and trained a speech recognition model that was SOTA at the time. Unfortunately while their voice recognition was great, they didn’t apply this scaling approach to natural language understanding. They instead went the root of trying to manually understanding grammar, and iterating all the thousands of possible sentence reconstructions in a large decision tree to help Alexa answer your queries. This of course was hopeless, but this was also almost 5 years before OpenAI released GPT-3 so you can’t fault them for doing essentially what Siri did.
Now the issue with Alexa is like most issues big organizations face, they are slow moving and cannot pivot quickly. What they need to do, is actually hard and will need to be done by essentially a monarch CEO, he needs to delete all the work the Alexa teams have done over the last 5 years in 1 swoop and replace it with LLM’s. Many folks in Amazon made their career on improving the Alexa stack, they will of course mostly be defensive and argue vehemently against deleting entirety of Alexa tech “LLM’s hallucinate too much, we need a combined approach”, they will plead, but the stack needs to be deleted, the entire organization needs to pivot to LLMs. Apple has managed to take steps towards this, I won’t be surprised if Amazon soon will, or maybe they won’t, depends on their ability to not be disrupted.
If they are guilty of anything, it’s being unable to do good research to discover GPT-3 on their own (though tbf no one except OpenAI did this), and then being unable to ditch all the technical debt they have accumulated over 5+ years and pivot completely into LLM’s.
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I wonder how true that is. I guess it’s your first time buying detergent it might work but most people I know have a specific detergent and they buy the same one no matter where on the shelf it moves.
> I wonder how true that is. The fact that the middle shelf of a supermarket is usually the first one to be empty is quite compelling evidence. > I guess it’s your first time buying detergent it might work but most people I know have a specific detergent and they buy the same one no matter where on the shelf it moves. Just to validate that assumption: Would you say this is the same for toilet paper? Soap? garbage bag…
>Customers actually used Echo mostly for free apps such as setting alarms and checking the weather. “We worried we’ve hired 10,000 people and we’ve built a smart timer,” said a former senior employee. That's actually really funny to read. Just last night I was watching my brother cook and he asked Alexa to set a timer (It's pretty much the only thing he uses it for...) I jokingly said "You know, that's a really expen…
don't get me wrong, it is silly, but also being able to set a timer without touching anything with your gross cooking hands is unironically a wonderful feature.