Alexa is in millions of households and Amazon is losing billions • Hacker News Board

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

#761

Post by marcosdumay » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 3:54 PM UTC

tsimionescu wrote: post #567

dchftcs wrote: post #559

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In some cases the retail store just doesn't list the price and the store owner may just come up with a highly marked-up price when asked. 10x would be very rare though indeed.

What store doesn't list prices? Isn't that illegal in most places? In my country even the tiniest ancient village stores I've been to have prices listed on items (sometimes simple labels attached to the items, such as "10", but still there).

Some stores won't let you near the stuff they sell, you have to talk to somebody. Maybe that's what the GP is talking about.

Anyway, it's expected that you'll ask for the price and may go away after hearing it. So crazy mark-ups are risky business.

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

#762

Post by gregmac » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 3:55 PM UTC

ihkasfjdkabnsk wrote: post #390

asdasdsddd wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've interviewed many people on Alexa before. From what I gather, its just a giant switch statement, and each individual "path" takes a bunch of effort to support and there are thousands of paths for music, ordering, commands, etc. It's peak AI == if statement architecture.

Throwaway, used to work at the NLU unit of Alexa about 5 years ago. There is some ML going on but as with all ML projects I have worked on people want control. This means you add rules for the "important" stuff. You also add test cases to make sure the ML works. But if you already have those test cases, why not just match on them directly? There are also advanced techniques for generating examples (FST for example).…

> You also add test cases to make sure the ML works. But if you already have those test cases, why not just match on them directly?

Kind of says it all.

At the end of the day if you have a complex product but don't have comprehensive test cases, it's just a matter of time until your users notice your product sucks.

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

#763

Post by rqtwteye » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 3:57 PM UTC

regularfry wrote: post #604

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…

It's malicious compliance. They probably wouldn't show anything other than the pack price if they had a choice, so there's something forcing them to show unit prices. So given that they have to show them anyway, they have an opportunity to inject profitable confusion. Non-metric units are just icing on the cake.

"They probably wouldn't show anything other than the pack price if they had a choice"

The absolute dream would be to price it like health care. You only find out the price months or years after buying the item and multiple phone calls to clear up errors. And for one person it would be 50 cents and for another person 200 dollars.

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

#764

Post by rqtwteye » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 4:00 PM UTC

zyberzero wrote: post #264

mschuster91 wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vote for politicians that campaign on consumer protection legislation. Here in Europe, it's been mandatory to show a price related to a reasonable common base point (e.g. liter, kilogram, piece, usage-unit for laundry detergent) adjacent to the actual product's price for many years now. You can go and use 1/10/100 grams/milliliters though for small scale packages where that is reasonably common (e.g. spices), and tha…

Fun fact: my local store uses different units for the comparisons. Not that you can choose from that many different units, but for example brand A corn flakes comparison price is price/serving while brand B corn flakes is compared by price/kg. Sure, the serving is based on weight but I still need to do some math to figure out which one is cheaper :) This is one of the biggest food chains in Sweden.

"Serving" is the biggest vector for manipulation ever. They can make up whatever they want. I still remember looking at a small bag of potato chips that had 3 servings.

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

#765

Post by tempodox » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 4:05 PM UTC

LordKeren wrote: post #329

mvanbaak wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

hype, marketing, investors spent millions so lets make it happen. It feels a lot like the whole crypto thing

This is by design— the rhetoric around crypto was specifically tailored to emulate all the new-exciting-tech talking points in an attempt to get new people to buy in to the market and prop up the next rug pull. Every new culturally significant tech is going to sound like crypto from now on. And ultimately I think it is too easy to cynically look at all tech hype through the lens of crypto. I think it is pretty fair t…

> more real use cases than crypto ever did.

Indeed, with crypto the suckers needed to do the hallucinating themselves. LLMs automate that and do it for you.

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

#766

Post by marcosdumay » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 4:05 PM UTC

creato wrote: post #507

linsomniac wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here in the US with Amazon it will usually give you a price per quantity, though that can vary between "each", "oz", etc... The real issue being complained about is that there may be 10 listings in Amazon for "Tide Pods", so if you say to Alexa "Order Tide Pods" you aren't sure what you'll get, what quantity, or what price. Amazon REALLY needs to do some product normalization. It is true that if you go into a grocery…

> They try this with things like screws, “Try” being the key word, because it is useless. It maybe could work if vendors populated the metadata correctly, but they don’t, and amazon put far too many similar categories into it, so you can’t actually filter on most of the parameters without filtering out most of the options you wanted to see, or selecting dozens of options.

The concept of a marketplace just isn't compatible with the concept of Alexa.

If you do both, at least one will fail. Every time.

You can probably mangle one of those concepts enough for them to become compatible. But you'll end up with something very different.

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

#767

Post by tharkun__ » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 4:06 PM UTC

hahamaster wrote: post #710

netsharc wrote: post #659

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I prefer prices per 100g because I mostly buy food that's under one kilo. I'm sure they show prices per 100g just to make them look cheaper but in my case I actually prefer it this way.

It doesn't even matter what unit is chosen as long as it is kept the same across.

Comparing Smarties to M&Ms is super easy if both have to use price per pound, price per oz, price per g or price per kg. Who cares if the price per kg would be $0.031.as long as I can see it's $0.028 for the other for the same unit without doing math.

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

#768

Post by marcosdumay » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 4:07 PM UTC

bombcar wrote: post #691

HWR_14 wrote: post #524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except then you have to wonder if the price changed. Or if something else about the listing changed.

It seems the simplest form of code for software that says the last time you ordered tide pods it was $10 for 1 pound now it is $10 for 1/10 of a pound. Do you want to continue?

The kind of organization that is politically capable of creating something like this could successfully run Alexa the way Amazon is trying to run it too. Or in a lot of different ways.

But Amazon can't.

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

#769

Post by ghaff » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 4:09 PM UTC

bombcar wrote: post #694

csunbird wrote: post #681

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But, the usual case is that the major companies in the market collude to strip away these kind of offerings, as "free unconditional returns" hurts bottom line of all companies in the market. This is the real power of capitalism. Think about it, for example the TV sector: All companies colluded to reduce the selection of TVs to "Smart" TVs only. I can't just go and buy from a competitor, because it simply does not exi…

The problem here is just the group that wants them is minuscule. Nobody wants to admit it, but the smart TVs are what people want. You can buy dumb TVs that have no smart features or smart TVs with the smart feature can be completely ignored. Vizio is good for this, but nobody wants to pay for those except commercial units.

TV companies do try adding features that go beyond dumb display panels. Ask them how that worked for 3D, which people didn't adopt. Yes most TVs are "smart" but I'm pretty sure most people won't pay much of a premium and many use something like an Apple TV instead anyway.

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

#770

Post by vkou » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 4:09 PM UTC

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.

Where I live, labels get these price per amount labels...

But they don't keep the denominator consistent, even across the same category of product.

So I get to compare a price/oz, versus a price/lb versus a price/serving and all the while, I contemplate why nobody's interested in burning the whole store down.