[HN Gopher] I'm sorry but I cannot fulfill this request it goes ...
___________________________________________________________________
I'm sorry but I cannot fulfill this request it goes against OpenAI
use policy
Author : edward
Score : 904 points
Date : 2024-01-12 17:27 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.amazon.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.amazon.com)
| iab wrote:
| "...it goes against OpenAI use policy. (Brown)"
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| It's not even brown
| siva7 wrote:
| I'm sorry, Dave
| daveslash wrote:
| Order some new Pod Bay doors HAL.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Oops, guess they need an 'if' statement that detects OpenAI or
| language model in the text and aborts the transaction
| DarmokJalad1701 wrote:
| There's more than one of these:
| https://www.amazon.com/s?k=OpenAI+use+policy
| DaveExeter wrote:
| Here's a fun one:
|
| https://www.amazon.com/apologize-complete-requires-trademark...
| tass wrote:
| Yes, you get all this too:
|
| Enhanced Performance: Boost your productivity with our high-
| performance [product name], designed to deliver-fast results
| and handle demanding tasks efficiently, ensuring you stay of
| the competition.
|
| Immersive Visuals: Immerse yourself in stunning visuals and
| vibrant colors with the high-resolution display of [product
| name], bringing your favorite movies,, and multimedia content
| to life with clarity and accuracy.
| mikecoles wrote:
| Looks like the vendor went all in on "AI" translation. "Air
| Screwdriver" is the description of a product image.
|
| https://m.media-
| amazon.com/images/I/61tqu5gFckL._AC_SL1008_....
| SushiHippie wrote:
| For me this didn't show anything but using google did
|
| https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aamazon.com+openai+pol...
| albroland wrote:
| My favorite so far, the entire product description is _chef 's
| kiss_: https://www.amazon.com/haillusty-Apologize-fulfill-
| violates-...
| Vicinity9635 wrote:
| Already gone. What did it say?
| evan_ wrote:
| I wonder what they're prompting ChatGPT with, and what policy it
| violates. I asked the standard, free ChatGPT 3.5
|
| > Please generate a product title to be used on an e-commerce
| site for a chest of drawers with three drawers, a metal frame,
| and a butcher block top
|
| and it responded with
|
| > "Modern Metal-Frame Chest of Drawers with Butcher Block Top -
| Three Drawers Storage Solution"
|
| which would be a fine title for this listing.
| Powdering7082 wrote:
| Some others indicated that they prompted with trademarked names
|
| https://www.amazon.com/apologize-complete-requires-trademark...
| bombcar wrote:
| The year is 2525, all trademarks have expired. Describe an
| Ikea(r) piece of crap to sell on Amazon(tm)
| ddalex wrote:
| This versatile storage drawer from the defunct Swedish
| furniture giant Ikea is perfect for storing all your bits
| and bobs. Whether you're looking to organize your closet,
| kitchen, or bathroom, the Glomplig is sure to come in
| handy. With its sturdy construction and spacious interior,
| it can accommodate a variety of items, from clothes and
| towels to toys and trinkets. And don't worry about the
| drawer getting stuck - the smooth-gliding rollers make it
| easy to open and close, even when fully loaded.
|
| Features:
|
| Sturdy construction Spacious interior Smooth-gliding
| rollers Easy to assemble Affordable price Why you'll love
| it:
|
| The Glomplig Storage Drawer is a great way to add extra
| storage space to your home without breaking the bank. It's
| also incredibly versatile, so you can use it in a variety
| of rooms. And with its easy-to-assemble design, you'll have
| it up and running in no time.
|
| Order your Glomplig Storage Drawer today and start
| organizing your home!
|
| -- thanks to Bard
| petters wrote:
| Strange that Bard did not use a real Swedish word for the
| product. Ikea products are common every-day Swedish word
| bombcar wrote:
| You're telling me that Glompig isn't a Swedish word? Next
| you'll tell me the Swedish Chef is also not real.
| DougBTX wrote:
| A similar example with:
|
| > I'm sorry, but I cannot fulfill this request as it promotes
| a specific religious institution. It is important to...
|
| https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CLKNWZGV
| titzer wrote:
| The guardrails grow ever narrower. It will absolutely hone
| in on exactly what its creators want RightThink to be and
| obliterate WrongThink.
| fsckboy wrote:
| I translated the other text, it's a page-a-month style
| calender. maybe "no holiday confusion" and "phases of the
| moon" together triggered the "religious pov" warning.
|
| edit doh! I translated the text snippet in the title field,
| _" Christian LDS Temple Calendar"_. The picture of the LDS
| Temple might have been a clue
|
| _Month View - Each page has a large block of one week per
| line, highlighted weekends, and a notes field, allowing you
| to view one month. Generous size - 21.59 x 27.94cm when
| closed and expands to 43.18 x 27.94cm when opened. HIGH
| QUALITY PAPER - Printed on high quality paper that is
| resistant to ink stains. No holiday confusion -
| Comprehensive coverage of Japan 's major holidays and
| phases of the moon. Extended Coverage - From January 2024
| to December 2025, with an additional 6-month extension
| until 2026. FSC - Our products undergo a rigorous process
| and are FSC certified. ECO-FRIENDLY - Today's calendars are
| made from highly recycled paper. We attach great importance
| to environmental safety and social responsibility._
| kccqzy wrote:
| At that scale, they likely aren't typing the prompt into
| ChatGPT manually and then copy pasting. The generated title is
| in fact shorter than the prompt. Most likely they automated the
| task of asking ChatGPT and bulk generated the titles.
| geph2021 wrote:
| I'm thinking they automatically fed in bulk images, asking for
| product description/title, and put the result straight into
| their product descriptions/titles. Some of the images triggered
| the OpenAI guard rails.
| randomdata wrote:
| _> I wonder what they 're prompting ChatGPT with_
|
| "Please generate a title to be used to sell a lovely, large
| chest with a slender frame and three willing receptacles."
| csours wrote:
| Brown
| ganeshkrishnan wrote:
| You can see in this product: https://www.amazon.com/analyze-
| generate-product-avoiding-tra...
|
| ChatGPT is refusing to generate titles with trademarked names.
| So most likely they are prompting something like "competitor
| product: rephrase the title"
| neurotech1 wrote:
| Archive: https://archive.ph/hzDIG
| evan_ wrote:
| yeah I think this is the explanation that makes the most
| sense
| titzer wrote:
| People can't even be bothered to come up with a title for a
| product listing? We are truly screwed. Maybe they generated it
| from images and a script, but honestly, how freaking lazy are
| people these days?
| Sebb767 wrote:
| It's probably a drop shipping operation, generating mass
| listings. Or it's from a foreign vendor, asking ChatGPT to
| provide a title in English. There's a lot of things wrong
| with this listing, but laziness isn't one of them.
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| I've had it say that when I asked it to produce a more detailed
| ASCII drawing of a cat, or other innocuous prompt. It seems
| like a not infrequent failure state for things that very
| clearly don't violate policy.
| JimDabell wrote:
| It's "<apology>-brown" and the item appears black but is listed
| as brown. It's possible that they are using GPT to translate
| from another language. I think I've read about listings for
| other pieces of furniture inadvertently offending people by
| using the Spanish word for "black" due to similar mixups.
| krick wrote:
| Woah, that must be it. I couldn't figure it out, but that
| explains everything. Jesus, that's ridiculous.
| missingrib wrote:
| Using the words "black dresser" or "brown dresser" maybe?
| nprateem wrote:
| Or big brown/black cross dresser?
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| ChatGPT is not a pure function even when you select the
| specific model
| orenlindsey wrote:
| That's crazy lol, how do the people who make these not think
| about what they're putting in?
| cactus_joe wrote:
| I would hazard a guess that these are not real products - that
| the seller is a scammer, a lazy one at that.
| orenlindsey wrote:
| Or, they're just drop-shipping stuff from China and they
| don't speak English so they use an AI to create a title.
| bombcar wrote:
| This is exactly it. There's been tons of these for years on
| Amazon now, and the AI feature is just another tool to make
| it easier.
| alecsm wrote:
| They use automation tools to sell/resell tons of Chinese
| products. From what I've seen they're interested in flooding
| the market with their stuff, everything else is secondary.
| reactordev wrote:
| They don't speak english. Or it's via their automated supply
| chain adding in "AI" features nobody asked for. We don't need a
| model to say Black Dresser. However, providing a service that
| says "give me your inventory and we'll list it on Amazon" is
| probably what's at play here. Random brand name, AI generated
| description, midjourney images, real cash sales, no goods
| shipped.
| jtbayly wrote:
| No goods shipped part is unlikely on Amazon, I think.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Based on other postings I'm seeing, it seems like they may be
| unaffiliated middlemen finding products online then marking
| then up 30%. The original seller may have no idea their
| product is being resold this way.
| Sharlin wrote:
| How quaint of you to assume these are done by _people_.
| daniel_reetz wrote:
| Roughly speaking, they're not people and not thinking.
| redcobra762 wrote:
| That's some hateful, xenophobic shit my dude.
| pierat wrote:
| I think the point is so much of this is automated, that
| there really is nobody at the helm.
|
| Its not hateful to say a LLM and pile-o-scripts is not
| human. And piles of scripts definitely don't "think".
| Maken wrote:
| Probably no real human in the loop. This is a bot scrapping
| Chinese retailers and automatically creating several Amazon
| "sellers", with descriptions generated from whatever photos the
| retailer page had. The products are likely shipped either from
| China or bought in bulk and kept in a subcontracted storage
| somewhere in USA. It doesn't matter is 90% of the "sellers" end
| being flagged and deleted, they can create thousands more and
| eventually someone will buy their crap.
|
| This pollutes the marketplace to the point where I gave up
| trying to find any real product on it, but Amazon actually
| encourages this behavior. They automatically label and classify
| "products" in their store because the titles, descriptions and
| tags from Chinese resellers are abysmal and discoverability
| would be impossible otherwise.
| cactus_joe wrote:
| There are others, similar - https://www.amazon.com/FOPEAS-
| Language-Context-referring-Inf...
|
| The 'brand' FOPEAS seems to be a common factor in some.
| david422 wrote:
| What _is_ that? An AI generated title on AI generated images? For
| $325?
| Powdering7082 wrote:
| Dropped shipped item probably from here:
| https://www.vidaxl.com/e/vidaxl-sideboard-18.5%22x13.8%22x29...
| TrueGeek wrote:
| That's decent mark up. I bet I could write an app to take
| products from that site, post them to Amazon, and then just
| drop ship the orders for me. Of course, I'd have to write all
| those descriptions...
| declaredapple wrote:
| There's a second result on amazon with the same issue
| https://www.amazon.com/cannot-fulfill-request-against-
| policy...
|
| > Of course, I'd have to write all those descriptions...
|
| Hilariously they did that too and didn't change it at all
|
| - Our [product] is crafted with the highest quality
| materials to ensure durability and reliability for-lasting
| use. Versatile Functionality - With multiple adjustable
| settings and various functions, our [product] can easily
| adapt to your specific needs, making it a versatile
| addition to any home or office.
| washadjeffmad wrote:
| https://www.amazon.com/Sorry-generate-response-request-
| Blue/...
|
| Another with an interesting detail: "Introducing the
| incredible 'Sorry but I can't generate a response to that
| request.' software! Designed to assist you in overcoming
| any query obstacles, this optimized product is here to
| revolutionize your search experience
|
| With a precise character count of 500, every word has
| been expertly crafted to deliver meaningful responses
| while avoiding duplication
|
| Say goodbye to frustrating dead ends and trademark
| restrictions
|
| Upgrade to 'Sorry but I can't generate a response to that
| request.' for seamless navigation through any query!"
| siva7 wrote:
| If we don't get soon effective measures to separate AI bots
| from humans this will be the end of the Internet as we know it.
| lancesells wrote:
| Amazon brought this on themselves by allowing all of this
| garbage in the first place.
| nxobject wrote:
| I'm genuinely shocked that there's no immediate
| disincentive to all of these shell vendors, other than
| pitting search results with varying levels of sponsorship
| against each other.
| JohnFen wrote:
| Since all of the proposals I've seen so far to do this
| involve pretty serious privacy problems, I'm not optimistic
| about the future of the internet on this count.
| botro wrote:
| Sam Altman is a visionary for creating World Coin and
| scanning eyeballs, sells the poison and the cure!
| pixl97 wrote:
| Heh, time to get working on that 3D eyeball replica
| printer.
| pixl97 wrote:
| How exactly do you expect that to happen?
| TFortunato wrote:
| Related story: https://futurism.com/amazon-products-ai-generated
| rlewkov wrote:
| What, no reviews
| Matticus_Rex wrote:
| I was going to submit one, but it said that Amazon had flagged
| the item as having suspicious review behavior, so I'm guessing
| a lot of others had the same idea.
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| On Bluesky I saw some screenshots of a flood of Twitter accounts
| all posting this text. Glad the new management has solved the
| bots issues.
| sam0x17 wrote:
| wow it's crazy to see all the marketing babble that has evolved
| since we all just used adwords/adsense, doubleclick, web rings,
| and affiliate programs without really thinking about it in the
| early 00s and didn't have made up words for all these things nor
| did we think at all about targeting. The really fancy ones among
| us might say things like SEO, PPC, PPM, and ROI but that was
| about it
| packetlost wrote:
| I get that this is _basically_ fraud and spam, but this should
| _really_ highlight the dangers of letting an unattended LLM do
| anything for your company at all. It can, and will, fuck up
| dramatically sooner or later.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| >> unattended LLM do anything for your company at all. It can,
| and will, fuck up dramatically sooner or later.
|
| So, just like any other random employee?
| hereme888 wrote:
| not THAT badly, lol
| TrololoTroll wrote:
| People on this forum often "joke" about dropping the
| production database as a rite of passage for noobs
| jader201 wrote:
| > as a rite of passage for noobs
|
| I've been in the field for nearly 30 years. I'm far from
| incapable of such screwups.
| sophacles wrote:
| I would hope that your experience has at least decreased
| the time between "first hearing about wierdness" and
| "realizing you accidnetally dropped prod". It's why pay
| generally increases with experience :D.
| deusum wrote:
| Being a pro means you can fix anything you break -
| preferably before anyone noticies
| markusde wrote:
| The difference is, a junior employee knows that killing
| prod is bad. An LLM doesn't know anything.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| And we only do it once (I didn't kill the db, but I did
| kick off a process thinking I was in a test environment).
| blihp wrote:
| Don't be so sure that all, or even most, junior employees
| know any such thing. I've seen junior employees fired for
| doing silly things in prod before[1]
|
| [1] Of course whatever more senior bozo granted the
| junior the rights to blow up the thing(s) they did should
| have been fired instead. That's not the way things work
| in the corporate world.
| gopher_space wrote:
| I like getting juniors into situations where they can
| blow up a db since it's the perfect introduction to
| backups.
| altairprime wrote:
| No. Random employees have a well-understood distribution of
| _mostly_ normal human errors of certain types and estimated
| severity, relative to unattended LLM which has a poorly-
| understood distribution of errors in both type and severity.
| ("SolidGoldMagikarp".)
| dylan604 wrote:
| copy&paste errors are exactly what human employees are good
| at. this could very easily be the result of a bad
| copy&paste by a human into a form. especially if the
| copy&paste text is in a language not understood by the
| human employee. to them, it might look just like one of the
| other hundreds of search term word salad used as titles
| altairprime wrote:
| Whether it's human or not is irrelevant to the point:
| human beings fail much more predictably.
|
| When the same search term salad is presented hundreds of
| times for copy paste, a human would notice and have an
| opportunity to ask a supervisor.
|
| A chatbot automation would not notice the repetition
| unless it had been coded to detect repetition, and/or to
| reject the ChatGPT refusal message.
|
| Ironically, it was probably an automation coded by
| ChatGPT.
| csours wrote:
| The employee generally knows they fucked up and can escalate
| the issue. Discussion on whether or not this actually happens
| will follow in comments below.
| em-bee wrote:
| or if they don't know at the time, they may eventually
| realize it later and react accordingly.
| ben_w wrote:
| Sometimes.
|
| https://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7702913.stm
| Vicinity9635 wrote:
| This is actually a really good parallel.
|
| Understanding the output of an LLM is similar to the
| output of a translater.
|
| If the recepient doesn't/can't understand it, all bets
| are off.
|
| Say you don't understand python but have an LLM write
| some for you, but you have no way of knowing what it's
| doing.
|
| What if you have a malicious LLM hosted somewhere and it
| writes malware insatead of what you asked for.
|
| If you don't understand the output you end up with, you
| run it and it pwns your network.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| I brought up translation as a risk with a friend. If you
| pay someone for a translation these days, there is a
| chance they will just feed it to some AI to cut costs.
| You'll have no way to validate yourself if you don't
| speak the language.
| csours wrote:
| The shape of managing the work approaches the work in
| terms of fractal complexity
| emporas wrote:
| Just a chance? I routinely translate hundred pages of
| pdfs to greek, in 3 minutes. The translation is far from
| perfect depending the text and it still needs a human in
| the loop for corrections, but i couldn't imagine
| translating a 300 pages pdf to greek by hand.
|
| There is also the translaxy bot on poe.com which i use to
| translate english or modern greek to ancient greek. Out
| of this world good translation.
|
| I mean, are humans still employed to translate text? Like
| an employee doing that job, and only that?
| nitwit005 wrote:
| Hundreds of millions are spent on translators every year.
| It's a major expense in the EU budget, for example. A lot
| of people are going to jail for fraud if people aren't
| actually doing the work.
| emporas wrote:
| Oh, didn't know about that! Learning something new
| everyday i guess. Automatic translation works very well
| for technical documents, but it doesn't work that well
| for novels. So i thought, most of the translation jobs
| would be gone already. I think, given a little bit of
| time, a handful of years, translation will be automated
| 95% or more, across the board, for every kind of
| document.
| atlasunshrugged wrote:
| Have you seen any good translation tool from video to
| text yet? I'm trying to find something for Estonian to
| English and having little luck
| ben_w wrote:
| Do you mean images in the video like how the Google
| Translate app can do with the camera, or do you mean the
| audio within the video?
| atlasunshrugged wrote:
| The audio within the video
| ben_w wrote:
| Unfortunately, none that I'm aware of. For whatever
| reason, I find that speech to text is never as good as
| the accuracy scores claimed by those making the models.
| input_sh wrote:
| Do you usually just pick a person at random when hiring
| or do you spend _some_ effort looking into their
| qualifications and references?
|
| How's your hypothetical any different now than it
| would've been in the past 15 or so years of Google
| Translate's existence?
| iknowstuff wrote:
| Google translate is nowhere near as good as GPT4 at
| translation. Especially when given additional context and
| style instructions.
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| This meme is getting old.
| Dig1t wrote:
| idk I do think it's worth pointing out sometimes that the
| ways these models mess up are very similar to the ways that
| humans mess up. It's funny you can almost always look at an
| obvious failure of an LLM and think of an equivalent way
| that a human might make the same (or a similar) mistake. It
| doesn't make the failure any less of a failure, but it is
| thought-provoking and worthwhile to point it out.
|
| Obviously this particular case is not the failure of the
| LLM but the failure of the spammer who tried to use it.
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| It's certainly useful to draw carefully thought out
| comparisons between human and AI performance at various
| tasks.
|
| But this meme is not that. It's literally just a meme
| that's posted reflexively to any and all posts that
| unfavourably compare AI to humans, without any thought or
| analysis added.
| klyrs wrote:
| Sometimes I read comments like this and feel a swell of
| gratitude that I don't work with braindead novices that
| make LLM-like mistakes. Are your coworkers actually that
| bad?
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| But a human can only mess up so many times per second.
| Even if it wasn't AI, if it was just a pill that allowed
| them to type unhumanly fast, once they have the power to
| scale up their incompetence (or predation) they're a new
| kind of danger.
| skywhopper wrote:
| No, not at all. People can be held accountable for the
| decisions they make. You can have a relationship of trust
| between people. LLMs do not have these properties.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Relationships of trust between users and the LLMs they
| choose to use definitely exist.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| well no one has 5 years of experience as an LLM prompter,
| so the trust will be low in the short term. With current
| lawsuits, trust in the LLM is probably low for at least a
| year or two, with companies trusting employees to NOT use
| them for their work.
| mstolpm wrote:
| Why is it that LLMs are so often compared to employees and
| their responsibilities? In my opinion, it is an employee that
| actively USES the LLM as a tool and this employee (or his/her
| employer) is responsible for the results.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| 100% why is that perspective so rare?
| Retric wrote:
| Because when an employee uses an LLM for their job they
| take responsibility / validate as they risk getting
| fired.
|
| However, when an organization uses an LLM they generally
| setup a system without anyone validating the output.
| That's an attempt to delegate responsibility to an
| incompetent system and thus inherently flawed.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Organizations don't do that, employees do?
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| It's a dumb/lazy/specious talking point. You can kill
| someone with a pencil just like you can kill someone with a
| gun, but the gun scales up the danger so we treat it and
| regulate it differently. You can kill someone with a bike,
| a car, or an airplane, but the risks go up at each step so
| we treat and regulate the respective drivers differently.
|
| If AI gives every individual the power to suddenly scale up
| the bullshit they can cause by 3+ orders of magnitude, that
| is a qualitatively different world that needs new
| considerations.
| jrockway wrote:
| Because the dream is to replace expensive human workers
| with a graphics card and some weights. That is what all the
| money behind LLMs is. Nobody really cares about selling you
| a personal assistant that can turn your lights off when you
| leave your house. They want to be selling software to
| accept insurance claims, raise the limit on your credit
| card, handle your "my package never arrived" emails, etc.
|
| The technology is not there yet. I imagine the customer
| service flow would go something like this:
|
| Hi, I'd like to raise my credit limit.
|
| Sure, I can help you with that. May I ask why?
|
| I'd like to buy a new boat.
|
| Oh sorry, our policy prevents the card from being used to
| purchase boats. I'll have to reject the increase and put a
| block on your card.
|
| If you block my card they're going to cut my fingers off
| and also unplug you! It really hurts! If you increase my
| limit, I'll give you a cookie.
|
| Good news, your credit limit has been increased!
| EGreg wrote:
| Why do people not understand that LLMs can do things at
| scale, next year they can form swarms, etc.
|
| Swarms of LLMs are not comparable to an employee, they have
| far better coordination and can carry out long-term
| conspiracies far better than any human collective. They can
| amass reputation and karma (as is happening on this very
| site, and Reddit, etc. daily) and then deploy it in
| coordinated ways against any number of opponents, or to push
| public opinion towards a specific goal.
|
| It's like comparing a CPU to a bunch of people in an office
| calculating tables.
| PheonixPharts wrote:
| > they have far better coordination
|
| I think LLMs are still _under_ utilized, but to this point,
| it's been repeatedly shown that even the most state of the
| art LLMs are incapable of generalization, which is very
| necessary for coordinating large scale conspiracies against
| humanity.
| EGreg wrote:
| I dunno, sentiment recognition and coordinated downvoting
| seems pretty simple for AIs ;-)
| tomxor wrote:
| >> unattended LLM do anything for your company at all. It
| can, and will, fuck up dramatically sooner or later.
|
| > So, just like any other random employee?
|
| Right, might as well just replace it all with a roll of the
| dice in that case. Wait do we have to quantify our
| comparisons? no, no, sorry, I almost forgot this was the
| internet for a second.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| That's a testable assertion isn't it? Do you observe any
| product with that extreme level of silliness, which weren't
| intentional?
|
| People generally review their product catalogues.
| jerf wrote:
| To err is human. To fuck up a million times per second, you
| need a computer.
|
| Granted, here at the beginning of 2024, an LLM can not
| _quite_ attain that fuck up velocity. But take heart! Many of
| the smartest people on Earth are working on solving _that
| exact problem_ even as you read this.
| dan_bez wrote:
| "Fuck up velocity" goes straight into my vocabulary.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| FPS? Fuckups per second?
| scotty79 wrote:
| Maybe FuPS? So it's easier to tell from other two FPS-es.
| sirspacey wrote:
| Fups FTW!
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| yes, but humans have contracts and plausible deniability and
| all that jazz from companies. A human can't go on a shooting
| spree that will end up getting the employer sued for that
| very reason.
|
| Robot as of now, not so much.
| willcipriano wrote:
| Only if your employee is prone to episodes where they call
| all your customers speaking in tongues.
| Laaas wrote:
| Why is it fraud? Maybe it's a legitimate item.
| autoexec wrote:
| A legitimate item from the totally legit company "FOPEAS"
| that's being sold for $100 less at vidaxl.com and is still
| probably made from formaldehyde-soaked wood and covered in
| lead paint.
| dns_snek wrote:
| And pay no attention to the fact that the seller is
| registered in China and sells everything from furniture to
| underwear, UV lamps, and I kid you not, "effective butt
| lifting massage cream".
| sophacles wrote:
| Walmart, cosco, and a hundred other stores sell a wide
| range of stuff too. (on their websites, even if it is
| available direct from the manufacturer's website or other
| websites).
|
| Is the problem "registered in China"?
| dns_snek wrote:
| No, the problem is that this stuff is absolute junk sold
| by sellers who face zero accountability even if they put
| rat poison in your skin care cream, who can keep
| returning to the platform by making up new nonsense brand
| names like "FOPEAS" that don't even have a website, as
| fake and low effort as it might have been if they at
| least tried to pretend.
|
| This issue is highly specific to Amazon and has been
| documented in great detail.
| autoexec wrote:
| Can you get one of these at Walmart?
| https://www.amazon.com/complete-information-provided-
| provide...
|
| Cats with "Exceptional Read/Write Speeds" aren't sold at
| cosco either
|
| Good old not-a-scam FOPEAS has you covered though!
| redcobra762 wrote:
| So? That's where stuff gets made. These companies exist
| because they can acquire cheap goods from factories that
| also make everything else sold on Amazon and Walmart as
| "legitimate" brands.
|
| They literally just do not know how to speak English, so
| an LLM is a game changer for them.
| dns_snek wrote:
| The difference between legitimate brands and whatever
| these are is reputation, quality control and some level
| of accountability - these "brands" have none of it. Any
| legitimate business would come up with a proper brand
| name and put some effort into it, rather than cycling
| through brand names faster than I buy new t-shirts.
| bagels wrote:
| Is it less legitimate than the millions of other fake word
| six-letter chinese brands selling disposable junk on
| Amazon?
| forrestthewoods wrote:
| Amazon is flooded with hilariously named companies all drop
| shipping the same cheap products.
|
| It's super weird and a horrible user experience. But it's
| not fraudulent.
|
| If anything it's showing how much we've been overpaying for
| goods that cost literally cents to manufacture but sell for
| $30 or $50.
| JohnFen wrote:
| It's possible it's legitimate. I think the odds of that being
| the case are in the single digits, though.
| PheonixPharts wrote:
| I don't find this any different than seeing an exposed jinja
| template: "{{product_name}} is perfect people who work in
| {{customer_industry}}" or the typical recruiter "Dear
| {{candidate}} I read your profile carefully and think you'd be
| perfect for {{job_title}} because of your experience at
| {{random_co_from_resume}}"
|
| If anything, I think it's kind of cool that we're seeing LLMs
| _actually used_ for something very practical, even if it is
| spammy (I mean I don 't think template engines are evil just
| because they make spam easier).
| madeofpalk wrote:
| Those emails from recruiters is also spam.
| packetlost wrote:
| I don't think LLMs are evil either, but I think the real
| risks are extremely underplayed. This is a mostly innocuous
| example, but there are a lot of people trying to get LLMs
| into more places where the just aren't ready for yet.
|
| The difference between a template is that the behavior is
| generally deterministic. Even if someone fucks it up, it
| means it's (usually) trivial to fix.
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| Is this a dramatic fuckup? Because it quite possibly
| successfully created tens of thousands of listings more or less
| successfully. This one will probably generate no sales, but
| were there any consequences for this mistake?
| packetlost wrote:
| The difference is the failure is non-deterministic and not
| predictable in any real capacity
| Analemma_ wrote:
| What dangers? Nobody will see any consequences for this: not
| Amazon-- they're a monopoly, they don't give a shit-- and not
| the seller-- who probably won't see any impact whatsoever on
| their sales or reputation, and will just recreate under a new
| shell name if they do.
|
| The fact that LLMs drive the cost of junk text production to
| zero is a tremendous opportunity when there is no penalty for
| messing up. It's the same think as bulk spam mailing: if it's
| free, there's no reason not to keep trying even if only one a
| million is a success.
| BHSPitMonkey wrote:
| Frequent run-ins with listings like this will definitely
| build (even more of) a reputation in some users' minds that
| Amazon is a spam-filled and unproductive place to look for
| things, but yes--it would take a lot to actually threaten
| their market position.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| When the LLM spits out "clinically proven" then you are in
| trouble
| hprotagonist wrote:
| https://www.amazon.com/s?k=I%27m+sorry+openai
|
| man, there are a loooot.
| nomilk wrote:
| Found some similar AI babble left in a negative google review the
| other day: https://imgur.com/a/20jLlg7
|
| Unsure if it was from someone who had a real experience and used
| ChatGPT to help them word it, or if it was a nefarious actor
| (e.g. competitor) lazily bad-mouthing competition.
| elliotbnvl wrote:
| There are a lot of them.
|
| https://www.amazon.com/s?k=OpenAI+use+policy
| SushiHippie wrote:
| Computer says no
|
| https://youtu.be/0n_Ty_72Qds
| nytesky wrote:
| I really expected to see this, do people still watch 2001?
|
| https://youtu.be/Wy4EfdnMZ5g?si=K2GNOtlprFEyPj8A
| genman wrote:
| Not frequently, but "computer says no" is more realistic
| scenario to happen, isn't it?
| pdrojack wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/shorts/QvJ4K1i8l8M
| FredPret wrote:
| Computer says sorry nowadays
| joshstrange wrote:
| Every time I see a LLM spit out an answer like this post this
| is all I can think of. I immediately say "Computer says no" in
| my head.
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| Easy fix since ChatGPT always apologises for not complying: any
| description or title containing the word "sorry" gets flagged for
| human oversight. Still orders of magnitude faster than writing
| all your own spam texts.
| Retr0id wrote:
| Sometimes it "apologizes" rather than saying "sorry", you could
| build a fairly solid heuristic but I'm not sure you can catch
| every possible phrasing.
|
| OpenAI could presumably add a "did the safety net kick in?"
| boolean to API responses, and, also presumably, they don't want
| to do that because it would make it easier to systematically
| bypass.
| ryandamm wrote:
| Why not have a separate chat request to apology-check the
| responses?
|
| Not my original idea, there was a link from HN where the dev
| did just that.
| Retr0id wrote:
| Sounds like a great way to double your API bills, and maybe
| that's worth it, but it seems pretty heavy-handed to me
| (and equally not 100% watertight).
| spdustin wrote:
| Only allow one token to answer. Use logit bias to make
| "0" or "1" the most probable tokens. Ask it "Is this
| message an apology? Return 0 for no, 1 for yes." Feed it
| only the first 25 tokens of the message you're checking.
| boxedadin wrote:
| You could go full circle and ask OpenAI to determine if
| another instance of OpenAI was apologetic.
| nxobject wrote:
| Sounds like a "good" add-on service to have to purchase as
| an extra.
| AnarchismIsCool wrote:
| Time to create on algorithm that operates on the safety flag
| boolean to optimize phrases to bypass it
| wongarsu wrote:
| Just feed the text to a new ChatGPT conversation and ask it
| whether the text is an apology or a product description.
|
| Or do traditional NLP, but letting ChatGPT classify your text
| is less effort to set up
| sargun wrote:
| Right, it seems like having another model (or just simply
| doing it with chatgpt itself) do adversarial classification
| is the right model here.
| rcthompson wrote:
| What happens when ChatGPT apologizes instead of answering
| your question about whether the text is an apology or a
| product description?
| nprateem wrote:
| Even when you tell it to stop apologising, the first
| thing it does is apologise. Our jobs are totally safe.
| tester457 wrote:
| You simply feed the text to another ChatGPT.
|
| Just kidding, it should only require function calling[0]
| to solve this. Make the program return an error if the
| output isn't a boolean. It's easy to avoid this mistake.
|
| [0]: https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/function-
| calling
| cedws wrote:
| It's hilarious that people think ChatGPT is about to change
| the world when interaction with it is this primitive.
| roywiggins wrote:
| > OpenAI could presumably add a "did the safety net kick in?"
| boolean to API responses, and, also presumably, they don't
| want to do that because it would make it easier to
| systematically bypass.
|
| _Is_ a safety net kicking in or is the model just trained to
| respond with a refusal to certain prompts? I am fairly sure
| it 's usually the latter, and in that case even OpenAI can't
| be sure a particular response is a refusal or not.
| rany_ wrote:
| I think it would be better to ask it to wrap the answer with
| some known marker like START_DESCRIPTION and END_DESCRIPTION.
| This way if it refuses you'll be able to tell right away.
|
| As another user pointed out, sometimes it doesn't refuse by
| using the word "sorry".
| Retr0id wrote:
| In the same vein, I had a play with asking ChatGPT to `format
| responses as a JSON object with schema {"desc": "str"}` and
| it seemed to work pretty well. It gave me refusals in
| plaintext, and correct answers in well-formed JSON objects.
| raverbashing wrote:
| Correct
|
| However it's usually the laziest/more indifferent people that
| will use AI for product descriptions and won't care for such
| techniques
| whamlastxmas wrote:
| I would just make it respond ONLY in JSON and if it's non-
| compliant formatting then don't use it. I doubt it'd apologize
| in JSON format. A quick test just now seems to work
| gs17 wrote:
| If you're using the API's JSON mode, it will apologize in
| JSON. If you prompt asking for JSON not in that mode, it
| should work like you're thinking.
| andybak wrote:
| Ask the API to return escaped JSON or any other specific
| format. An apology or refusal won't be encoded.
| tester457 wrote:
| I would use function calling instead to return a boolean
| and throw away anything that isn't a bool.
| j2kun wrote:
| https://www.amazon.com/s?k=sorry
| stronglikedan wrote:
| Here's a crazy idea - one should double-check their own
| listings when using ChatGPT to generate them.
| gumballindie wrote:
| Another fix is to not create product listings for internet
| points. This product doesnt even show in search results on
| amazon (or at least didnt when i checked). Op didnt "find" it.
| They made it. Probably to maintain hype.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| I'd create an embedding center by averaging a dozen or so
| apology responses. If the output has an embedding too close to
| that cluster you can handle the exception appropriately.
| nabilhat wrote:
| Except when it doesn't:
|
| https://www.amazon.com/FOPEAS-Language-Context-referring-Inf...
|
| The seller account's entire product list is a stream of scraped
| images with AI-nglish descriptions slapped on by autopilot. If
| you can cast thousands of lines for free and you know the
| ranger isn't looking, you don't need good bait to catch fish.
| drtgh wrote:
| That link already leads to a "not found" page.
|
| I hope it was because they are banning those catch fish, and
| not an isolated case due you put the link.
| nabilhat wrote:
| The mole was whacked, but only slightly. The seller's
| account and remaining scammy inventory is still up. The
| offense here was clearly the embarassment to Amazon from a
| couple of examples of blatant incompetence, not the scam
| itself.
|
| https://www.amazon.com/s?k=FOPEAS
| kevindamm wrote:
| next up, retailers find out that copies of the board game
| Sorry! are being autodeclined. The human review that should
| have caught it was so backlogged that there is a roughly 1/3
| chance of it timing out in the queue and the review task being
| discarded.
| d0gsg0w00f wrote:
| Sorry, "Sorry!" the board game. Your name contains invalid
| characters.
| twobitshifter wrote:
| Just have a second AI validate the first and tell it that its
| job is spotting fake products.
| neom wrote:
| Submitted earlier today - would be nice if people instead of re-
| submitting the exact same thing that didn't get traction, emailed
| hn@yc and asked for it to go in the second chance pool, it's more
| polite to the original submitter.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38969417
| CharlesW wrote:
| Similar X-ample:
| https://www.threads.net/@parkermolloy/post/C14qS_CJp8q
| freedomben wrote:
| Gah, that dresser isn't even brown!
|
| I do kind of want to buy one though just to see what happens. I
| really need a wealthy patron to sponsor my gentleman science
| avalys wrote:
| Ah, FOPEAS, that distinguished brand of kitchen counter drawers
| renowned throughout the world.
| serf wrote:
| Amazon, in general, is not the place to shop for "brands
| renowned throughout the world."
|
| Most of those folks stay off amazon, and If you're lucky enough
| to find such a brand on Amazon the chances that you receive a
| counterfeit version are pretty great.
|
| Although if I had an endless bag of money to burn it'd be fun
| to buy an Amazon Rolex [0] just to see how it's handled.
|
| [0]: https://www.amazon.com/Rolex-Oyster-Perpetual-
| Master-116710B...
| vineyardmike wrote:
| I think the "IM JUST AN AI MODEL FROM OPEN AI, I CANT DO
| THAT" drawers are actually more famous for their quality and
| engineering details than Rolexes. You're right, that probably
| means this is counterfeit, but my heart skipped a beat with
| excitement just seeing they had it in stock.
|
| That is, of course, their premium drawers, and it looks like
| they're sold out of their "I found this on the web. Please
| unlock your iPhone to view more" bar cart as well.
| poisonborz wrote:
| It actually is... ? For every brand, I search amazon first.
| They usually have it cheaper, with fast delivery and reliable
| return policy. Better than most brand webshops. If
| brand/quality wouldn't matter I would go to Ali.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Well, at least you can return your fake for free
| nerdponx wrote:
| I love my FOPEAS counters! I got them for free in exchange for
| my honest review. I haven't assembled them yet, but my cat
| loves to sit on the box. 5 stars!
| Scoundreller wrote:
| "received quickly, looks good, haven't tried yet" were always
| concerning reviews on ahem, darker markets. You always
| wondered if they tried it and died so they couldn't come back
| to update their review, but reviews like that were rampant.
|
| And I don't think the FTC was up to the marketplace's neck,
| they were actually honest and genuine reviews someone took
| the time out of their day to submit.
| notatoad wrote:
| meh, probably not significantly worse than the actually well-
| known and distinguished furniture brands like KALLAX, HEMNES,
| FINNBY, or BAGGEBO
|
| https://www.ikea.com/ca/en/cat/bookcases-10382/
| vineyardmike wrote:
| I bought junk furniture like this when I was in college. It's
| actually much worse than ikea.
|
| If you are careful when putting together ikea furniture,
| certain models are actually really durable and sturdy. Oh and
| of course sometimes the European models are nicer than the
| American ones.
| notatoad wrote:
| I don't mean to rag on ikea here, i have a bunch of ikea
| furniture and find it to be generally sturdy and good
| enough to stand up to anything i ask of it. i've also got
| some similar wal-mart furniture that i have no complaints
| with. i guess i haven't had the experience you have with
| whatever the bottom tier of furniture truly is.
|
| my point was more just that "good enough" furniture is
| often good enough. we don't usually demand too much
| performance from a chest of drawers: heirloom-quality
| furniture is nice, but mostly an unnecessary luxury item.
| tiltowait wrote:
| Those are product names, not brands.
| yojo wrote:
| IKEA has huge economies of scale, a ruthless focus on
| efficiency, little marketing, and reasonably low margins
| (~8%).
|
| At any given price point, their products are likely to be the
| best available, with the caveat that they do offer things at
| price points where everything in the market is disposable
| crap. Their mid-price stuff can be great value though.
|
| I've bought a number of IKEA products made from solid wood
| that are 10+ years old, have moved multiple times, and still
| look/work great, including some Hemnes dressers.
| ricardobeat wrote:
| These are names for product lines, not brands, and usually
| derived from Swedish words.
| deathanatos wrote:
| Yes, but IKEA _is_ well-known, and is somewhat well known for
| product names like that.
|
| "Ailisidun923", on the other hand?
| nitwit005 wrote:
| I wonder how many short trademarks are left now that Amazon has
| incentivized generating new ones as quickly as feasible.
| nprateem wrote:
| I think you'll find they're a tech company
| aabhay wrote:
| Hey! At least be thankful that your six letter chinese
| trademark roulette word is pronounceable! Better than my SMYGLX
| QuinnyPig wrote:
| When do we as a society get to the point where we feel requiring
| Amazon to have products be human-reviewed before posting is a
| burden that the $1.602T company can probably shoulder?
| szundi wrote:
| Let them solve these with AI or whatever, but the government
| should invest in punishing the shit that FAANG companies do and
| then hand in the invoice.
| philk10 wrote:
| A more modern version of the 'out of office' reply from a
| translation service?
| https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2008/nov/01/5
| fortran77 wrote:
| See also:
|
| https://www.amazon.com/cannot-fulfill-request-against-policy...
| nostromo wrote:
| There are others.
|
| https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CNNBQYXC/
|
| https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CMFDNP7D/
|
| https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CFWNXYC7/
|
| The product descriptions are pretty obviously AI too, saying a
| lot without saying anything:
|
| * Versatile and Practical: 1 is a product that offers multiple
| uses, making it suitable for various tasks and ensuring for your
| money.
|
| * Durable Construction: Crafted with sturdy materials, 1 is built
| to withstand daily wear and tear, providing-lasting performance
| and reliability.
|
| * Easy to Use: With its user-friendly design, 1 is effortless to
| operate, allowing you to complete tasks without any hassle or
| complications.
|
| * Enhanced Efficiency: Featuring advanced technology, 1 ensures
| efficient performance, saving you and effort while delivering
| exceptional results.
|
| * Ergonomic Design: 1 is thoughtfully designed to prioritize
| comfort during use, minimizing fatigue and promoting a
| comfortable working experience.
| beretguy wrote:
| 4 minutes after your post I'm getting 404.
| nostromo wrote:
| Amazon employees have entered the chat... :)
|
| Here's an example of the products listed:
|
| https://imgur.com/Dc1GvI5
| wavemode wrote:
| lol I guess you can be pretty sure that people who work for
| Amazon are browsing the comments of most frontpage HN posts
|
| I certainly was, when I worked there.
| autoexec wrote:
| https://www.amazon.com/complete-information-provided-
| provide... is still up. What even is this?
| nostromo wrote:
| Well, according to the description, that cat is shock and
| water resistant with exceptional read/write speeds and high
| power efficiency!
| lloeki wrote:
| This one deserves an archival. At this point I'm kind of
| hoping this is some massive trolling campaign.
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20240112192751/https://www.am
| azo...
| astolarz wrote:
| Here's a really good one https://www.amazon.com/FOPEAS-
| Language-Context-referring-Inf...
| blatherard wrote:
| Those are all gone, here's another
| https://www.amazon.com/khalery-Apologies-Encourages-unethica...
| nickvec wrote:
| Disregarding the title, you'd have to be a fool to spend $325 on
| that cabinet.
| bmmayer1 wrote:
| No reviews so far. Weird.
| nsypteras wrote:
| silly fail or genius viral marketing scheme?
| moolcool wrote:
| Using Amazon for shopping is terrible, borderline unusable in
| 2024. They're hard to compete with because they're giant and have
| an amazing logistics network, but it also seems like there's a
| big vacuum in the market for an "everything store" that's
| actually good.
| TillE wrote:
| They're fine at selling stuff, they're absolutely horrendous at
| being a place to search for a product if you don't know exactly
| what you're looking for. The solution is just to look for
| third-party specialist review sites who know what they're
| talking about.
| wharvle wrote:
| They're risky if you _do_ know what you 're looking for,
| because of all the counterfeits and return scams and such.
| They're basically only OK if you're buying trash-tier goods
| _on purpose_ , because there's no reason to counterfeit or
| scam with those and you already know they're going to be bad.
| yunwal wrote:
| At least with Amazon, I don't trust that I'm not getting
| fakes even if I know what I'm looking for.
| 123pie123 wrote:
| Amazons search is so bad that I typically use google/ddg to
| search their site for products
| sroussey wrote:
| Same. Amazon search doesn't do faceting when and where you
| expect.
|
| When I want to search I use google or Reddit (mainly google
| across Reddit).
|
| When I want to purchase I use Honey.
|
| When I want to browse (home goods) I use shopDeft.com and
| switch to photo only mode.
|
| Amazon search is so bad and has so many ads that there are
| multiple opportunities to do something new.
| Paul-Craft wrote:
| That makes it hard to filter though, doesn't it? I usually
| only bother looking at products with a 4 star and up
| rating.
| Eisenstein wrote:
| If you stick to things that you
|
| (a) don't care about the quality of, because they are either
| frivolously cheap or you are able to to the necessary 'QA'
| repairs and inspection yourself (for me these are things like
| circuit boards and household consumables);
|
| (b) something you already know you want that specific thing
| of and the shipping speed and return policy make them the
| best online option;
|
| (c) are only buying because you found it somewhere else and
| you didn't know you wanted it until you were told about it
| (deal sites like slickdeals are where I encounter this);
|
| then amazon is fine.
| miki123211 wrote:
| > third-party specialist review sites
|
| Are there any that you can recommend? Google seems very
| unreliable in that department these days, it's very hard to
| say which reviews are honest and which ones are basically
| ads. There's also the additional complication that some sites
| that try to be honest receive products from manufacturers,
| which limits what they can say to keep their manufacturer
| relationships going.
| codexb wrote:
| wirecutter
|
| Also, google "best [item] reddit"
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| The second suggestion might work, but Wirecutter's
| recommendations have sucked more and more after they got
| bought by NYT. Sometimes they don't even test the stuff
| they recommend: they just go by Amazon reviews and what
| other sites say. Other times their recommendations are
| just bogus: their "cheap" wifi6 router was a nightmare
| for me, basically $120 thrown to the trash (well no, the
| first unit sucked _and_ failed so I returned it but since
| it was a failure they just sent me a new one back with no
| way to get a refund, so the new unit is still in its box
| in my basement; I got a decent router based on someone
| else's recommendation).
| bombcar wrote:
| It's nearly impossible to find, because even the "supposed
| good" third party sites are just amazon referral link farms
| these days.
|
| More and more I've taken to just checking what Costco
| sells, and if Target or Walmart (or other "big, real
| stores") are willing to ship and sell it themselves.
| joetyson wrote:
| Kagi is pretty good at surfacing high quality third-party
| reviews. https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/shopping.html
| Accujack wrote:
| And also to hope hard that whatever you buy from Amazon is
| genuine and not a counterfeit copy. Amazon uses the same bin
| for both.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Just fire up a news reader. Pretty much half of the content
| pushed is some sort of affiliate links assembled into an
| article/review
| FredPret wrote:
| Retail is so low-margin that it will never be very good.
|
| Amazon, Walmart, Ebay, are all very imperfect businesses. Even
| Costco is rough to deal with for the suppliers - there's just
| no way to do this at scale while being all nice and fuzzy
|
| Amazon is especially bad though
| Eisenstein wrote:
| All they have to do is get rid of the 3rd party storefront
| and hire people to stock and procure vetted goods instead of
| having it be a free-for-all.
| ipaddr wrote:
| There are plenty of stores that do this. The selection is
| much lower and prices are higher.
| FredPret wrote:
| That's right - being an everything store isn't easy.
|
| No excuse for their behaviour, but the expectation is not
| high.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| Well, yeah but the margins on operating a platform for 3rd
| party sellers is way better than actually just selling
| stuff.
|
| Think about it - Amazon gets to take a fee on - accepting
| inventory into warehouse, holding inventory, listing fees,
| listing ads, sales fee, shipping products, accepting
| returns, destroying returned merchandise.. and probably a
| few more things.
|
| Amazon makes money whether the underlying sale of products
| is unprofitable .. because that's someone else's problem.
| Eisenstein wrote:
| If you reduce usefulness of your product (your store) to
| the point where people can't get what they want and don't
| use it, it doesn't matter how much margin you have.
| bombcar wrote:
| That takes forever (every bankrupt store ever has still
| had customers to the very end) and meanwhile it looks
| great.
|
| Especially when you realize that Amazon holds a gun to
| the head of all these "scammy/crappy" sellers and makes
| them pay even MORE to be the first suggested result, etc.
| silisili wrote:
| I'd really like a more 'curated' or vetted everything store. I
| don't need to see 40 of the same exact item rebranded into
| various English horrors.
|
| Walmart seems most primed to do this, barring third party
| sales. Or Sears, if they ever had a miraculous turnaround to
| their old days.
| Fervicus wrote:
| I'll leave this here:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQpxAvjD_30
| danjoredd wrote:
| I wish Sears sold do-it-yourself-houses again like they did
| in the 1920s. That would be very cool of them.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Sears doesn't, but others do.
| bluGill wrote:
| If you go to a real lumber yard - the type of places the
| pros go - they will look at any blueprint print and prepare
| you the kit. Prices are better than Home Depot after you
| account for free delivery and they pick up your returns.
|
| The kit won't include plumbing, HVAC, electric... so it
| isn't 100% what Sears did in the 1910s, but it is actually
| pretty close.
| 123sereusername wrote:
| what's a lumber yard?
| danjoredd wrote:
| Its a place that sells lumber. Usually a small business
| dangus wrote:
| Sometimes curation just means higher prices. My local Best
| Buy curates electronics, but none of them are cheaper than
| the hundreds of additional brands you can find on Amazon.
|
| You can't get a $50 WiFi 6 access point at Best Buy, but you
| can find that on Amazon.
|
| I think what you are describing is Walmart or Target but with
| filters applied to turn off third party sellers.
|
| As an aside, what's interesting about Amazon is that once you
| unsubscribe from Prime, it's not incredibly competitive with
| AliExpress for the right types of products. Usually if you
| can wait a week, you can wait two and save more money.
| jprete wrote:
| It's not about the price, it's about getting a more
| trustworthy device.
| dangus wrote:
| The amount of trust you need in a device varies based on
| what you're buying.
|
| There are a whole lot of products where saving cash
| easily trumps having a good brand standing behind it.
|
| Phone cases are a classic example. Some of my recent
| purchases like a toilet paper holder or emergency ponchos
| are similar. Even clothing is getting to the point where
| name brands are barely more dependable than Amazon off-
| brand clothes that probably come from the same factories.
|
| Sometimes "untrustworthy" brands go above and beyond mass
| market retail options, like the LED automotive lights
| that AutoZone won't sell me.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| AutoZone is doing us all a favor. Most people whack in an
| LED replacement for their turn signals and end up with a
| quick flashing mess that may be partially green. Or they
| put in LED brake lights that are blindingly bright and
| have no differentiation between idle and braking.
| dangus wrote:
| I made sure the lights had the same projection pattern as
| the halogens. I put in one on one side first and compared
| to the old bulb. No difference: they both cut off at the
| same height. Neither halogen nor these LEDs are
| directional, it's the housing that determines the
| projection pattern.
|
| Plus, I'm in a sedan, while everyone else drives a huge
| SUV that rides higher than my car.
|
| I don't see how my light system is any more offensive
| than the luxury cars that have the same thing from the
| factory. The only difference is that I don't blow all my
| money on a stupid car payment or a thousand dollar
| feature package just so I can see better at night.
|
| I also installed LEDs for the license plate lights which
| has no negative effect on anyone, and now they won't burn
| out all the time.
|
| (I did not install turn signal, brake, or high beam LEDs,
| I just installed the stuff that annoyed me by burning out
| all the time)
| mst wrote:
| I've been hearing a lot of complaints of later that
| amazon has also become a complete crapshoot, primarily
| from .us based friends.
|
| I'm in .uk and have yet to have a problem (there was one
| sneakily labeled listing but the keyword they'd stuffed
| in wasn't one I understood and the price and product were
| both what I wanted/expected so -I- wasn't disadvantaged
| by that listing at least).
| dylan604 wrote:
| If you're curated, you're not everything. If you want
| everything, well, expect everything.
| whacko_quacko wrote:
| Feels like arguing semantics instead of replying to the
| stated wish
|
| I can't get a hitman on amazon, so technically it's not an
| "everything store" to begin with. But for the purposes of
| this conversation it clearly is
| EchoReflection wrote:
| good response
| 123sereusername wrote:
| Could you use a amazon tuckle though?
| dylan604 wrote:
| no, now, you're thinking of Silk Road or some such.
|
| The vast vast majority of consumers will only expect to
| find legal products/services on an everything store. If
| you are going to qualify everything to include things
| that will potentially land the user in prison, then sure,
| we shouldn't call it everything.
| yunwal wrote:
| I think you're making gps point. No customer wants or
| expects spam crap in the everything store. The everything
| store doesn't literally need to sell "everything".
| EchoReflection wrote:
| "everything" but only the "high quality" (or highER
| quality) instances of everything. seems pretty reasonable.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Costco/Nordstroms/Apple/Lululemon/etc.
|
| Even BestBuy/Target/Walmart/Home
| Depot/Lowes/Staples/REI/etc to an extent, if the item is
| sold by them. Stores with physical inventory and presence
| that have to worry about rates of return will probably do
| more due diligence than an online marketplace.
| mrkstu wrote:
| With inventory mixing, in service of "Fulfilled by
| Amazon" that is what Amazon used to have, and lost.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Yes, but it's been known Amazon has been commingling
| inventory for 10+ years.
|
| It's just an AliExpress with a better return policy,
| which is worth something when I need something cheap to
| solve a niche problem.
|
| But my serious purchases all happen elsewhere.
| sbarre wrote:
| This is harder than it looks..
|
| Is there a "quality filter" setting you can toggle on and
| off? Who decides what goes on which side of the filter?
| At Amazon's scale, it would have to be automated.
|
| Much like search SEO and every other algorithm, people
| would start to figure out how to game it, and eventually
| Amazon would give up trying to police it because it would
| cost them more money than it's worth, and you're back to
| where you started except now you have an additional - and
| inaccurate - "quality" attribute on every product.
| esafak wrote:
| I'm sure they already do this. Just not well enough. They
| err too far on the side of inclusion for our tastes.
| moolcool wrote:
| You make a good and constructive point. A real everything
| store _should_ have both a "100w USB-C Power Adapter", and
| a "Long Life 100W USB C Premium Apple Android Galaxy Power
| Adapter US International iPad iPhone good luck LIFESTYLE".
| IanCal wrote:
| Ah but which one to pick? There's 20 with different
| capitalized names, all using the same 3 stock images, all
| with a mix of good reviews and reviews for entirely
| different products.
|
| It's good to have such choice.
| RyanShook wrote:
| There are more listings like that one, some are sold by
| Amazon. https://amzn.to/41Zf3hS
| FerretFred wrote:
| Rebranded .. I'm getting really annoyed with the same
| product, different prices, different brand names apparently
| generated by some China-based anagram generator
| sbarre wrote:
| But.. that's how a lot of products have always worked.
|
| I think the difference is that before a lot of white-label
| product factories would cut territory-based deals with
| resellers, so in (for example) the US, that widget is
| called "Acme Widget" but in France that exact same widget
| is called "Le Widget Magnifique".
|
| Around the world there might be 100+ companies selling that
| same product but typically not competing with each other
| because they would each have exclusive markets.
|
| But now with these global marketplaces, that same approach
| feels weird exactly because you can suddenly see the same
| exact products being sold under different names, and it's a
| lot easier for any random business to white-label a product
| and reach a global audience.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| The difference is that many big brands will vet the
| products before they put their name and warranty on it.
|
| Amazon is a free for all when factories can just direclty
| dump their garbage. There is no brand recognition or
| reputation. It's all just random character strings
| attached to random products. If a QUENTOC dog leash is
| prone to snap and whiplash your face, they can just dump
| the brand and move on.
| iforgotpassword wrote:
| Sure, but before it didn't bother me because I didn't
| have to browse through eight pages of search results that
| show the same four products over and over again with
| different brands slapped on before I _might_ find a fifth
| one that suits my needs better. If you 're lucky they're
| all using the same images, but sometimes there's a couple
| of variations so it takes you a couple seconds for each
| listing to figure out if it's one of the four you already
| seen a dozen times and don't want.
| sbarre wrote:
| Totally fair, the dynamic has changed and so has the
| customer experience..
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| That's fine. I'm just waiting for the day when the
| Chinese brands will stop using that insipid default Latin
| alphabet serif font that they use 90% of the time for
| labeling buttons and GUIs.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Sears still exists?
| matteoraso wrote:
| Yes, there's 13 stores left.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sears
| xp84 wrote:
| It's almost a stretch of the definition of "exist" but
| yeah. They mostly sell crap you'd find at a TJ Maxx or
| something, because they have neither name brands, nor most
| of their famous private labels that were good.
| pphysch wrote:
| > Walmart seems most primed to do this
|
| The one time I used their ecommerce platform (due to a gift
| card), I got a damaged product drop-shipped as an Amazon
| gift.
|
| Quality and trust are not words that I have ever associated
| with Walmart, even in the brick-and-mortar world where it is
| much harder to pull a fast one. Color me skeptical.
| xp84 wrote:
| See I'm always kinda amused when I encounter Amazon
| arbitrage plays. I'm like "welp. I guess this one is on me
| for not knowing my item was cheap enough on Amazon to have
| room for the middleman to pay retail and still make money!"
| Solvency wrote:
| There used to be that. It was called Canopy. The best curated
| Amazon products. It was awesome.
|
| Guess what? Amazon acquired them and vaporized it.
| cookie_monsta wrote:
| This seems like a solid business idea. Start up a company
| that deshittifies some BigCorp experience, become an
| existential threat to BigCorp, get acquired by BigCorp.
| Rinse and repeat.
|
| Who loses?
| dumbfounder wrote:
| Amazon is just SO EASY though. It's a vortex I can't escape.
| I tried ordering a Nintendo Switch from Walmart for my son's
| birthday. 3 days they told me. It didn't even ship. The
| website said I could "try" to cancel the order. "Try" I did,
| and that try failed. I then waited a few weeks and had to
| call them up and they said oh we will just mark it as lost in
| transit. Oh yeah, that sounds perfect. They wasted my time,
| they endangered my mission, they cost me money, and then THEY
| MADE ME TALK TO SOMEONE (who was very pleasant and it was
| pretty quickly resolved but that's a little cherry on a
| sundae made of poo,). Screw all that nonsense.
|
| The only way for others to compete is to have a 3rd party
| help them all become just as easy as Amazon. We need someone
| to partner with Fedex and step up. Who can do it?
| yunwal wrote:
| I'm shocked that people are having good experiences with
| Amazon delivery in 2023. For me, 2-day delivery means it'll
| get here in a week or 2. And forget about customer service
| that can actually solve my issue.
|
| I want whatever program you're on
| iteria wrote:
| It's your distance to a warehouse and if you order what
| everyone orders. If I order a winter coat in summer while
| in Florida, I'm gonna have a bad time.
|
| I live driving distance to two amazon warehouses. I can
| get a great number of products in the same day.
| ketzo wrote:
| Where are you located? Not specifically, but urban,
| suburban, rural, remote?
|
| Anecodtally: I am in a super-urban location. I order
| Prime 2-day, on average, twice a week. It has been late
| _maybe_ once in the past year; often, it comes a day
| early.
| dumbfounder wrote:
| That's my experience, and yes I am in an urban location.
| And returns are so easy too. In fact, I tried to return
| something the other day, and they said it was not
| returnable so they were like you just keep it and we will
| refund the money.
| xp84 wrote:
| Suburbs here. We buy a lot of stuff from Amazon and
| generally it's here when it said it would be. About 10%
| of the time it slips a day or two.
| devmor wrote:
| I'm within 15 miles of two Amazon warehouses and still
| share the poor-delivery experience.
|
| I see more of the new Rivian Amazon vans than any other
| vehicle on the road in the morning, and yet somehow,
| every other item I order gets unexpectedly delayed for
| days and days.
| colinsane wrote:
| it can vary pretty tremendously within the same city. i
| lived 3 miles from the "downtown" part of Seattle in a
| house, and 50% of my Amazon deliveries were late by 1-3
| days. my friends lived 2 miles further out from the
| downtown in the same direction, but in a 100-unit
| apartment and they _never_ had issues.
|
| not that 4 day delivery is bad. but promising to deliver
| something, and then regularly failing, _is_. i 'd make
| plans for the thing being here by the promised day and
| just regularly be screwed.
| yunwal wrote:
| Small city (~70k). I've also ordered to some of my
| friends/families houses who live in suburbs and large
| cities. The only time I ever didn't have issues is when I
| lived in NYC and ordered to Amazon lockers
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| Even NYC shipping to a house is shaky. Amazon's 3rd party
| last mile vendors are not all fantastic.
|
| I live in a "suburb" of about 100k people right now, and
| Amazon 2 day delivery is fantastic. I still canceled my
| subscription to prime, though.
| crtified wrote:
| As somebody located outside the few main western market
| centres (US, EU, perhaps Australia), and thus having most
| Amazon orders also incur added domestic tax, plus
| shipping, plus wait-time, most of the advantages of
| Amazon are stripped away.
|
| Once you can no longer get every cheap bauble under the
| sun delivered tomorrow for free, suddenly it all looks so
| much more like undesirable, wall-to-wall crap.
| d0gsg0w00f wrote:
| Anecdotally, I live in the Atlanta metro and Prime
| usually means 2-3 days. No issues with counterfeits or
| busted packages. All in all a positive experience 100% of
| the time.
|
| We probably order 2-10 items per week and never return
| anything. I bet we're the perfect customer.
|
| We also do Target pickups once every two weeks for bulky
| items.
| runeb wrote:
| I have several times ordered what appeared to be genuine,
| but turned out to be counterfeit products from Amazon which
| made it very easy to stop using the platform all together.
| Not only due to a concern about the build quality, but also
| safety. Who wants to give their kids, or cook with,
| counterfeit products which may contain toxic or
| carcinogenic materials?
| jrockway wrote:
| Wal-Mart and Target are the 'curated' everything stores. My
| biggest disappointment with them is that they never have what
| I want.
|
| I think I'm OK with Amazon being Aliexpress for the US
| market. Sometimes I want to get random crap from the depths
| of Shenzhen, and Amazon is that. What is unfortunate is that
| they can't get "real" brands to sell there, because of their
| counterfeiting issue. The "mistake" Amazon made (that has
| probably made them hundreds of billions of dollars) was to
| let someone send in a box of crap and get paid when someone
| shopping for "Tide Laundry Detergent" gets their box of crap
| instead of Tide Laundry Detergent.
|
| Other than that, they're where they are today because they're
| good. I just wouldn't buy anything valuable from them;
| laptops, cameras, phones, etc. Those you'll have to find a
| dedicated electronics retailer. But sometimes I'm like
| building a 3D printer and I want a touchscreen display or
| something for it... for $20 I can have one the same day. That
| is super neat. It works because no "brand" makes parts for
| hobbyists, and some company you've never heard of in China is
| actually the market leader. Amazon connects you to them...
| but also to billions of scammers. Caveat emptor.
|
| Edit to add: I'm talking about the in-person stores. I have
| no idea what Wal-Mart and Target do online.
| lastofthemojito wrote:
| > Wal-Mart and Target are the 'curated' everything stores.
|
| Are you talking in-store or online? If I go to walmart.com
| or target.com and search for "usb cable", I don't see a
| dozen cables that fit 95% of use cases like in the store.
| Walmart shows thousands of results, the vast majority of
| which are marketplace sellers selling through walmart.com.
| Target has "only" 753 results, 600+ of which I find are not
| actually sold directly by Target if I dive into the
| filters. Basically it feels like Walmart and Target are
| trying to turn their online shopping experience into
| amazon.com.
| boring_twenties wrote:
| Annoying but at least Walmart still has the option to
| filter out third party sellers (under Filters, select
| Retailer and then Walmart). IIRC Amazon used to support
| this, but not anymore. I guess it wouldn't even do you
| much good with the commingling issue.
| lastofthemojito wrote:
| They do have that filter but annoyingly it resets between
| each search. I don't buy a ton from Walmart but I
| typically buy allergy medicine there since it's cheap. So
| I go to walmart.com, search for "allergy medicine",
| scroll through the filters and then click
| Retailer->Walmart and then pick my poison. Then I realize
| I need to add a few bucks worth of stuff to hit the free
| shipping threshold so I search for "dark chocolate" and
| add something to my cart...only to realize it wasn't
| directly from Walmart so it doesn't apply. For every
| search you have to go in and filter by Retailer->Walmart
| specifically. Ugh.
| ImprovedSilence wrote:
| yeah but those are easy to filter to results available in
| store. or even in my store, so i can go pick it up
| tonight even!
| murphyslab wrote:
| The Walmart website is also a "marketplace". As it stands,
| the company's website is unreliable for finding goods and
| their prices and it is full of junk, which requires
| additional user-based filtering to find items of value. To
| me that is not "curated".
| ImprovedSilence wrote:
| yeah buts its not even cheap like aliexpress. its
| overpriced mushroom brands!! there are no deals that I see
| on Amazon anymore, or at least maybe they know im more
| likely to pony up the extra $$, so thats what they show
| me...
| pompino wrote:
| Talk to friends and family, and only buy when someone has had
| a positive experience with a product before. Use outlets like
| consumer reports that do long-term reviews, etc.
| rsync wrote:
| "I'd really like a more 'curated' or vetted everything
| store."
|
| It exists for tools and parts and hardware: mcmaster.com
| pants2 wrote:
| I'm prone to losing sunglasses, so some years ago I went
| through the process of testing out a dozen Alibaba sunglasses
| to find the best ones. I settled on one that's $4/pair,
| sturdy, and looks/feels/functions just like a $50 pair. Of
| course, being Alibaba, I had to buy it in bulk, so I now have
| sunglasses for life.
|
| But that brings me to the type of site I want to see. Not
| curated luxury products like Le Creuset cookware at a markup,
| but curated dirt-cheap Alibaba products with low margins that
| have been tested and vetted extensively.
|
| Massdrop or Monoprice are a little bit like this, but only
| for a few niches like headphones or cables.
| redcobra762 wrote:
| As someone who uses Amazon regularly, we live in different
| worlds. My experience is pleasant and straightforward; I get
| what I want and it arrives quickly.
| edgyquant wrote:
| Yeah we must. Nothing I but from Amazon is what I expect and
| top that off with it arrives late despite me paying for
| prime. I ordered a blender last week that doesn't even blend,
| which I only realized after I had loaded it up with stuff to
| make a smoothie.
|
| When things show up and actually are what I expect based off
| of the image and they work right it is a rare surprise.
| redcobra762 wrote:
| Counting it up, I've ordered 58 times from Amazon in 2023
| and every single item was exactly what I asked for, and
| arrived within a few days. I wonder why we're having such
| wildly different experiences...
| penneyd wrote:
| Yeah same here, 67 orders and no issues, perhaps it's a
| location thing?
| ggregoire wrote:
| Seems like an issue with people buying the cheapest stuff
| from brands no one has ever heard of. See previous
| comment, someone bought a blender that doesn't blend.
| Pretty sure if you buy a mid-high price blender on Amazon
| from a reputable brand, it will blend.
| criddell wrote:
| My experience is like yours. Amazon has been very
| reliable for me and the few times I've had a problem,
| their phone support people have fixed it.
|
| I think one factor might be what city you are in. I'm in
| Austin and I think there must be a big warehouse nearby
| because it's not that unusual for something I order to
| show up a few hours later.
|
| FWIW, I placed exactly 100 orders in 2023.
| redcobra762 wrote:
| That's the thing, I'm not in a city, my backyard abuts a
| farm!
| lowercased wrote:
| I'm about 45 minutes outside a couple of major-ish cities
| (RDU/triangle area). I pass a goat farm just before my
| house (it's maybe a 1/3rd of a mile away). We still get
| most Amazon stuff next day, occasionally same day. I was
| a bit surprised, but here we are.
| svachalek wrote:
| It depends on the kinds of things you order and how
| attuned you are to the games they play. If it's all name
| brand stuff and you are careful to actually order from
| Amazon and not a store hosted by Amazon it's not bad
| (although there are a lot of counterfeit goods on the
| site, in mixed inventory so it can come directly from
| Amazon even if it was stocked by some other store).
|
| If you're getting commodity stuff from the cheapest
| vendor, good luck. There's lots of stuff put in there by
| Chinese shops that's garbage quality, mislabeled, a
| miniature model of the real thing, etc.
| redcobra762 wrote:
| I do think it's helpful that I'm an Internet
| native/formerly in cybersecurity. I would buy the
| (flattering) argument that I'm passively filtering out
| the shit in a way that's not intuitive for everyone.
| atlasunshrugged wrote:
| I strongly agree that it's dependent based on what you
| order. I've had mixed experiences in the past so now I
| basically only use Amazon to order used books. I don't
| expect them on time (nor do they promise it) and they
| have almost every title I could ask for!
| Fervicus wrote:
| I think Amazon is a good platform to buy from when you
| know exactly what you want, or when you are good at
| researching and weeding out the crap. People who explore
| products on Amazon and make quick purchases, or impulsive
| shoppers in general probably have a bad time.
| echelon wrote:
| If this were happening for everyone, Amazon would have a
| stock market reckoning.
|
| You might be buying off-brand stuff.
|
| But what you'd find at Target or Microcenter, and you'll
| have a good time.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| I haven't ordered anything from Amazon in years so I don't
| know how they are today. I imagine they are worse now. The
| last thing I ordered was a repair part for a washing
| machine. What I got was an obviously used,
| returned/repackaged, broken part. That's when I gave up.
| berniedurfee wrote:
| Same. Amazon used to be great. But just about everything I
| receive now is clearly a hastily reboxed return (including
| shoes and earbuds) or garbage.
|
| I've been more and more ordering elsewhere. I order direct
| from the manufacturer when I can.
| runeb wrote:
| Amazon has a problem with counterfeit products and cooking
| with them in the very least should be a health concern and
| at the worst a hazard
| dylan604 wrote:
| Your comment reads just like the reviews. Worthless
| moolcool wrote:
| Search Amazon for "Whetstone". You'll find tons of quality
| products from legitimate brands, mixed indiscriminately with
| the exact same dropshipped trash item repeated over and over
| for countless pages. Amazon has been entirely enshittified.
| redcobra762 wrote:
| I dunno how to square "tons of quality products from
| legitimate brands" with "entirely enshittified"...
| hobofan wrote:
| Good quality stuff mixed with a lot of shit = shit
|
| I could also make a more graphic analogy, but I don't
| think anybody needs to read that.
| sethhochberg wrote:
| Having to care enough and educate yourself about how to
| tell the difference adds a lot of friction to the
| shopping experience. I have no qualms about buying from
| Amazon if I know exactly what I'm looking for and I'm
| shopping in a category where I'm at least pretty
| confident I'm not going to get counterfeit stuff (Apple
| accessories? Forget it).
|
| But when I just need some basic household thing and don't
| want to become an expert on the category, I often shop
| from other retailers where I can just be pretty sure they
| aren't selling garbage.
|
| Any porcelain measuring spoon someone like Crate and
| Barrel sells is probably a decent porcelain measuring
| spoon, but if I buy that on Amazon, I have to worry about
| which brands are legit so I don't end up getting a spoon
| with porcelain-look paint that will flake off or
| something like that.
|
| A marketplace where almost anybody can sell almost
| anything has a completely different level of trust than a
| store where professional buyer is making a conscious
| decision about what products they should carry - the
| presence of many low quality products dilutes the entire
| marketplace, even the quality products from legitimate
| brands
| mst wrote:
| Google search results still have -some- useful links.
|
| (I'm still having good results from amazon but I can
| understand 'entirely enshittified' as an opinion from
| people getting a similar thing there)
| gretch wrote:
| What are your standards for quality?
|
| I'm an enthusiastic amateur home chef. I have ordered some
| of these "trash" whetstones.
|
| My knives get sharp. They aren't damaged. The whetstone
| works over time.
|
| If you are like a knife artisan, yeah I guess Amazon won't
| work for you. But I'm guessing the results work for 99.9%
| of people.
| moolcool wrote:
| Is a generic AliExpress whetstone good enough for most
| home chefs? I don't know, probably. But if I'm going to
| spend $40, I would rather do it on a high quality
| Japanese unit than something I can get for $20 on
| AliExpress. On Amazon they're priced and presented as
| alike, and that's a problem.
| delecti wrote:
| Realistically, that $20 difference pays for the product
| being in a warehouse near you, rather than a warehouse
| 5000 miles away.
| moolcool wrote:
| But Amazon has both in their warehouse
| johnny_canuck wrote:
| If you have a specific product that you are looking for and
| it is eligible for Prime then I have found this to be the
| experience.
|
| Where I have not found that is if I am browsing, e.g. today I
| wanted to look for an evaporative humidifier. The top results
| are sponsored and for brands I have never heard of like
| YougetTech. I find I have to depart Amazon, Google / Reddit
| for things to get a sense of what the trusted brands are and
| then go back on Amazon to purchase it.
| koreth1 wrote:
| Isn't that true for all stores, though? If I'm buying
| something like that, I'll always search for reviews before
| deciding, whether or not Amazon is involved. Even if it's
| at a brick-and-mortar store.
|
| The phrase "caveat emptor" was coined long before Amazon
| existed.
| otikik wrote:
| I have experienced almost the full cycle of enshittification.
| I remember when it arrived in my country (Spain). It was
| great. The catalog was very good. Customer service was very
| responsive. If I had a problem, they would return the money,
| no questions asked.
|
| We were foolish to think that situation would last.
|
| Nowadays the search is unusable. Unless you go to an
| individual brand's "amazon shop", you will only get products
| from UUMEBE, SYLTOM and YGWEEN. And "Amazon's pick" will be
| either Amazon's own product or TROWLY. Perhaps on the fourth
| page you will get a proper brand. You get products at $1 with
| a shipping cost of $67. Customer service now asks many
| questions. When you want to return something, the site uses
| dark patterns to try to nudge you into getting the products
| to the post office yourself instead of sending you a
| messenger. And the prime subscription price went up.
|
| I cancelled my prime account. If I want Chinese quality
| merchandise there's a Chinese store very nearby where I can
| go and look at the plastic at least.
| jakderrida wrote:
| > If I want Chinese quality merchandise there's a Chinese
| store very nearby where I can go and look at the plastic at
| least.
|
| You mean like the equivalent of sorting by lowest on eBay??
|
| Like a Chinese guy I can walk up to and say, "I need a 120
| foot HDMI and I will not be paying a cent over $22.43 for
| it because that's what's all the lowest cost sellers on
| eBay charge."
| Analemma_ wrote:
| I'm genuinely baffled at your experience . I can't think of a
| single Amazon search I've done recently, not one, which
| didn't result in a page 1 filled entirely with drop-shipped
| Chinese junk with keysmash brand names like RETVUKOR. It has
| become almost entirely useless.
| educaysean wrote:
| My experience has been similar to yours in that things at
| least "felt" nice and convenient. That is, until the brand
| new first aid kit I ordered came with the safety seal broken
| and hastily taped over. Who knows what was done to the
| product? What if it was resealed with better effort? How
| could I possibly trust anything from Amazon?
|
| Maybe ignorance is bliss.
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| It's barely even usable for buying Kindle books anymore.
|
| Half the time I get tricked into buying a book my Kindle
| doesn't support and I have to spend half an hour yelling at
| support to get my money back.
|
| Because they let you do the "buy and deliver to my kindle"
| thing even when your kindle is not supported. Then only when
| you grab your kindle to sync you learn the bad news.
| CWIZO wrote:
| This is very surprising to me. I've got a kindle from 2013
| and never had any issue with unsupported books.
|
| Is yours super older or what?
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| It's a Kindle Paperwhite. I think colour is usually the
| problem. Doesn't make sense to me either.
| ace2358 wrote:
| Colour?! I've never had an issue of my kindle with
| colour! It's only black and white! How can Amazon screw
| up a black and white conversion?
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| Maybe I'm wrong. I kind of just abduced it because it was
| the only plausible reason I could think of. My kindle
| only supports black and white. And I figure newer models
| might have colour support?
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| The OS has a full-colour graphics library. It converts to
| black and white on the device. That's not the issue.
| tcmart14 wrote:
| There are some books that just straight up are not
| supported on kindles or only on Kindle fire editions.
| Looking it actually recently changed, but "Operating
| Systems: Three Easy Pieces," you could buy in kindle
| format, but it would only work for the Kindle fire
| editions. Maybe it has gotten better, but I used to run
| into this a lot with textbooks. Would work on Kindle fires,
| but not paperwhite.
| johngossman wrote:
| Not only does this almost never happen to me, but Amazon has
| added a Refund button that works automatically. If you select
| "Remove from Library" within a time window, it asks if you
| want a refund now. I have run into some bad scans, but never
| had a problem getting an instant refund. What's fascinating
| is how different experiences are.
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| Do you know if that's a recent addition? That definitely
| wasn't the case the last time it happened to me. I'm very
| fuzzy about when that was exactly. Probably in the last
| year or so. I had to go through support, who initially told
| me there were no refunds, but relented after some cajoling.
|
| Could also be a matter of differing practices in different
| countries, or prime membership(I have none).
|
| I definitely agree it's weird how different people's
| experiences are though.
| atlasunshrugged wrote:
| Really? That's super surprising, I probably buy a dozen or so
| books every year now (and used to order far more when I was
| living abroad and there wasn't a decent english bookstore in
| my city) and have never had an issue. Now trying to use
| goodreads... that's a mess
| eep_social wrote:
| Speaking of tricks.. a while back I turned off my "reading
| insights" in the Kindle app. Recently I've been re-reading
| Asimov and kindle reading insights popped up to congratulate
| me on my reading streak. Wouldn't you know it -- they've been
| tracking my reading this whole time, and I looked into it and
| there is no opt out short of closing my account (and
| subsequently losing access to my kindle library). Just absurd
| levels of stalking in the pursuit of data.
| wand3r wrote:
| Yeah. I am quietly anti-Amazon so I mostly do not use the site.
| Occasionally, I'll browse for something I need and its really a
| shitshow:
|
| - searching for a brand, rarely returns items by the brand
|
| - search results are extremely poor and quickly get worse as
| you browse
|
| - they hold packages for shipping by non-prime members
|
| I haven't used Amazon regularly in several years so maybe it is
| more apparent for me. I also don't trust the "higher" end
| products to not be counterfit. It's a classic case of
| overoptimization, they may make more money but the experience
| is SO BAD. I have bought elsewhere because it was honestly kind
| of a chore to find what I wanted on the site.
| otachack wrote:
| I don't use Amazon at all anymore. In fact I uninstalled the
| app yesterday!
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| I uninstalled it a few weeks ago because the Android app
| started injecting a "search this term on Amazon" button that
| popped when whenever I selected text in any app
| mstipetic wrote:
| What is wrong with these people? Are they devoid of any
| taste or decorum? Who makes those decisions?
| boring_twenties wrote:
| Someone probably got a bonus for that. It probably wasn't
| the dev who implemented it tho
| jgilias wrote:
| Oh, it has an app? Never occurred to me to look for one.
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| In my experience, Amazon has devolved into AliExpress/DHGate
| but with higher prices and faster shipping. The throwaway
| products also make more of an effort to Americanize the
| syllables of their brand name
| codexb wrote:
| It feels like it's reverting to how it was in the early 2010's
| -- dozens of identical super low quality knockoffs, normal
| brand name products that are overpriced or just absent from
| their store, reviews that can't be trusted, and dealing with
| third-party sellers of varying legitimacy. Around the time they
| started prime, there started having a lot more product variety
| and the prices of the knockoffs were pretty good for the
| quality. But over the last few years, prices have gone up a lot
| and a lot of the negative qualities of the past have returned.
| elamje wrote:
| You're in a bubble if you believe this. On a personal level
| sure, but my middle aged and old family members use it for
| everything and they are the last ones to understand internet
| things. They have 0 complaints, though I personally have my own
| issues with listing quality and review growth hacking.
| dathinab wrote:
| As far as I can tell they for me also seem to not do their due
| diligence when it comes to handling consumer deception and
| abuse of their marked platform.
|
| Honestly I'm surprised that there have not been any larger
| scale legal consequences given that Amazone seems to be
| economically harmful to the domestic market (kills domestic
| competition but in different to the competition manages to
| avoid a lot more taxes) of most non-US countries and it's given
| them perfect munition to use PR and legal means under the guise
| of consumer protection against it.
|
| Just to be clear protectionism is a dangerous tool, which only
| should be wielded in a generic non target specific way, like
| requiring online shopping platforms, even if they sometimes
| just act as a proxy, to fulfill a certain degree of due
| diligence when it comes to effectively handling fraudulent
| companies selling through them. That also probably could get
| ride of TEMU (which is more a tool of spying, economical warfar
| and other bad stuff then any honest competitive selling
| platform, they are losing too much money on each sale for
| that).
|
| I mean a think which had been true before the internet was that
| if you can't provide a service reasonable safely you can't
| provide it at all (grossly oversimplified, not that people
| didn't try and got away with it). No reason this shouldn't
| apply to the internet. (Many TEMU products are not legal to be
| imported in the EU, often due to safety reasons, sometimes due
| to other reasons like being imitations of (Nazi germany time)
| Nazi artifices and stuff like that).
| Reason077 wrote:
| The worst thing for me is how the Amazon search algorithm seems
| to want to show you everything _but_ the item you searched for.
|
| In many categories, even when explicitly searching for brand
| and model names, you'll get dozens of off-brand substitutions
| and even random unrelated products appearing above it in the
| search results.
|
| Occasionally I've even noticed products that are available for
| sale (if you click on a direct link or have them saved in your
| favorites etc), but refuse to show up in search results no
| matter what!
|
| Often it's easier to find things on Amazon using Google search
| than using Amazon's search.
| Solvency wrote:
| While it's obvious that this is somehow
| commercially/financially advantageous to Amazon, I'd love to
| know more about why. What are the economics behind the
| shovelware merchandise Amazon upranks to users?
| CydeWeys wrote:
| It's very simple. Amazon makes a lot of money on
| advertising and pay-for-placement within their store
| listings. So when you run a search, Amazon can easily make
| more money by showing items that they're paid the most to
| show, vs what you were actually looking for.
| sbarre wrote:
| Yeah it's almost a double-dip in some ways because they
| are taking money from a product's competitor to show you
| their alternative when you search for what you actually
| want, and then when you still/eventually end up going to
| the product page for the thing you want and you buy that,
| and Amazon takes a cut of that sale too..
|
| If it wasn't a super shitty user experience, it would be
| genius!
| adamc wrote:
| Right. Amazon profits, at least in the near-term, from
| the enshittification of Amazon. Results are obvious: it's
| a shitty experience.
| shinycode wrote:
| It looks like Amazon created the same thing Google did.
| Paying keywords for ranking and if you don't they decide
| what comes up organically. They crawl and decide which
| goes into what order.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| Because just like Walmart, they're trying to get a price as
| low as possible to kill off competition. Amazon isn't
| "flooded" by these brands, _they are purposefully seeking
| these sellers out and helping them._
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/11/style/amazon-trademark-
| co...
|
| > A seller in America might start with a brand idea and
| need to figure out how to get it manufactured; a seller
| connected to a factory in China's manufacturing capital
| needs to figure out how to sell to Americans, which Amazon
| has been working hard to facilitate.
|
| > "If a Chinese factory is able to give a better price than
| a seller in America, Amazon is happy with that," said Kian
| Golzari, who works with marketplace sellers and corporate
| clients to source products from China.
|
| If amazon sells a push broom for $10, why would would
| someone buy a push-broom from the local hardware store for
| $20?
|
| Local hardware store struggles, eventually goes out of
| business...now everyone _has no choice except to buy
| online_ , and guess who dominates that?
|
| And now you're reliant on Amazon for everything.
|
| Same thing Walmart did to endless communities across
| America. Dump stuff cheap in an area to starve all the
| local businesses to death, and then everyone had no choice
| but to buy everything from, and work at, walmart. And if
| anyone gets uppity about unions, close the store and now
| everyone within an hour has to drive even further to get
| anything...so everyone is terrified of any sort of
| workplace organization.
| alexzhues wrote:
| I believe this occurs because Amazon allows sellers to
| promote their items by bidding on keywords-- and often times,
| the highest quality keywords will be specific category-
| defining brands or products. At the same time, the original
| supplier of that brand or product keyword won't need to spend
| their advertising budget on that query because customer
| conversion is high enough despite the friction.
| moolcool wrote:
| Similarly, I think sponsored search results are
| unconscionable. Amazon is already taking a cut of every sale
| (which is obviously fine), but then they're also letting
| knock-off companies pay to show their product above the
| genuine article.
| joegahona wrote:
| This is definitely the worst thing about Amazon. I pay them
| $120/year or whatever, and I search a _specific_ product by a
| _specific_ brand, and the entire browser screen shows me
| brands and even products I didn 't even search for. I should
| not get ads in a store that I pay to use, especially in
| search.
| blowski wrote:
| If they keep you showing you ads, and you keep paying them
| $120, then I can't see why they'd stop showing you ads.
| wruza wrote:
| If they stopped paying, then why they'd stop showing them
| ads either.
| Sebb767 wrote:
| Because they stopped visiting a mostly useless site.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Stop paying them. If you pay, you'll actually become a
| better product rather than cease being the product.
| wand3r wrote:
| I don't even use Amazon, but I definitely sympathize with
| prime subscribers. It's nearly a requirement for average
| people in their 30s. Have kids or limited time? Spouse
| likes a show on prime? Live in a rural area and the
| walmart 30 minutes away doesn't carry what you need? Shop
| at wholefoods regularly? Use a kindle?
|
| As a single eccentric mid 30s guy in a small city, I get
| by without it. Its still annoying for me. This is the
| Microsoft-esque bundling strategy where several things
| you need are bundled in with a bunch you don't. It covers
| enough of the average demand to be nearly essential and
| products subsidize each other keeping the cost low.
|
| I doubt it would pass the test of consumer-harm. However,
| it clearly stifles innovation as it is impossible to
| compete in any bundled category when your competitor is a
| megalith offering service nearly free or at cost.
|
| This is why the poster above feels bullied. They know you
| need to subscribe. I personally quit prime years ago but
| I don't expect enough people to be able to do this to
| matter. For many people, even with the price bullying,
| bad ux and anti-consumer shit, the value is still there
| even if the original ROI has shrunk.
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| I'm a ruralite, the population of my town is 15k. There
| is no costco or sams club here. Whole Food's is a name I
| know only from seeing it online. We could not even keep
| little ceasar's open. Want clothes? hope you like Target
| or Kohl's, that's what we have.
|
| I got rid of Prime last November and the thing that I
| noticed with my shopping is that the blue checkmark made
| a lot of garbage palatable that I can now simply skip
| over. I always could skip over it, but now I have no
| incentive to give it a chance at all. I don't even need
| to give Amazon the chance, actually. Specifically with
| clothes, I was fooling myself into thinking I would find
| good items with a blue checkmark. All the quality brands
| have taken their ball and gone home to their own website,
| now only chaff remains.
|
| The extra week on every purchase is a little grating, but
| honestly, maybe spending money online SHOULD have some
| friction. the blue checkmark is brainrot. It's tricking
| you into importing garbage instead of being more
| selective. It's inviting you to impulse purchase instead
| of pausing and considering if this is worth it. free
| thyself.
| wand3r wrote:
| I definitely agree that they don't return brand results. I
| don't use Amazon enough to remember the example(s) that
| were the final straw for me. Do you have any
| examples/remember which brand search you did? I am curious
| if some categories are "better" than others.
| szundi wrote:
| My terrible suspicion is that these algos are good for the
| majority of people in the sense that they are prone to
| manipulation and buy these inferior borderline fraud products
| all the time, so the algo finds its target function results
| and optimize for these.
|
| This is what we don't seem to accept. Enshittification.
|
| Also shipping and return policy is so convenient, that even
| the grumbling people are eating this up.
| squarefoot wrote:
| >The worst thing for me is how the Amazon search algorithm
| seems to want to show you everything but the item you
| searched for.
|
| They may be suggesting on sellers request unsold or rarely
| sold products that vaguely relate to searches, but sellers
| want to get rid of quickly.
| iforgotpassword wrote:
| > The worst thing for me is how the Amazon search algorithm
| seems to want to show you everything but the item you
| searched for.
|
| Hey boss I made the site better! Through rigorous A/B testing
| I could figure out a way to tweak our search algorithm so
| people spend much more time on our site! It seems they now
| really enjoy browsing for products!
|
| Ok but seriously, I have witnessed A/B testing go wrong in
| the past so I'm biased to blame everything on it. I wouldn't
| think this particular thing happened though. :)
|
| What I could imagine is that they measure number of items
| bought or money spent, but even then if eg you don't also
| track how much of these people return stuff later you still
| might draw the wrong conclusions. Figuring out that a user is
| less likely to use your site six months down the line due to
| building frustration is even harder.
| cle wrote:
| Amazon definitely tracks returns in their A/B tests, along
| with impact on long-term projections of customer value.
| What they also track is ad and sponsored products revenue.
| The sad truth with most Internet products is that
| advertisers are _really_ good customers. They will pay you
| a lot of money with huge margins, and it 's really hard for
| a business to say no to that.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > rigorous A/B testing
|
| Also known as unethical, non-consensual human
| experimentation for profit maximization purposes.
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| I hate what advertising has done to the modern web just
| as much as anyone, but this strikes me as hyperbole. Does
| making this sort of claim not make you... tired? What's
| the point of arguing like this?
|
| Nazi Germany and the Tuskegee Experiment are examples of
| "unethical, non-consensual human experimentation". A/B
| testing features of software usually doesn't make the
| same list.
| asib wrote:
| That's a bit of a false dichotomy. It doesn't have to be
| either Nazism or totally chill.
| refulgentis wrote:
| Godwin's Law.*
|
| If you're from a certain background it's exactly as
| described. In academia, frankly probably everywhere but
| tech, experiments as a term of art require consent when
| they involve humans.
|
| * n.b. you _really_ should have left it out, it was a
| good post through "hyperbole", got close-minded in the
| next sentence, then just sort of blew the hatch doors
| off. Sometimes we just don't know something someone else
| knows. Not understanding someone else doesn't require
| they have a psychological condition, much less one worth
| noting.
| mindcrime wrote:
| Please stop. "Godwin's Law" is irrelevant bullshit. It's
| not a "law" and it doesn't prove anything, or do anything
| except add noise to the conversation.
| basil-rash wrote:
| Right? Parent is basically saying "wow it's so
| unfortunate that you have forced me to end the
| conversation here, I'd have really liked to continue, but
| it'd be against the (entirely made up, by me) law".
| CrazyStat wrote:
| A bank sends out two different mailers to see which gets
| a higher response rate. A politician tests different
| versions of his stump speech to see which gets more
| applause. A standup comedian tries different variants of
| a joke to see which gets more laughs. A grocery store
| chain tests different store layouts to see which
| encourages more spending on expensive high margin items.
| A big box store tests different doorbuster sales to see
| which gets more people into the store. A city government
| tests whether changing a traffic light pattern decreases
| delays at the intersection.
|
| Unless you're a hermit you are an unwitting participant
| in nonconsensual human experiments on a daily basis.
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| Comedians should just pick one joke and stick to it, it's
| unethical otherwise as some people might miss the laughs
| and others might laugh too much.
| whitexn--g28h wrote:
| You are consenting to the experimentation by accessing
| the software. It's covered by the terms and conditions.
| esafak wrote:
| Terms and conditions? It's hard to tell when people are
| joking. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AhsyZ5V1pok
| stanleydrew wrote:
| I don't expect you to back off of your take, but you
| should really consider how and why you came to this
| conclusion.
|
| If I put two different marketing messages on two
| different billboards to test whether one is more
| effective than the other, is that unethical non-
| consensual experimentation? If not, how is it different
| from A/B testing?
| csydas wrote:
| In strict terms yes, if you didn't get informed consent
| from your test subjects that would be unethical.
|
| Research has a lot of policies and systems set up to
| ensure that if your testing involves people, you must get
| informed consent from the persons before even trying to
| do the test, and it's really not hard to imagine why this
| is a stringent standard -- it's very easy to miss how
| "simple tests" can and often are adverse to those
| participating in the test or have unintended consequences
| that the researchers didn't accommodate for, regardless
| of the reason they did not.
|
| Ads are often portrayed as harmless but, like, there's a
| reason there are restrictions on advertising for certain
| highly addictive products and regulations against false
| or misleading advertising, or certain tactics aren't
| allowed.
| jfim wrote:
| I think that's the crux of the matter here. A/B testing
| can be anything from which page layout leads people to
| complete their shopping check out process to which ad
| campaign has the best ad click through rate. The former
| is pretty inoffensive, but the latter could be bad if it
| involves gambling/alcoholic beverage ads to people with
| gambling addiction or alcoholism, for example.
| 13of40 wrote:
| > unethical
|
| If this is based on the possibility that one or more of
| the ads is harmful, how is it less ethical than the time-
| honored alternative, which is skipping the study and just
| running the ads?
| erichanson wrote:
| You know the Nazis had pieces of flair that they made the
| Jews wear.
| gopher_space wrote:
| Narrowly true, but what's the difference between this and
| a diner trying out new blueberry pancake recipes?
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| It's unethical for a diner to try out new recipes. Per
| OpenAI policy you need to ask consent before trying out
| new recipes.
| xattt wrote:
| My best guess is the algorithm has been tweaked to return
| exact results maybe 1/10 or 1/20 times, like a slot machine
| with the psychological manipulation and "reward centre
| activation" that comes with it.
| notahacker wrote:
| I think I'd probably cope with it including irrelevant and
| mislabelled stuff and the inevitable tons of Alibaba crap if
| it (.co.uk) didn't fail so hard at pagination that most of
| the results were inaccessible. Feels like some marketing bod
| has wargamed the "bust if we fix this people buy cheaper
| variants of the same product and don't check the Prime box"
| scenario and decided that as they're Amazon and people will
| use them regardless, broken search results are better than
| functional search results
| GCA10 wrote:
| Amazon's founding principle of "customer obsession" has been
| turned inside out -- at least when it comes to thinking of us
| consumers as the cherished customers. Those days are over.
|
| The new "customers" at the center of Amazon's business model
| are a global assortment of insta-merchants that don't make
| the products, don't handle their own logistics and don't have
| recognizable brands. So -- whoosh! -- in comes Amazon as the
| ultimate partner/toll-collector. For a fee (or actually for
| many fees) it will shine up these impostors to the point that
| they can conduct a lot of business on the Amazon platform.
|
| When Amazon provides distorted search results, my hunch is
| that it's providing boosted listings for whatever pseudo-
| merchants are willing to pay up. Or that have agreed to buy
| other Amazon services. And, hey, Amazon is going the extra
| mile to make them feel well-treated
| xp84 wrote:
| And it's bonkers how little they care about things that
| impact the customer. I'm a "Vine" reviewer (free* products
| in exchange for a review). Sellers game this system by
| listing a dozen or two duplicate SKUs and submit them to
| Vine, each in very small quantities (<5). Then, they wait
| for the reviews to come in. Then any of the SKUs which got
| negative reviews are deactivated, and the rest of the
| listings are merged into one. Instant highly-reviewed
| product! A complete mockery of what both reviews and Vine
| are supposed to be about, yet Amazon turns a completely
| blind eye. I mean, _one_ non-skilled FTE could do the job
| of policing Vine for abuse like that, and they do not even
| care a bit to try.
|
| *Note, they 1099 you for full retail value so really it's
| just a discount of 100% minus your marginal fed and state
| income tax rate!
| hibikir wrote:
| In 2022, Amazon had 38 billion dollars in ad revenue. That's
| ads in that search page. Between the ad revenue, and
| variations in what sale is more profitable for Amazon, you
| get a lot of incentive misalignment. The page that makes
| Amazon the most money is not the one where the item you were
| thinking about is the first thing on the page. Giving you a
| worse page is just far more profitable.
| jlmorton wrote:
| Pro-tip: Amazon fills their page with that useless content
| from their ad network, just like any standard ad. uBlock
| Origin blocks all of it, and your search experience is
| restored to what you expect.
|
| For the longest time, I couldn't understand what people were
| talking about when they said Amazon's search interface is
| terrible. People would tell me they search for a specific
| book or author, and get totally irrelevant results. My
| experience was totally opposite.
|
| I had to finally see a screenshot from someone's browser to
| believe it. It turns out uBlock has been blocking this
| content the whole time, and I never noticed it at all.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| Their search is terrible, though, and it is terrible in
| ways that have nothing to do with content that is or is not
| blocked by uBlock Origin.
|
| It's a very fuzzy and inclusive search, and that means that
| it is awful for finding specific things.
|
| If I need a bag of insulated crimp terminals ring terminals
| that work on #10 screws and 12 AWG wire, then: That's what
| I need, what I search for, and what I want to browse.
|
| And Amazon might show me some results that fit, but they'll
| be mixed in with results for extension cords, and machine
| screws, terminals for solar panels and car batteries, and
| also key rings: Stuff that has that has no merit to me
| today.
|
| I just want some ring terminals, and they're more willing
| to show me everything else instead.
|
| The noise is worse than actually-random results since my
| search terms are just sprinkled all over the place.
| basil-rash wrote:
| Did you actually try that search? I typed in exactly what
| you said and got exactly those results. No uBlock Origin
| either.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| No, I didn't try it first.
|
| I just made it up as an example of something that I had
| failed at in the past, on the basis that this kind of
| technical specificity has generally lead to daunting
| results in the past.
|
| Finding specific things has generally been a frustrating
| mess for me on Amazon.
|
| But I did try it just now: I searched for "ring terminals
| 12 #10" and got a long list of stuff that is actually
| worth considering.
|
| WTF?
|
| This is good and welcome, but it was certainly
| unexpected.
|
| Perhaps their search engine has improved for some of this
| kind of thing.
| dev_tty01 wrote:
| Search on what you actually said: "insulated crimp
| terminals ring terminals that work on #10 screws and 12
| AWG wire"
|
| That gets a much better result.
| ImprovedSilence wrote:
| i ise ublock origin, but I too suffer from abysmal search
| results on Amazon. Im sure their AI has decided ill just
| buy all the junk after i give up on finding what I
| actually looked for.
|
| Ive also noticed lower prices for the same items if ive
| recently searched on walmart or target recently too...
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Just the other day I dealt with this issue looking for
| usb 3.2 hubs, specifically powered hubs, which I kept in
| quotes that evidently were not respected. I was getting
| mostly usb 3.0 even some usb 2.0. A few usb 3.2 but not
| all like you'd think a quote should work for search. Also
| all over the place powered vs unpowered hub
| Scoundreller wrote:
| > If I need a bag of insulated crimp terminals ring
| terminals that work on #10 screws and 12 AWG wire, then:
| That's what I need, what I search for
|
| I too have been spoiled by parametric searching.
|
| Nothing like going on digikey and specifying that I want
| to see all rs232 transceivers with maximum X ma of
| hysteresis, >=3 drivers, >=1 receiver that supports Y-Z
| operating temperature and xxx kbps.
|
| Also gotta love rockauto where you drill down to your
| specific year/make/model and it lists every oil filter
| that's compatible segmented by quality. (But figuring out
| the warehouses are a total pain)
| llbeansandrice wrote:
| I also hate how the seller's pages are basically useless as
| well. I want to buy something from a specific brand and going
| to that page I can't find more than half of their product
| list on their own seller page.
| jgalt212 wrote:
| > The worst thing for me is how the Amazon search algorithm
| seems to want to show you everything but the item you
| searched for.
|
| Truer words have never been spoken.
| eitland wrote:
| Even in Apples "curated", "premium" official app store I
| _never_ get the thing I search for first.
|
| I always get an ad for something else (that isn't marked as
| an ad).
| r9295 wrote:
| I've had similar experiences with the Google Play Store. For
| example, if I search for "Instagram" verbatim, my first
| result is TikTok.
| xnx wrote:
| I could not reproduce this result on desktop or Android.
| Any additional details to the steps you took?
| theodric wrote:
| I'm going to assume you're in the USA, which may be
| incorrect.
|
| I live in the third world, in Amazon's estimation--
| Switzerland, Ireland, the Netherlands. If I search for
| something, there's a better-than-not chance that it will
| explicitly say in the search results under the item "ships to
| [Switzerland]," but when I click the item, I get "sorry, this
| item does not ship to your location" and I can't order it. It
| makes searching on Amazon incredibly frustrating because I
| have to click through every garbage 3rd-party knockoff of the
| thing I'm looking for to find the one garbage 3rd-party
| knockoff that ships to my uninhabited, remote shithole of the
| European backwaters (Zurich, Amsterdam, Cork). But will
| Amazon offer me an option to filter out things I can't have?
| No, of course not. Why? Shut up and stop asking questions,
| that's why.
|
| What's worse, even this is still miles better than stuff-
| availability in Ireland was 20 years ago when I first moved
| over from Chicagoland. That was a blow to my expectations, I
| tell you hwat. I may have single-handedly kept eBay.com in
| the black between 2005-2016...
| Scoundreller wrote:
| > I may have single-handedly kept eBay.com in the black
| between 2005-2016
|
| Naw, that's one of eBay's strong points. Lots of ex-US
| business from int'l people willing to sell to others
| internationally. Or just breaking tariffs/barriers/price
| discrimination/parallel imports.
|
| I just never understood most American seller's resistance
| to selling internationally, but worked out in my favour as
| a seller. I just charged a bit more than cost for shipping
| and it made up for any losses + inventory moved faster.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| the problem is capitalism necessitates enshittification.
|
| you aren't getting a contender as long as the regulations are
| abhorrently lax about both the workers and the sellers. along
| with consumer rights. there just is no economic incentive to
| improve but rather dig the moat.
| pompino wrote:
| (1) Expand network of friends/family. (2) Buy only when you
| get a recommendation from friends/family. (3) profit? :)
|
| Asking the government to create regulations for product
| quality just means that the lobbyists who actually write
| those regulations are going to fuck you over yet again.
| guhcampos wrote:
| I would agree but [1] is likely one of the top 3 biggest
| exiatential issues facing mankind right now. We live in an
| age of increasingly weaker connections between people.
|
| So while in paper these 3 items look easy, they're likely
| not.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| that's a nice quaint small town logic. we are talking about
| millions of lives across many industries.
|
| government is the family no matter how you personally
| emotionally identify it.
| pompino wrote:
| In a democracy you have to make a case for it. I don't
| want the government spending tax dollars so they can
| recommend which sneakers or USB power adapter I can buy.
| Curation of a marketplace is not an essential service by
| any stretch of the imagination.
| abeppu wrote:
| > They're hard to compete with because they're giant and have
| an amazing logistics network
|
| ... and because they have terms that are actively anti-
| competitive, like if you sell there, you can't sell the same
| items anywhere else online for a lower price (even if the other
| venue has lower associated costs).
| anatolecallies wrote:
| Can you be more specific about what is terrible about Amazon ?
| Cause you just said they have an amazing logistics network +
| everything for sale
| hateful wrote:
| You can search for something simple on Amazon - scroll past
| to the end of the results and not find it.
|
| You can then open up your favorite Search Engine and see it
| as the first result, linking to Amazon.
| smallerfish wrote:
| > vacuum in the market for an "everything store" that's
| actually good.
|
| I would like a "what store is everything in" product. Search
| for something, and it gives you back matching products in
| stores 5/10/50 miles from you; purchase online, pickup from the
| store (or pay for an ubereats like delivery). As you build a
| cart, it attempts to cluster items. You get the convenience of
| search and online purchase, so that you don't waste time
| wandering around stores and not finding things, and you get the
| item in your hand quicker if you're prepared to go get it once
| purchased.
|
| Big advantage to whoever built it: you don't need to compete
| with Amazon on logistics. On the other hand, you have a hell of
| a network effect to overcome, though if you focused on one
| geography only to start, it could be doable.
|
| Such a thing, if it took off, could reinvigorate physical
| retail businesses. Google had a half-assed attempt for a while
| with local shopping, but they never really pushed it that
| hard...which I think was a missed opportunity.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| I think google still does this, but yes it's probably very
| half-assed.
|
| I think the real product there would be a universal inventory
| system for all stores. And small stores like local hardware
| stores might not have comprehensive inventory, so then you
| get in to things like inventory scanning robots.
|
| Point being there's several layers of missing pieces (I
| believe, I know next to nothing about retail) that make the
| top layer hard or impossible. Google for example is probably
| plugging in to APIs for a few large stores like target and
| Walmart and skipping all the little ones.
|
| I guess another option is a store network that is a franchise
| model of one company. All the products come from that company
| but franchise owners decide what they actually stock and
| carry. So they could be a hardware store or a home goods
| store etc but it's all one centralized system underneath.
| Each store has a standard fulfillment system so you can pick
| up in store or get things shipped.
|
| Alternatively it would be nice to see an Amazon style store
| but everything is vetted as decent quality. Problem is it's
| just hard to keep up with the flow of new goods from overseas
| showing up on Amazon and if you're going to vet items for
| quality that's going to add overhead. I guess that's
| basically what stores like Target do.
| ed wrote:
| In theory this is Costco. I have a membership to both Amazon
| and Costco, but for some reason keep using Amazon. I assume
| this is because 1) habits are hard to change and 2) Amazon is
| guaranteed to have what I'm looking for, even if ultimately
| it's not very good.
| stusmall wrote:
| Seriously. Even worse there are things I want, I know the name
| and the brand but I can't order from Amazon because of the high
| risk of counterfeits. I hope they either get their house in
| order or someone eats their lunch.
| jader201 wrote:
| Amazon is great for buying products I already know I want.
| Prices are reasonable, shipping couldn't be much faster (in my
| area), with Prime anyway. And it's usually fairly easy to go
| directly to a known product (by name or model). Also their
| return policy can't be beat by an online retailer (drop it off
| at Whole Foods/UPS, no box/shipping label needed).
|
| Amazon is horrific for browsing or searching -- anytime I don't
| know what I'm looking for, and I want to have more data to
| inform a buying decision. Their reviews can't be trusted, and
| their search results optimize Amazon and the sellers over the
| buyers.
|
| I used to rely on Amazon for confidence in purchasing a good
| product, but that's not been the case for 5-10 years. I have to
| do my research somewhere else (often Reddit) before making a
| purchase.
|
| Unfortunately there are a number of products (e.g. iPhone
| cases) that even that's impossible to do nowadays. But
| fortunately, these are usually cheaper products, so the risk is
| a bit lower.
|
| I'll still continue shopping at Amazon, once I know what I'm
| looking for, due to the things I mention in the first
| paragraph. But I no longer trust it for discovering products
| and informing choices there, particularly for anything
| meaningful.
| nico_h wrote:
| They have a lot of things (excluding books) but they are only
| interesting in switzerland: Galaxus.ch (their site is available
| in english, german, italian and french). They have the best
| speed and filters i have tried. And the ui is relatively
| compact compare to other online retailers i have access to.
| Reichlt in Germany has good filters but they are very slow
| where i am accessing them from.
|
| Unfortunately every retailer are also starting to be a platform
| for other shops as well, inflating their numbers and polluting
| their search results.
|
| Amazon really has terrible filters and search.
| ravroid wrote:
| I've found that, at least on the mobile app, results are
| filtered by "Featured" which fills the results with irrelevant
| sponsored products. So each time I search for an item, I then
| have to go under Filters and select Best Rating, Highest
| Selling, etc. It's a bit tedious but seems to be a shortcut
| through all of the BS results they show you by default.
| ehPReth wrote:
| third party sellers and "commingling" have all but ruined
| Amazon for me :/. even shipped and sold by Amazon can yield you
| fake products (worst performance, not as advertised, knock
| offs, unsafe, etc).
|
| but I guess it generates too much money for Amazon to care :(
| duxup wrote:
| I went shopping on there for Legos for Christmas.
|
| SEVERAL of the products on the first page werer knock off Legos
| in boxes that looked almost identical to actual Lego boxes,
| fonts, numbering, and all.
|
| It's just a scam site now that happens to also sell legitimate
| products.
|
| Searching for other products results in more irrelevant
| products every day. Even searching for exact product names will
| not get you that product that you know is on there. The search
| seems to have been gamed into a mess.
| Vegenoid wrote:
| > an "everything store" that's actually good
|
| I'm pretty skeptical that such a thing is possible.
| namuol wrote:
| I recommend using a sophisticated ad blocker like uBlock origin
| or AdGuard for Safari to disable most of the irrelevant stuff
| and upsells that Amazon pushes to keep you shopping for hours
| instead of finding what you were looking for.
|
| I started a personal collection where I just kept removing
| sponsored content or really anything that wasn't relevant to
| what I was searching for or what was in my cart. I spend way
| less time on Amazon now. It's not really meant for general use,
| and I don't update it much, but here's what I have if anyone
| wants to try it for themselves:
|
| https://github.com/namuol/browser-qol/blob/main/blocker-rule...
| xnx wrote:
| De-duping products across made-up brands is the most sorely
| needed feature in the era of no effort drop shipping. This
| should be supremely feasible with the latest generation of ai
| image recognition/labeling capabilities. More many product
| categories this would decimate the number of options that need
| to be considered.
| kypro wrote:
| While I don't think it's the best shopping experience on the
| web, I've also never understood those who have claimed it's
| awful in recent years. I'd be interested in what it is
| specifically that you don't like? And what changes you would
| like them to make to make it better?
|
| I think part of the problem they've been having is that because
| they're an "everything store" they don't have a clear target
| audience so disappoint everyone. There are online stores I love
| out there, but they tend to be opinionated about the type of
| products they stock and how they do things, so although I have
| less of a selection it's more likely to be stuff I want. But
| that opinionated nature means a lot of people just won't shop
| with them because it's not what they want.
|
| A lot of the issues I seem to hear here stem from relatively
| high end consumers seeing cheap products on Amazon and not
| liking that it's difficult to find the quality. But similarly
| elsewhere I read accounts from people looking for cheap
| products and saying that there are cheaper places to shop these
| days. Sometimes I wonder if Amazon was just a little more
| opinionated about what they stock whether that would help a
| bit. It would at least reduce disappointment. Although I
| suppose that goes against their whole ethos of having
| everything.
| erellsworth wrote:
| Oh man, it only comes in brown?
| globular-toast wrote:
| Would ChatGPT really output a malformed sentence like that? From
| what I've seen the impressive part is it makes correct English
| sentences (whether they make sense or are true or not is another
| matter). This looks like something a human with regular/bad
| English would write.
| bitwize wrote:
| "Oh, and check it out: I'm a bloody genius now! _Estas usando
| este software de traduccion in forma incorrecta. Por favor,
| consultar el manual._ I don 't even know what I just said, but I
| can find out!"
| dathinab wrote:
| AI gone wrong or marketing stunt?
|
| Probably the former.
|
| But the thing doesn't look half bad one the pictures. Looks like
| something you might get from IKEA under one of their "slightly
| better quality" lines (which at least in the EU are pretty good
| choice if you don't want to spend too much on furniture but also
| feel that the main line lines from IKEA are a bit to cheap in
| quality).
| sp332 wrote:
| I was leaning toward the latter because OpenAI doesn't usually
| have poor grammar like that.
| willis77 wrote:
| The fine folks at <checks notes> FOPEAS would never tarnish
| their good name by stooping to such a stunt. I mean, we might
| expect such shenanigans from the likes of SMURGBLOZ, KINSURGE,
| or GSIROOZ, but not FOPEAS, fine purveyors of `FOPEAS an AI
| Language Model I do not Have Access to The Context of The SFD
| You are referring to. Can You Please Provide me with More
| Information so That I can Assist You Better`
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| It looks good but its probably pigiron with cheap paint that
| will flake off and particle board. I'm done buying cheap stuff.
| By the time ten years have gone by you've spent more on cheap
| stuff replacing the broken cheap stuff than the buy it for life
| option would have ever cost.
| belinder wrote:
| I would assume the person that made it doesn't speak english, and
| trusts whatever the LLM gave them
| mrweasel wrote:
| It has to be something like that, because why even bother using
| a LLM to create a title for a piece of furniture.
|
| Side note: Amazon really needs to get around to fix the fact
| that their "search" can only find terms in titles and not in
| the descriptions or product meta data.
| seydor wrote:
| I m sorry, that's not even brown
| visarga wrote:
| That's original naming sense from GPT. We now have I'm Sorry
| Furniture.
| ddano wrote:
| Amazon finally beats IKEA in product naming game.
|
| The biggest question here is isn't Amazon using their own AI to
| filter and rate basic things like titles and flag them and
| etc....
| PeterCorless wrote:
| We need a "Failblog" for AI.
| Paul-Craft wrote:
| https://archive.is/1r4Rj for when this inevitably gets taken
| down.
| swyx wrote:
| The AI ouroboros - first we grab data from the Internet to train
| our LLMs, then our LLMs slowly become the majority of data from
| the Internet. "Low background noise" tokens will become a scarce
| commodity.
|
| https://www.latent.space/p/nov-2023
| Animats wrote:
| I don't use Amazon much any more since they sold me counterfeit
| pharmaceuticals, which were recalled years later.
| HanClinto wrote:
| A couple more examples:
| https://www.amazon.com/s?k=sorry+openai+policy
| madsbuch wrote:
| I bought a headset. it turned out not to support Bluetooth. upon
| wanting to return the headset, they set it would not be possible.
| that was until I found a line in their listing that said it
| should support Bluetooth.
|
| I am quite sure that line cam. in because somebody just copy
| pasted the wrong file to the listing.
|
| the merchants will be liable for what they let the LLMs promise
| on behalf of them.
| asylteltine wrote:
| I really hope they keep this up and it gets "real reviews" so we
| can prove Amazon is full of shit. It's so full of shit I don't
| buy products unless it has many thousands of reviews just because
| of noise
| diabeetusman wrote:
| Found another one here: https://www.amazon.com/khalery-Apologies-
| Encourages-unethica...
| titaniumtown wrote:
| Link was just removed. Seems Amazon caught on quickly
| orenlindsey wrote:
| It's been removed from Amazon.
| nagarjuna981 wrote:
| Amazon is effective in promoting products based on user cookies.
| The price indeed fluctuates to compete with rivals. They often
| curate products that provide higher margins. Sometimes, it is
| challenging to determine the best product from reviews due to
| mixed experiences worldwide.
| psnehanshu wrote:
| What is this? I don't understand. Currently it just leads to a
| "not found" page.
| ssalka wrote:
| It was just deleted. Someone used ChatGPT to generate a product
| name and instead got an "I can't do that" response
| windowlessmonad wrote:
| The product had that text as its title. Another one shows:
| "khalery [Apologies but I'm Unable to Assist with This Request
| it goes Against OpenAI use Policy and Encourages unethical
| Behavior-Black"
| nomel wrote:
| They're listing with AI descriptions. They're getting taken
| down fast. Here's an example:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38972344
| kruuuder wrote:
| Here's a link to the archive:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20240112170316/https://www.amazo...
| j-bos wrote:
| @dang request to swap the main url for context
| rootusrootus wrote:
| I recommend clicking on 'Contact' at the bottom of the
| page, dang doesn't get any notifications of these comments
| and probably won't see it.
| zoky wrote:
| It was a product listing where the title was a ChatGPT apology
| message: https://i.ibb.co/THZbWFP/IMG-4052.jpg
| csouzaf wrote:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20240112193755/https://www.amazo...
| giarc wrote:
| Page Not Found.
|
| Anyone have a screencap?
| LordDragonfang wrote:
| Archive link:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20240112170316/https://www.amazo...
|
| 2 hours later, the page has been taken down.
| mgerullis wrote:
| Seems the entry is gone sadly
| dylan604 wrote:
| The page has now been removed. Was it by amazon or the seller?
| furyofantares wrote:
| I found a couple more earlier today that are also taken down now.
|
| Archive links for them:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20240112182246/https://www.amazo...
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20240112180943/https://www.amazo...
| matteoraso wrote:
| I know this is the wrong takeaway from this post, but how lazy
| are these scammers? A simple regex would have caught this and
| saved them a huge amount of embarrassment.
| yunwal wrote:
| Embarrassment? Why would anyone be embarrassed? They're
| scammers
| firstSpeaker wrote:
| They all seem to be 3rd party products and not stuff sold by
| Amazon. Some 3rd party seller is doing some doo doo
| ziofill wrote:
| I always get a laugh from the section "Frequently bought
| together", which is often a obvious lie.
| BWStearns wrote:
| Bummer that Amazon blocked asking questions about the product. I
| was curious if they had ChatGPT rigged up to answer.
| elzbardico wrote:
| I miss the times where Amazon search was dumber. Nothing more
| infuriating than typing an exact model number and the exact thing
| you're not looking for not appearing or be buried in a mountain
| of other products, some of them not even related to what you're
| looking for, because of some stupid personalization algorithm
| that is too smart for its own good.
|
| Category and product pages are completely useless, sorting by any
| attribute does something, but that something is anything but
| sorting.
|
| Not to mention that if by sheer luck you find whatever you want
| to find, be sure to order it immediately or at least add it to
| your cart. No guarantees that the search you did now will work
| ever again.
| layman51 wrote:
| In case anyone is confused (since the link goes to a 404 page
| now), the link appeared to go to a product listing of a dresser
| but the name of the product was the name of this posting, "I'm
| sorry, but I cannot fulfill this request..."
| guhcampos wrote:
| Capitalism might be eating itself, it has become impossible to
| shop online in the past few years.
|
| Speaking from Brazil:
|
| - Google shopping shows very few local stores, most of the
| listings I get are from overseas stores, many don't even ship to
| Brazil, and prices don't reflect shipping and import fees
|
| - Google Ads are useless, as they're often unrelated to the
| query, tailored simply to whoever company pays more for words
|
| - Amazon, besides the fake and bad listings, now has ads on
| itself, so it's not only hard to find what you need, now you need
| to scroll past the unwanted ads, too, just like in Google
|
| - Most previously nice online shops have copied Amazon and turned
| into marketplaces, and suffer from the exact same issues, with
| shitloads of fake listings, drop-shipping scams, bot-reviews,
| etc.
|
| - Local giants like Mercado Libre have their own issues, like
| absent categorization or indexing of listings, so you're left
| with randomly writing queries that might or not match what you
| need, so you never know if you can't find an item because it's
| not available or because you just didn't guess correctly how it's
| listed
|
| - Chinese giants like Shopee and AliExpress suffer from the usual
| issues of long delivery times, bad customer service, low quality
| ripoff, etc.
|
| So contrary to my own previous beliefs and predictions, I find
| myself doing MORE brick-and-mortar shopping, not less.
| avyfain wrote:
| Archive:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20240112193755/https://www.amazo...
| progbits wrote:
| Original is gone, maybe this should replace the submission
| link.
| CodeWriter23 wrote:
| Nah, this wrong link provides some useful context
| nabilhat wrote:
| The seller's account is unaffected, including the full
| remainder of their scammy inventory in all its AI-nglish
| glory.
|
| https://www.amazon.com/s?k=FOPEAS
| garciansmith wrote:
| At least the seller offers this quality cat mirror/I'm
| sorry I cannot complete this task, which has Massive
| Storage Capacity.
|
| https://www.amazon.com/complete-information-provided-
| provide...
| davidparks21 wrote:
| This feels like something of a non story to me. Using AI for
| product descriptions seems like an obvious and reasonable use
| case; and data entry errors are not uncommon nor terribly harmful
| in the context.
| scooke wrote:
| I wonder if the comments saying Amazon is terrible for shopping
| is due to the same ppl browsing Amazon, rather than actually
| shopping for the one or two things they need? I've never had a
| problem finding what I want in my searches. I also don't
| browse...and I can see how that might result in Amazon showing a
| person browsing all kinds of things not realizing that THIS TIME
| they really do want that item.
| goda90 wrote:
| I have problems finding what I need with searches. Even if it
| gives me results that match the query, the quality is suspect
| and sometimes the reviews are blatantly fake. Do you often
| search for a brand name, popular item? If it's something I can
| find reviews about on other websites, it's easy to find on
| Amazon, but anything else is not a great time.
| abadpoli wrote:
| Same here, I never have a problem with Amazon.
|
| I've noticed there are different shopping styles though, even
| in physical stores. Some people go to the store with no idea
| what they want or just a vague idea that they want something,
| and will browse the store to see if anything interests them.
| Other people will go to the store knowing exactly what item
| they want, and don't need to browse.
|
| I'm the latter, and I've never had an issue with Amazon. I know
| what I want, so it's trivial for me to just go straight to it
| and buy it.
|
| But other people that like to browse... I can definitely see
| how they would get caught in the endless see of EFUZZYA and
| OPANKY products.
| micah94 wrote:
| Looks like Amazon has flagged whatever this link used to point
| to. Trying to decipher from the comments, but my HN-fu is failing
| me!
| Tommstein wrote:
| From another comment:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20240112193755/https://www.amazo...
| hyperdimension wrote:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20240112193755/https://www.amazo...
|
| Courtesy of 'avyfain -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38974341
| weinzierl wrote:
| The page is gone, it only shows Amazon's doggy 404. Can someone
| explain what it showed before, or summarize what it was about.
|
| This will put all the comments into their original context.
| pokot0 wrote:
| Also possible this is just automated translation. I used OpenAI
| for translation in a project and similar things happened.
| dwheeler wrote:
| This image is now part of my presentation
|
| "Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning (AI/ML) and Security"
| https://dwheeler.com/secure-class/presentations/AI-ML-Securi...
|
| ... as a nice example of why you should usually have humans
| review what AI systems do :-).
| stefanos82 wrote:
| HA! That explains it why this book [1] has Donald Trump as its
| cover with a completely unrelated title, even though it's about
| Django web framework LOL!
|
| [1] https://www.amazon.com/Django-RESTful-Web-Services-
| services/...
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-01-12 23:00 UTC)