For me it’s not the logistics, for me it’s the catalogue. They have so many ridiculously niche items that I want that would be impossible to buy from a local store
But that's just the basic physics of mail-order shopping, it isn't anything specific to Amazon.
Every general store in every town everywhere can't possibly stock millions of individual products. When some item has a potential customer base of a few tens of thousands of people in a country of hundreds of millions, most stores would never get a single sale for that item. But when you can serve the entire country at once via the mail, having a single centralized warehouse specializing in that niche category of items is quite viable.
The only difference with Amazon is that you are buying from a single website, rather than going to the website of a small webshop specializing in your flavour of niche items. And the drawback is that Amazon has zero quality control, so rather than a store where you can browse for known-good curated high-quality niche items you will instead be drowned by piles of absolute garbage - with the occasional decent item hidden in between.
Sure, Amazon might beat your local store, but that doesn't mean it is good for buying niche items.
I used to be very skeptical of all the stories on HN and elsewhere about amazon pages being full of poor quality knockoffs, because that simply wasn't my experience at all, ever.
But in the last couple of months, as I progress through a kitchen remodel and more importantly a kitchen reorganization, I've been seeing precisely this phenomenon every time. The most visible signs are the machine generated "brand names" ("Howonder", "Jaico", etc. etc.), closely followed by multiple instances of clearly the same low quality, SE-Asian-manufactured product being sold under 4 different brand/product names.
I think the difference is that in the past, I've actually known the product I was looking for, and amzn showed me that one and little else. At the moment, I'm casting blindly ("stainless steel kitchen turntable") and there it is: low quality, uncurated crap, everywhere.
Sure you can buy a niche product from a niche store, but it's gonna take them 3 days to get to the post office, and 2 weeks to get it to you. And they're gonna charge you $9 for the privilege.
Even the great stores like McMaster-Carr are kind of unpleasant to use, because the shipping is so slow (even though everything else about the experience is far superior to Amazon.)
I think Amazon might have induced this problem somewhat. Most retail stores have just stopped stocking niche items because people just buy them from amazon and it frees up a lot of floorspace they could use to stock high sales volume items instead.
When someone books over their meeting i don’t understand why people don’t just decline the meeting with a note saying “this clashes with a meeting already in my diary”. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with this and puts the onus back on the person to find a bigger time
How do you expect a hierarchy to function? Should the assistant to the SVP ask the managers to let the employees reschedule? That’s like a lot of bureaucracy for exactly the same flexibility.
(Am open to better approaches though! Not saying I particularly enjoy last minute urgent meetings you can’t say no to. But most often those are important and with people whose agendas need more care than mine.)
One of my favorite things about self-hosted Vaultwarden is that you get distributed backups for free. Every client keeps an offline copy of your entire password vault, kept in sync when the client is online.
So for me to lose my vault, not only would my server have to get hit by a bus, but also my phone, my desktop, my HTPC, both laptops...
Yes 100%. I see this all the time. You’re asking about a product and the LLM will cite a source from a competitor where the competitor will review the source and list a few positives about the product but lots of negatives. Then the LLM uses them in the response. So cheeky
Is the problem that the response sounds like AI? Or the response is incorrect? Or too verbose? Or a mix of all three or something else?
What if the response was perfect and sounded exactly like your colleague. Would you care if it was AI generated then?
I think there could be a world where a colleague could just ask its (finely tuned) AI tool of choice to respond for it and colleagues would hardly notice as the output would be so good!
I can’t help but think that that world would be so much more productive as we would spend less time in slack answering messages and more time doing more important work.
However there are two very important things that need to be in place for this to happen:
- colleagues have to have their AI tool know all of the their context on their projects….etc and and in-depth understanding of how they write
- colleagues must review (and tweak if necessary) the output
My guess is that the problems you are seeing is that your colleagues are failing on one or both of these points
Its like reading reddit comments now. Many of them are generated by AI and bots, and they sound just like real people. Or advertisers masquerading as regular people recommending specific products.
It used to be fairly obvious (using em dashes, etc) but now AI writing, with the correct guidance, is very much the same as regular conversational writing.
If all your colleague does is generate a “response” in a specific writing style based on some context, there’s no reason to talk to them at all. The good ones have some novel human insight that can’t be approximated by a slop generator.
And if you really want to record all your work and project context somewhere, just let people ... look at that directly? Or summarize and query it with their own LLM if they want to?
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