wulrus

joined 2 years ago
[–] wulrus@lemmy.world 6 points 3 days ago

It's not far-fetched at all - that's what happened with search engines. Lobotomising an LLM is not that easy, as we just saw with the strange Grok outbreaks after they tried to make it anti-woke. But they can work through training data, nudging it softly in a direction. I bet that what happened with early days SEO is already happening again: They optimise online content for influencing LLMs trained by it. When their shills and bots (also LLM driven, lol) say "shelf X is scientifically known to be very durable", that becomes a "likely thing to say", which is all an LLM is looking for.

What you add is the suspicion that the corporations behind LLMs influence this process more directly and get paid for it, either already or in the near future, and that seems likely.

 

I was a huge fan of Amazon from a usability perspective. Unmatched, I'd say!

But there are obvious reasons against it: Worker exploitation and the political situation.

Got to admit, I'm a "soft-quitter", still got my account and still order there as a last resort.

My latest purchase: Several different types of heavy-duty storage racks.

Method used for shelf type one (4x):

  • Amazon for search & comparison
  • tried the product on geizhals.de, but to my surprise, it omitted the manufacturer as an option!
  • went directly to the manufacturer, who had a very decent paypal checkout integration (obviously, invoice / wire transfer and auto-fill form would be preferable)

Price compared to Amazon: Exactly the same.

Method used for shelf type two (2x):

  • Wanted to try the new ChatGPT "Agent" to do a research based on a list of criteria. (I know, it's not European!)
  • Quite happy with the results, which included a table with metrics such as "price per storage area". It did not include any Amazon results and showed mostly manufacturer stores
  • It had this as the top result: https://juskys.de/products/2er-set-lagerregal-easy-160-x-80-x-40-cm#%3A%7E%3Atext=Mit+bis+zu+640+kg%2Cbelastbar
  • I decided to go with a bigger version of that
  • Checkout was just slightly quirky, but lost no more than 3 minutes compared to Amazon

This is what ChatGPT Agent generated. Is it a viable shopping method in general? We'll see. In any case, it's not European, and there are huge environmental issues with it. Similar results might be gained from asking online, like in a home community.

[–] wulrus@lemmy.world 46 points 1 week ago

Couldn't that be interpreted as a confession that their air is at least as unsafe as staying with a heavy smoker the whole night, in terms of PM 2.5 and other hazards?

[–] wulrus@lemmy.world 2 points 2 weeks ago

I wonder how much of the problem would be avoided if the top personal CO2 emissions per capita were capped at Scandinavian upper middle-class level since 1970 (imported CO2 included). Flying on vacation only occasionally, comfy car yes, SUV just if needed, nice modern house yes, wasteful lack of insulation no, buy what you need and treat yourself to some fashion, electronics etc. yes, mindless consumerism no. Just a comfy standard of living.

I wonder if the mindless consumerism in certain countries with insane emissions per capita makes up a big part of the problem, or if the sheer number of "decent standard of living" would have pushed us over the edge anyway.

[–] wulrus@lemmy.world 9 points 2 weeks ago (5 children)

In wonder if, in terms of logistics, delivery of groceries and online shopping could be a good thing.

Of course not with instant-services like Flink. Of course not with single-use cardboard boxes and worker exploitation.

More like the good old milkman. People order their groceries, and they are delivered in reusable boxes next day, old boxes picked up. Same with online shopping.

Both is already a thing, but few do it. Maybe it would work much better if a huge percentage of people would do it, e. g. 15 % for grocery delivery. The grocery truck would not have to do more miles than if it would deliver to the current 1 % (guessed), just needs to be bigger and have more stops.

In communities that are not built to live car-less, that might save many individual car trips.

[–] wulrus@lemmy.world 1 points 2 weeks ago

Just been discussing my kid's "what if": If T-Rex, allosaurus etc. were around these days, a polar bear or black bear would still be way more dangerous. It'd be no big deal once people got used to it. Few safety instruction signs perhaps, similar to areas with bears.

Once you can't fight it without high caliber guns and can't outrun it, there is not much of a difference. Bears, can't even out-climb them.

[–] wulrus@lemmy.world 8 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

That does make sense. Smartest thing he has said so far.

We already have "Miss Germany" etc. Why did we not think of using that term for the respective leader?

[–] wulrus@lemmy.world 8 points 3 weeks ago

The blue numbers are completely absurd. 30% live in Texas, 32% in California, 30% in NYC. And 20% with a household income over 1 million? I know a couple who are top seniors at Google & Apple, respectively, and while I think they may be over 500k annually, I doubt it's a million. And I definitely know they are far from the median.

[–] wulrus@lemmy.world 3 points 3 weeks ago

Bad cops, even the worst of the worst, do a normal job 99% of the time. It's the other 1 % of their actions that have such a negative impact.

[–] wulrus@lemmy.world 10 points 4 weeks ago

When you are not up to date on the topic, it sounds like a far-fetched dystopian alternate timeline.

[–] wulrus@lemmy.world 11 points 4 weeks ago

Reminds me of an ad (!) German conservatives (CDU) made. I don't remember all the details, but it showed the politician as he stated something like: What the social democrats want to do would make housing in Berlin affordable again, thus removing real estate from the free market.

These people are in it so deep, they think that the common man would hate that just as much as they do.

[–] wulrus@lemmy.world 3 points 1 month ago

That was so nice when I got an 8 year old indoor cat. You could see this world of wonder in her eyes, as she didn't know where to look and where to sniff first.

With time, I could let her run free but supervised in a shared apartment building garden. She always went to the same pine trees and couldn't get enough sniffing them. Also jumped on the window sill of neighbour cats just to hiss at them from the outside.

When I went to neighbours, for example to pick up a package or talk about something, she trotted next to me through the hallways like a well-trained dog and sat next to me when I talked to a neighbour. The whole stairway and hallways were another great adventure to her, sniffing and clawing doormats etc.

[–] wulrus@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago

Yes, the worst was when something startled her (sting from a thistle?) and she dashed for the door full speed, into the harness, did a looping. A good fit is essential, could have cause major injury!

 

I've been on it since things got bad in the US. And in most cases, I found a good replacement. Different Pizza delivery, book order, convenient even, most of the time.

For general products I switched to Otto (Germany) mostly, Thalia for books. And I was able to get the biggest recent order through there (two big screens, screen mount, cables), as well as some smaller ones. Alternate would have been another option.

Cost is significantly higher, often +10 % - +20% for the same product and no free shipping.

But what I miss most is convenience. The whole process at Amazon is just working great, especially for stupid people with bad attention (that might be me). Miss a little detail, and you ordered with advanced payment, adding double the clicks and inputs to do a wire transfer. Or not realise you did that and wonder why the product never ships a few days later. Buy from a marketplace seller who ships through DHL, but can't use a DHL pickup location anyway.

What I always disliked about Amazon was the exploitation of employees. How much does that even save per product? I bet that the people handling my order would be happy with EUR 2 extra split among them, as they certainly handle many orders per hour, and I'd be happy to pay that. Is there really no market for high convenience with fair prices?

I do have 10 minutes extra per day to work through a lacking order flow for a good cause, but it would take lots of resources to catch up to that level of convenience.

view more: next ›