froztbyte

while looking for that I also found these gems (from here):

He wanted it to cost $20 and be controlled entirely by voice. Its brains would live in the cloud, exploiting the company’s Web Services offerings and allowing Amazon to constantly improve it without requiring owners to upgrade their hardware

oh yes tell me again how shitty-and-corp-flavour lcars with extreme reaction latency because of a dc roundtrip is something everyone would want just because it's $20

Over the next few months, Hart hired a small group from inside and outside the company. Like his boss, he was obsessed with secrecy. He sent out vague emails to prospective hires with the subject line “Join my mission” and asked interview questions like “How would you design a Kindle for the blind?” He declined to specify what product candidates would be working on. One interviewee recalls guessing that it was Amazon’s widely rumored smartphone and says that Hart replied, “There’s another team building a phone. But this is way more interesting.”

"way more interesting" brings to mind that quote regarding "technical sweetness"..

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/11/amazon-alexa-is-a-colossal-failure-on-pace-to-lose-10-billion-this-year/

That plan never really materialized, though. It's not like Alexa plays ad breaks after you use it, so the hope was that people would buy things on Amazon via their voice. Not many people want to trust an AI with spending their money or buying an item without seeing a picture or reading reviews. The report says that by year four of the Alexa experiment, "Alexa was getting a billion interactions a week, but most of those conversations were trivial commands to play music or ask about the weather." Those questions aren't monetizable.

Amazon also tried to partner with companies for Alexa skills, so a voice command could buy a Domino's pizza or call an Uber, and Amazon could get a kickback. The report says: "By 2020, the team stopped posting sales targets because of the lack of use." The team also tried to paint Alexa as a halo product with users who are more likely to spend at Amazon, even if they aren't shopping by voice, but studies of that theory found that the "financial contribution" of those users "often fell short of expectations."

at some point we’re going to get some dipshit going “Google made DeepDream which implies a computer can dream which means it must be able to think. Checkmate, atheists” as their line, aren’t we?

I’m curious about how this went

I think I recall reading something a while back that said the original plan was to make alexa a kind of platform, like a thing that vendors could deliver apps for, but that it completely fell on its arse for some reason (can’t remember now if it was cost or some petty “design choice” fuckup by amazon restricting something, or what). I’ll try find the article later

which comes to mind for me because this choice feels quite a bit like re-attempting keeping that pitch alive while also moving the hard part (and cost centre) elsewhere

“Well, but if we couldn’t commit this crime, our business couldn’t exist.” Sounds like your business shouldn’t exist, then.

so refreshing to see that from elsewhere too. same stance I hold about so much of the awful shit in the world (including an internet primarily financed through surveillance advertising), and it’d be great if more people bought in

although with how many businesses are speedrunning dumb choices (like the alexa thing etc), maybe that day comes sooner than not

poster name checks out, and I didn’t even get to see the dumb

are we about to find out the hachyderm board/steering group/whatever are involved in the nanowrimo ai shit? I recall a bit about some previous dumb shit about a bunch of the people in the foundation, think it was coiner noise with a dash of ai hyping iirc?

bonus: can just clip that bit from Bohemian Rhapsody as a theme song

speaking in general: the tpot crowd are rabid about posting about their own shit, and will get alllll frazzled up the moment anything like this happens. and they have just-enough overlap with quite a few circles that if you happen to be connected to x/y/z it will readily cross your radar

but one can also keep an eye on them directly to see what they're up to. and there is value in that too, despite the mental downpayment it requires

MDMA, however, is meth; it’s literally its name: thre-four-methylene-deoxy-methamphetamine. Not only is it more cardiotoxic than vanilla meth, it’s significantly more metabolically demanding

chemistry is when you ignore most of the structure of a molecule and its properties and decide it’s close enough to another drug you’re thinking of (and, come to mention, you can’t stop thinking of)

I learned my (extremely elementary) organic chemistry through chill afternoons in bars sipping beer and reading about ochem, and I know better than these clowns. brb establishing new school, Drunken Monkey Ochem

severely underestimating how much biohacking was really just coke the whole time

probably starting their own journey now to test it out! I look forward to their Incredible Journey post

LAION reckons it's finally dealt with the CSAM

and I'm sure everyone who trained on that can easily integrate this change, right. right?

oh, right, they can't, because none of the chucklefuck shit works that way. but I'm sure they'll totes jump right onto a full retraining cycle, because they're such good and ethical people who totally live the values they claim