I think you've got it backwards. Amazon (as Walmart before them) has done more to help poor people than any other firm or program around. Squeezing suppliers and returning the benefit to consumers in lower prices, providing a wide offering of goods previously unavailable are real benefits which improve peoples lives.

SpaceX is a government contractor -- an amazing one no doubt, but without the custom of the government they wouldn't exist. Tesla grew up on government subsidies for years and when faced with real competition, Elon suggested it was time to stop the subsidies. He may be doing good for the planet, but he is an ego driven hype machine.

Amazon = net negative for people who do business with them. "Squeezes" relationships, as you put it.

Elon Musk ventures = solves real world problems while maximizing fun.

It's interesting how you paint Amazon and Walmart. Let me bring up just one example:

The short term price squeezing means manufactures are responding by providing lower quality items to Amazon, just like what they do at Walmart. (Try buying a box of name brand Pampers diapers on Amazon right now and compare them with the same SKU at, say, Target) And all the more power to them if that's their goal. But long-term it isn't a sustainable strategy, business or environmental.

Low-quality products equals more landfill and less money in consumer's pockets overall. It also means a very small market for product re-use, such as buying second hand. I grew up with 20 year old appliances from a local thrift shop. Every appliance I buy now seems to have a 24 month shelf-life, with the liability of having to dispose of unrecyclable materials. I'm telling you, net negative.

>Low-quality products equals more landfill and less money in consumer's pockets overall. It also means a very small market for product re-use, such as buying second hand. I grew up with 20 year old appliances from a local thrift shop. Every appliance I buy now seems to have a 24 month shelf-life, with the liability of having to dispose of unrecyclable materials. I'm telling you, net negative.

Nice anecdote, maybe you're just abusive? I buy simple appliances from Walmart and they last fine. I have a $15 drip coffee maker that has probably made about 2000 pots of coffee now from them and it still works. I'm telling you, net positive.

Is there a real study/video on that SKU comparison?

This seems a like a false equivalence to me. There is far more than just Amazon that has facilitated the benefits you described. The Internet, portable computing, etc. all played a role in the general standard of living increase. If Amazon had not become dominant entity its very possible that another or many other competing players could have done things differently.

It's a lot harder to argue that another player in the market could have filed the niche that Elon identified and continues to expand.

> I personally would give my business to others even if i pay a bit more.

I’ve done this increasingly over the past six months. I used to enjoy the Amazon shopping experience but I just can’t trust them anymore.

And Elon selling the pipe-dream of production ready FSD maybe 10+ years early to Tesla lapdogs that drink up all the koolaid because they believe in him? He is equally cunning towards the unsuspecting consumer

what is FSD in this context? fully self-driving?

Correct.

But with a different goal

Just curious, have you ever used AWS?

Ah, the UI trainwreck that powers half the world

The CLI and SDKs are fine.

If you’re spending a lot of time in the UI, you’re doing it wrong.

For light usage I would beg to differ

I'll never forget getting told off by the S3 PM at Reinvent because I had the nerve to ask for global sort in the S3 file browser. "Do it yourself!" he said... like, I need to find one file, sorted by date, about once every other month. You want me to learn the CLI and write a custom script for THAT?! Un-effing-believable

They have a bajillion highly-paid programmers (and enough infra to power God himself) and yet one basic feature present pretty much elsewhere in both the online and offline worlds is too much to ask

S3 is one of the last things I would manage from any GUI. I don’t use GUIs when I’m searching or listing local files either.

Besides the S3 cli commands are some of the most intuitive.

S3 is not a file system though and is a big blob of objects with tags. I think the worse thing AWS ever did was present S3 as a file system in the web console.

You probably got told off because S3 isn't a file store. Asking for such a feature displays great ignorance about what the S3 service actually is.

How would that even work on the API level efficiency given how S3 is architected? It’s clear given their optimization techniques they tell you to use that S3 is optimized for prefix style searching. That’s all they offer from the web console, the cli or the SDKs.

It would amount to retrieving everything from the S3 conceptual “index database” and doing a non optimized sort when everything is architected to search based on the key and a key prefix.

It’s far more efficient to let the client get a subset by prefix (ie “folder”) and sort/filter by other meta data client side.

The web console doesn't even do global prefix searching

Why bother giving me a file browser if I'm supposedly not supposed to be browsing files?

What do you mean by “global prefix searching” you mean across multiple buckets?

Why bother giving me a file browser if I'm supposedly not supposed to be browsing files?

Welcome to the world of leaky abstractions.

As in, search results reflect only the current visible page and not all pages. If you use a bucket as a dump for, say, daily backups, finding a specific file from 3 years ago is really time-consuming and needlessly difficult. Can't sort, can't search.... just pure frustration

I haven't checked this feature in years -- maybe they fixed it

It comes from a fundamental lack of understanding of what S3 is and how it is organized. Objects are indexed as a key value store optimized for sorting on a key and a key prefix. The fact that keys can have backslashes as a character doesn’t mean that objects are stored in “folders”. Knowing how S3 indexes data - by key only and all other metadata is tagged on the object and not in the index, should inform how to name your keys and your access patterns.

For instance sorting by date, would involve AWS querying each objects meta data and then sorting it.

If having to find objects by date is an important use case, why not create keys in the format of YYYYMMDD?

Or just use the CLI.

https://github.com/aws/aws-cli/issues/2095

Build an index of your S3 bucket with DynamoDB.

It was a dumb ask. You got told off because your question indicated you hadn't even glanced at documentation.

Giving users an interface and then expecting them not to use it seems a little... idunno.... sanctimonious?

Like if you don't want me using something, don't give it to me. Users gonna use

Seriously though that attitude is antithetical to the spirit of computer nerditry. Who do they think they are telling me what I can and cannot use?

Computer nerdery is not doing things in the GUI. It’s using the provider API for your language of choice and building your own tools.

That's one school of thought. Many of us grew up on mac and windows and appreciate good, power-user friendly GUI design

And honestly (not directed at you) that’s a problem endemic with “AWS consultants”. Too many of them are old school netops people who took one certification learned how to click around in the console and now call themselves “AWS Architects”.

They end up duplicating their on prem architecture and processes - costing companies more and not knowing how to automate and increase efficiency.

As far as “powerful GUIs”, one of the earliest game changers for the Mac that helped Apple survive during the dark ages were all of the custom workflows that publishers had created using AppleScript. It wasn’t the better GUI back in the day.

You say that, but just wait until you try using anything else.

GCP is much better in that regard.

I don't get Azure, it's UX is very meh, though at least faster than AWS.

The AWS web UI is a trainwreck by design. Amazon doesn't want to spend a penny more on it than the bare minimum, and the APIs and CLI tools (which are the intended entry points for all serious customers) do the job exceedingly well.

I have. It sucks.

> Musk is also deluded too but his goals and intentions are genuine.

Dupe.

What?

The kicker for me was when I realized my browser history was being accessed to serve up product suggestions. Gross.

Any writeup on this?

I think I got confused with local browser history and browsing on Amazon but:

https://www.popsci.com/erase-browsing-history/

"However, this mode won’t erase everything you do. If you log on to a site like Facebook or Amazon in incognito mode, those pages will recognize you and record your browsing activity. In other words, your browser won’t remember what you’ve been up to, but any sites you log into will. This means you might see evidence of your private browsing in ads that appear later. And if you download files, private mode won’t wipe them either, though it will clear out your download history."