fortituded0002

My favorite is when I buy something from Prime and it says two day delivery once it ships in two weeks.

After the novelty wore off, Alexa was pretty useless in our home. It eventually turned into a voice command to set a timer while cooking and asking it to play Spotify. But after many times when it would kick in and interrupt us in the middle of conversations - when we didn't even come close to saying the wake-up word - it got in the way more than it helped. Really glad to have it turned off and put away now.

This is all solid advice but seems to be unrelated to gaining an unfair advantage.

I interpret "unfair advantage" to be more about employability and how valuable you are in the field (starting with inside the business you are in) and not about putting more money in your pocket.

The CEO class is a mixed group of people, some of which are incredibly smart. But your point is well taken and worth considering. They are "just people" too.

On a side note, I can't figure out all the responses to this comment. Everyone seems to be piling on and talking about stuff totally unrelated to your point.

I think this is what happens when game developers make websites. They don't realize that people want a link that they can share.

Amazing leap you made there. But by all means, let's let people run rampant and not have any boundaries and then shrug when violence happens against minorities.

> There is no system better than complete free speech, because it allows the most amount of information to be passed back and forth and gives people the opportunity to decide for themselves.

I used this think this, but then I figured out that I live in a world where I'm not always welcome by the "majority" and have seen first hand how these things can go sideways. Now I view this attitude as a privilege and that it typically comes from someone whose rights aren't all that impacted by the tyranny of the majority.

I'm not familiar with them but things make a lot more sense now. The writing seemed pretty off with lots of odd signals about how to think, how to fall in line, and spell out what our outrage should be. The talking points seemed a little too clean-cut and less about a discussion.

Not much to see here. Time to move on.

> pretty much everyone says they prefer the full price to be shown up front in search result pages. But, as someone who is privy to a ton of A/B testing in this area, the opposite nearly always results in higher conversion

That may be true, but those are measuring two separate things - customer desires and customer behavior. Just because it results in more sales doesn't actually mean the customer still wants that. I know I didn't when I rented a car recently but I was pretty much stuck when picking up the car at the airport. I would have definitely found another solution if I knew upfront how much the real cost was going to be.

> at the same time I'm not a fan of the news media's quest to find some of the biggest outliers possible

I don't consider being in the hospital wanting to watch Netflix to actually be that much of an outlier. It's pretty common and I know for certain that I'd want to do it (along with many many others) if I were in that situation.

Meta's has a corporate value for "Focus on long-term impact" which is trying to counter short-term gains that don't produce over time. They also talk about how you can make a "big impact" as an IC there, which from what I know is true since you can work on big projects, but they aren't necessarily the projects you'd want to work on if you have some form of value system that includes empathy.

Years ago, I met someone that boasted about doing auto-play for videos in your feed so that get sucked into related video after related video. He was particularly proud of implementing a feature (he worked it out with the PM) where you could only delete one video at a time from your history instead of in batch. The goal was to make it harder to purge your data and frustrate the customer so they give up. Ultimately they wanted more data on you so that they could further "optimize" the app to better suit/manipulate you. Pretty sure this is what they mean by their company core value of "focus on long-term impact."

> I've also been in positions where my 'people managers' advised me against my interests.

Generally curious here - do you mind adding some examples/details? Looking back at my career I can't think of a time when any 'people manager' advised me against my own interests. I am no longer an IC and since I haven't experienced this, I worry it's a blind spot in how I'm interacting with others.

I have the same overall reaction. But suspect that your analogy with the calculator to distract some people reading this. Difference being that one is user input error and the other is either ChatGPT misunderstanding what's being asked or just lacking training data and presenting an answer that's incorrect.

By yes, an eye roll from me as well. A few months back I heard the horror stories about how a bot answers with confidence and now it's the main complaint in articles about why it's busted and dangerous. It doesn't bring anything new to the table and doesn't push the conversation forward in any way.

Are these sales numbers or how much they make after everyone else gets their cut? Is that what they mean by "taxes"? Steam takes 30%. The publisher can easily take 50%, but they may have negotiated better terms due to the funds they put in on their own and that it's an existing game.

> Yet, their number of warehouse employees is still growing like an exponential curve. Compare the number of items shipped per 1,000 warehouse employees in 2012 vs 2022 and no it’s not wildly different.

No idea where this data is coming from. But there are a lot of factors at play and this is pretty high-level data on what could be going on. It doesn't account for changes in how the company operates, the number of warehouses that are spinning up, how packaging and shipping has evolved (moving between warehouses to consolidate multiple orders into single shipments, etc), the massive spike in orders during the pandemic...

But really, What's your goal here? It seems like you just want someone to say you are right instead of discuss? If you wanted to discuss, I'd expect that numbers thrown out would have some sort of backing behind them and displaying curiosity as to why things may be operating a certain way as opposed to already deciding how things work.

They do. I've seen it. It's been in the works for years. Each time I've worked in the warehouses things have changed. It's not fully automated, but improvements have been made.

> Why it is not happening?

Amazon has been working on robotics for years and has been incorporating it into their warehouses for a long time.

https://www.supplychaindive.com/news/warehouse-robotics-auto....

Not sure how much I agree with this, but a buddy of mine for years talked about how problematic it was for warehouse workers to fight for higher wages and more support because their jobs would likely be automated away in the near-ish future. His argument was that these jobs are not intended to be long-term career jobs and that by pretending they are, you run the risk of doing people a disservice as they stay longer and they become less employable over time.

I'm cofounder of a small company and wear many hats - writing code, roadmap planning, mentoring, product design, etc. The diversity of skills needed is fantastic and loads of fun.

But the biggest benefit is I get to set set the culture of the company without having to answer to anyone else. I worked for years in corporate tech companies (FAANG) and while I could create little pockets of healthy spaces, there were always people getting in the way of creating a truly psychologically safe place for people. It's a huge relief not having to worry about that anymore and instead I can fully tap into the psychology of motivation, treat people with fairness and empathy, and be transparent without getting into trouble with leadership. It's made the job more satisfying and everyone we work with gets along amazingly well while being incredibly supportive of each other.

I often wondered why it was a different URL and that it wasn't enabled by default. This is explains it really clearly why it always felt disingenuous. Thanks.

> It's not a search engine.

I'm curious how this is going to play out over time. They way I interact with ChatGPT is very very different from how I interact with Google. When I try to use them the same way one of them fails in frustrating ways.

> When you use it for the many tasks it IS suitable for it's really, really impressive.

I completely agree with this. For me I've found ChatGPT to be very useful in helping to generate ideas, learn about things, or explore topics that I don't fully understand. Basically if I'm curious about something, then ChatGPT is really useful. The more I use it, the more I find that I'm poking at responses with follow up questions. It feels much more like a conversation and my interactions/approach is changing as a result. I'm now finding my approach with ChatGPT to start broad ("What's the difference between ____ and ____?"), followed by more questions to dive deeper ("Can you tell me more about ____ and provide some examples?"). It does have it's limits, but I find the way of interacting and teasing out the details that I'm after to be far more interesting and useful. And the more I use ChatGPT, the less I want to use Google. At this point, Google is mostly just simple searches only like "which service is streaming ____?" or "restaurants in my area".

Great advice.

I have tried this often, while it is really useful, sometimes it isn't enough. What I found more useful a good chunk of the time (on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit..) is to start blocking people. There are some people that are so far off the mark that what they say not only gets in the way, it actively erodes the quality of what's out there. I've found it far more beneficial than just shrugging and moving on.

> Can you blame him?

Absolutely. Good business owners know their limits and how to utilize people that have the skills they don't have. It doesn't matter if he "hasn't needed to do it before." He's an adult with multiple companies under his belt. He should absolutely know better and that fact that he doesn't is breaking trust consumers have with his ability to lead efffectively.

Where's the reference to grade school coming from? It wasn't in the original post.

I love the color coded approach for this, but to problems for me:

1. I can't tell the difference between the pink and the purple in the formula. The text is fine, but the formula isn't. 2. I have no idea what "signal" means in the "spin your signal" so the single sentence explanation is completely useless to me.

This bums me out a bit because I think there's something really great here.

I don't think you are off the mark.

(from https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/userguide/UsingE...) > Server-Side Encryption – Request Amazon S3 to encrypt your object before saving it on disks in its data centers and then decrypt it when you download the objects.

Yes it looks like it's at rest. It automatically decrypts if you go through S3 APIs to access the objects. The big leaks were due to S3 buckets being public which I believe means that this new encryption on by default won't actually help.

The only thing Encryption at rest gives you is comfort in knowing if Amazon servers get compromised - not if your servers that have permissions to pull the data get compromised.

With that said, it is a good step in the right direction. And additional security added helps address at least some use cases.

This comment doesn't even begin to capture how off (and concerning) the data is. I'd love to see some demographic analysis of funding.

> I always wonder how desperate and depressing it can be for being a deafblind

Here are some things I've learned that have changed my perception of things a bit:

1. The later in life disabilities come into play (especially around blindness and deafness), the harder it tends to be for people. It's not just the adjustment and learning new things - it's also the loss. But for people that are born with the same set of limitations, it's usually just the norm for them so less traumatic in general. This is an important distinction a lot of times because it can be easy to lump everyone into the idea that it's "desperate and depressing."

2. There are thriving communities and educational institutions where people can find others that are in the same boat. Us non-disabled folks tend to not know about them because they can fly under the radar, but they exist and people can find a lot of support in those circles. Sure, it's going to be limited given the population size and bumping up against the abled-focus world can be incredibly tough, but it isn't as grim as we tend to think from the outside.

The most common these days is a "tactile" approach where one person uses sign language and the deaf-blind person holds their hands to "listen". There's research going on to make American Sign Language more streamlined to support this sort of interaction, but while that's doing on, in the US at least, it's common to have people just sign ASL. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GrK3P15TYU

Blindness is a spectrum though so it's possible that some deaf-blind people will have some sort of ability to see (usually takes the form of tunnel vision). In that case, they can still communicate similar to deaf individuals but it's usually modified so that the hands remain much much closer to the face (stay within view of what they can see).

What an odd coincidence. I was just telling someone about this two days ago.

Barbara Walters did an interview with a man that's deaf-blind and uses Tadoma with her. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PmKKfpmifg&t=295s

The interview itself is dated and we've moved beyond a lot of the "doomsday" description of deafness and blindness (and deaf-blindness), but it's still interesting. And Walters herself credits the man as being one of the most inspiring and memorable interviewees she's ever had.

> I told the contacts at Stripe that I would do a write up about what happened from my point of view to help them understand what happened to me. I figured it would be good to do that write up publicly to help both Stripe and potential Stripe customers understand what happened and how it was resolved.

Sucks that you had to get to this point, but thank you for taking the time to do this and being rational about it. Being able to review what went sideways is invaluable for big companies and complex processes on their end. Having customer input can really help push things in the right direction for everyone (including existing and future customers).

(FYI: not affiliated with Stripe. Just glad to see people pushing things forward in a way that is not only productive but can have positive impact on people.)