It’s really quite disappointing to see how fast just copy/pasting AI responses has proliferated, even into things that don’t benefit the copy/pasters. I’m doing an online course currently that has absolutely no benefit outside of learning the content (i.e. the certificate or whatever you get for completing means nothing) - yet classmates are very clearly just copying/pasting in responses for the exercises. How does that benefit them? More than any slop I’ve experienced thus far, this instance has made me the most worried/sad/pessimistic to see. If even people who are supposedly motivated to learn (why else would you pay for this course?) just revert to the easiest AI slop path, what hope do we have for avoiding it in stuff that more resembles “work”?
The EHR company Epic uses a similar naming scheme for the slimmed down version of their EHR (Sonnet) and mobile app (Haiku). Their Apple Watch app is Limerick.
Saw that coming. Just like Google did with the SEO heist a person bragged about a couple weeks ago, if you make big tech companies look foolish they are going to react quickly.
And the tweet fundamentally misunderstands how ahref works. If google killed the site in question, ahref would have no idea given they have their own crawl.
This is still baffling. The tweets make it sound like they're competing against google and stole traffic from google, but their landing page makes it look like they're some sort of business modeling SaaS? Why would they be competing against google?
They are competing against another business (not google), and through AI generation of content (based information gathered from the competitors site map) they were able to capture web traffic from Google that would previously have gone to their competitor.
The issue isn't just low effort affilate spam pages piss fighting with each other. It's that they were trying to sell the technique as a product to people who make actual content so that they could steer viewership of their other high-quality-content competitors towards AI generated garbage.
Basically a weapon to taint your competitors brands by redirecting their viewers away from their content to ad saturated AI garbage.
Pure speculation and just trying to connect dots... I wonder if they realized they are losing a lot of money on ChatGPT Plus subscriptions. Sam tweeted about pausing sign-ups just a few days ago: https://twitter.com/sama/status/1724626002595471740
Lots more signups recently + OpenAI losing $X for each user = Accelerating losses the board wasn't aware of ?
No way OpenAI cares meaningfully about losses right now. They're literally the hottest company in tech, they can get stupendous amounts of capital on incredible terms, and the only thing they should care about is growth/getting more users/user feedback.
> they can get stupendous amounts of capital on incredible terms,
This may be the problem: at some level OpenAI is still a non-profit, and the more capital they accept, the more they're obligated to produce profits for investors?
Perhaps Sam was gleefully burning cash with the intention of forcing the Board to approve additional funding rounds that they had explicitly forbidden, and when they discovered that this was going on they were apoplectic?
I had an email from openai last night saying I now have to credit up front for api usage, rather than paying at the end of the month. Thought it was a bit odd for user paying like $3 a month for embeddings. Then looked at the news.
I think they have cash issues. Can’t get more uses due to lack of gpu, and current users are costing too much.
Arc is way ahead on browser UX. Opening links in Pinned Tabs into a modal over the Pinned Tab content is exactly how I want to use link aggregator sites
Simply a great example of using engineering and inventiveness to solve the problem they had. I remember noticing the screen having a flash, but because it coincided with the 'bang!' noise it felt natural.
Matt Levine frequently discusses the fact that losing billions of dollars means at some point, someone trusted you with billions of dollars. Which new employers (especially banks) look on favorably.
In particular, because the people are management who don’t lose anything when investors get wiped out. The solution is clawing back money that execs paid themselves with these embezzled (on a risk-adjusted perspective) funds.
You can apply the same thing to people management. Who cares if you're a shit manager, if you've managed 100 people that's still going to be looked upon more favourably than someone who's managed 20 people really well for a 100 person management position.
Applying it to execs is probably a simpler comparison. Shit exec means you were still an exec, so you can probably get hired somewhere else as an exec.
Totally agree. I give out my password to friends because their current tiers (4k also means you get 4 screens) make it seem like I’m paying extra to be able to do so.
There were seemingly odd hoops for customers to jump through to have their purchases qualify for Smile. Didn't type in the 'smile' URL? Too bad, no donation for you. One of the oddest was requiring push notifications in order for mobile purchases to count (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21233815).
Amazon in my country has an image problem. Sure people use it, but people hate it for "killing the high street" and other such nonsense.
Facebook adverts picking random local charities and showing how much they've raised is far better, run them on amazon's front page too.
The local hospice I choose has raised £3k via amazon smile. That's far better PR than them giving £1m novelty cheques to some remote city based charity.
Of course it had an impact. It's guaranteed to just be something that's not seen as 'sexy' internally, and therefore has probably had no-one championing it, and it gathered dust and finally... someone just wanted to kill the code.
I've seen it happen first hand in similar sized companies.
I'm quite convinced the motivations for both the creation and teardown of this donation program must have come from the money people, not from the techies. It must have been a tax write-off. Nothing else makes sense, knowing how strongly Amazon is a cost-cutting company.
I would often forget to type "smile" when searching for stuff, but then I'd just add to cart, close the window, and go to my cart via smile. That seemed to work.
But I think we can all see this for what it is — belt tightening. Will they increase other philanthropic activities to the tune of what they were previously giving away via Smile? I would be very, very surprised if so.
They actually might. Whatever the overhead was in managing and tracking payments to that many charities based on payments from that many customers had to be significant. Instead, they could just throw 50 mil across the top 10 each year and not have to deal with managing the smile program anymore.
I imagine there could be ways to make their philanthropic donations more efficient. What I'm saying is I doubt they are actually going to donate this amount, and achieve greater impact (however that is measured). I imagine they are going to launch programs that they were already going to launch, donating to whatever charities they favor for other reasons. For example, if they're building a new office somewhere, they can give a bunch of money to charities in that community, to build goodwill in the community.
But these donations are not done purely for altruistic reasons — they're calculated decisions that also help the corporate entity. There's nothing wrong with this, and they'd still be doing good. But it's not the same as letting your customers decide where to donate hundreds of millions of dollars.
I always assumed having to type the smile domain was more about making sure they didn't have to make both an affiliate payment and a smile payment on the same order.
Seemed like an easy way to cut off affiliates while appearing to be generous. Maybe I'm just too cynical.
Oh but they weren't forcing the customers to go to smile and strip the affiliate attribution for their session. Why, they don't even provide a link for the customer to click! The customer is choosing to actively navigate to smile themselves (when prompted by t he reminder at the top of the amazon page). So obviously that means Amazon can't be accused of doing anything nefarious to screw their affiliates (or, more seriously and litigiously, their advertising partners) out of their due credit for the sale. The customer simply chose to switch to smile. And it's all for charity so who could possibly complain?
www.amazon.com sets cookies for (*).amazon.com, though. Session cookies (and affiliate info) could therefore still be accessed on smile.amazon.com. I think affiliate attribution is just discarded regardless of cookie presence.
They wanted you to turn on push on mobile so they could pollute your Lock Screen with ads. I did it and promptly set iOS to deliver them silently because it got really annoying, but it was an easy way for the EFF to get some money from purchases I was making anyway.
It was also in this weird spot where they wanted to use it for PR but simultaneously wanted to shove it beneath the floorboards so people won’t mass adopt it.
On android they did the asshole thing and detected if the notifications were disabled and turned off smile. No ios hiding the true notification state there.
That’s because smile was invented as a way to bypass having to pay Google for the referral link; incentivize people to retype the link before actually buying it was the ultimate goal.
There’s a row in PA listing Biden with 104.3% of the vote in a block with 1285 votes (the differential increased by more than the total number of votes). Data error?
I also see 3 blocks in PA of 25k+ votes with 90%+ Biden (one is 97%) - can someone better at statistics tell me how likely that is due to chance given the other values (assuming the data is reporting accurately)?
Expected. Last time round, Clinton got 82% in Philadelphia. And mail-in voting was majority Democratic in most places this year.
You'll see similar, on the face of it absurd numbers in the other direction in very red areas for the in-person vote, where the few Democrats available mostly voted by mail, so virtually everyone voting in person voted for Trump.
Philadelphia normally goes for the Democratic candidate by around 80%, and mail-in voters this year are disproportionately Democratic, so it is not unusual that some blocks of main-in ballots in Philadelphia county would be 90% Biden. Note that the total vote (mail-in + election day) in Philadelphia county for Biden is exactly 80%, so there doesn't seem to be anything anomalous here.
It's a reference to the famous (perhaps misattributed) quote from Stalin: "Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything."
