There are no viable competitors because nobody is big enough to take on Amazon. Anyone with aspirations to will inevitably just get undercut and run out of business.
There exists some people, notably me, that refuse to use AMZN due to this type of shit they allow on their platform.
I got hooked on them during college because I got tired of getting shafted by the local university bookstore.
Used to be tax free as well since they were e-commerce related. But state comptrollers later closed that loop hole since they realized how much revenue they were losing.
Then some time in 2020-2021 learned about the abuses to their workers, awful working conditions, near impossible quotas. Then came the merchant abuse stories of AMZN using the purchasing data to push out their own white label items, advertising/ranking merchants below those items (sometimes even cheaper to undercut them). Then as a consumer, the quality of the items ordered from AMZN has dropped significantly.
Free shipping. Free returns. 1-day shipping/same day shipping. It’s all a gimmick and you pay for it in one way or another.
All of those factors have caused me to move my money away from AMZN completely.
Yes I realize warehouse division is nearly subsidized by AWS division. In the long run, it won’t matter unless there is a significant
What did I do:
Easy, purchase directly from manufacturer where possible. Shop local for similar items.
Still try to avoid big box stores as much as possible. For example, using mcmaster.com in place of big orange/blue.
Sure I pay for shipping but I end up buying in bulk to offset it anyways.
Sure it takes 3-4 days to arrive.
I likely won’t get free return shipping, but so far have never had to return items. ("Free returns” at most big box stores are now factored into the cost of items these days. So you pay for it even if you don’t use it)
But in the end, I am getting quality products. I think I can only recall a couple of cases where item did break under normal condition (dog harness). But they were happy to replace at no cost. No need to return defective item.
> Free shipping. Free returns. 1-day shipping/same day shipping. It’s all a gimmick and you pay for it in one way or another.
Yes but I actually much prefer that cost to be included in the list price compared to sellers trying to hide part of the purchase price in inflated shipping costs.
Some emacs setups. (much more variability than VIM)
Some VIM setups.
The thing that all of these have in common is that they are designed for experts, not for every user. Also each one of those is a custom full platform app (or primarily text based) vs web app.
Conflating beginner tools and expert tools (user-friendliness) is usually where everything go wrong. For most people, Wordpad was enough, Microsoft Word was for when you need a bit more control. But an expert tool is Adobe InDesign where you have the maximum control. And the UI is quite different.
Same when learning to code, a basic text editor like Gnome's Text Editor or Nano is all you need. But an expert will reach out to Intellij's for his project because his needs are more complex.
Is that last one actually Garage Band? I used to use it a very long time ago and I don't remember it ever looking like that. It does, however, look basically the same as Logic does today. I'm not sure if I'd consider it a good GUI or not.
You got downvoted for the snark, but damned if it ain't a reasonable opinion.
If you read the seminal "Design of Everyday Things" by Norman Rockwell you'll come away annoyed at half the physical _doors_ you walk through... here in 2025.
I've been pushing these terms to help us talk about and design better interfaces at work...
Static Interfaces - Your supermarket's pretty much a static interface. The frame of whatever website you're looking at. These are static. They've very powerful and were pretty much all you had before digital interfaces became ubiquitous. There's an initial learning curve where you figure out navigation, and then for the most part it's fairly smooth sailing from there provided the controls are exposed well.
Adaptive Interfaces - These interfaces attempt to "adapt" to your needs. Google is probably one of the most successful adaptive interfaces out there. A query for "Shoes" will show a series of shopping results, while a query for "Chinese food" will show a map of the restaurants nearby. The interface adapts to you.
I call this narrow adaptive because the query triggers how the UI adapts. I think "wide area" adaptive interfaces where the interface attempts to meet your needs before you've had a chance to interact with the static interface around it are tremendously difficult and can't think of examples of them being done well.
Adaptable Interfaces - This last interface bucket includes controls which allow a user to adapt the interface to their own needs. This may include dragging icons into a particular order, pinning certain view styles or filters, or customizing the look or behavior of the applications you're working with.
Finder, the iPhone's basic UI, terminal, basic music catalog management (e.g. iTunes)... these are interfaces which are created once with an initial curve of varying difficulty to learn and then live on for decades without much change.
Conclusion - The best interfaces combine an intuitive static frame, with queried adaptive elements, and adaptable features to efficiently meet the needs of a diverse group of user flows instead of attempting the one size fits all approach (which leaves 2/3rds of people annoyed).
Another category, searchable interfaces, may fit into one of these or may be it’s own separate category. But tools like MacOS Spotlight or the command palette in some editors are very useful for power users. Having every command available through a minimal set of fuzzy keyboard strokes is a significant productivity boost, while also allowing some degree of discoverability.
As an aside, if anyone at Adobe is reading this, this sort of tool would be an excellent addition to Illustrator, Photoshop, etc. InDesign already has something like it, although that implementation leaves a little to be desired.
Or you can focus on a single class and produce the best UI for that class.
Static Interfaces for the common actions that everyone does. Best as basic utilities in the operating system (Notepad, The calculator)
Adaptive Interfaces where you have a few advanced layouts for people that wants a bit more. (Wordpad, Notepad++, Kate,...)
The expert tools (Blender, matlab, Adobe Illustrator,...) You will have a small userbase, but they're often willing to pay for a good tool that will solve their needs.
I am guessing some of those loom operators transitioned to mending and patching, and operating the new machines. Guessing we will do the same. Just not all of us will make it.
Yes I believe Docker/AKS somewhat recently defaulted to least privelege for container users, so you end up having to explicitly grant access to every little thing...
What Rust helps with is memory safety, which is stuff like dangling pointers and use-after-free. Memory leaks are not a safety issue, they're an efficiency issue.
> Why are people so crazy about Rust?
The whole memory safety thing isn't actually the reason so many people love Rust. In the Rust 2024 community survey, 82% of users agreed that "Rust allows us to build relatively correct and bug free software." Memory safety is part of that, but there's a lot more to it.
So, for example, while Rust does not guarantee the lack of memory leaks, it does make them relatively hard to produce by accident in the first place. This is due to the intersection of a few different parts of Rust's overall design.
Blazor is a great developer experience but when you put it side by side with the other technology solutions (react, angular, anything really) its so slow that you will quickly be told to use something else...
Please explain that to me? Where is the illegality and unconstitutionality? Agencies are part of the executive branch. This particularly agency was created by executive order. The executive branch can police itself. Just because some people don't like it doesn't mean it's illegal. What is illegal is USAID spending money that is violating the current president's executive order. Bringing that to light is not illegal. In fact it is the duty of the executive to make sure that his orders are being carried out.
That's not how our government works. The executive branch does not get to pick and choose what parts of the budget approved by Congress it wants to execute. [0]
Also, a later act of Congress (The Foreign Affairs Reform and Restructuring Act of 1998, 22 U.S.C. 6501 et seq.) established USAID as its own agency.[1]
In the federal government of the United States, the power of the purse is vested in the Congress as laid down in the Constitution of the United States, Article I, Section 9, Clause 7 (the Appropriations Clause) and Article I, Section 8, Clause 1 (the Taxing and Spending Clause).
The power of the purse plays a critical role in the relationship of the United States Congress and the President of the United States, and has been the main historic tool by which Congress has limited executive power.
I dont know if people are lying and/or intentionally gaslighting. DOGE brings information to Trump, Trump acts on it. The illegal part is made up by their political opponents who have apparently being using governmental agencies use to influence other countries to also influence the US - that’s where they went wrong.
You are completely and utterly wrong. The US constitution gives Congress and ONLY congress the power to spend tax money. Musk has absolutely no legal authority to unilaterally stop payments approved by congress. What Musk is doing is a very intentional effort to usurp this authority illegally. Musk should really end up in prison or deported for what he is doing right now.
In the federal government of the United States, the power of the purse is vested in the Congress as laid down in the Constitution of the United States, Article I, Section 9, Clause 7 (the Appropriations Clause) and Article I, Section 8, Clause 1 (the Taxing and Spending Clause).
The power of the purse plays a critical role in the relationship of the United States Congress and the President of the United States, and has been the main historic tool by which Congress has limited executive power.
Not confident Trump will prevail: Scholar on his attempts to take Congress' power of the purse Professor Deborah Pearlstein joins Morning Joe to discuss her column for the NYT outlining some of Trump’s actions implemented in his first few days in office and why she says Trump is hardly the first president to claim broad executive power, but the difference is not just the enormity of his claims, it's that the administration mostly doesn't try to craft legal justifications for its actions.
You keep saying Musk and you are right Musk has no power, he just reports information to the President Trump who makes any call. So that part is irrelevant. The government can say we want to spend $1,000,000 on hammers but it doesn’t mean you have to spend $1,000,000 on one hammer. If the president finds you can buy a hammer for $10 then he can direct to 100,000 of them there instead. Also, if he finds government agencies are not performing on their obligations he can get rid of them. And lastly, a lot of changes are going to take effect until the next budget, which will be ratified by congress. Just because he says “we’re cancelling X” it doesn’t mean he’s stopping it now but once a new budget it passed.
If congress passes a law to give X dollars to Y department or organization than it is blatantly and utterly illegal for the Executive branch to just say "Nah" and not do so.
"The government can say we want to spend $1,000,000 on hammers but it doesn’t mean you have to spend $1,000,000 on one hammer."
This isn't the level of detail we are concerned with. Congress says that USAID gets $5 billion a year then the Executive branch HAS to transfer that money or else it is in direct violation of the US constitution. Your entire argument is nonsensical and irrelevant.
There must be some confusion because they aren’t cutting programs approved by congress. They are literally cutting funds that were NOT explicitly approved by congress only.
They weren’t the only ones building it, for what it’s worth. They were well aware of that.
If you knew a country wanted to build a weapon to cripple your own country, and you had the necessary skills to build that weapon, would you feel come compulsion to try and build it first in order to protect your family and friends? To protect yourself?
Absurd, AI has had zero impact in the everyday life of most of the population of Earth, in fact the biggest impact has been upon the wallets of speculators
I can tell you from personal experience that chatgpt is a game changer in universities and schools. Close to 100% of students use chatgpt to study. I know in our university pretty much everyone that attends exams uses chatgpt to study. Chatgpt is arguably more valuable then Wikipedia and Google for studies.
i don't think they are gonna allow chat gpt while giving the end semester exams, right? or quizzes/assignments? Unless there is some homework aspect to it, it still can act as a tool not a crutch. If student's use it as a crutch, then yeah they are not gonna do as well I presume.
This is EXACTLY what I remember people saying about Cell Phones and PDAs when they were popular in the 90s (people can't remember phone numbers any more), Google when it was first unleashed (people won't know how to use card catalogs and libraries any more), and then again about Wikipedia when it became popular. What actually happened was that behavior changed and people became more efficient with these better tools.
Let me add that this change compounds over time. More efficient studying results in more competent people. I believe it's very hard to measure the impact, but there is a very positive long term impact from how much these tools help with learning.
There was a posting, some time ago, about someone complaining that their young, primary-school-age sister was using ChatGPT to an absurd degree. I'm not sure that's a bad thing. She'll probably be one of the Thought Leaders, of Generation AI.
I think that ML will have a really big impact on almost everyone, in every developed (and maybe developing, as well) nation.
We need to keep in mind that ML is still very much in its infancy. We haven't even seen the specialized models that will probably revolutionize almost every knowledge-based vocation. What we've seen so far, has been relatively primitive all-purpose "generate buzz" models.
Also, don't expect the US (and many other nations) to take this lying down. Competition can be a good thing. Someone referred to this as the "Sputnik Moment" for AI.
It's going to be exciting, and probably rather scary. Keep your hands inside the vehicle at all times, and don't feed the lions.
Offloading all your thinking to a machine will not make you a “thought leader”, but rather a nitwit who can’t tie their shoelaces without asking ChatGPT.
It's like when we were kids and teachers said "you won't always have a calculator in your pocket". In 30 years, we might all have an AI model in a brain chip, who knows.
> Chatgpt is arguably more valuable then Wikipedia and Google for studies.
But ChatGPT is just a glorified Wikipedia/Google. For the consumers it's an incremental thing (although from the engineering perspective it may seem to be a breakthrough).
> But ChatGPT is just a glorified Wikipedia/Google
It really isn't, unless something really majorly changed recently. Neither of those you can query for something you don't know about. Lets say you want to find the meaning of a joke related to cars, Spain, politicians and a fascist, how you'd use Wikipedia and Google to find the specific joke I'm thinking about?
ChatGPT been really helpful (to me at least) to find needles from haystacks, especially when I'm not fully sure what I'm looking for.
I just tried it myself with ChatGPT o1 and with Claude's Sonnet 3.5, Sonnet got it after two messages, o1 after 4.
If you're unable to reproduce, maybe tune the prompt a bit? I'm not sure what to tell you, all I can tell you that I'm able to figure out stuff a lot faster today than I was 2-3 years ago, thanks to LLMs.
Additional hints that might help; the joke involves a car and possibly a space program.
I ran it 10 times with the extra information, and each time got a different result. I don't know if any of them were the specific joke you were after, I get the feeling it was just making them up on the spot. None of them are even funny
It seems to be censored with US puritan morality (like most US models), but I think that's besides the point (just like if the joke is "even funny" or not), as it did find the correct joke at least.
I just got a load of responses like "Sure, here’s a joke that combines cars, Spain, politicians, and a fascist with a touch of space humor: Why did the Spanish politician, the fascist, and the car mechanic get together to start a space program? Because the politician wanted to go "far-right," the mechanic said he could "fix" anything, and the fascist just wanted to take the car to the moon... so they could all escape when things got "too hot" here on Earth!"
Ok, that's cool. So because you were unable to find a needle in this case, your conclusion is that it's impossible that other people to use LLMs for this, and LLMs truly are just glorified Wikipedia/Google?
No, I don't think that LLMs are glorified Wikipedia/Google. I think they're a glorified version of pressing the middle button on your phone's autocomplete repeatedly
Yeah... when I googled it initially I guess I got personalized results. After I left the link here I clicked on it (bad order of operations) and was surprised to find a much different set of search results.
Go try to learn a college level mathematics concept from Wikipedia, then try to learn it from ChatGPT. The wiki article may as well be written in a foreign language
Yeah, and when I was in high school everyone used to refer to Encarta.
> I know in our university pretty much everyone that attends exams uses chatgpt to study.
And they shouldn't be doing that. They are wrong. Students should be reading suggested bibliography and spending long hours with an open book in a table instead of being lazy and abuse a tech that is yet in its infancy when learning concepts. Studying with a chatbot. Complete madness.
I don't know why you are being downvoted.
Learning from something that regularly hallucinates info doesn't seem right.
I think AI is a good starting point to learn about what terms to research on your own though.
OP is downvoted because of "students should be at a table with a book and that's it", like it's the 50s. LLMs can be wonderful study aids but do have plenty of issues with hallucination, and they should therefore only be part of a holistic research mix, alongside search engines, encyclopedias, articles and yes, books. Turning Amish is probably not the right way to go though.
If you want reputable sources of information, books are unparalleled like it or not, it's a fact.
> "students should be at a table with a book and that's it"
That's not what I meant (or yes if you take what you read literally):
What I meant was whole process that your brain goes through when you read, synthesize information, take notes, do an exercise, check answers, compare different explanations/definitions from different authors, etc. makes at least from my point of view a rich way to study a topic.
I'm not saying that technology can't help you out. When you watch for example a 3brown1blue video you are definitely putting good use of technology to aid you to understand or literally "view" a concept. That's ok and actually in many cases can be revealing. You can't get that from a book! But on the other side a book also forces you to do the hard work of thinking and maybe come up with such visualizations and ideas by your own.
Happy to be pointed as an "Amish" when it comes to studying/learning things ;) but I hope that I convinced you that what I explained has nothing of Amish but that you don't need a source of power to read a book.
> has had zero impact in the everyday life of most of the population of Earth
You do realise those two can be true at the same time, right? The first one is relative, while the second is absolute, so they don't necessarily cancel out.
I am personally using it for around 50% of my questions about all kinds of things (things I used to Google and get frustrated with bad results). And my wife uses it for about 40% right now, even or recipes and other bits. We both love it.
Work wise about to implement it and see how it does on some work we couldn't scale to humans.
I'm fairly sure the customer support agents I've been talking to recently were using an LLM to draft their emails. No idea if they were supposed to be doing so or not, but the style of sentences in their emails…
And I'm seeing GenAI images on packaging, and in advertising.
AI is definitely having more than "zero impact", even if AI has gone from being a signal saying "we're futuristic" (when it was expensive, even though it was worse) to "we cut every cost we can" (now it's cheap).
Zero impact is an exaggeration, but what others have pointed out is that there aren't a lot of companies primarily based on AI which are making a profit. Personally I can't think of any.
The only thing Absurd is the holdouts like yourself who refuse to see the impact the current gen of AI has on. Sure, you could probably say most people are not touched but there are definitely significant populations within the US and its only going to grow and spread.
So had the companies that crashed in the Dotcom Bubble. And still a pet food delivery service (like the infamous pets.com) can be a profitable and sustaining business now (> 20 years later).
this is an announcement not a cut check. Who knows how much they'll actually spend, plenty of projects never get started let alone massive inter-company endeavors.
