Their prices stay lower, so if the person buying the laptop ships around even a little bit, they will likely buy from one of the non-affiliated sites.

So… I don’t think that’s necessarily how it works, at least not in aggregate. The first issue is the market capture you mention: Amazon has a sort of “soft” market capture-- you’re free to buy stuff from wherever, of course, but Amazon encourages customers to stay in their ecosystem, and also doesn’t permit sellers to set prices lower off-site for products that they list on Amazon (e.g. if they want to have a sale on their own website, that sale price must be reflected on Amazon, too). Those are some of the ways that Amazon exerts “soft” market control, which we both recognize is enough for algorithmic pricing to work.

Google also has this kind of “soft” market control… And they are generally much wider-reaching than Amazon. For instance: You suggested that people will “shop around.” How do people shop around? They probably use a search engine, and their search engine is probably Google. If Google was trying to interpret intent and guide their shopping decisions, why wouldn’t they privilege companies using “personalized pricing” in the search results, and bury non-participating competitors? Similar things already happen with ads. So when the user “shops around a little bit,” they are probably doing so in the context of the first page of Google results… Which, of course, Google is in control of.

Some people will clue in and search through other channels, or have retailers that they prefer, and visit directly… But many people will not bother/know to, just like they don’t bother/know to check CamelCamelCamel for Amazon price history to see what the algorithms are doing. Sometimes it’s lazy or complacent, but lots of the time they just don’t understand that it’s happening, or the degree to which it affects them.

You don’t think companies would opt into letting Google manage “dynamic pricing” for them on a per-user basis? Travel sites already offer this for airlines after you signal intent, such as a destination and date range… And sellers on Amazon already use tools like Sellery to algorithmically reprice items without human supervision. Some products change price hundreds of times per day as a result.

Big retailers like Walmart are trying to make “personalized pricing” work, which tries to anticipate price tolerance based on past shopping behavior on an individual basis.

So it’s not a stretch at all IMO to imagine Google offering a “personalized pricing” service that you can install on any website, right under the script tag for Google Analytics. Or Amazon, or Walmart, or whoever-- They all have mountains of data on us.

Let me know if you find out lol

Interesting. How do you find that out?

And in fact, they never did.

Can we go on land yet?

s/“a god”/“finished for the day”

H e m p

Some of them are built so that the back doesn’t fall off at all.

I could see the (USB-?)C adapter taking the worst of the wear-and-tear, and maybe being more resilient than plugging the 3.5mm directly into the device. Imagine the travesty if it turned out that USB-C adapters turned out to be the solution to fragile headphones all along!

Pocket? Idk, it seems natural to me that moving around with a device in your pocket, plugged into a pair of headphones would cause bending and twisting of the cord, which would wear it out over time.

And lots of other stresses, like accidentally getting them caught on something and yanking them out of your ears, wrapping them up to put away in a bag/pocket, etc. It’s no wonder I wore out so many pairs.

OTOH, the only wired listening device I own now is a headset that I wear at my desk, which I expect to last forever because it’s subject to none of those stresses.

The main thing to know about Inscryption is that you wanna know as little as possible about Inscryption before you play.

Also if Inscryption works for you, check out the other Daniel Mullins games. He’s got mould-breaking down to his own quirky idiosyncratic science.

Venn diagram of Lemmy users and Mary Poppins stans barely touching.

If that works, you should try it with a product that you aren’t interested in too and compare the results.

Sound was quite atrocious, downvoted 👎

“Legitimate interest” is a concept from GDPR, which is the EU’s major legislation around digital rights. “Legitimate interest” is an extremely soft concept that basically says “a company must have some reason that is not obviously bullshit to process your data.” That includes advertising. “We need to know your age, gender and city so we can decide what ads to show you” is considered “legitimate interest.” See? Soft.

What it doesn’t cover is “We just think it’s desirable to accumulate as much data as we can about you for no particular reason and maybe we can just sell it one day, idk.” That would not be considered “legitimate interest.” Similarly, asking for e.g. a user’s phone number but having no particular explanation for why you need it would not be “legitimate interest.”

So when you see “legitimate interest” cookies as a category, you can interpret that as “cookies that have some purpose-- including advertising-- as opposed to literally no purpose other than superstitious data hoarding.” Block them.

Those kinds of patterns are already emerging! That “mulling the result through a loop” step is called “reflection,” and it does a great job of catching mistakes and hallucinations. Nothing is on the scale of doing the whole problem-solving and implementation from business requirements to deployed product-- probably never will be, IMO-- but this “making the LLM a component in a broader system with diverse tools” is definitely something that we’re currently figuring out patterns for.

What are some shortcomings in your view?

Mom can we have Linux?

No

sudo Mom can we have Linux?

What the hell kind of second-rate DBMS doesn’t encode gender into its primary keys SMDH!!