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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: May 14th, 2024

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  • I don’t think they’re owned by Amazon, but the shipping email gave me an “Amazon Logistics US tracking number”. I guess that means Amazon handles warehousing and shipping? I don’t know what the practical difference is between buying on their own site (which used Shop.com for payment processing, fwiw) vs buying on Amazon.

    There are classes of products that are basically impossible to find locally now. Or if you can find the products, they’re outrageously expensive. One example is computer cables. 20 years ago I could walk into any dollar store and get all kinds of cables and adapters for $1-5. Now the only things I see locally are, like, $30 HDMI cables. I’m not paying $30 for a cable, especially not when that money would be going to another huge corp like Best Buy or Target. I’m willing to pay a bit more to shop local but there are limits, and there are so few truly local places left.


  • If that fails I do a web search and buy from another platform

    This is something where I think we could benefit from the wisdom of a community.

    Naively searching the web will generally yield >90% results centered around Amazon. Even if you exclude all Amazon domains, you need to sift through all the listicles and “review” sites that are really just Amazon ads with Amazon affiliate links inside.

    Same deal if you want to use deal aggregators like slickdeals. The overwhelming majority of posts there are from Amazon, or subsidiaries like Woot.

    Heck, recently I bought something direct from a brand’s own web site, only learning that they shipped through Amazon when I got the Amazon tracking number. I’m honestly not sure if I could have known that before completing my order.

    It is getting ever harder to avoid giving Jeff Bezos more money.


  • Yeah. The newer versions of Dall-E, GPT-Image, and similar cloud apps seem to have subnetworks specifically for text. They’re worlds better than they were just a year or two ago. Like, you can twist them into generating semi-coherent-looking text logos, or make a cartoon character wearing a T-shirt with some text on it.

    I’ve seen some complex pipelines with open models, where people train loras specifically to fix the things the base models suck at, like hands, text, etc.

    But it’s still a really dumb idea to generate a whole presentation slide or infographic that way, for a wide variety of reasons. If you ever get decent results, just consider yourself lucky. I mean, even the people with the skills to do this well (who are few and far between) would find it way more trouble than just, you know, making slides the normal way.

    The incompetence we keep seeing from Microsoft is staggering. I can only assume this is malicious compliance. I imagine some exec said “everyone needs to use AI for everything” and everyone below them said “okay you dumb fuck, here you go”.