You're right, but I didn't realize that till later. Except for the original "Parable of the Sower" was from Jesus not Olivia. But I also thought of Olivia's first.
Same @ my tests w/ video game trivia questions: they might not be extremely popular facts and most humans would struggle to answer them ad-hoc but the facts are in Wikipedia and I'm pretty certain Wikipedia is in the 15T tokens of the training material.
Got me jobs, helped me hire other people, got me a ticket to some of the big technology debates and then helped me win one or two. Gave me a place to write cat obituaries and heavy-metal reviews. Launched Feb 27, 2003 (20 years last month) and I haven't regretted it for a microsecond.
We agree, AWS is a clean break, ads is way more messy.
But ads only works because of Amazon retail's sorta-kinda-monopoly position. It's still a big distortion of the market. But I don't have a bright idea what to do about it.
Isn't it kind of self-correcting? The more Amazon pushes products sold by third parties, the worse shopping at Amazon becomes. The worse shopping at Amazon becomes, the more people will shop elsewhere and not see the ads.
Absolutely. Every HN thread about Amazon retail is littered with comments about giving up on shopping there and finding a better experience (e.g., less junk, cheaper prices, better selection) elsewhere. If anything, the growth of Amazon Ads has pushed e-commerce spend to Walmart, the actual leader in retail.
I agree 100%. However, a lot of my woes with Amazon are due to inventory commingling- because I make sure to only buy Ships & Sold by Amazon items.
With that said, Walmart is beginning to push 3rd party sellers a lot online too, and filtering for items sold by Walmart can be difficult. A lot of times items show up as in stock in search results only to actually not be in stock when I finally load the product or cart pages, and Walmart will often switch these to in-store pick up automatically which is frustrating as the nearest store to me is quite far. I’ve had good luck shopping at Target but their prices are almost never as competitive.
That sounds like a frustrating experience. I don't shop at Walmart because Seattle is kind of a Walmart desert (whereas Amazon return drops are everywhere), but it always seems like there are comments promoting it in those threads.
lmao as someone who spent a couple months at Walmart global tech, they may be the leaders in retail but they are not stealing Amazon customers. If anything Target, Wayfair, Best Buy, TJ Max etc are taking more market share.
Last time I shopped at Walmart, it was a mess and their e commerce is even worse, products come all beat up, 3rd party policies are a free for all atm, and the scams are even worse there
The other stores' taking e-commerce share would be consistent with the spirit of the comment, IMO.
I agree on the third-party products/listings. I have to assume that Sam Walton is turning in is grave because it all seems like a perversion of old-school merchandising.
Amazon retail is a tent pole... Not unlike a blockbuster movie that might not even be profitable, but creates profits for all kinds of businesses around it.
I'm not sure we do. Amazon retail at this point from a business perspective is nothing but a way to sell ads. Talking about retail losing money when not counting ads is like saying google search loses money when not counting ads. And no, Amazon would still be able to sell ads if they had a smaller market share.
Yes, Elasticsearch is an option, but many (most?) instances haven't installed it, including mine.
And even when it is installed, it doesn't do what I want.
In addition to my own posts, I want to index the public posts of those I follow, and I want to organize by topics that aren't found in the text of the post, and I want to "follow" search terms similar to how the latest Masto allows following hashtags.
None of this is available with Elasticsearch even if it was enabled on my instance.
Everybody's saying "well of course you can't stop people crawling so just give up." I don't buy it - you also can't stop people from driving too fast or smoking in restaurants or torrenting popular movies. That's why we have lawyers and courts and legislation.
If Mastodon gets content licensing right, you'll still be able to ignore it and go ahead and crawl data when the license forbids, it scratches your itch and you're ethically challenged. But then if you do anything with that data in public you're going to get legal nastygrams. That may not even stop you, but it will drive up the cost of your lack of ethics.
Ask any security pro. You can't ever stop all the attackers. All you can do is make it more and more expensive to do bad stuff, and eventually most of them won't have a strong enough incentive to pay the price.
There are plenty of people on Mastodon - the vast majority is my bet - who, when there's a choice of content licenses, will cheerfully say "make it public", and then there will be excellent full-text search.
Are you saying there is currently confusion as to whether a Mastodon user inadvertently issues a license for their copyrighted content to be included in full text search, simply by using Mastodon?
If not, what is preventing someone from sending a legal nastygram now, given that no such licenses currently being granted?
Or are you saying that Mastadon users are not able to legal prevent indexing based on copyright alone (i.e. fair-use, or not substantial enough to qualify for copyright protection), and thus we need to force followers into some kind of private contract that they would break?
I believe they meant physically. Just because you can't stop people physically smoking doesn't mean you can't stop them by social or legal (which reflects social) means.
Similarly, just because you can't stop people from indexing Mastodon physically, doesn't mean that you can't stop them by social or legal means. However, I would add that the internet is really hard to control because of how open it is, which is why we patch security vulnerabilities instead of only relying on publicly shaming or arresting malicious actors on the internet.
Realistically, what's going to happen with "courts and legislation" is that anyone who wants to do scraping will simply operate from the jurisdiction where it's legal. That's the crucial difference between regulating roads or restaurants, and regulating stuff on the Internet, at least in the absence of Great National Firewalls.
