14 mentions · 19 chunks · 18 episodes
.... In prior cycles, consumer and infrastructure evolved sequentially. Google and Amazon built massive consumer audiences first, then over years exposed capabilities as infrastructure. AWS didn't follow S3 overnight. The cycles were long ...
Amazon Wins Court Order Blocking Perplexity AI Shopping Agent "The order sides with Amazon's claim Perplexity accessed password-protected accounts without a...
...ayer (APIs, imports, manual input) Layer 1: Source platforms (Spotify, Netflix, Amazon, etc.)
...tible futures. One path is already obvious: low-funnel, intent-driven commerce. Amazon is the archetype.You express intent, the system completes the action then takes a cut. The other path is much less clear: brand, meaning, trust, emot...
Alexa isn't your assistant. It's Amazon's assistant, situated in your kitchen.
... get in a doom loop that causes harm in the outside world. For example, some of Amazon's warehouses are designed for robots, not humans. Although any system, even "airgapped" ones, there's some information leakage. If the inner system r...
A post on Bluesky reacting to the Amazon outage: "this entire week has been one single PSA: "the cloud" just means "someone else's computer" and that "someone else" is one of three companies...
...ople who are transacting for extremely small time horizons have less incentive. Amazon famously found that every 100ms of delay translates to 1% of revenue. So what if things that most people regret doing, we introduced just a little bi...
...t matter what the actual word is, as long as it's distinctive. Same reason that Amazon has so many slop brands, they don't need a good word, just one that's novel that they can trademark. The acronym is a kind of jargon, a compact packa...
...on from a single game to an integrated game, which incentivizes cooperation. On Amazon in the last decade we've seen the rise of faux brands–made up words that no one has any repeated connection to. It looks like a brand, but the trust ...
"'Alexa, what do you know about us?' What I discovered when I asked Amazon to tell me everything my family's smart speaker had heard" That's the kind of stuff that you capture from people speaking out loud in their homes. Im...
Alexa is not your assistant, it's Amazon's! Similarly, ChatGPT is not your assistant, it's OpenAI's. When Claude makes an artifact, it feels like it made something for you. You didn't make i...
...ou talk to Alexa you have to hope you're staying within the grammar some random Amazon employee took the effort to configure sometime in the past.
...gle Search, the downside is tiny; just immediately do the query again manually. Amazon's search results have famously become quite scammy and crappy, which means trusting Alexa to buy an item for you has gotten harder. The common AI ass...
...ust to the hardware. But it also verifiably locks the cloud host (think Google, Amazon, Microsoft) out from peeking at what is happening. But the risk factor that most people care about as a user is not so much the cloud host, but the s...
...ent you didn't deeply trust to roam around your house out of your view. Imagine Amazon sending a nuclear-fusion-powered humanoid robot to your house for free. Would you allow it into your home? What about if it only worked if it was plu...
It's not possible to mash together Apple's goal (relentlessly high quality) and Amazon's tactics (bottom up emergent entrepreneurialism).
...It's not possible to have all three of the broad bottom-up entrepreneurially of Amazon, the quality of Apple, and scale.
Amazon has a famous 70% rule, that most decisions should be made with 70% of the information you wish you had. There's an asymptotic curve of usefulness of ...