Amazon Files CFAA Lawsuit Against Perplexity's Comet Agent.
Amazon Files CFAA Lawsuit Against Perplexity's Comet Agent. The Silo Wars are heating up!
Topic: Amazon
13 mentions · 18 chunks · 17 episodes
0.0× distinctiveness vs baseline
?
How much more common this term is here than in ordinary English. Higher values mean the topic is more characteristic of this corpus.
1.8x burst in 2023 Q4
?
Peak quarter intensity across the topic's active span. Higher values mean attention was concentrated into a shorter stretch rather than spread evenly over time.
Topic summary
?
A short read on the topic's time range, peak episode, and strongest associations. Use it as the quick orientation before drilling into examples.
- Amazon appears in 18 chunks across 17 episodes, from 2023-10-09 to 2026-06-15.
- Its densest episode is Bits and Bobs 10/27/25 (2025-10-27), with 2 observations on this topic.
- Semantically it travels with Apple, Hacker News, and search result, while by chunk count it sits between model quality and collective intelligence; its yearly rank moved from #14 in 2023 to #63 in 2026.
Over time
?
Raw mentions over time. Use this to see absolute attention, not relative rank among all topics.
Observations
?
The primary evidence view for this topic. Sort it chronologically when you want concrete examples behind the larger pattern.
This week I learned about the history of Secure Electronic Transactions (SET).
...cker. So an industry coalition set out to do a proper, deep solution: SET. Then Amazon came out and people went, "Oh I can buy whatever book I want on here? Here's my credit card!" The limiting factor was not the purported strength of t...
Amazon Wins Court Order Blocking Perplexity AI Shopping Agent
Amazon Wins Court Order Blocking Perplexity AI Shopping Agent "The order sides with Amazon's claim Perplexity accessed password-protected accounts without a...
Alexa isn't your assistant.
Alexa isn't your assistant. It's Amazon's assistant, situated in your kitchen.
Human-in-the-loop can slow down the computer's loop.
... 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:
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...
Modern society pulls towards more efficiency.
...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...
Why do people use acronyms?
...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...
An insightful Hacker News comment about the power of brand:
...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"
"'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!
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...
When you 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.
...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.
Asking an assistant to do an action is like hitting that "I'm feeling lucky" button.
...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...
Confidential compute is only part of the story.
...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...
The frame of "agents" implies agency.
...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 mash together Apple's goal (relentlessly high quality) and Amazon's tactics (bottom up emergent entrepreneurialism).
It's not possible to pick and choose the best characteristics of your peers and do them yourself.
...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.
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 ...