Some online retailers (such as galaxus for those in Europe) include return statistics on the sale page against comparison brands as well as price history graphs. This helps stamp out two of the core complaints about amazon: fake reviews and fraudulent discounts.
If you look around, you'll see products on Amazon occasionally marked as "frequently returned". It has steered me away from a few purchases.
Unfortunately, they haven't really countered the "keep creating new accounts" drop-shippers. Some categories are especially bad about this- if you find a back massager that you like, buy it in bulk right away, because the model and probably seller won't be around by the time you want another.
There is a consequence to shifting to LLMs. Despite Siri's reputation, it is a well used product(1), and despite HN's constant noise, Siri actually works very well for the purposes of controlling other apple devices in ways that I've noticed to be far better than Alexa (the other digital assistant that I regularly use).
Switching that to an LLM-based represents a massive increase in computational requirements without pushing the needle for most requests. While fancy, users don't want to sit and have a verbose ChatGPT style conversation with Siri, they just want the command run and done. So this means any advertised change to Siri will need to be sufficiently large such that Siri could seemingly decode any request with minimal or no follow-up questioning, anything short of this will be largely derided, and face the same backlash as current-era Siri.
At the moment siri answers many trivial requests without the use of an LLM. Yes you can speak to siri with relative terms or needs based requests, e.g. saying "It's dark in here" will result in siri turning on the lights in just the room where the request was made(2), even if other receivers in the house heard the request. It's also smart enough to recognise that if you label a room as something like the "office" but later made a request for the "study", it will prompt if actually meant the "office".
The big caveat here is that Siri's abilities change based on the language selected, non-english languages appear to have less flexibility in the type of request and the syntax used. Another factor is that requests during certain peak periods appear to be handled differently, as if there are fall-back levels of AI smarts at the server level. To get around that new Siri will need to be largely offline, which appears consistent with Apple's new AI strategy of local models for basic tasks and complex requests being sent to private cloud compute.
Like Apple Maps, I anticipate the pile-on to Siri will go on far longer than deserved, but what does seem certain is that change is coming.
(1) Apple have stated that Siri is the most used digital assistant. However I have not found any supporting data for this claim other than Apple's own keynote address where the claim was made.
(2) Requires that rooms are set up in homekit and there are per-room based receivers, such as a homepod in each room.
On avoiding travel: One doesn't have to make a principled decision, it's entirely rational to avoid travel to the USA.
There's a growing body of holiday makers with neither a criminal record nor evidence of carrying a banned substance, who have been turned away from the USA for nothing more than the vibes of the CBP. In some cases these people were strip searched and thrown into federal prison without any kind of evidence and no wrongdoing whatsoever.
An informed person would be right in holidaying elsewhere, otherwise it's a gamble if they will lose the money paid for their holiday and flights.
On avoiding business with the USA: The tariffs and their mercurial changes create a type of instability where a USA-based vendor, at random, may no longer be able to fulfil their contract. It's incredibly damaging for our American partners.
> For the first time in my life, I have seriously started to consider moving me and my wife to a different country, which I hope I don't have to do but I am genuinely scared that they're going to detain my Mexican-immigrant wife.
from the rhetoric i reckon thats the implicit goal of all these policies in the end; just make things so chaotic and stressful people stop emigrating/naturalizing...
Yes it's a bit odd that the article poses the question if this will help or harm credit seekers. The point of the system is to provide transparency.
What does need to happen however is that these inputs are properly weighted such that those using FICO can make appropriate decisions. Similar to credit cards, numerous BNPL-purchases do not necessarily indicate that the debtor is in financial trouble. They could merely be using the services for the other conveniences they offer. Whereas seeking numerous loans is usually a negative metric.
The reason why social media and similar websites now have infinite scroll is because the next page button provided you with a circuit breaker to stop and reconsider if you actually wanted to continue or if you were just mindlessly scrolling.
So if you have a genuine intention not to use certain websites at particular times (e.g. work time), then having any kind of forced interruption can be useful for changing that behaviour.
If you're looking to create genuine change, then making those websites load slowly is even more effective than going cold turkey (because it minimises the dopamingeric effects.)
The friction makes me want to disable the measure before it makes me want to stop the activity. And unlike paging in forums, I can disable it. That’s why these measures never work for me.
If you don't actually want to stop, then these opportunities for pause do nothing, because in that pause you reaffirm that you do want to continue the behaviour.
This ties into why addiction is so powerful, while many people know their addictions are bad, they enjoy them and don't actually want to stop. I.E. They don't value the results of cessation versus keeping the addiction.
It's entirely possible to reach for your phone, then tap an app or load a website on your computer while being semi-aware of your actions, and this is typical for people with ingrained behaviours. These people can start scrolling instagram or twitter without really thinking about it. Having a forced circuit breaker gives these people an opportunity to stop and reconsider their actions.
At the end of the day only you have full agency over yourself.
Let me try to illustrate: I might want to stop after the "circuit breaker" comes up for the tenth time. But the nine times before are annoying enough that I'll disable it before I reach the tenth time. Maybe not initially, but after a few days. In other words, the friction vs. frequency they exhibit, in conjunction with how easy or difficult they can be turned off, makes them not work for me. And I haven't found anything of that kind that works well. Either the friction is high enough that I'll rather disable it, or it's too low to actually serve as an effective deterrence. What would be needed is something that "ramps up" in just the right way.
I do understand your position and reasoning, but I'm hoping to explain that you're asking too much of the system. Nothing is going to overcome your personal willpower, if you want to see that site or load that app, there isn't any local technical solution that is going to stop you.
These systems are trivial to defeat, after all you turned them on, you can just as easily turn them off, but that's not the point at all. It's not meant to be an unsurmountable technical wall. The point is to provide you with a moment to actively think about your actions instead of an autopiloting behaviour that lands you on a website or app that you are trying to avoid using. People who use employ these types of "circuit breakers" do so because they find that they frequently find themselves autopiloting to these services. For these people the circuit breaker is their moment to realise "oh hang on I said I don't want to be doing this while I'm working on my project", rather than "oh this is inconvenient, I'll just disable it for the time being".
The stopping power comes from you, not from the crutch.
I heard an interesting (and certain to be inflammatory) take the other day:
"When we visit the USA, we look at it the same way you might look at Fiji or some other underdeveloped country."
While I can explain part of that view as differences in cultural priorities (i.e. US residents valuing extensive highways over high speed rail). What I can certainly agree with is that internally in the USA, some states rate of progress far exceeds that of others to the extent that without significant leadership at the federal level there will certainly be "two Americas".
Apple asking for what are effectively lead fees was easily the most news-worthy and reported change made for the EU market.
Which raises the question: how are we this far into that change with Apple being informed that the EU meant something else?
To me, the optics are terrible on both sides. It's easy to be uncharitable to Apple for preserving their income stream, but it's equally just to be uncharitable to the EU for fishing for reasons to leverage what will certainly be a disproportionate fine instead of clarifying their position early. It's quite clear what they want is fine-revenue, not actual developer protections.
>It's quite clear what they want is fine-revenue, not actual developer protections.
I don't know how much out of touch with reality must be someone to make such a delusional statement. For everyone else out there, it's just clear that Apple failed again with their malicious compliance.
If they were interested in fine revenue they would have fined Apple far more in the first place. 500 Million is a slap on the wrist. They could have fined them up to 6% of Global Turnover.
And the EU isn't dependent on that Pocket Change either.
Maybe you should try travelling outside of the US once, and broaden your horizons
Where school kids tend to get stuck is that they'll hold contradictory views on how fractions can be represented.
First it'll be uncontroversial that ⅓ = 0.333... usually because it's familiar to them and they've seen it frequently with calculators.
However they'll then they'll get stuck with 0.999... and posit that it is not equal to 1/1, because there must "always be some infinitesimally small amount difference from one".
However here lies the contradiction, because on one hand they accept that 0.333... is equal to ⅓, and not some infinitesimally small amount away from ⅓, but on the other hand they won't extend that standard to 0.999...
Once you tackle the problem of "you have to be consistent in your rules for representing fractions", then you've usually cracked the block in their thinking.
Another way of thinking about it is to suggest that 0.999.. is indistinguishable from 1.
>However they'll then they'll get stuck with 0.999... and posit that it is not equal to 1/1, because there must "always be some infinitesimally small amount difference from one".
Honestly teachers are half of the problem because they seem to make a game out of pointing out these sorts of contradictions instead of teaching the idea that you need "to be consistent in your rules for representing fractions".
That and every next step in math classes is the teacher explaining that most of how you were taught to think about math in the previous step was incorrect and you really should think about it this way, only to be told that again the next year.
https://diffusionillusions.com
https://dangeng.github.io/visual_anagrams/
There are also videos with the process explained
reply