For me it's a bit of both. I'm working on exciting energy software with people who have deep knowledge of the sector but only semi-decent software knowledge. Nearly every day I'm reviewing some shitty PR comprised of awful, ugly code that somehow mostly works.
The product itself is exciting and solves a very real problem, and we have many customers who want to use it and pay for it. But damn, it hurts my soul knowing what goes on under the hood.
I should have read this 12h ago! This afternoon, I tried to create my first simple agent using LangChain. My aim was to repeatedly run a specific python analysis function and perform a binary search to find the optimal result, then compile the results into a markdown report and export it as a PDF.
However, I now realize that most of these steps don't require AI at all, let alone agents. I wrote the full algorithm (including the binary search!) in natural language for the LLM. And although it sometimes worked, the model often misunderstood and produced random errors out of the blue.
I now realize that this is not what agents are for. This problem didn't require any agentic behavior. It was just a fixed workflow, with one single AI step (generating a markdown report text).
Oh well, nothing wrong with learning the hard way.
You call it silly because you could be doing useful stuff on your phone. I'd go one step further and say that even if you're slacking off that's not necessarily a bad thing. Everybody, including politicians, slacks off from time to time. Be it due to stress, awful sleep because the neighbor's dog barked all night, illness, or something else. It's just human and there's little wrong with it as long as you do your job well most of the time.
Which has me wondering if the entire point is to make the politicians critically aware of how absurd AI performance monitoring isn't as innocuous as those selling it to the politicians will make it out to be.
I obviously don't want politicians to be habitually slacking off, but everyone has good days and bad days. There are days where I spend half my time on HN instead of working (hello today), but I typically make up for it shortly afterwards by having a super productive day. The important fact is that, on average, I'm productive and deliver on my job duties.
Politicians should absolutely be held accountable, it's an important job, but I don't think they should be held to standards that we hold no one else to.
> Bezos nailed it on this topic: “[...] [I]n our retail business, we know that customers want low prices, and I know that's going to be true 10 years from now. They want fast delivery; they want vast selection. It's impossible to imagine a future 10 years from now where a customer comes up and says, 'Jeff I love Amazon; I just wish the prices were a little higher,' [or] 'I love Amazon; I just wish you'd deliver a little more slowly.' Impossible. And so the effort we put into those things [...] will still be paying off dividends for our customers 10 years from now. [...]”
> You should consider what won’t change, and the following is a (non-exhaustive) list of things that I think won’t change: I believe AI is and will continue to gain intelligence
Okay, but that way you can frame every ongoing change as a constant. "Change X will continue, and because it's already ongoing and will simply continue, I consider it a constant and therefore add it to my list of 'things that won't change'". But that's clearly not what Bezos meant.
I think it's pretty easy to see the statement is an oversimplification to the point where it loses pretty much loses all value. Bezos says customers want vast selection, but most would agree that the reason Amazon is garbage these days is because it's flooded with cheap crap. The selection is vast, but the pile of dung is so large that it's practically impossible to find a good product hidden underneath the rest of it.
I find Bezos' statement to be a bit oversimplified. For example Temu (and virtually every other Chinese E commerce) wipes the floor with price and selection. Costco is cheaper than Walmart. Yet Amazon is vastly larger than both.
Agreed. Without negative caveats, such positive statements are meaningless.
Customers want cheap goods.
Caveat: They don't want (to know that) those goods are produced by slave labour.
Customers want a vast selection.
Caveat: This should not include fake, shoddy or misleading listings
Customers want rapid delivery.
Caveat: And they want it cheaply, or ideally for free, without breaking their stuff, at times they are home or in a manner they can receive the goods while away from home.
Sorry this is a bit off topic (but relevant to your post).
I'm not American, but what do people like in Amazon, as in the retailer?
I have experience with the German Amazon, and often they're not the cheapest, they often don't have stock of the most popular items (as in the stuff you'd actually want, like iPhones or NVIDIA GPUs), and same day delivery, while nice, is something I can usually live without (and I'm willing to trade it in exchange for lower prices).
They seem to have an endless back catalog of cheap and cheerful mystery products of dubious quality, but I hardly consider that a decisive competitive edge.
Amazon is excellent at selling physical books. I can order pretty much any vaguely popular book and have it delivered the next day at a price rarely higher than anywhere else.
That’s Amazon’s core business philosophically, everything else is an add on or side project that happened to be profitable.
I think that just like the original sin of web development is trying to run apps in a document browser, the original sin of Amazon is trying to sell everything in a bookstore.
> I'm not American, but what do people like in Amazon, as in the retailer?
I'm not American either, but I use Amazon.fr occasionally. It has going for it:
* it's a trustworthy site. If I order something, I'm 100% sure I'll get it or get my money back. If I'm looking for something rather niche like an ESP32-S3 microcontroller, it beats buying on it vs a random site I've never heard of before that it will have longer delivery times and might be a scam or might have nonexistant support
* it has a large catalogue. I can buy coffee, kimchi, small electronics (PWM servo motors), larger electronics (toaster), power bank, USB C charger, mouse, outdoor furniture. It's easy to buy all sorts of stuff off it without hunting specialised physical stores or a ton of different websites. (of course for some things I know and already trust various websites or stores, so I buy off them; but for more generic or niche things, Amazon is pretty good)
* support, returns, delivery are all very good and there is barely anyone that is even close.
US Amazon isn't like that, but iphones and short supply GPUs aren't widely available anyway. Apple controls where you can buy an iPhone and NVidia controls who gets GPUs.
Yes, definately. I find the lack of discussion about time frames as totally unserious. Their starting assumptions could be all valid if clairvoyantly made in the 90s and they'd still be utterly useless in helping startups make decisions for that decade. However, if they knew there would be significant breakthroughs in the early 2020s, well that'd be something else. Though you know, they'd have to find some random ways to stay alive until then.
Bezos is making assumptions about human behavior in that quote, and those assumptions seem instantly obvious to any human who is asked, regardless of their experience or expertise with any business whatsoever. There is no instant validity possible with the AI assumption.
> You should consider what won’t change, and the following is a (non-exhaustive) list of things that I think won’t change: I believe AI is and will continue to gain intelligence
I think this is a miss-representation of what he meant. Given that AI will be capable and prevalent (cheap intelligence) what are the factors that remain constant? He goes a lot into demand for physical things, like resources and/or supply chain, which is true. If anyone can relatively easily create a digital service then those with capital and physical resources will have bigger moat.
I personally think what will happen with the demand for digital services with intelligence being cheap.
100%. This sentence in particular seems at odd with looking at constants:
> “Better product”: We need to define "better" clearly, but if you're basing this off your R&D efforts, I would very much fear the competition coming my way. If someone can use enough compute to copy you and use AGI to make a product better than what you currently have, is it still "better"?
IMO, better products is actually a constant that is anti-fragile to AI. Better products remain the best way to gain market shares for the foreseeable future (alongside solid marketing, ops and finance).
(total side track) There are other things that some customers want though:
- for the recommendations to offer me things I want or need, not things I just bought
- to be able to evaluate the quality of items rather than just the price of items
- for Amazon to extend it's brand around the items that I buy. "Amazon Recommends" is just so weak and offers no assurance or opportunity for loyalty. It's more or less meaningless and I suspect it's something that suppliers buy.
As every in business it's very difficult. I know that Amazon is humongous and knows it's business inside out. I am sure that Amazon insiders just feel tired reading other people's ideas about what would make things better, but on the other hand I do think that the narratives of business inevitability (and AI inevitability) are just false. Yes they have triumphed until recently, but what's happening in China really does undermine the idea that the future will be everyone just grifting to everyone else for a dime while the big corps enshitify anything that emerges from the primordial ooze.
Not that I think that what's happening in China is good.
> Except Dairy Queen, Wendy’s, and McDonald’s outside of the U.S. don’t have this problem.
Heck, even Ikea has successfully been selling ice cream (from self serve machines!) here in the Netherlands for like 20 years now. €0.50 back in the day, €1 now. Can't remember the last time all machines (yes, they do have at least 2 usually) required maintenance.
1. Size. DMA requirement is >=7.5b turnover in the EU, or worldwide market cap >=75b. Not the case for Spotify.
2. Non-provision of core platform services. It's not just "important gateway between business users and consumers", it's "important gateway between businesses and consumers *in relation to core platform services*". Core platform services are e.g. search engines, operating systems, browsers, app stores and so on. This is why Spotify isn't a gatekeeper.
And the exact same reasoning applies to American companies. Video streaming platforms like Netflix are also excluded for example, even though Netflix has a market cap >=75b.
Core platform services include "online intermediation services" and "video sharing platform services" both of which Netflix could be argued to count as. But I guess there are probably fewer than 10,000 EU businesses distributing content through Netflix?
I was under the impression that Netflix was not deemed video sharing platform because they don't actively dictate what is and is not allowed on the platform the way YouTube does. But maybe it was the 10,000 rule, who knows. To my knowledge the EU never made explicit why companies were not deemed gatekeeper.
At some point, labelling gatekeepers comes down to how many "gatekeepers" are there resources to go after.
Naming all potential gatekeepers would only set the EU up to look capricious when it still only had enough resources to go after its highest priority targets.
So there will never be an obvious rational line of who is in or out. Just the sued and unsued.
> he made his students work use pens while taking his tests
This is very common in the Netherlands, I think that's why it was a rule of his.
In general, the Dutch education system seems to be against pencils (at least this was the case until recent; I'm Dutch and mid 20s). You're tought to write using a fountain pen, not a pencil. In high school, you're allowed to switch to ball point but absolutely not to pencil. In university, write with pretty much anything you want, but... not with a pencil. If you do take your test with a pencil, there's genuinely a chance your teacher will give you a 0, although most of the time they'll probably be forgiving.
I majored in CS in the Netherlands and every test was done with good old pen and paper. Students still make mistakes all the time, which is why everyone uses a scrap sheet.
The product itself is exciting and solves a very real problem, and we have many customers who want to use it and pay for it. But damn, it hurts my soul knowing what goes on under the hood.
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