absynth

I just wonder how much unintended traffic they receive.

eg If they put DNS, NTP etc on it... Likely billions per hour or something equally ludicrous.

Deluge is likely an exponential understatement.

inflation and cost of living increases are much bigger factors than GLP-1.

An infinitely wide but infinitely short world should suffice.

I call this Caution Shedding.

see also: squirrel wingsuit.

On the other hand, do you really need 50x VGA cables? yes? YES?! ok, as you were! Keep them in the ever growing box.

The idea of grouping by same or at least like is great for de-cluttering.

Depends.

Is this for work? If so then QA, verification and similar tasks of a senior looking after juniors. They're book-smart and all that jazz but they're still juniors.

Only pedantically. Pragmatically it definitely stinks.

Max dose of WTF exceeded. Good stuff!

If this is the now, the future is going to get very very very unhinged. Not unlike last week.

...while you're at it, stop making sites that are unusable until all the analytic slop has loaded.

Why would doing something or taking action be dumbing down?

You are bristling with something like anger but it has nothing to do with what I wrote.

I'm off to go hiking. There are thousands of stars out there.

I asked Amazon for help with my account. They couldn't figure out the URL to get me where I needed to go. They said they needed to escalate. The question was definitely not complicated. They wanted to call me asking questions.

Meanwhile, Gemini gave me the url and explained what I needed to know in one reply. Problem solved. Same question to ChatGPT gave me the correct answer as well. I bet Claude or Grok would have also found the correct answer.

This is where things take a turn: Google.com/ddg/bing failed. amazon's own search failed. Its worth knowing that the good results from the chatbots pointed at Amazon's web.

Based on this one example, I could begin to think document style search engines are dead.

Presumably Amazon were trying to put me into their little Voice AI microcosm. They'd obviously (?) record my voice (yes) of me getting increasingly annoyed (likely) at some Voice Chat Bot (likely) and then they'd apologize (?) for not knowing (probably?).

Is that the goal? Waste 30 minutes of my time for what could have been answered by a chat bot but not a web search?

The underlying situation seems even weirder than simply trying to cut costs. I think Amazon has cut so many corners they have forgotten what shape they are trying to create.

I have only one answer so far: Their customer support has no idea how to navigate their own website and this is by design. This is NOT the customer support people at fault. Let that all sink in: Someone got a bonus for this service design. This is somehow optimal according to Amazon. Yet this style of service design will only get worse for paying customers. It will be much worse for non-customers.

Progress!

I don't think this is restricted to Amazon either. I think this is industry wide. The in-page chat bots are usually just as broken.

I routinely used to compile C programs on other compilers to find defects that one or another didn't find. Compiling on Windows vs Linux. You could summarize / minimize it down to compiling it with warning as errors etc but you'd be missing the point.

The point wasn't actual cross-platform portability even though that was a nice side effect. It was to flush out all the weird edge cases.

Edges like security flaws. Buffer overflows are usually platform specific. There are plenty of other ways to find these issues but simply recompiling for a different platform surfaces all sorts of issues.

You watched all that content. Did you take action on it? What did you make or do as a result?