fortituded0002

My favorite is when I buy something from Prime and it says two day delivery once it ships in two weeks.

After the novelty wore off, Alexa was pretty useless in our home. It eventually turned into a voice command to set a timer while cooking and asking it to play Spotify. But after many times when it would kick in and interrupt us in the middle of conversations - when we didn't even come close to saying the wake-up word - it got in the way more than it helped. Really glad to have it turned off and put away now.

This is all solid advice but seems to be unrelated to gaining an unfair advantage.

I interpret "unfair advantage" to be more about employability and how valuable you are in the field (starting with inside the business you are in) and not about putting more money in your pocket.

The CEO class is a mixed group of people, some of which are incredibly smart. But your point is well taken and worth considering. They are "just people" too.

On a side note, I can't figure out all the responses to this comment. Everyone seems to be piling on and talking about stuff totally unrelated to your point.

I think this is what happens when game developers make websites. They don't realize that people want a link that they can share.

Amazing leap you made there. But by all means, let's let people run rampant and not have any boundaries and then shrug when violence happens against minorities.

> There is no system better than complete free speech, because it allows the most amount of information to be passed back and forth and gives people the opportunity to decide for themselves.

I used this think this, but then I figured out that I live in a world where I'm not always welcome by the "majority" and have seen first hand how these things can go sideways. Now I view this attitude as a privilege and that it typically comes from someone whose rights aren't all that impacted by the tyranny of the majority.

I'm not familiar with them but things make a lot more sense now. The writing seemed pretty off with lots of odd signals about how to think, how to fall in line, and spell out what our outrage should be. The talking points seemed a little too clean-cut and less about a discussion.

Not much to see here. Time to move on.

> pretty much everyone says they prefer the full price to be shown up front in search result pages. But, as someone who is privy to a ton of A/B testing in this area, the opposite nearly always results in higher conversion

That may be true, but those are measuring two separate things - customer desires and customer behavior. Just because it results in more sales doesn't actually mean the customer still wants that. I know I didn't when I rented a car recently but I was pretty much stuck when picking up the car at the airport. I would have definitely found another solution if I knew upfront how much the real cost was going to be.

> at the same time I'm not a fan of the news media's quest to find some of the biggest outliers possible

I don't consider being in the hospital wanting to watch Netflix to actually be that much of an outlier. It's pretty common and I know for certain that I'd want to do it (along with many many others) if I were in that situation.

Meta's has a corporate value for "Focus on long-term impact" which is trying to counter short-term gains that don't produce over time. They also talk about how you can make a "big impact" as an IC there, which from what I know is true since you can work on big projects, but they aren't necessarily the projects you'd want to work on if you have some form of value system that includes empathy.

Years ago, I met someone that boasted about doing auto-play for videos in your feed so that get sucked into related video after related video. He was particularly proud of implementing a feature (he worked it out with the PM) where you could only delete one video at a time from your history instead of in batch. The goal was to make it harder to purge your data and frustrate the customer so they give up. Ultimately they wanted more data on you so that they could further "optimize" the app to better suit/manipulate you. Pretty sure this is what they mean by their company core value of "focus on long-term impact."

> I've also been in positions where my 'people managers' advised me against my interests.

Generally curious here - do you mind adding some examples/details? Looking back at my career I can't think of a time when any 'people manager' advised me against my own interests. I am no longer an IC and since I haven't experienced this, I worry it's a blind spot in how I'm interacting with others.

I have the same overall reaction. But suspect that your analogy with the calculator to distract some people reading this. Difference being that one is user input error and the other is either ChatGPT misunderstanding what's being asked or just lacking training data and presenting an answer that's incorrect.

By yes, an eye roll from me as well. A few months back I heard the horror stories about how a bot answers with confidence and now it's the main complaint in articles about why it's busted and dangerous. It doesn't bring anything new to the table and doesn't push the conversation forward in any way.

Are these sales numbers or how much they make after everyone else gets their cut? Is that what they mean by "taxes"? Steam takes 30%. The publisher can easily take 50%, but they may have negotiated better terms due to the funds they put in on their own and that it's an existing game.

> Yet, their number of warehouse employees is still growing like an exponential curve. Compare the number of items shipped per 1,000 warehouse employees in 2012 vs 2022 and no it’s not wildly different.

No idea where this data is coming from. But there are a lot of factors at play and this is pretty high-level data on what could be going on. It doesn't account for changes in how the company operates, the number of warehouses that are spinning up, how packaging and shipping has evolved (moving between warehouses to consolidate multiple orders into single shipments, etc), the massive spike in orders during the pandemic...

But really, What's your goal here? It seems like you just want someone to say you are right instead of discuss? If you wanted to discuss, I'd expect that numbers thrown out would have some sort of backing behind them and displaying curiosity as to why things may be operating a certain way as opposed to already deciding how things work.