leviathant

I have to wonder what people are eating that leads to the toilet problems I hear complaints about. Do you not have enough fiber in your diet? I'm a 47 guy and I can't remember the last time I clogged a toilet.

We built our place in 2017 in Philadelphia, and our kitchen island has electricity. We did get non-servicable LED ceiling lights. It took 10 years before one of them started to blink. Rather than wait around for all of them to fail, I replaced the entire house with newer, slimmer LED lights, for less than the cost of a fancy floor lamp. The new ones let you select brightness and color, and were a breeze to install, and run much cooler, temperature wise.

I don't miss having to change light bulbs, and upgrading the lighting one a decade is a trade-off I was willing to make.

The spam bots I regularly deal with on reddit are using accounts that are several years old. I'm not sure if they are hacked, purchased, or something else.

The funny thing to me is that, for years, Shopify has been trying to position their Shop app as an Amazon alternative, but just can't get the traction. Shopify and Amazon are two very different business models - but man, Tobi and Harley want that money!

ChatGPT comes along, and suddenly it has a real shot at the global customer capture that Shopify could never manage, so they jump in bed, and release a series of garbage collaborations, some of which got rolled back (Shop on ChatGPT, but you can only have one item in your cart, lulz), and some of which just keep mutating. Shopify fumbled pretty badly, and it was wild to watch the entire industry go from "You'll be buying through the LLMs this year" to "So, let's talk about AEO, GEO, and discovery..." like nothing happened.

None of the AI companies seem to have their heads screwed on straight about ecommerce, except potentially Google. The payment processors are sniffing around, too, since at the end of all the discovery, that order needs an easy means of processing payment.

I think your open-source, decentralized, interoperable marketplace is a noble effort, but you're up against multi-billion-dollar business interests who are looking to capture revenue from processing, and have dozens, if not hundreds of people on the case not only from a development standpoint, but from a business and marketing standpoint. Maybe you've got a team like that under you, too. Best of luck.

I've thought from the start that the strongest possibilities for ChatGPT to monetize boil down to advertising (so many ethical problems), and becoming a marketplace that finally dislodges Amazon. But that is a VERY tall mountain to climb.

Oh wow! Sounds dangerous.

Do more cyclists kill drivers, or do more drivers kill cyclists?

I say this as someone with tens of thousands in audio equipment, as someone who can hear the compression warble in the hihats and the cymbals - audio quality with earbuds doesn't actually matter. It's like the argument for audio quality in cars - you're listening in a hostile environment, and convenience wins over fidelity. I remember walking to work one time with over-the-ear Sennheisers attached to my iPod and it felt ridiculous, and unsafe.

I finally capitulated to earbuds when they started giving them away with the Pixel phones. The "find my" feature basically justifies the pro-prices, to me, because my biggest complaint about bluetooth earbuds in my own use case was how easily they're lost. I've lost and recovered my Pixel Buds Pro 2 a couple of times now. When traveling a lot by train and plane, the convenience of pocket-sized noise-cancelling earbuds has become worth it for me.

But when I'm on meetings, I'm wired in. During the pandemic, I lost track of how many times my colleagues' Airpods would sputter out and die in the middle of a client meeting. Then they'd switch to wired headphones and their Macbook microphone. They sounded better, they could hear better, and there was no battery power sword of Damocles anymore.

The traffic from Meta was absolutely crippling my old (but still active) forum. I would try blocking the user agent and it would route around that, I blocked by IP range, and eventually put Cloudflare up. Meta is malware in every possible sense, as far as I'm concerned. Nothing they do is for the greater good.

My first job was "stockboy" at Kmart in 1996, at 1996 American minimum wage, and part of the job involved cleaning toilets.

And, honestly? If more people had to clean toilets in use by other people, maybe we wouldn't have so many folks expecting other people to clean up after them. I see countless posts in my Facebook group about trash on the street. In the time it took to take a photo and post it to social media, they could have picked up the trash and taken it to a nearby bin.

But I suppose that experience goes two ways. Some people think they're above the human condition, to the point where they won't even clean up after themselves, even in their own homes. And other people recognize that it's actually not that hard to clean things up, if you just do it. We all have good and bad days.

It took a little while because I was struggling with the scale a little bit at first, but I found my house. I appreciate that you tore 95 and 676 out! Keep it up - consistent art direction usually beats hyper-realism, for me, and I appreciate the bizarro world you've concocted.

Flagging seems extreme, but this is a very low information post about audio adapters, with a smidge about amplification. I went in expecting some kind of arduino-to-electromagnet jiggery-pokery, but I suppose that just means set myself up for disappointment.

There is an Ikea in south Philadelphia not far from the Old Swedes Church, but they do not do anything to promote the Swedish history there, however brief.

The colors of the flag is Philadelphia pay homage to this Swedish heritage.

And now automate and scale that with Claude/OpenAI/Gemini/whatever. It's insidious and terrible.

What I do love is that when you're a mod, that post history isn't necessarily hidden.

I cannot emphasize strongly enough just how deeply pervasive the spam is at Reddit. I'm a mod at the ecommerce subreddit, and I've only caught some of the AI-powered marketing operations because in one particular campaign that was making fictional claims about things I had direct knowledge about. Once I looked into the post history, and started to untangle the web of accounts that formed a self-supporting community of posters and commenters, just subtle enough to get genuine engagement, but specific enough to make the kind of posts that the LLMs will siphon up and regurgitate.

It's not just shady little operations. I'm speaking specifically about the SCAYLE ecommerce platform, in my example. They've got Zalando money to play with, and as a German platform that's trying to break into the North American market, it appears they've made a bet on indirectly spamming the LLMs with fictional tales of commerce replatforming horror stories. At first, they're some of the more interesting topics in a sea of really useless posts, with contributions from people who seem to have some real experience with enterprise ecommerce. I was a little suspicious, but these interaction campaigns were spread out enough that I didn't put the pieces together for months. Of course, to go back on what I said at the top of the paragraph, maybe SCAYLE is shady, and I'm giving them too much credit.

The good news is, some of the AI powered tools that mods have access to are getting better at surfacing suspicious patterns of behavior. However, I still find I have to manually address these campaigns.

In the cat-and-mouse game with these marketing jerks, I'm always reluctant to surface what's working and what isn't. This is an interesting post, but it's going to make things worse. Ah well.