A while back, one of the image generation AIs (midjourney?) caught flack because the majority of the images it generated only contained white people. Like…over 90% of all images. And worse, if you asked for a “pretty girl” it generated uniformly white girls, but if you asked for an “ugly girl” you got a more racially-diverse sample. Wince.

But then there reaction was to just literally tack “…but diverse!” on the end of prompts or something. They literally just inserted stuff into the text of the prompt. This solved the immediate problem, and the resulting images were definitely more diverse…but it led straight to the sort of problems that Google is running into now.

Aww, why didn’t he stay the course? Things have been going so well!

I think they claimed they’re not discriminating against browsers, they’re just better at identifying adblockers on Firefox or something.

Illegal to do…what? Not offer high-res videos? To have any delay before streaming videos? To refuse to serve you videos, even if doing so caused them to lose money? How would you enforce that on Google, much less on smaller startups? Would it apply to PeerTube instances?

Google sucks for doing this. It’ll drive people to competitors–hopefully even federated competitors. But laws to ‘fix’ the problem would be nearly impossible to craft–and would be counterproductive in the long term, because they’d cement the status quo. Let Google suck, so that people switch away from it.

Well, fair. But even in that case, they have every right to degrade your YouTube experience, as owners of YouTube. As ISP (I mean, assuming NN was still a thing) they couldn’t selectively degrade traffic, but YouTube has no obligation to you under net neutrality.

This has nothing to do with net neutrality. Google is not an ISP. With or without net neutrality, Google could fuck with YouTube users.

There’s an important difference, though, especially with Lemmy. You used XMPP to communicate with particular people. When Google convinced, whatever, 70% of users to use Talk and then slammed the door shut, the smaller instances were no longer viable. People on those instances lost contact with their friends. They aren’t going to just chat with whoever else happened to be left outside the walls.

But I don’t look for specific people on Reddit, or on Lemmy. Any large-enough instance is fine. Just like people moved from Reddit to Lemmy, they can move from one instance to another. A major rift could drop the quality of the experience, at least for a while, but the instances would still be viable. They’re not suddenly useless the way an isolated Jabber server was.

FTX stole from customers. Binance didn’t sufficiently spy on its customers. They are not the same.

You think Google was fishing for VC money?

H1B holders are chained to the employer (as are other visas), but green card holders are not. Source: green card holder.

That works if you’re dominant in the market, and you have companies rushing to make software for your platform. If you’re not, you end up as an also-ran platform with a handful of half-baked ports (like every “smart TV”).

Let’s be real, the Navy continued to stick with Windows XP…

Yeah, “small and below 5 lbs” describes like 90+% of Amazon deliveries.

They did save millions of lives, though, and allowed us to stop the constant quarantines months or even years early, whatever their motivations (and I’m not as cynical about that as you).

Meanwhile, all the Internet smartasses who love to criticize the drug industry non-stop did exactly jack shit.

Much of the research happened long before COVID–at a loss. There’s a reason this miraculous new mDNA vaccine technology appeared out of nowhere just in time for the pandemic: researchers had been working on it for years already, using investments and borrowed money. Government grants just went to finishing the vaccine and scaling up so quickly it was kinda mindboggling. They didn’t just get to stuff the cash in their pockets.

If the EU bans Chinese cars, that’s not capitalism in action.

Got any examples? Between Walmart, Etsy, AliExpress, Best Buy, MonoPrice, Home Depot, and Wayfair, plus the fact that nearly every major store has online shopping and delivery…I really can’t think of anything I could only get on Amazon. To be quite frank, I think the US government’s case is sorta ridiculous.

I mean, if people have lost faith in Amazon, they sure don’t show it with the amount they spend on it.

That’s basically an exploit. Different ‘products’ can be related, and the reviews are supposed to be useful across them. The most obvious examples are just different colors of socks, or different sizes of shirt. Sometimes it’s variants on a product: one with a handle and one without, or different models of TV with the same screen, or whatever.

But it’s not Amazon who makes those connections, it’s the companies entering product data. Some of them abuse it, and say products are related when they’re not at all. Since there’s millions of products listed, it takes time to identify and fix the false associations. In the meantime: people looking for headphone stands see reviews for whisks.

But yeah, quality has gone down. It hits some product categories a lot worse than others: cheap electronics is a shitshow.

Sure. But they’d make similar amounts of money (possibly more) by selling non-counterfeit goods.

They want their market to be open to third parties, because otherwise those third parties are gonna launch competing platforms. Better if they stick with Amazon, and Amazon gets a cut of the sale. There are thousands and thousands of Chinese companies selling products on Amazon, and many of them are fantastic deals. If Amazon blocks them, they all move to AliExpress, and maybe that really takes off and bites into Amazon’s market share.

But when you consider the sheer number of products offered on Amazon, it’s hard for them to separate the good-but-cheap from the crap counterfeit bullshit. And as you say…they make money either way, so it’s not the highest-priority problem to fix–though as I said in another comment, they are aware that if enough products are crap, people will lose faith in Amazon as a whole, so they’ve tried different techniques to block bullshit reviews in the past.

But if somebody else wants to put in the work to filter shitty knockoffs from the results page? Well, that’s fine with them! They make money selling you the real deal products, too–likely more, because their cut of a more expensive original product is gonna be higher.