"After quizzing these companies about data practices, I learned that most are sharing what’s happening in my home with Amazon, too. Our data is the price of entry for devices that want to integrate with Alexa. Amazon’s not only eavesdropping — it’s tracking everything happening in your home."
#GeoffreyAFowler, 'Alexa has been eavesdropping on you this whole time'
The Lost Cause is my next novel. It's about the climate emergency. It's hopeful. $LibraryJournal called it "a message hope in a near-future that looks increasingly bleak." As with every other one of my books #Amazon refuses to sell the audiobook, so I made my own, and I'm pre-selling it on #Kickstarter:
"Es gibt nichts, was ich mehr hasse als diese Firma. #Amazon ist das Nordkorea des Internets. Die perfekte Diktatur. Als Händler haben Sie bei Amazon nur Pflichten und absolut keine Rechte. Für Amazon zählt nur der Kunde. Die Händler werden behandelt wie der letzte Dreck. Ein glücklicher Tag in meinem Leben wird sein, wenn ich diese Firma in den Wind schießen kann. Im Moment bin ich leider auf diesen Umsatz noch angewiesen." https://www.fr.de/kultur/literatur/antiquar-wolfgang-rueger-ich-bin-sklave-von-jeff-bezos-92393005.html
“Amazon has become a vestigial place, a retail colossus barely hindered by either competition or regulation, where prices go up as quality goes down, and the undifferentiated slurry of products from obscure brands is wreathed in inauthentic reviews.”
Time for a reckoning with #Amazon. @pluralistic in the NY Times is thorough and correct.
Jokes aside, it was bad before but now I have completely given up on buying ebooks or go through Kindle Unlimited as a result. Instead, I do it the slow way, via Goodreads or social media recommendations. That's the only way I know to cut through the noise, and I feel bad for the #WritingCommunity because they have to battle through this trash to be found 😔
#Amazon releases details on its Alexa #LLM, which will use its constant surveillance data to "personalize" the model. Like #Google, they're moving away from wakewords towards being able to trigger Alexa contextually - when the assistant "thinks" it should be responding, which of course requires continual processing of speech for content, not just a word.
The consumer page suggests user data is "training" the model, but the developer page describes exactly the augmented LLM, iterative generation process grounded in a personal knowledge graph that Microsoft, Facebook, and Google all describe as the next step in LLM tech.
We can no longer think of LLMs on their own when we consider these technologies, that era was brief and has passed. Ive been waving my arms up and down about this since chatGPT was released - criticisms of LLMs that stop short at their current form, arguing about whether the language models themselves can "understand" language miss the bigger picture of what they are intended for. These are surveillance technologies that act as interfaces to knowledge graphs and external services, putting a human voice on whole-life surveillance
Yelp has started publicly naming and shaming businesses that pay for reviews. The review site's new index documents businesses offering everything from a crisp $100 bill for leaving the best review to a $400 Home Depot gift card for a five-star review. It also lists every business whose reviews have ever been suspected of...
Rückkehr ins Büro: Amazon warnt Angestellte per Mail, andere US-Firmen drohen
In den USA verlieren erste Unternehmen die Geduld und drängeln die Angestellte stärker zur Rückkehr ins Büro. Teilweise wird bereits regelrecht gedroht.
TL;DR: #Shudder will be getting an ad- supported tier. If they offer this as a cheaper alternative, ok, but if #AMC+ eventually pushes this on current subscribers unless they pay more a la #Amazon, I'm out.
We already have an ad supported horror channel; it's called #TUBI.
Vor 20 Tagen habe ich in dem freundlichen, lokalen #Buchhandel ein Buch bestellt. Es ist immernoch nicht da. Ich brauche es für meine Ergotherapie. Bei #Amazon hätte ich es in drei Tagen gehabt. Ich finde Amazon auch irgendwie scheiße, aber ich verstehe, warum viele Menschen da bestellen.
Ängste um die chinesische Konjunktur, aber auch neue US-Zinssorgen waren heute zu viel für den DAX. Der Index rutschte ab und scheiterte dabei erneut an der Marke von 16.000 Punkten.
Yelp names and shames businesses paying for 5-star reviews (arstechnica.com)
Yelp has started publicly naming and shaming businesses that pay for reviews. The review site's new index documents businesses offering everything from a crisp $100 bill for leaving the best review to a $400 Home Depot gift card for a five-star review. It also lists every business whose reviews have ever been suspected of...
Do you prefer Twitch or YouTube for watching live streams?
Title. Curious if I should get a Twitch account or not as currently I only have YouTube. Not sure if I want another corpo ad machine in my life.
Jeff Bezos urged Amazon to flood search results with junk ads, FTC alleges (www.cnbc.com)
Amazon's ads strategy helped pump its profits while steering shoppers to higher-priced goods, the agency alleges.
FTC readies lawsuit that could break up Amazon (www.politico.com)
A case would be a high-water mark for FTC Chair Lina Khan who gained prominence criticizing the company’s dominance.
Fans of Chloë Grace Moretz sci-fi series distraught as Amazon cancels series despite ordering second season (news.yahoo.com)
Amazon has cancelled its original series The Peripheral despite renewing the show for a second season back in February....
Netflix: Streamer's expansion into gaming is 'natural extension' (www.bbc.co.uk)
Streaming hits such as the Queen's Gambit are being adapted as games as the streamer looks to expand.