10 ms·

But I can send my personal shopper and you'll be none the wiser.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
bradleyjg 1y ago
It’s possible to violate all sorts of social norms. Societies that celebrate people that do so are on the far opposite end of the spectrum from high trust ones. They are rather unpleasant.
- ToucanLoucan 1y ago
  Just the Silicon Valley ethos extended to it's logical conclusions. These companies take advantage of public space, utilities and goodwill at industrial scale to "move fast and break things" and then everyone else has to deal with the ensuing consequences. Like how cities are awash in those fucking electric scooters now. Mind you I'm not saying electric scooters are a bad idea, I have one and I quite enjoy it. I'm saying we didn't need five fucking startups all competing to provide them at the lowest cost possible just for 2/3s of them to end up in fucking landfills when the VC funding ran out.
  - SoftTalker 1y ago
    My city impounded them and made them pay a fee to get them back. Now they have to pay a fee every year to be able to operate. Win/win.
    - account42 1y ago
      Do those fees actually improve anything for the citizens who now have to deal with vehicles abandoned on sidewalks everywhere or does it just buy the major a nicer yacht?
- sublinear 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - bradleyjg 1y ago
    A place where you can lose you wallet and get it back with all the cash inside. The horror!!
    - sublinear 1y ago
      [flagged]
      - ghurtado 1y ago
        [flagged]
        sublinear 1y ago
        [flagged]
        tempfile 1y ago
        [flagged]
      - fireflash38 1y ago
        That's a very sad and lonely way to live.
        sublinear 1y ago
        I don't think we're talking about the same thing.
        account42 1y ago
        Obviously. You should heed the advice of other posters who told you to look up the meaning of the word.
- pixl97 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - Workaccount2 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - _proofs 1y ago
      this is such a wild comment -- there are countless products where regardless of purchase -- the user is still served advertisements. i have no idea what reality, or timeline, this comment belongs in. broadcast television, paid streaming entertainment is just straight up the most glaringly obvious example of a paid service overflowing with advertisements. paid radio broadcasts (xm/Sirius). operating systems (windows serves you ads any chance it gets). monthly subscriptions to gyms where youre constantly hit with ads, marketing, and promotions be it at the gym or via push notification (you got opted into and therefore have to opt out of intentionally after the service is paid). mobile phones, especially prepaid come LOADED with ads and bloatware. i mean the list goes on -- you cannot be serious.
      - Workaccount2 1y ago
        > pay for services in full directly Those are hybrid subscriptions/subsidies. Not paid in full. If you are being exposed to ads in something you paid for, you are almost certainly being charged less money. Companies can compete on cost by introducing ads, and it's why the cheaper you go, the more ad infested it gets. Pure ad-free things tend to be much more expensive then their ad subsidized counterparts. Ad subsidized has become so ubiquitous though, that people think that price is the true price.
        _proofs 1y ago
        this seems like semantics and corporate hand-waving -- that's not what is conveyed to the user in what i have observed as the context of paid services and the promises asserted around what a purchase gets a customer. in the subsidized example, xm/Sirius is marketed to users as an "ad-free paid radio broadcast"; the marketing literally attempts to leverage the notion of it being ad-free as a consequence of your purchase (power) in order to highlight its supposed competitive edge and usefulness, and provide the user an incentive to spend money, except for the fact that the marketing is false. you still get served promotions and ads, just less "conventional" ads. i go to a football game and im literally inundated with ads -- the whole game has time stoppage dedicated to serving ads. i guess my season ticket purchase with the hopes of seeing football in person is.. apparently not spending enough money? i see this as attempting to move the goalposts and gaslight users on their purchase expectations, as a way to offload the responsibility and accountability back onto the user -- "you don't pay enough, you only think that you pay enough, so we are still going to serve you ads because <insert financial justification here around the expectations we'e undermined>. why then is there any expectation of a service being ad-free upon purchasing? who the hell actually enjoys sitting through 1.5 hours of advertisements and play stoppage? over time users have been conditioned to just tolerate it, and over time, the advertising reclaims ground it previously gave up one inch at a time in the same way people are price-gouged in those stadiums -- they don't have much alternative, but apparently the problem is the user should fork up more money for tickets so as to align their expectations with reality? while they're getting strong-armed at the concession stand via proximity and circumstance and lack of competition, no less. are you really trying to tell me the problem there is, they need to make... more money? and THEN and only THEN we can have ad-free, paid for entertainment otherwise known as american football? is this really about user expectations, or is this about companies wanting their cake and eating it, too?
itsdesmond 1y ago
[flagged]
- dang 1y ago
  Whoa, please don't post like this. We end up banning accounts that do. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - itsdesmond 1y ago
    Aw, alright. I thought it was a funny way to make the point and I figured the yo momma structure was traditional enough to not be taken as a proper insult. Heard tho.
    - dang 1y ago
      Thanks for this. Now that you explain your intent, I see the joke. Unfortunately, it's too easy for the intent not to come across in these forsaken little text blobs that we're all limited to here. A lot of it boils down to the absence of voice tone and body language.
rapind 1y ago
It's all about scale. The impact of your personal shopper is insignificant unless you manage to scale it up into a business where everyone has a personal shopper by default.
- mbrumlow 1y ago
  Well then. Seems like you would be a fool to not allow personal shoppers then. The point is the web is changing, and people use a different type of browser now. Ans that browser happens to be LLMs. Anybody complaining about the new browser has just not got it yet, or has and is trying to keep things the old way because they don’t know how or won’t change with the times. We have seen it before, Kodak, blockbuster, whatever. Grow up cloud flare, some is your business models don’t make sense any more.
  - ToucanLoucan 1y ago
    > Anybody complaining about the new browser has just not got it yet, or has and is trying to keep things the old way because they don’t know how or won’t change with the times. We have seen it before, Kodak, blockbuster, whatever. You say this as though all LLM/otherwise automated traffic is for the purposes of fulfilling a request made by a user 100% of the time which is just flatly on-its-face untrue. Companies make vast amounts of requests for indexing purposes. That could be to facilitate user requests someday, perhaps, but it is not today and not why it's happening. And worse still, LLMs introduce a new third option: that it's not for indexing or for later linking but is instead either for training the language model itself, or for the model to ingest and regurgitate later on with no attribution, with the added fun that it might just make some shit up about whatever you said and be wrong. And as the person buying the web hosting, all of that is subsidized by me. "The web is changing" does not mean every website must follow suit. Since I built my blog about 2 internet eternities ago, I have seen fad tech come and fad tech go. My blog remains more or less exactly what it was 2 decades ago, with more content and a better stylesheet. I have requested in my robots.txt that my content not be used for LLM training, and I fully expect that to be ignored because tech bros don't respect anyone, even fellow tech bros, when it means they have to change their behavior.
542354234235 1y ago
True, and I would ask, what is your point? Is it that no rule can have 100% perfect enforcement? That all rules have a grey area if you look close enough? Was it just a "gotcha" statement meant to insinuate what the prior commenter said was invalid?
Polizeiposaune 1y ago
To stretch the analogy to the breaking point: If you send 10,000 personal shoppers all at once to the same store just to check prices, the store's going to be rightfully annoyed that they aren't making sales because legit buyers can't get in.
- sublinear 1y ago
  Too bad. Build a bigger store or publish this information so we don't need 10,000 personal shoppers. Was this not the whole point of having a website? Who distorted that simple idea into the garbage websites we have now?
  - recursive 1y ago
    Weird take. The store doesn't owe your personal shippers anything.
    - the_real_cher 1y ago
      In the same token the personal shoppers don't owe the store anything either.
      - eddythompson80 1y ago
        Surely they owe them money for the goods and service, no? I thought that's how stores worked.
        the_real_cher 1y ago
        Context friend. This article and entire comments sections is about questionable web page access. Context.
        eddythompson80 1y ago
        You're replying in a store metaphor thread though. Context matters.
ghurtado 1y ago
Sure. There's lots of things you could do, but you don't do them because they are wrong. Might does not make right.
- rjbwork 1y ago
  How is it wrong to send my personal shopper? How is it wrong to have an agent act directly on my behalf? It's like saying a web browser that is customized in any way is wrong. If one configures their browser to eagerly load links so that their next click is instant, is that now wrong?
  - ghurtado 1y ago
    Here's a good rule of thumb: if you have to do it without other people knowing, because otherwise they wouldn't let you do it: chances are it's a bad thing to do.
  - _proofs 1y ago
    if you send your personal shopper to a store, and the business is... closed for business, or refusing you entry, and you just... go in anyway. that's called breaking and entering, and generally frowned upon -- by-passing the "closed sign".
fireflash38 1y ago
And you can be trespassed and prosecuted if you continue to violate.
tom_m 1y ago
Perplexity isn't your personal anything. It's a service just like Postmates and Uber. You want a personal shopper equivalent? You're going to pay more money. It won't say perplexity all over it.
amelius 1y ago
But the store owner can ask the personal shopper to leave, if e.g. they find out that they work for a personal shopper service.
- account42 1y ago
  What the article is advocating for is hiring bouncers that strip all shoppers so they can do just that.
dataflow 1y ago
> But I can send my personal shopper and you'll be none the wiser. They will be quite the wiser if they track/limit how often your shopper enters the store. You probably aren't entering the same store fifteen times every day and neither would be your shopper if they were only doing it on your behalf.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

It’s possible to violate all sorts of social norms. Societies that celebrate people that do so are on the far opposite end of the spectrum from high trust ones. They are rather unpleasant.

ToucanLoucan 1y ago
Just the Silicon Valley ethos extended to it's logical conclusions. These companies take advantage of public space, utilities and goodwill at industrial scale to "move fast and break things" and then everyone else has to deal with the ensuing consequences. Like how cities are awash in those fucking electric scooters now. Mind you I'm not saying electric scooters are a bad idea, I have one and I quite enjoy it. I'm saying we didn't need five fucking startups all competing to provide them at the lowest cost possible just for 2/3s of them to end up in fucking landfills when the VC funding ran out.
- SoftTalker 1y ago
  My city impounded them and made them pay a fee to get them back. Now they have to pay a fee every year to be able to operate. Win/win.
  - account42 1y ago
    Do those fees actually improve anything for the citizens who now have to deal with vehicles abandoned on sidewalks everywhere or does it just buy the major a nicer yacht?
sublinear 1y ago
[flagged]
- bradleyjg 1y ago
  A place where you can lose you wallet and get it back with all the cash inside. The horror!!
  - sublinear 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - ghurtado 1y ago
      [flagged]
      - sublinear 1y ago
        [flagged]
        tempfile 1y ago
        [flagged]
    - fireflash38 1y ago
      That's a very sad and lonely way to live.
      - sublinear 1y ago
        I don't think we're talking about the same thing.
        account42 1y ago
        Obviously. You should heed the advice of other posters who told you to look up the meaning of the word.
pixl97 1y ago
[flagged]
- Workaccount2 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - _proofs 1y ago
    this is such a wild comment -- there are countless products where regardless of purchase -- the user is still served advertisements. i have no idea what reality, or timeline, this comment belongs in. broadcast television, paid streaming entertainment is just straight up the most glaringly obvious example of a paid service overflowing with advertisements. paid radio broadcasts (xm/Sirius). operating systems (windows serves you ads any chance it gets). monthly subscriptions to gyms where youre constantly hit with ads, marketing, and promotions be it at the gym or via push notification (you got opted into and therefore have to opt out of intentionally after the service is paid). mobile phones, especially prepaid come LOADED with ads and bloatware. i mean the list goes on -- you cannot be serious.
    - Workaccount2 1y ago
      > pay for services in full directly Those are hybrid subscriptions/subsidies. Not paid in full. If you are being exposed to ads in something you paid for, you are almost certainly being charged less money. Companies can compete on cost by introducing ads, and it's why the cheaper you go, the more ad infested it gets. Pure ad-free things tend to be much more expensive then their ad subsidized counterparts. Ad subsidized has become so ubiquitous though, that people think that price is the true price.
      - _proofs 1y ago
        this seems like semantics and corporate hand-waving -- that's not what is conveyed to the user in what i have observed as the context of paid services and the promises asserted around what a purchase gets a customer. in the subsidized example, xm/Sirius is marketed to users as an "ad-free paid radio broadcast"; the marketing literally attempts to leverage the notion of it being ad-free as a consequence of your purchase (power) in order to highlight its supposed competitive edge and usefulness, and provide the user an incentive to spend money, except for the fact that the marketing is false. you still get served promotions and ads, just less "conventional" ads. i go to a football game and im literally inundated with ads -- the whole game has time stoppage dedicated to serving ads. i guess my season ticket purchase with the hopes of seeing football in person is.. apparently not spending enough money? i see this as attempting to move the goalposts and gaslight users on their purchase expectations, as a way to offload the responsibility and accountability back onto the user -- "you don't pay enough, you only think that you pay enough, so we are still going to serve you ads because <insert financial justification here around the expectations we'e undermined>. why then is there any expectation of a service being ad-free upon purchasing? who the hell actually enjoys sitting through 1.5 hours of advertisements and play stoppage? over time users have been conditioned to just tolerate it, and over time, the advertising reclaims ground it previously gave up one inch at a time in the same way people are price-gouged in those stadiums -- they don't have much alternative, but apparently the problem is the user should fork up more money for tickets so as to align their expectations with reality? while they're getting strong-armed at the concession stand via proximity and circumstance and lack of competition, no less. are you really trying to tell me the problem there is, they need to make... more money? and THEN and only THEN we can have ad-free, paid for entertainment otherwise known as american football? is this really about user expectations, or is this about companies wanting their cake and eating it, too?

itsdesmond 1y ago

[flagged]

dang 1y ago
Whoa, please don't post like this. We end up banning accounts that do. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- itsdesmond 1y ago
  Aw, alright. I thought it was a funny way to make the point and I figured the yo momma structure was traditional enough to not be taken as a proper insult. Heard tho.
  - dang 1y ago
    Thanks for this. Now that you explain your intent, I see the joke. Unfortunately, it's too easy for the intent not to come across in these forsaken little text blobs that we're all limited to here. A lot of it boils down to the absence of voice tone and body language.

rapind 1y ago

It's all about scale. The impact of your personal shopper is insignificant unless you manage to scale it up into a business where everyone has a personal shopper by default.

mbrumlow 1y ago
Well then. Seems like you would be a fool to not allow personal shoppers then. The point is the web is changing, and people use a different type of browser now. Ans that browser happens to be LLMs. Anybody complaining about the new browser has just not got it yet, or has and is trying to keep things the old way because they don’t know how or won’t change with the times. We have seen it before, Kodak, blockbuster, whatever. Grow up cloud flare, some is your business models don’t make sense any more.
- ToucanLoucan 1y ago
  > Anybody complaining about the new browser has just not got it yet, or has and is trying to keep things the old way because they don’t know how or won’t change with the times. We have seen it before, Kodak, blockbuster, whatever. You say this as though all LLM/otherwise automated traffic is for the purposes of fulfilling a request made by a user 100% of the time which is just flatly on-its-face untrue. Companies make vast amounts of requests for indexing purposes. That could be to facilitate user requests someday, perhaps, but it is not today and not why it's happening. And worse still, LLMs introduce a new third option: that it's not for indexing or for later linking but is instead either for training the language model itself, or for the model to ingest and regurgitate later on with no attribution, with the added fun that it might just make some shit up about whatever you said and be wrong. And as the person buying the web hosting, all of that is subsidized by me. "The web is changing" does not mean every website must follow suit. Since I built my blog about 2 internet eternities ago, I have seen fad tech come and fad tech go. My blog remains more or less exactly what it was 2 decades ago, with more content and a better stylesheet. I have requested in my robots.txt that my content not be used for LLM training, and I fully expect that to be ignored because tech bros don't respect anyone, even fellow tech bros, when it means they have to change their behavior.

542354234235 1y ago

True, and I would ask, what is your point? Is it that no rule can have 100% perfect enforcement? That all rules have a grey area if you look close enough? Was it just a "gotcha" statement meant to insinuate what the prior commenter said was invalid?

Polizeiposaune 1y ago

To stretch the analogy to the breaking point: If you send 10,000 personal shoppers all at once to the same store just to check prices, the store's going to be rightfully annoyed that they aren't making sales because legit buyers can't get in.

sublinear 1y ago
Too bad. Build a bigger store or publish this information so we don't need 10,000 personal shoppers. Was this not the whole point of having a website? Who distorted that simple idea into the garbage websites we have now?
- recursive 1y ago
  Weird take. The store doesn't owe your personal shippers anything.
  - the_real_cher 1y ago
    In the same token the personal shoppers don't owe the store anything either.
    - eddythompson80 1y ago
      Surely they owe them money for the goods and service, no? I thought that's how stores worked.
      - the_real_cher 1y ago
        Context friend. This article and entire comments sections is about questionable web page access. Context.
        eddythompson80 1y ago
        You're replying in a store metaphor thread though. Context matters.

ghurtado 1y ago

Sure. There's lots of things you could do, but you don't do them because they are wrong. Might does not make right.

rjbwork 1y ago
How is it wrong to send my personal shopper? How is it wrong to have an agent act directly on my behalf? It's like saying a web browser that is customized in any way is wrong. If one configures their browser to eagerly load links so that their next click is instant, is that now wrong?
- ghurtado 1y ago
  Here's a good rule of thumb: if you have to do it without other people knowing, because otherwise they wouldn't let you do it: chances are it's a bad thing to do.
- _proofs 1y ago
  if you send your personal shopper to a store, and the business is... closed for business, or refusing you entry, and you just... go in anyway. that's called breaking and entering, and generally frowned upon -- by-passing the "closed sign".

fireflash38 1y ago

And you can be trespassed and prosecuted if you continue to violate.

tom_m 1y ago

Perplexity isn't your personal anything. It's a service just like Postmates and Uber. You want a personal shopper equivalent? You're going to pay more money. It won't say perplexity all over it.

amelius 1y ago

But the store owner can ask the personal shopper to leave, if e.g. they find out that they work for a personal shopper service.

account42 1y ago
What the article is advocating for is hiring bouncers that strip all shoppers so they can do just that.

dataflow 1y ago

> But I can send my personal shopper and you'll be none the wiser. They will be quite the wiser if they track/limit how often your shopper enters the store. You probably aren't entering the same store fifteen times every day and neither would be your shopper if they were only doing it on your behalf.