ChatGPT recommended me some good hard drives for price per TB, and one particularly cheap one had direct checkout with Walmart, so I tried it, because why not? It let me get all the way to the payment step before it told me it was out of stock. Walmart's website told me it was out of stock when I decided to click on the link. This is probably part of why it doesn't convert.
On a related note, I think that's a good monetization vector for chatbots. Long back I asked ChatGPT to recommend a few USB hard drives with very specific requirements -- including a small size and weight ("can be duct-taped to a tablet form-factor device without being obtrusive and constantly falling off"), low cost, and speed fast enough to boot an OS from. After a pretty technical conversation, it came up with 3 very specific products, one which ended up being the start point of the one I actually purchased on Amazon.
I came away thinking if those were presented as affiliated links, that conversation could have been monetized in a mutually beneficial way.
I keep thinking of that interaction whenever the discussion of ads on chatbots crops up. In an ideal world, model providers could better capture the value they provide. Unfortunately, I suspect such conversations are too rare, and often harder to monetize. (Like that time free tier ChatGPT helped me recover $500 in compensation for an airline delay. Great value for me, but no upside for OpenAI.)
Unfortunately given the amounts and timelines of returns that investors expect from OpenAI, and their scale, and with ChatGPT constrained to its “Free Consumer-facing Internet App” form factor, they are doomed to have to trade in the reserve currency of the web: ads.
>I came away thinking if those were presented as affiliated links, that conversation could have been monetized in a mutually beneficial way.
I also ask LLMs for product recomendations. But the moment I suspect they are hidding the best items (not paying for the ad) to push the second best (not even talking about pushing shit as good products because they pay more) is the moment the LLM loses its value as recomender.
The trouble is that monetization and usefulness tend to be in conflict. It starts out as, show affiliate links if there are any. Then it turns into, prefer targets that we have affiliate agreements for. Then, don't show products unless we have affiliate agreements. Then, prioritize ones that give us more money. And on and on.
If they want to capture some of the value they provide, they should do it the standard fashion where they directly capture value from me by having me pay.
Yes unfortunately, the forces of enshittification will be at play with any model provider that has had billions invested in it.
> If they want to capture some of the value they provide, they should do it the standard fashion where they directly capture value from me by having me pay.
That would be ideal, and that's what their subscription products are for, but even their free versions provide so much value that is hard to capture. That's what I meant by chatbots being constrained by their "Free Internet app" form-factor... Consumers on the Internet largely just are not willing to pay, nobody managed to get micro-payments to work, and so the reserve currency of the web is ads.
It doesn't have to be the most really, but it's fair that they get some monetary returns commensurate with the value provided. All human society is based on an exchange of value, after all.
But realistically speaking, billions of investor money means that nothing short of the "most money" will be good enough.
My AI agents recommended RAM, GPU, and CPU upgrades, but deemed the prices were still pre-their-existence, when I went to the links they sent they were often 2x more expensive.
That's typical of my experience with all of these stock-aggregator sites. Either the best price is some dodgy or outright fake storefront, the item's OOS from the real vendor, or the price is out of date.
Trying to buy things like GPUs or SSDs are a joke. I really wish even one vendor would just implement an actual waiting list, locked to an account with a verified address and purchase history. I'm fine to wait for my purchase, but having to race bots for a lottery ticket purchase is a pain.
meta-search sites in travel (Skyscanner, etc) have the same problem of out of date cached information from the merchant. not solvable in practice because there's so much traffic volume and low rate of conversion that you must cache for cost reasons.
Those typically have a list of vendors from lowest to highest (cached) price. IME the prices are correct more often than not but if the best deal has expired you can still check out the next best one.
Well, my point is that there is always a certain level of incorrectness and that can never be fixed because of the cost of retrieving up to date pricing and availability.
I had the opposite, but it was for a SSD for a raspberry pi 5. I asked it to look online for good price. It found a place, and I ordered it. It was not a well known site like Walmart, but I got what I needed.
I'm currently using a fully vibe-coded, personal River window manager that works just how I want it to. I switched to it after I realized I couldn't do everything I wanted in Hyprland (e.g. tile windows to equal areas instead of BSP by default).
Simple example of how impactful this separation has been for me.
I encountered similar setbacks with hyprland (https://github.com/ArikRahman/hydenix), and I eventually wound up preferring scrollable tiling managers. I restarted from scratch with niri, and have found it to be a stable platform to develop against. Here's my current dotfiles (https://github.com/ArikRahman/dotfiles)
Much like Android, Chromebooks are considered a different target even though they use the Linux kernel. This release will be for a generic Linux desktop binary rather than specific 1st party systems.
Sure, and when I worked at Google on Chromecast there was also that build of Chromium.
All of that is very different from The G actually providing a packaged official Chrome build, though. Which for some reason they couldn't be bothered to do before (Firefox exists though)
"Prediction" markets were supposed to be great because of insiders: they make the probabilities much more accurate and actually useful for forecasting.
But they ended up just being for gamblers and there is no more signal.
Prediction markets are a great idea, but in practice their users (and eventually their owners) only want sports gambling. The addiction overrides everything.
We're sooo screwing over an entire generation of men.
Essentially the argument is that more dumb money in a prediction market provides an even stronger incentive for smart money to join, moving the price back to an accurate probability.
I regularly check geopolitical markets to see if a breaking news story is substantial or not, and find it useful. It can help distinguish between propaganda and intelligence there.
It does seem like there could be a distinction between markets which require genuinely knowledge and analysis (geopolitics), versus pure gambling (sports, crypto up/down 5 minutes, etc), but I'm not sure who's going to bother making it.
A good recycling program sounds like a tall order. I'm seeing Silver nanoparticles (heavy metal) and multiple things that react violently with water.
I'm always skeptical of any idea that ends with a bespoke industrial-scale recycling process. People tend to massively underestimate the complexity of recycling, especially at scale.
In general, bespoke recycling processes can make sense, especially if you manage to design the items to recycle with the recycling process in mind. There are several types of goods where this is put into practice (paper, compounds like TetraPak packages, various polymer plastics). Not sure about all the differrent types of batteries, though.
We struggle to recycle normal batteries without injuring or killing people. Lead-acid batteries contain literal plates of lead oxides, and we can't manage to keep that out of the water supply! I don't see how we'd do any better with silver nanoparticles.
Nothing I'm saying is meant to condemn recycling as a concept, by the way. Only to condemn technologies where disposal is dismissed with a shrug and a "idk just recycle it."
> we can't manage to keep that out of the water supply!
AFAIK, the lead in the water supply doesn't come from batteries. It mostly comes from lead pipes. Lead acid battery recycling is one of the more efficient recycling programs out there.
"efficient" and "clean" aren't the same thing, and they never have been.
Recycling lead-acid batteries is extremely efficient. Nearly the entire battery by mass is recovered.
But, it also causes severe lead pollution around recycling sites. Lead acid battery recycling is one of the leading causes of lead poisoning around the world [1]. Estimations vary, but all generally agree that millions of human-years of life have been lost due to lead pollution caused specifically by lead-acid battery recycling. [2]
Returning to the original point, recycling anything involving heavy metals is extremely difficult to do without poisoning people. If we can't avoid it with one of the simplest, dumbest battery technologies in regular use today, I don't see how we're going to avoid it with a battery technology involving heavy metal nanoparticles.
My reading of both those reports isn't that lead can't be safely recycled without contamination, but rather that countries with low regulations and oversight aren't recycling lead batteries in a safe manor.
In fact, the second link is more about the problem with using smelting to recycle lead. That requires a lot of power and thus emits a lot of CO2.
Is it the case that lead acid batteries are being primarily recycled through exports?
I saw a video on the CATL sodium batteries the other day and the deal is that they’ve found a way to reinforce the material in a way that brings up the slope of the back half of the discharge curve so it’s almost as good as lithium down to about 20% state of charge before falling off the cliff. Lithium is more like 10% but that’s something you can manage with charge circuitry and overprovisioning.
So yeah I’d like to know the answer to your question too.
That's only a valid concept in some embedded engineering case, where a certain capacity is required, and double that amount is provisioned to account for degradation.
Few consumers think this way. Something doesn't have double the capacity that it has; the capacity is the capacity, and the decline looks bad.
The whole idea of the embedded part is that you make the degredation invisible to the consumer for as long as possible. From the factory, only charge up to ~4.07 Volts or thereabouts. Every N cycles, add 0.01 V to the threshold. Your phone probably already does something like this.
But yeah, 20% degredation in 100 cycles is atrocious. No amount of firmware shenanigans will be able to paper over that, not in any regular consumer product at least.
I can still think of use cases, though. Reserve power sources that aren't meant to be cycled daily, where smallness is valuable. Those little car jumper packs, for example. If there was a UPS close to the size of a regular power strip, I'd buy a few.
Engineering is compromise though. If you can make a hybrid that loses 5% at 100 but still retains 500wh/l you’re in good shape.
There was someone working on a membrane a while back that’s pretty good at diffusing the lithium transfer in a way that reduces dendrite formation substantially, for instance. That’ll drop your volumetric advantage and likely your max discharge and charge rate a bit but would fix a lot of other problems in the bargain.
I’m not saying that the solution, but there is a palette of tools you can mix and match and that may be one of them.
> Your phone probably already does something like this.
It most certainly does not. Most devices track battery health % (last full capacity divided by design capacity) and the gauge just presents state of charge (current capacity/lastfull)
The better phone charge threshold systems measure usage and keep the phone in the 30-80% soc range as often as possible.
Voltage drops faster on old cells as they age so you need a coulomb counter. Only extremely shit designs guess soc based on voltage alone.
Not if your application requires 2X the energy. Aircraft, drones, etc. There's always trade-offs in battery design. As an old saying goes: you can have high specific energy, low degradation, or low cost... pick two!
Charge cycle capacity drops are generally not linear. If we start with 2x capacity and drop to 1.6x after 100 cycles, then we might end up with 1.2x after 1000 cycles. Some smartphone manufacturers would love that as you start with extremely superior energy density and then have a built-in obsolescence.
Ok, but something like Zed is almost as snappy as native GUI frameworks AND has a consistent user experience. It doesn't seem like they are making any tradeoffs there.
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