Selling AI Nonsense

It’s been pretty obvious for a few years that Amazon’s marketplace is filled with no-name products from no-name brands peddling questionable quality. Buying on Amazon is a roll of the dice even more than eBay these days. This stems from sellers looking to mass-list and mass-sell items with minimal effort. With ChatGPT and other “AI” tools hitting the scene, people’s ‘cheats’ to do less work are being exposed in listing titles. Kyle Orland at Ars Technica has more. Amazon users are at this point used to search results filled with products that are fraudulent, scams, or quite literally garbage. These days, though, they…

Amazon Ditching Android

Amazon pushes its physical products all the time on its website. Fire sticks, Fire TV, Echo, etc. The list of hardware it offers is pretty extensive. Amazon takes the approach of “cheap and replaceable” tech in order to make money with services and convincing you to buy stuff. But now Amazon is doing something unexpected: bringing the operating system of its products in-house. Jeff Parsons at Tom’s Guide has more. At present, the company uses its Fire OS, a fork of open source Android that sits inside the likes of the Fire TV Stick 4K Max, Fire Tablet series and Echo Show speakers. But…

Rivian’s Fork on Amazon’s Route

The future of delivery trucks should be electric. The USPS is finally going to head into this direction. Amazon has been part of this change too. Their 2019 deal with Rivian created an electric delivery van that looks amazing and is great for the environment. But in typical Amazon style, they’re barely living up to their end of the agreement. And as-such, Rivian wants out. Emma Roth at The Verge has more. …with Amazon reportedly only meeting the bare minimum of ordering 10,000 vehicles this year, the two are renegotiating. In 2021, The Verge reported that the terms of the original deal gave…

Stamping Out Emissions

Slowly but surely, electric vehicles (EVs) are breaking through into the mainstream. As much as I hate to give credit to Lord Manchild, his company has been a difference-maker in this area. Now we’re seeing the government get involved here in the US. The United States Postal Service (USPS) is making strides toward electrifying its fleet of delivery vehicles, and it’s turning to Oshkosh and Ford to help make it happen. It announced plans to purchase over 100,000 electric delivery vehicles over the next decade. Mitchell Clark at The Verge has more. In an announcement post on Tuesday, the agency said it…

Alexa, Go Away

With the massive proliferation of Amazon Echo / Alexa devices, Amazon found a gaping hole by which to get their hardware into people’s houses. For years Amazon has generally released shoddy, commodity (AKA crap) they sell at a loss in order to get you to use their services more. The Echo was a hit, mostly due to its incredible speech recognition and speed with which it could reply. When Amazon first introduced the Echo, the question was “what do you do with this thing?” but it quickly became a perfect Kitchen computer for setting timers and reminders. Alexa was the…

WWWTF

It’s been… a week in the tech sphere. So much so that I felt the need to write about it all in a Lightning Round update because it stretches far and wide. For starters, there’s the trainwreck that is Twitter & Elon Musk. To call it a crisis is an understatement. A billionaire with thin skin is running his $44B company into the ground. From public firings to fights with advertisers to enduring shenanigans with their update to the paid “Blue” service that was incredibly foreseeable, Twitter is all over the place. I soooo want to write about it but…

Amazon Adds More Robots

In a world where there’s always enough money to spend and enough companies to buy, leave it to Amazon to buy one of the biggies. News broke late last week that the World’s Largest Bookstore has acquired iRobot, the company that makes the Roomba. The price tag? A cool $1.7 billion. Brian Heater at TechCrunch has more. “Since we started iRobot, our team has been on a mission to create innovative, practical products that make customers’ lives easier, leading to inventions like the Roomba and iRobot OS,” CEO Colin Angle said in a release. “Amazon shares our passion for building…

Smart Cart

It’s no secret that Amazon is pushing hard into grocery. Here on Long Island, there are no less than six Amazon Fresh stores under construction. One innovative aspect of Amazon stores are their “Just Walk Out” system that tracks your items and auto-bills you for them when you leave. That works great for convenience store items, but what about grocery? That’s where the Amazon Dash Cart comes in. James Vincent at The Verge has more about this. The cart’s main feature is a sensor array in the rim that uses AI-powered cameras and barcode scanners to identify whatever you put…

TikTok Book Scamming

Leave it to “trends” on TikTok to come up with terrible ideas. The latest viral trend, on the social network that’s definitely not funneling data to China (we promise!), is to buy Kindle books on Amazon, then return them within the allowed window for a full refund. Claire Woodcock at Vice has more of this awful idea. The #ReadAndReturn challenge drew attention to Amazon’s Kindle return policy, which states that readers can “cancel an accidental book order within seven days.” But what’s been presented as a literary community “life hack” is hurting romance-fantasy authors like Lisa Kessler’s bottom line. Vice As…

ePub Sorta Comes to Kindle

The Kindle is one of the best single-use products on the market. To me, it’s everything a dedicated device should be. It does one thing and excels at it. In fact, anything else the Kindle tries to do (audio, web browsing, etc) is laughably bad. One part of the Kindle that’s been different than other eReaders out there was the lack of support for the common ePub file format. Now, Amazon seems to be finally adopting it. In an Amazon kind of way. Alex Cranz has more. What this has meant in practice is that, for the last 15 years,…

Alexa Anyone

Amazon’s runaway success with Alexa and the Echo devices “she” lives in is quite obvious. As someone who owned an original Echo back when you needed an invite to buy it, I can remember the awe in how good the voice recognition was. The time it took to understand a question, send it to the cloud, then return a response was a big win. It seems now that Amazon allows anyone to provide information to questions Alexa may not know. Jack Morse at Mashable has the story. Way back in 2019, Amazon announced that, going forward, any old idiot off…

Amazon Thought Keeping Flex Drivers’ Tips Was Okay

Amazon, a company worth $1.75 TRILLION, uses normal people to deliver goods from Whole Foods and Amazon Fresh. Amazon calls their program Amazon Flex. It’s a near-identical setup to DoorDash and Uber Eats jobs. Normal people use an app for “gig work” and deliver stuff using their own vehicles. Earlier this month Amazon settled a lawsuit with the FTC about pocketing the tips of Flex drivers. Earlier this year, the FTC sued Amazon for withholding tips in its Flex program between the years 2016 and 2019. Amazon continued to collect portions of the drivers’ tips up until the government filed…

Echo Show 15 is Too Amazon-ey

Amazon dropped a deluge of new tech and among them is the cool-looking Echo Show 15. It’s a framed display that mounts to the wall and shows you information you may find relevant. You can see to-do lists, a calendar, or even smart home controls. It’ll also recognize people via its camera and play music with its Alexa integration. But, you can’t fully customize it. Because Amazon loves selling you crap. Unfortunately, it won’t be possible to utilize the whole display with your own preferred items if you wanted to create a smart home dashboard, for example. Half the screen…

Kindle Paperwhite’s Oasis

Finally, finally, finally. Amazon has decided to give the Kindle Paperwhite one hell of an update. Amazon announced a new Paperwhite with three features that were a long time coming: bigger screen, adjustable color temperature, and USB-C. The new model, however, looks to improve on virtually every aspect of the e-reader. The battery has been boosted from six weeks to approximately 10 weeks from a single charge. Charging itself is faster: thanks to USB-C, the device can fully charge in about two and a half hours. And the color-temperature changing tech that Amazon debuted on the 2019 Kindle Oasis has made its…

Proof that Amazon’s ‘Customer Obsession’ is BS

Amazon loves to say they’re “customer obsessed” in everything they do. Turns out it’s a great smokescreen to toss up when they want to ignore the reality of their business. This thread on Twitter is indicative of every customer service interaction I’ve ever had with Amazon. Even when there’s obvious fraud, Amazon DGAF. The CSR also told me that there are now FIVE Amazon accounts associated with my (now canceled) debit card number. They also maintain that there’s no way this security breach happened on Amazon. It is possibly the worst “customer service” I’ve ever experienced (except maybe Comcast). https://twitter.com/davastewart/status/1435287777722109954?s=20…