This is why assigning an "onboarding buddy" is so important (even on-site) ... a new team member isn't going to feel empowered to ask questions and interrupt people right off the bat usually. Their more-senior onboarding buddy can make the introductions and get their questions answered by the right person without feeling awkward about it.
I completely respect wanting to live in SF ... I have personal reasons why I can't move away from where I'm at, but I also have a full time job with a company headquartered literally as far as possible from me in the continental united states. So I get to live where I have to live and make a good salary to support my family, and they get to use my talents as long as they continue to feel I bring them value.
That's the thing ... this discussion isn't saying everyone has to move away from SF, that's ludicrous. But if you want to live in SF, my point is why would you want to have to be on public transit for four hours every single day? It takes time you could use for living your life, and contributes to pollution.
In an ideal world, you could live in SF, work for google remotely, and maybe pop into campus every few days or even weeks, as needed. And then google can also hire from the millions of developers that live elsewhere as well. That way: you could live on the beach, live in socal, live in norcal, live on a farm in Iowa, live in Hawaii, live in New Jersey ... whatever kind of life you want to build, would not have to be linked to whether there is a company you want to work for in that place.
We are an adaptive species ... just because some folks are strong in-person (due to years of experience at it), doesn't mean they won't adapt to have better digital communication skills when it becomes a more prevalent practice. I think people will be fine ... even if there's an adjustment period :)
that's why you shouldn't use _either_ of those as repositories of information ... they're great for the ephemeral discussions, but once consensus is reached, you should have other ways of tracking that, whether it's: github/devops/jira issues and tickets, or some kanban board somewhere, or design documents, or a wiki. The discussion itself shouldn't be the artifact that records the decision.
Has anyone ever made some variant of these "* does not exist" sites with some control sliders/options, that controls various aspects of what's generated?
So things like: gender, hair color, face shape, etc?
Basically, an AI-driven character generator that isn't completely random?
Absolutely. Waifu Labs https://waifulabs.com/ implements a grid-based choice system for evolving anime portraits, and Artbreeder https://artbreeder.com/ implements controls plus crossbreeding and other features for a variety of StyleGAN/BigGAN models. There's plenty of scripts and Colab notebooks as well for various kinds of editing or control if Artbreeder doesn't do it for you. (I think Runway may also do editing but I haven't used them in ages.)
GAN models do not need to be specifically architected to enable control, because you can reverse them to get the latents/seed and manipulate that to 'edit' images: https://www.gwern.net/Faces#reversing-stylegan-to-control-mo... So if someone wanted, they could use Arfa's model to edit images.
So many comments about, "doesn't everyone know they do this?", and "everyone does this!"
I say there should be an explicit difference between "running a platform", and "selling on a platform", and never should the two meet. By "platform" here, and in the context of selling stuff online or IRL, I mainly mean that the store should never compete with their suppliers ... it's madness and unethical. If everyone can get a piece of the pie, it makes for a healthier ecosystem. We should want the rising tide to lift more than one boat.
And yes, I believe this should be regulated at the policy level.
This of course has implications for other forms of "platforms", such as operating systems, APIs, and clouds; but I'll leave those discussions for another time ;)
The major question I don’t have a good answer to is, “Why is this different than brick and mortar store brands like Safeway signature?”
Surely a part of is is placement, but Safeway could put own brand ketchup at the same level (and I think sometimes does) as Heinz and still wouldn’t sell the same volume.
Amazon is clearly getting a big advantage here, I’m just curious about what the underlying dynamics are that allow them to be so much more successful in their context than it seems store brands are in other contexts.
The difference is that Safeway does not have any other sellers on their shelves. Safeway buys inventory at wholesale and sells it at retail. Everything that is sold in Safeway was intentionally selected by Safeway to be there.
If you see a product on a Safeway shelf, the company that makes that product already got paid--by Safeway. If Safeway puts a generic ibuprofen bottle next to a bottle of Advil, that's fine with Advil because Advil already got paid! Safeway is assuming the risk that those bottles of Advil might not sell because everyone buys the generic.
Amazon is different--they sell things themselves, but they also offer to run a logistics platform for other folks selling things. Folks who use this platform believe (are led to believe) that they are going to direct to consumers, NOT selling wholesale to Amazon. Amazon purports to be a neutral infrastructure provider, like UPS or Verizon.
Now, you can say that these folks are naive for believing Amazon about their neutrality, but it is what Amazon said! Many of these companies would never have used Amazon for logistics in the first place if Amazon had said "we are going to use all your data to copy your products and go direct-to-consumer ourselves with our copies, including placing them above yours in search results." Who would take that deal?
I don't see as big of a distinction between Safeway and Amazon. The demand for pain medication is relatively constant, so if sales of Safeway's generic ibuprofen increase it will come at the expense of Advil because Safeway will start buying fewer units. The harm is one step removed but is still there.
I think a better argument would be the scale of the data collected by Amazon vs physical stores. But on the other hand, Safeway has an online store where they can collect the same information and if they are anything like Walmart then they also already have startlingly detailed insight into the supply chains and logistics of their suppliers that surely rivals what Amazon sees if you use their warehousing service.
I don't think it makes sense to draw a clear distinction between Amazon generics and Safeway/Walmart generics. It seems like a fuzzy line at best.
Maybe. One distinction I want to argue is placement: Amazon always places the Amazon Choice options at the top of the search and product listings. They also always include them in the "Popular, Editor's Picks, Highest Rated, etc." box that appears in the middle of most pages on the site. This would be like you walking into Safeway for a bag of sugar, and as soon as you turn down the aisle, there's an employee telling you everyone buys the Safeway brand Sugar or an advertisement with three boxes showing Safeway's as the Most Popular option, and two others next to it.
Where this gets real distinct is in delivery: Amazon is currently purging its warehouses of stock from thousands of vendors so it can keep stock of Amazon-brand and big box brand alternatives to those same products. (See: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-28/amazon-is...) So, the Safeway equivalent of this would be you going down the sugar aisle and finding exactly 1 or 2 bags of competing brands with a note that says, "Hurry! Almost out!", and each bag has 10lb. anchor attached to it. But there's 100 bags of Safeway sugar, and there's a line of employees offering to carry it through the store for you do you don't hurt your terribly sore shoulders...
How would you feel if a Safeway associate slapped a tracking device on you when you walked in the door, and then didn't tell you they were recording everything you thought while you were working your way through the store? That's how Amazon.com works. Oh, and if Safeway could just look at your other recent thoughts and know you fapped about 20 minutes before you walked in the door? That's also Amazon.
Another issue. At Safeway, Heinz ketchup is the real deal. No duplicates.
Amazon, on the other hand, has allowed duplicates, cheap reproductions and false reviews to proliferate. Now the only way you are assured a product is what it says is if it is an amazon brand.
That's actually not true at all the shelf space at grocery store are often paid for by the name brands. "Slotting fees" etc. Often if the product doesn't sell Safeway returns it to get the money back.
> If you see a product on a Safeway shelf, the company that makes that product already got paid--by Safeway.
This is not necessarily true. It's typical to not be paid for anywhere between 30 and 90 days. Additionally, some deals are more complex and depend on actual purchase volume.
I have wondered the same thing every time this question comes up. It seems the difference is that the companies that put products in grocery stores are very large companies that spend a huge amount on marketing themselves (e.g. P&G, General Mills). So, the "house brand" is less recognizable to consumers and sells at a discount to the known brand that is often a larger company than the grocery chain. The grocery stores need the name brands because shoppers come looking for them (and Safeway gets the benefit of all the marketing they do). In Amazon's case, they are serving as a distribution channel for many, many small brands, none of which are known as well as Amazon (whereas Kellogg's cereal is better known than Safeway). That changes the power dynamic in favor of Amazon.
I had a friend who worked at a milk factory. They took their 2% organic milk and piped it into cartons with different labels: brand names as well as store brands, off to be sold at various price points.
To his company it didn't matter at the end of the day if people bought the brand name or the store brand, it was all the same stuff.
I think you’re totally right. In addition/corollary, it seems a lot of the things Amazon Basics sells are basically commodities. If you have a million iPad stands, eh, just buy the amazon basics one, it’s probably not crap and the reviews look good. I need my stand, my USB adapter, my cable, my whatever to just, “do the job”, there’s not a whole lot of performance differential within the category beyond works/doesn’t work. If there’s a strong quality differentiator in the product I think they’d do less well and I bet their data scientists have answered that question one way or the other.
This also points to a hidden advantage Amazon has which is totally unethical. Namely, Amazon is perfectly willing to sell counterfeit name-brand goods, and presumably this doesn't extend to their own Amazon Basics products.
I don't think this singlehandedly explains why Amazon is so unwilling to do anything about their huge counterfeit problem, but it's suspicious that the dilemma resolves in their favor.
We allowed this vertical integration in retail when maybe we shouldn’t. Yeah it shaves some costs, but is probably having a huge effect on supplier diversity and margins. If we’re revisiting the consumer welfare above all doctrine, this seems fair to revisit as well.
The vast majority of the "store brands" are made by the same companies who make the usual branded stuff. In many cases, it's the exact same product in a different wrapper or container, made on the same production line by the same company and the same staff. Sometimes to differentiate the product, it might have subtly different ingredients, or be of slightly lower quality to differentiate it from a "premium" product but still within the quality spec of the original product (for products which are binned or have batches of varying quality, or where there's variability e.g. biscuits which cook differently at different places on the conveyor).
I used to work in a big brewery where we made supermarket branded beers. It was the same product in a different can. Actually, the exact same can, with a custom paint job. It was one of the more generic beers, rather than one with a taste associated with one of the well-known premium brands, but there was zero compromise on quality there. What was packaged for the supermarkets was 100% identical to beers with our own company name on it.
It's only the cheapest of the cheap "value" stuff which has been significantly cost reduced and has compromised quality. That's stuff like pastry with a higher water content in place of fats, or substituted ingredients such as palm oil in place of butter etc. In these cases you're paying less, but obviously getting less product for your money. That's its own specialised segment. These are often made by different companies with their own separate supply chains, and possibly living by a different set of ethics... There clearly seems to be a market for this type of thing, but given the reduced nutritional quality and taste, it's not necessarily providing a genuine cost saving.
Does it mean that the brand of Amazon is better than the likes of Safeway or Target who sell their own products to compete with more name brand ones? Or it could also be that the brands on Amazon such as the top voted comment here might be smaller brands without enough name recognition to gain the attention of a buyer.
Such a difficult thing to regulate. The instant you stop Amazon from selling on its own platform, they will open a subsidiary Amazon Retail, which is a favored customer on their platform. Whatever new regulation you can come up with, there will be armies of corporate lawyers ready to satisfy your requirements while still capturing that audience who is ready (and wants) to be captured by a platform-branded generic option.
Yeah, just take a look at the financial sector. Your typical big investment bank has insider knowledge of a sizable percentage of the companies in the economy and separately, makes tons of trades. The two businesses are kept separate, no information exchanges between the two groups, no winks and nudges. If they get it wrong, they could go to jail.
If it is possible to create a so-called firewall [0] within banks to avoid unfair advantage via insider trading, it is possible to create a firewall between the platform and seller divisions withing Amazon for a similar effect.
Do you believe that investment banks actually respect the principle of a level playing field? Given the widespread fraud revealed during the 2008 financial crisis, I find that a more plausible scenario is the banks pay lip service to the idea of a level playing field and make a show of instituting a firewall, but in practice the firewall leaks information like a sieve, which the banks ruthlessly exploit for profits. The bigger the bank, the more clients they have, hence the more information they have, hence the higher the chance for insider trading and big profits.
Because "consumer choice" isn't a practical and full response to corporate abuse of power. Regulation is complete - if it's a well written regulation it works.
Amazon has a dominant position in the marketplace and it is leveraging it in a blatantly anti-competitive manner. As a country we have consistently decided that smaller and decentralized is better - there is no compelling reason to allow Amazon to keep borging small businesses.
This is a ban against vertical integration no? There are real efficiencies (apples entire premise) from owning and running the whole stack top to bottom.
It'd be a ban of any mixture of vertical integrating with not vertically integrating. Which in turn makes it tough to transition (either direction) between the two.
So, Apple would be allowed to vertically integrate and make the chips, hardware, operating system, and applications for their products. But they'd have to stop selling Belkin chargers alongside Apple chargers at apple.com, and the iOS app store would have to contain either only Apple apps and no third-party ones or vice versa.
It fixes a power imbalance that allows for the platforms to take advantage of their customers. A platform becoming dominant is insidious because it takes away the "choice" ... if you want to do business, you will probably have to engage with them, but as we see here, Amazon is taking advantage of the fact that they own the platform by taking their customers' (the sellers) data, and using it for themselves to put their customers out of business.
I agree a diverse marketplace is a healthy one, and that requires intervention since clearly the initial rules are not enough. Some like to pretend that free markets are only negatively impacted by regulation, and only positively impacted by its participants.
That seems like a distinction without a difference. Yes, Safeway owns inventory of branded merchandise that's on their shelves, but in modern retail, they probably don't own more than a couple of weeks of inventory. And, in modern retail, it's highly likely that branded vendors (like Coke and Pepsi) have very complex relationships with retailers that include co-op fees for marketing, premiums paid for end-cap placement and special displays, and bonuses for hitting certain volumes.
App stores are the same thing since most companies with app stores have their own apps. They can decide when the right time is to build their own version of something that's popular and promote it in their app store.
> I say there should be an explicit difference between "running a platform", and "selling on a platform", and never should the two meet.
Its a free market, you can do what you want as long as costumers like it. Valve makes its own games and the platform. There are other example where this is true.
Should SpaceX not be allowed to launch Starlink. Falcon 9 is a platform, and Starlink is selling the product that you get threw this platform. Maybe not a perfect example, but one could equally make a argument about that as well.
All of these things are pretty artificial opinion based market restrictions, and everybody want to create different rules based on different was to evaluate this question for every market business and so on.
So you would make totally different choices about what is a platform and what isn't. If my company has a product and then opens up the underlying API, is my product now illegal?
For me this is all nonsense, why not just have both the suppliers, consumers and everybody else involved make choices based on what they think is best. Why do you know better of how to define these terms and what evidence is there that when you force a separation it is better at 'raising all boats'. There is no evidence to prove that in the majority of cases.
In the example of Steam they lost many games because suppliers didn't want to deal with them. Microsoft SQL now runs on Linux because people didn't want to us Windows. In all of those cases, costumers and suppliers are perfectly capable at making those decisions for themselves and then the company has to make choice how adjust to this situation.
Why any of this is bad, is totally unclear to me.
Its easy to say 'see this one bad example' and the ignore a huge amount of efficiency gained by vertical integration. The idea that we have bureaucrats to have control over every single vertical integration decision by every company is pretty insane dream to me.
This reminds me of 'Indian Socialism' where you had to fill out a application for every market each company wanted to get into and the of course super smart regulator would then make sore that the 'correct' amount of companies were in each market. Of course as always there was tons of regulatory capture and corruption to say who got a permit and who didn't. Witch is basically the same pickle you want to get into, just with 100x more detailed determination about ever companies internal structure as well. A recipe for disaster if you ask me.
The idea of enlightned regulator who for each choice of each company on each level can figure if that decision is correct for 'the global population' is a total fantasy. Neither can they do it, nor would their intensives to do it actually be for the good of 'the global population'.
Yeah ... it's a great system unless you live in a part of the country that is not trying a smart approach; a place where "best ideas" are routinely dismissed as partisan politics.
Is it, though? Run your states the way you want to. Maybe your comrades in Texas prefer a running economy to lives. This is a good thing that you can make that choice.
I don’t see how not having states would change that.
We have a federal government that has the power to take action. Republicans are stopping that from happening and so some states are choosing to fix it for themselves.
It can be replaced by local co-working spaces (or even coffee shops with the right community) ... very few reasons anyone on this earth should be traveling dozens and dozens of miles, for hours on end every single day, just to co-locate with people, when they live next to thousands
