>The marketplace that builds "agent-friendly" commerce (verified listings, structured data, transparent pricing, API access) becomes the default backend for AI shopping.
I'd like to believe this, but claims like this have been made since the early days of internet commerce. After all, it's not hard to specify structured data about items and run queries against it. But it largely has not materialized outside of a few special suppliers.
You can't actually search Amazon or eBay or Wayfair for things with specified dimensions or characteristics. You can, however, find lots of listings for things like "Gzsbaby 6 Piece Jumbo Dinosaur Toys for Kids 3-5 and Toddlers, Large Soft Dinosaur Toys for Lovers - Perfect Party Favors, Birthday Gifts "
Perhaps this time is different? But why is it different? What economic incentives will lead to good structured data and transparent pricing, rather than whatever the AI equivalent of glurge/slop listings is?
Because agentic AI can parse unstructured data and make purchasing decisions regardless of whether your site allows it, which avoids the chicken-and-egg problem.
It's similar to DoorDash. If your restaurant didn't want to sign up, they added you anyways and took orders on your behalf, then sent a physical courier over with a prepaid card to order takeout. Sometimes the menus were parsed incorrectly and customers blamed the restaurant.
This forced restaurants to sign up, claim their page, and keep their menus up to date, since not offering delivery wasn't an option.
At least 1 agentic AI tool will ignore these new terms and buy stuff on eBay anyways. Inevitably there'll be bugs or it won't get the best deal. At first this won't matter, but eventually competitors will offer a bug-free purchasing experience and consumers will move over.
>Because agentic AI can parse unstructured data and make purchasing decisions regardless of whether your site allows it, which avoids the chicken-and-egg problem.
People can do that too, and also benefit from actual structured data. But the avoidance of the chicken and egg problem didn't seem to result in widespread structured data stores beating out the SEO-spam-style listings.
this. marketing speak appears much more frequently in online text, which is what AI is trained on, than it does in normal everyday human speech that AI isn't able to capture and train on en masse yet.
It’s not universal - but it’s a compelling rhetorical device /s
It just sounds like slop as it’s everywhere now. The pattern invites questions on the authenticity of the writer, and whether they’ve fallen victim to AI hallucinations and sycophant. I can quickly become offended when someone asks me to read their ChatGPT output without disclosing it was gpt output.
Now when AI learns how to use parallelism I will be forced to learn a new style of writing to maintain credibility with the reader /s
I hate this. Writing skills used to be a way to show you're paying attention to detail and making an effort. Now everyone thinks I'm cheesing it out with AI.
I also have a tougher time judging the reliability of others because you can get grammatically perfect, well organized emails from people that are incompetent. AI has significantly increased the signal to noise ratio for me.
Yeah, but the stuff people seem to obsess about are just bits of neat typography like dashes and rhetoric flourishes that should, or used to, signify good writing and worked for a reason. The AI just overuses them, it’s not that they’re bad per se. I suppose it’s a treadmill like anything else that gets too popular. We have to find something new to do the same thing (if possible!). And that sucks.
People cant verbalize good and bad writing. Being able to see it and being able to diagnoze are two different things.
Fact is, AI writing is just bad. It checks all the elementary school writing boxes, but fails in a sense that it is a bad, overly verbose, just subtly but meaningfully incorrect text. People see that, cant put the issue into words and then look for other signs.
Yes, ai is bad in a way someone who learns some rules about writing produces bad texts. And when human writes the same way, it is still bad.
You are correct. There's just a lot of societal pressure to know what good writing is, even amongst people who don't read outside of social media. They don't want to appear stupid, so they say dashes are "AI" because everybody does.
Thin lightweight whiskers are going to be challenging to manage on a propeller-driven vehicle. They'll get blown all over the place. Having them extend out past the propellers will likely get them tangled in the propellers.
But that's fine, isn't it? If they're intended to detect fixed objects, then noticing that one or more of them have ceased to be blown around in that way may be a good way to detect unanticipated contact with a fixed object: When the signal becomes less noisy, then maybe something is in the way.
And the whiskers don't have to be all floppy like a wet noodle. I myself am thinking that something rigid or semi-rigid might be good. Perhaps something akin to armature wire, or thin spring steel. Maybe even literal bamboo chopsticks.
They can also be constrained so that they don't get sent into the props.
My little brain thinks that the drone-end of the whiskers can be attached to potentiometers, with light return springs to bring them back towards center, like the mechanism used by an analog stick on a PS3 controller.
> And the whiskers don't have to be all floppy like a wet noodle. I myself am thinking that something rigid or semi-rigid might be good.
I don't think you're right about this. The concept of the whiskers is to notice when you've collided with something. Real whiskers aren't rigid because colliding with something when you're rigid means snapping. (Ever stub your toe?)
Think of the rigidity of the whiskers as being traded off against your maximum movement speed.
Suppose I've got an assembly with a chopstick attached to a gimbal with some minor centering springs and sensors (potentiometers) inside. The chopstick has many degrees of free angular movement provided by this gimbal and overall assembly.
I gently bounce ("slam"?) that chopstick off of a thing, and this results in the feedback loop that provides positioning control to provide immediate instruction to back off in the opposite direction of the apparent impact.
Does the chopstick take damage? Does the gimbal take damage? Does the greater assembly take damage?
Why, or why not?
(I feel like we're speaking two different languages here. Have you ever looked at how a PS3 analog stick works, or have you not? It's not new tech. It wasn't even new when it was new, and it's very nearly 20 years old now in PS3 form.)
Yes, you've successfully confirmed: We're quite clearly speaking different languages.
(Good luck with...whatever it is that you may be talking about. My diction is good. I don't have time or patience to explain it for outliers who aren't following along well and who also insist that it must somehow be wrong. I apologize for this; I am actually sorry.)
Rigid whiskers have other sets of problems. Below someone mentioned that rigid whiskers will break when they contact objects. If the whisker is as rigid as the drone itself, it plausibly breaks the same cables that the drone breaks. You also have the problem that in the event of drone failure, you now have a spike-covered drone falling out of the sky. What kind of damage does a bamboo chopstick or thin piece of steel do when it hits someone or something at ground level at drone-falling velocity with the mass of a drone behind it?
It's quite possible that these problems are solvable and can be engineered around, that there's a whisker-based solution, but I don't see it. It's certainly not an obviously workable solution.
Honestly, my experience with Siri is that it works worse than it did 10 years ago. It's not clear to me if that's with Siri itself or just the general decrease in quality of Apple software over the past N years, but zero changes would have been an improvement.
Things that seemed to work reliably for me 10 years ago but now do not:
1. "Call mom". Siri has apparently forgotten who my mother is. I tried "Hey Siri <name> is my mother" and I got an error. I'm sure it's resolvable but come on.
2. "Directions to <destination>" This always used to fail when it couldn't find places, but lately, when I'm driving, Siri will respond "Getting directions to <destination>" and then... nothing. No directions come up. I have to do it 2-3 times to have the directions actually start.
I have experienced some similar issues. I think some of it related to the "locked" state of the device. Siri needs context data to answer, particularly the mom or some destination questions. Specifically for contacts or recent places data. This context isn't remotely stored, but provided by the device to Siri each time. I think when the phone is locked it doesn't have access to the data (reading or writing). When I mean "Siri", I mean both the on device and remote parts of it.
I think this also interacts with countries and states that have (possibly misguided) strict laws forbidding the "touching" of phones "while driving". My experiences suggest that using Siri when driving and the device is locked, it just gives up - I sort of see the start of it working then, bam, it stops. If I retry, I suspect that I've somehow "looked" at the phone in frustration, it saw my attention and unlocked. I now wonder if where I have placed the device is making a difference.
It does seem to work much better (when driving) if the device is already unlocked.
I also see odd things when using Shortcuts for navigation. If I've previously asked for walking directions and then speak the shortcut while driving it won't give directions until I switch to the "car" icon in maps. I think it might be trying to calculate the 15Km walking directions, but it doesn't complete before I tell it, frustrated, to stop.
When Siri doesn't work it is usually the times when I need it to. This is definitely a multiplier in disastisfaction.
3. It won't reliably play music anymore! I have a good set of songs in my iPhone's Apple Music library. When I say "Hey siri, play <song/artists>", it asks me for access to Pandora (which I do have on my phone). I don't want to play it on Pandora. I have the song! I have just spent the last 10 minutes trying to figure out how to change this, and neither the youtube video I found searching nor this reddit thread (https://www.reddit.com/r/ios/comments/y18ioq/changing_the_de...) seems to work.
Amusingly (?) the reddit people have the opposite problem. They want to use a 3rd party music app but can't get their phones to stop preferring Apple-provided apps.
I can sometimes get this to work by saying "Play <song/artist> on Apple Music", but even that is not reliable.
I would love to know why Siri has clearly deteriorated. I assume it’s opaquely failing due to server infrastructure not keeping up. Thought device-side was supposed to help with that. That’s another thing I’d like to understand — what are the moving parts to Siri?
Hey I tried to use Siri to call my mom ~half a week ago and it said it didn't know who my mother was. I did find it weird since although I don't use Siri much, I was almost certain I've had success with that exact same request before, and haven't changed my contacts recently.
Yeah I've been having this with directions for a while too. It generally takes on the second try but a good 30% of the time I'm getting the same acknowledgement it's getting directions and then just silently failing.
>Everyone benefits from it except the consumer, who's the only party who can't choose.
But of course they can choose. They can choose to not go to those events and venues and do other things with their time.
And I expect that pro sports will look back on these moves and realize that they cannibalized their future fan growth for higher revenues today. I go to fewer pro sports games than I might otherwise both because of the absolute cost and because it feels bad to pay a bunch for a ticket and then also have to pay like $15 for a hot dog. And I take my kids to fewer than my parents took me to for similar reasons.
I stopped caring about my favourite sports teams approximately 10 years ago, and now that I have kids, I probably won't ever take them to a pro game, and they'll probably grow up barely knowing what they are. They're completely cannibalised any kind of future for themselves, because I'm not the only person I know who's done this.
My friend who were big time fans of a certain Southern California team also completely abandoned an interest in sports when the team moved to LA. I asked one buddy what he did with his season tickets. "Burned 'em." He also used to put $1,000 every year on the team winning the Super Bowl. My other buddy threw all his fan stuff like a jersey in the rubbish.
This is the same pro sports industry that already stops you watching matches on TV once a week, spreads them over several different streaming platforms so you pay several times, and is currently trying to make it so you can't watch matches on devices that can sideload apps. Apparently, their revenue has only been going up, even with all these shitty things already happening...
And the die-hards will put up with just about anything. But not everyone is a diehard. On the margin, people who might have watched the game some night will find it too much of a hassle or expense and skip it. And if they do so enough times, they'll get into other patterns and stop caring as much about the team, or the sport, and so on.
What we're talking about here is elasticity of demand. For some people and some things, the short-term demand is very inelastic. But in the long term, it's not. And maybe the people making these decisions have better models of that than I do and they're going to continue to raise revenue with customer-hostile choices. But maybe they just don't care what happens past the next quarter or two and years or decades from now it will be clear they fucked up.
It feels like the recipient company did an awful lot of work in response to what was at best a fishing expedition. A serious complaint about licensing that demanded a real response would have been sent by post. It's not clear to me that scattershot LinkedIn messages deserve any response at all. The fact that the initial message lies about trying to contact him another way is another check in the "ignore this completely" column.
The same way that I wouldn't bother to fact-check a spam phone caller, why give any credence to this kind of thing?
The author explains this - initially, responding to the Mootype rep was not really given much thought or concern, for the same reasons you point out.
But then the rep started emailing EVERYONE, until eventually someone's manager started to panic about it. And when managers start to panic, it becomes everyone's problem.
So really this ended up being simply a successful scare tactic by Monotype.
But when it turns out to be a basically fraudulent report, now they suffer reputational damage both internally to this company (who I expect would now instruct any design agencies they use to not use any Monotype fonts in their projects), and now externally as this is reported on! So the 'scare tactic' might have been successful but the overall exercise actually seems pretty damaging to Monotype all in all...
I agree. Reading through this seems like a long winded way of putting off telling some random person on LinkedIn to bugger off. If there’s a supposed licensing issue, send a legal letter, not a LinkedIn message. Big waste of time for everyone involved
What if the company that is about to go bankrupt fails to pay its insurance premiums? Seems fairly likely to happen. About-to-be-bankrupt companies generally get behind on all their bills.
Don't worry, I happen to be knowledgeable about this.
Some key differences that come to mind (obviously YMMV):
Home insurance stops almost as soon as you stop paying vs. corporate insurance which is usually a bit more lenient and even has things like "tail coverage" in place.
The regulatory protections that apply to home insurance are very different to the ones applying to corporate insurance.
It's not uncommon for corporate insurance to cover events that happened while the company was insured, even if by the time the claim is filed the policy has been canceled.
Insurance is considered an asset of a company, and a judge can rule over what happens to them. This come into play particularly when bankruptcy is involved.
Many commercial insurance contracts, under some situations, cannot be canceled by the insurer, even if the company stops paying their premiums.
Anyway, I know on a naive approach it's easy to think that "all insurance is the same", but once you scratch a bit more than the surface of it you'll see it's a very complex affair!
> it's easy to think that "all insurance is the same"
Such an assumption is not necessary. (The difference between consumer and commercial insurance is also not germane when discussing a novel bonding scheme.)
If you’re getting thrown off by the home insurance analogy, think regulatory capital instead.
> regulatory protections that apply to home insurance are very different to the ones applying to corporate insurance
We’re discussing a hypothetical regulatory environment. Given the insurance is guaranteeing consumer protections, one would expect it to be strict.
There's a lot of physical infrastructure that works with quarters, and it's probably not worth giving that up for slightly improved coinage. Just drop all the coins smaller than a quarter.
There's also the 3rd amendment. It would be worthless to say soldiers can't demand change for the vending machine, when nobody at all can get quarters.
I'd like to believe this, but claims like this have been made since the early days of internet commerce. After all, it's not hard to specify structured data about items and run queries against it. But it largely has not materialized outside of a few special suppliers.
You can't actually search Amazon or eBay or Wayfair for things with specified dimensions or characteristics. You can, however, find lots of listings for things like "Gzsbaby 6 Piece Jumbo Dinosaur Toys for Kids 3-5 and Toddlers, Large Soft Dinosaur Toys for Lovers - Perfect Party Favors, Birthday Gifts "
Perhaps this time is different? But why is it different? What economic incentives will lead to good structured data and transparent pricing, rather than whatever the AI equivalent of glurge/slop listings is?
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