Shopify does this. If you ever go to purchase a product on a Shopify 'site, and enter eg your e-mail address, it'll save it even if you decide to cancel and close the tab. Sometimes you receive spam from companies along the lines of marketing or "we noticed you didn't complete your purchase" type crap. Shit is rly invasive.
They can only send the marketing emails if you have the "send me marketing emails" checkbox checked when you type in your email address. Dark pattern, yeah.
That has never stopped companies from spamming me with marketing even when I didn't agree or even explicitly disagreed (unchecked). Not a single company has been or ever will be held accountable so they just keep doing it.
Shopify 's "abandoned cart" emails are legally considered transactional emails, not marketing, which is probably what you're getting. It's a feature built in to Shopify. If the email isn't related to your abandoned cart contents, you can report it to Shopify. Shopify will investigate reports of abuse and eventually will terminate a store account for blatant abuse.
The checkbox is usually checked by default (it's a Shopify setting), in many jurisdictions (like the USA). "It" was probably an "abandoned checkout" email, which is a transactional email, and is legally allowed.
I use this Shopify feature as a buyer to get discount codes, as abandoned cart emails often come with them.
Isn't the email at the top of the form and the marketing checkbox at the bottom? It's an awful dark pattern and makes me want to not use any company that uses shopify.
They require your full address to show you shipping prices as well (vs just letting you estimate with country and postal code alone), so I have to punch in a ton of details before I nope out at awful shipping costs, and I end up with these emails.
The USB C connector has like 24 tiny SMA pins how is that trivial? Under the microscope with soldering equipment from a lab maybe, at home this seems impossible and it will likely not work due to the high frequencies involved, I don’t think you can get the impedance right when hand soldering this back on.
Well, not too easy but IMHO still doable, maybe after some training (a couple ready to build soldering projects). Both digital microscopes and precision soldering irons are rather cheap & widely available nowadays.
Yeah, because it's 17% when compared to the current +50% "promotion" they have going. They're raising base weekly limit by 25%. It's still more than non-promotion usage limits.
They’re literally reusing IP from The Office. It’s clearly not parody, and they directly reference the show. It’s one thing for a joke project to do that. They are attempting to profit off someone else’s creative work. And not even in the roundabout way AI does.
Not even in a clever way. The bots don't actually seem to carry any personality traits; they're just ways to label <session_0001> and <session_0002>. I won't accept it as an Office parody if Dwight can work well with others.
Morally, I think it's totally wild to care if some totally unrelated real world thing gets named after a twenty+ year old cultural icon of a TV show as an homage.
They're attempting to profit off their business. The office thing is a theme.
I can’t imagine having so little empathy that you can’t put yourself in the shoes of the creator of the IP. They didn’t even bother to tweak the characters. It’s not “inspired by” or riffing on a theme, it’s a straight ripoff being used to market some AI product. Do you think anyone who created The Office would want to be associated with AI, something that’s threatening to drive them out of a job?
What pisses me off the most is it’s just so damn lazy.
Something can be ridiculous and also conceptually interesting / intelligent.
Gas Town was (transparently, directly from the author's writing) a veneer of visual/linguistic flair applied over a conceptually fascinating and well-thought-out attempt to prod gen 1 LLMs (with all their flaws) into infinite, zero-touch agentic loops.
That the author chose to do so with Mad Max-themed animals doesn't validate or invalidate the underlying concepts.
Personally, I'd rather that than some soulless OpenAI / Anthropic / Microsoft / Google / Meta corporate-scrubbed blob of beige, riskless design.
Especially when it was abundantly clear they realized the presentation choice was ridiculous, but the guts were the more important part.
And not for nothing, there's the 'We're not Kansas anymore' utility of the sufficiently bizarre, to cue people to avoid reusing the wrong prior expectations.
E.g. in Munder Difflin: 'Your LLMs are occasionally brilliant but generally stupid characters, not brilliant human analogs'
I have an llm agent with a harness that stores/logs everything in a structured manner to local files and/or sqlite. This then turns more into casual conversation type stuff. Send it test results, talk about stuff, give it updates, etc, and it handles the rest. Querying the data is pretty straight-forward without the agent since it's plaintext/sqlite. I tried random tools over time but sorta fell out of them. This is kinda the only thing that's stuck.
Could take this further and make it better with structured tooling. Some sorta CLI perhaps, or an API, that the agent knows how to use, then can build a frontend on top or something. For now this works okay.
Yeah, maybe. The issue I foresee is more that the moat is quite small if you can just build it, so the moat would need to exist in stuff that can't just be built and replicated within a few weeks or something. User base maybe, connections to real resources, some other form of deeper value you can't just copy. Not sure though; I'm not a business person
Ya this is basically what Im building. I dont know where the connections to real resources actually live though? Insurance? Lab Results? Wearables? EEG headsets?
Suppose you could use voice too, yeah. I built a k8s-based sandbox environment. One pod = one agent, and then a bunch of scaffolding around that to manage it and stuff. "Agent" here is a Claude Code instance within a pod with root access to do whatever it wants inside the pod. The main interface is Discord, but it supports other interfaces/frontends. 1 agent = 1 pod = 1 discord channel, managed by the harness. It can do other stuff too, like spawn its own pods and namespaces to build and host its own infra, new agent teams/sub-teams, but unrelated.
I mostly use text to talk to it, and send files via the Discord file sharing mechanism. Discord has voice recordings too, which are sent as .ogg files, which the agents then turn into text with Whisper.
Not quite plain Claude Code but I didn't want to go into too much depth in my original message.
The end result though is a persistent data store for each pod/agent, and then I can talk to them whenever I want from wherever I want, and interact with it with proper media support and stuff. So I have one agent that's for medical logs and such, and others for various other things.
Thank you! Those would be more constructive ideas than what I originally sought out to do: play with text!
And the text-blob deserves refinement, IMO. It still seems 'cool' to me, though yes it's really really ambiguous just WHAT it is .. and if it were merely "really ambiguous" that would be better for us humans.
I did -want- to avoid spoilers.
I am impressed by the Dune story's epic nature. The all-caps treatment was meant in part to express this epic quality.
Also but more abstractly to call out how humans gather strings of concepts and form them into meaningful stories. So as I present the block of meaningless text it becomes meaningful upon a more technical word-parsing form of contemplation.
Haha, fair enough. I read the Dune books through the 4th and enjoyed them. I saw some typos and things and figured maybe there's something hidden in there.
Because China is a terrifying country with no real notion of human rights. Basically all Chinese companies (including Tencent) work closely with the government and do what they want under threat of arrest. There’s no way I’m uploading my data to China where their government can get at it whenever they want.
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