Hacker News: fckgw

New comment by fckgw in "Sixty percent of US consumers say 'AI' in brand messaging is a turnoff"

fckgw — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 16:07:17 +0000

The biggest one that jumps out at me is Amazon replacing their review search box with "Rufus", which searching the entire context of an item on Amazon, including descriptions, reviews, everything. It then wants me to ask it a question instead of doing a boring search for keywords.

If I'm looking at a product and want to search the reviews for the keyword "battery life" and see what real, actual people are experiencing, I can't do that anymore. A search for "battery life" in Rufus always returns some nonsense like "Many customers report good battery life, while others say it's runtime is shorter than expected". I want human experience! I want specifics! Why is everything sanded down to "good or bad"?

New comment by fckgw in "Sixty percent of US consumers say 'AI' in brand messaging is a turnoff"

fckgw — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 16:02:14 +0000

Consumers are tired of going through a popup slideshow of "Try our new AI features!" they won't use every time their apps update.

Allbirds rebrands as Smartbird in AI pivot, hires former AWS executive as CEO

fckgw — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 15:56:21 +0000

Article URL: https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/allbirds-rebrands-smartbird-ai-pivot-hires-former-aws-executive-ceo-2026-06-17/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48572272

Points: 4

# Comments: 2

New comment by fckgw in "Sixty percent of US consumers say 'AI' in brand messaging is a turnoff"

fckgw — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 15:54:25 +0000

What is is about management where they can't see how bad and half-baked these customer service agents are, but the customer can tell INSTANTLY they're AI and just not helpful in the slightest

New comment by fckgw in "Gamers beware: malicious wallpapers on Steam found stealing accounts"

fckgw — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 17:58:28 +0000

The malicious wallpapers, which use "Wallpaper Engine" are also published through Steam Workshop. It's still a Steam problem.

New comment by fckgw in "SpaceX to buy Cursor for $60B"

fckgw — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 16:35:15 +0000

You are not in any way the average person.

Food is the 3rd largest expenditure in most households, after housing and transportation.

New comment by fckgw in "A backdoor in a LinkedIn job offer"

fckgw — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 16:19:34 +0000

They target people looking at crypto startups because they're after wallets and seed phrases

New comment by fckgw in "Fox to buy Roku"

fckgw — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 18:23:21 +0000

Buy an AppleTV box and don't connect the TV to WiFi.

New comment by fckgw in "Fox to buy Roku"

fckgw — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 18:22:30 +0000

Roku's hardware business is only 10% of their revenue now. The vast majority of their income comes from their FAST streaming service, which they promote heavily on their devices.

They haven't been platform agnostic for a while now. Swapping out one streaming owner for another really isn't going to move the needle much.

New comment by fckgw in "Siri AI"

fckgw — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 21:52:33 +0000

You could just not use it.

New comment by fckgw in "Apple WWDC 2026 Livestream"

fckgw — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 17:49:33 +0000

This is a software keynote, they very rarely talk hardware at WWDC

New comment by fckgw in "Italy's Bending Spoons, owner of AOL and Vimeo, files for Nasdaq IPO"

fckgw — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 16:33:14 +0000

They're basically the retirement home for once-good apps and services who still serve a dwindling core audience but are not longer growing or even a real contender in their field.

New comment by fckgw in "Windows GOG DOS Games on M-Series Macs"

fckgw — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 17:30:40 +0000

Apple has historically always been about pushing devs forwards and dropping support for legacy systems.

Their attitude has been "we built new hardware, we built new software, we have the tools to develop for these new systems, adapt or die".

This Rosetta 2 transition is actually a couple years longer that their first PPC -> Intel transition. There's more time to adapt this go around.

New comment by fckgw in "Please Use AI"

fckgw — Fri, 29 May 2026 16:31:10 +0000

Then you're missing the point.

The point was "talk to another human about shared experiences, whatever that may be".

New comment by fckgw in "DuckDuckGo search saw 28% more visits after Google said people love AI mode"

fckgw — Wed, 27 May 2026 17:57:23 +0000

Because they want something they know that resembles the old Google Search which DDG provides.

New comment by fckgw in "Exit IP VPN servers mitigation rollout"

fckgw — Tue, 26 May 2026 17:13:21 +0000

Using your phone on a train would be hopping from tower to tower. Going to be swapping IPs endlessly.

New comment by fckgw in "Google changes its search box"

fckgw — Tue, 19 May 2026 20:24:04 +0000

That is incredibly weird, yes.

New comment by fckgw in "Apple unveils new accessibility features"

fckgw — Tue, 19 May 2026 19:04:01 +0000

It's a picture of a blind person. The type of person these features are for.

New comment by fckgw in "Power Tools Got Worse on Purpose. Who Owns DeWalt, Craftsman, and Milwaukee?"

fckgw — Fri, 15 May 2026 15:31:50 +0000

Yeah if you look at the power tool industry as a whole, over the last 20 years has seen massive improvements in quality across the board.

Cordless tools were a niche product, they could barely run an hour and they didn't have 1/10th the power a corded tool does. Things like cordless angle grinders didn't even exist because there was no way to get the required power to drive them.

You also have the advent of brushless tools recently which drive even more power to cordless tools. Smaller, lighter, more power and longer runtime. You put a cheap 18v Ryobi driver against an all metal housing Craftsman corded from the 80s, that cheap plastic Ryobi will outclass that Craftsman every time.

Some brands have risen and fallen. What's happened to Porter Cable is a shame. But conversely, how completely competitive a brand like Ryobi has gotten is also a near miracle. It's a great time for power tools!

New comment by fckgw in "Tesla is recalling its cheaper Cybertruck because the wheels might fall off"

fckgw — Fri, 08 May 2026 15:13:57 +0000

3 verified failures out of 173 total cars is an extremely bad rate for the automotive industry.