Logbook: amazon
AI and how much it increases your costs.
This here is a tracked price of an SSD from amazon that clearly shows how much AI is driving the price up for every human in existence. to replace the SSD in a cheap computer now costs more than the cheap laptop or computer you bought in 2024. It eradicates any advantages in buying consoles and more.
Rufus is failing upward.
Rufus is burning through money Like a kid with a sparkler in a gunpowder factory.
Amazon CEO Jassy defends $200 billion AI spend: “We’re not going to be conservative”
With a $15 billion AI run rate, they might recoup their costs in 13.3 years. But lets be real, they are not counting the upward costs, They don’t account for the land cost, they don’t account for hardware failure. They are land rushing and hoping they hit it big. James Wilson Marshall is likely spinning in his grave.
This is a bad idea, most people do not realize that the Slopocalypse is happening. AI companies are starting for the exits because smoke is happening. Between Claude releasing its source code, Sora melting overnight.
Rufus is going to follow Sora and Claude , out of the 200 billion with the “lion’s share going toward AI development.” Horse shit, anyone who has used Rufus knows that rufus is a very basic AI that favors trying to get people to buy the most expensive products without going through your sales history.
In all honesty Rufus will be the litmus test for pushing bad AI, They are not a centralized platform like grok nor is the AI functional outside of being a bad salesman. Rufus does not do anything other than say “i see you are looking at socks how about these socks” as it shows a 50$ pair of socks. In the economy right now we can’t afford 50$ socks. “Independent audits from January 2026 show Rufus only matches the “objectively best” product 32% of the time”. When your basic function is to (sell product)..How are you are burning 200 Million on AI? Fuck that call Wendy’s and get there bad AI , its all the same. Rufus is a digital Vampire, It doesn’t do much but where do you think it is getting its training data. At this point lets all buy condoms to screw with the LLM learning data.
This is the 1849 goldrush for the 2026 era, as more people jump in to play the AI game, the corpses of other AI miners are dying fast. for every large AI that dies, Likely 100 more smaller ones die. The Slopocalypse is here, and while you could dig with your hands in the goldrush the 2026 game is pay to play. You need to have storage that is skyrocketing in cost, Land, and obscene amounts of power to run an AI farm while destroying everything around you. The AI Farms(mines) that fail are quickly bought up and run again until they fail too. What is likely happening as well is the AI farms that are failing are being bought up by bigger AI, the problem is THE ROI IS EXTREMELY NEGATIVE.
The idea of AI is nice on paper, but when culture is making AI SLOP videos of farts our trajectory is heading towards idiocracy. The biggest question is when slop is done is there any room for advancement or has the system inwardly corrupted itself into uselessness. The part that is failing in this industry is the scaling issue, if we need an answer to something and the answer is a hallucination, the fix is not to throw more processing power at it. It should come down to a code audit.
Because models are training on themselves the slop has become the AI’s TikTok doomscoll and with the Data of a shower thought fever dream being inputted into the AI the model now makes it real and therefore a training point. Google has put in its own immune system via SynthID.
Well, Given we are watching the Slopocalypsy in real time and people Slopocalypse coffeepots might cease to function, in the end it is we the consumers that are stuck with the bill because at the end of the day the bankrupt company walks away and the land rot infects the system.
I’m off to have a coffee from my smarter dumb coffee pot with buttons and switches and no internet connection, hopefully you do the same, its cheaper!
Final note: when your run numbers are 15b with a 200b expenditure, this is cleanroom spending. it does not account for failure and other associated costs.
Vizio tvs enshittification and why I won’t touch them.
Walmart has recently made move to require a walmart account on your Vizio and ONN branded Tv’s and its not over Watch metrics, its over how much data they can take from you. Its how much they can market your name and sell it off to other Entities. They claim it is a unification, Its not, it is walmart wants your living room, These TV’s likely have microphones in them and worse proximity sensor to know who’s in the room.
Beyond innovation, the results from Walmart and VIZIO are already clear for customers. 65% of surveyed Walmart customers report that CTV ads helped them discover new products3, underscoring the power of placing premium content in front of high-intent shoppers.
How the fuck did they flavor this question. They probably used a no win question where they gave 5 answers and gave people a no way out. something like “How much do Walmart ads on your VIZIO TV help you learn about new items? 1.Significantly 2. Somewhat 3. A little bit 4. Not much 5. Not at all.. They just flavored the poll to 4 yeses and a no. The poll is bullshit and likely people don’t know what they answered to. Because they will bias the outcome. But Walmart should not have the control over the TV they want. We bought Vizio Tv’s for the game room, for grandma when her tv dies. We dont want to buy a TV for grandma when it makes her able to click the interface and made the home shopping channel in one go because she was watching the big bang theory and walmart spawns and ad for notebooks on sale.
Roku does the injected ad Garbage. Even when you try to turn it off you find ads overlaid on other ads. Roku recently patented technology for “HDMI Customized Ad Insertion.” This allows the TV to monitor the HDMI port. Meaning when you have a monitor for a test while you are checking out someones test results while you are looking up someone’s health roku just made a hipaa violation. Privacy is now a subscription service, the price of getting the subscription is shopping at savers and finding old tv’s that don’t record you while you take a shit. The problem is Walmart is the granddaddy of data from customers , they are the place the FBI turns to when they cant answer a question. they made the reason facebook knows you jerk off because they are reading your watches and phones sensors while you sent memes an hour ago to your work buddy.
The sad part is walmart just leaped over facebooks tracking. Because walmart just stepped up the game. They will probe your phone via the Vizio, Than when you hit the store they will have a tracking Tag that probes your phone again and if you go for the product that was on TV they have your home address, they have your means of payment. they have everything. This needs to stop. With this if you stop to long in an isle walmart will hallucinate that you are buying Plan B while you are pregnant because you dodged out of an isle to talk about something important. In states where birth control is frowned on you could be arrested.
My answer to this as much as I hate it, Buy a Firestick or a google device. Amazon uses Sidewalk, But you can turn that shit off. They are geofenced, they go no further than your TV. They have more regulatory rules to stop them from doing what walmart wants to do. If it is discovered that either them are taking information beyond the boundaries than you know to stop it . If that Vizio or ONN tv refuses to setup without an account, return the TV as a defective product. Make a report to the FCC that the TV is refusing to let you see OTA TV. Under the Telecommunications Act of 1996, specifically the OTARD (Over-the-Air Reception Devices) rule, manufacturers cannot place “unreasonable restrictions” that impair the use of antennas for video programming. There are people out there without internet still and imagine nursing homes being TV locked because no internet.
But honestly at this point I am almost ready to say if you buy a cheap TV , use a cheap Chinese brand, They will track you but the end game what is a Chinese man going to do if you talk about farts with a friend for 45 minutes.
Walmart is creating a surveillance state that the US government is dying for, now if walmart follows through they dont have to do it. Worse yet if Walmart cheats and says “you need the Vizio APP to set up the TV” congrats you have given walmart your location down to the foot.
It’s bad enough in the generation of smart Devices that you need a SCIF to talk about stuff that is under NDA or court injunction because of a divorce or other means. We as the consumers need to place boundaries. we go to the store to get products, we don’t need to spied on at home because we ran out of coffee.
Also, You know all of this is going to further enshitified by AI , The fact you know these TV’s are going to be taking private data, the second you replay the BLURAY/DVD of your child’s birth congratulations, your or your significant others Vagina is on the internet.
Anyways, if you buy a TV read the TOS , privacy policy and be safe. otherwise the assholes win. I need a coffee now…
Is amazon ok?
Amazon has been weird lately, Just a bunch of things I have noticed .
For one amazon prime Video is getting weird. Not sure if this applies to everyone but, Watch a TV show on amazon… Rather than go to the next episode It returns you to the Amazon Prime Video screen, I thought it might of been a fluke in the amazon app. I tried the same thing on my samsung TV , Same thing happened! Loaded up a brand new firestick that i have for media sharing Same problem?
This alone may not have anyone going Hmmm but there are other things Amazon Resale has people complaining because of people order X and get Y. Other items are shipped and people are getting refunds and told to dispose of Item.
They also are heavily leveraged into AI and their Rufus is dumber than a brick. They are putting hundreds of billions into AI and are hemorrhaging money for this.. They are trying so bad to be next Facebook in a way by being Big Data and they do not know how to do it . Costs for their AI outwiegh there standard app approach. The way it is going Jeff Bezos might have to use low grade fuel for his plane.
Amazon is also hiding reviews from normal users and instead show compensated reviews. Compensated reviews are garbage because the only way to keep getting items is give a glowing review. I’d take 10 Honest reviews over a single review where the person received the item for free.. They are so badly losing their way that they are bleeding long time customers turned off by this approach. Amazon probably knows they are losing a small percentage of customers. They are over leveraged and I am willing to bet they dont know how to get back . but even month to month if they lose 0.25% customers , You don’t have a leak you have a crisis , because even in that small percentage they are losing “whales” people that are big spenders.
If you go by this metric it works out to big money and the more that leave would be catastrophic.
| Metric | Regular Member | The “Whale” (Top Tier) |
| Est. Annual Spend | $1,400 | $12,000+ (Business/Bulk) |
| 0.25% Monthly Churn | 625,000 users / month | ~6,250 high-spenders / month |
| Annualized Users Lost | 7.5 Million Users | 75,000 “Whales” |
| Direct Revenue Loss | $10.5 Billion / year | $900 Million / year |
| Subscription Fee Loss | $1.3 Billion (at $179/yr) | (Included in revenue) |
So right now Amazon is using an enshitification phase while they try to bet the house on Rufus. Rufus has the tact of getting a pickaxe to the skull. If you ask google it gives you what you want while Rufus throws shit at you and goes HERE THIS IS WHAT YOU BUY NOW! At a guess Amazon knows they are bleeding but they are so committed to their act that they are reducing everything just to keep the ship running. So piss away customers and hope they can profit. if amazon had incrimented the changes rather than try to use a grenade to empty a bucket people may have tolerated this. But even marketwise they are pissing away money , The stock is down 8.18% in the last 6 months.
While amazon serves better as the general store they are trying to get into a neiche market and they have no fucking clue how to do it because they seem to be trying a what can we replace while not realizing th e limitations on the new.
They’ve replaced the general store with a high-stakes AI experiment, and right now, the experiment is blowing up in everyones face like wile E coyote trying to catch a profitable roadrunner.
Anyways, back to my coffee after this steamy thought.