I hope you’ll update us if you chase this down. I like 404 Media and I want to keep liking them, but only if the reporting is good. Hopefully it’s a typical tech journalism mistranslation where they use Tesseract OCR to scrape PDFs and the author just misunderstood, or something like that.

Edit: after looking, I don’t have any issues. Looks like just a raw list from whatever source, I don’t need 404 Media to try to “curate” that or remove elements that seem irrelevant, they can leave that to us.

That’s all I’m looking for and seems like a reasonable thing to expect, I’d prefer to avoid Amazon but am glad to know of that option, thank you! And to be clear, think you could confirm if you mean sold/fulfilled by Amazon or if you’re thinking of a 3rd party seller using Amazon the platform?

Doing this exact thing, right at the moment I’m reading this. Oof. Time to get my shit together lol.

First time I’ve ever seen him referenced anywhere outside where I learned of him! Best dude, what an inspiration.

FWIW I shifted my monthly Wikipedia donation to The Internet Archive recently and recommend others do the same. Just a few bucks a month, please, it matters. Zero hate for Wikipedia, it’s a critically important piece of human culture, but they’re plenty good on $ and we need to be fostering backups of shared knowledge and historical records. This is important! No one will do it for us, only we who care can do it!

Thanks for pointing this out, I had no idea. Removed it and left a review complaining.

Thiel’s company, Palantir, is making inroads at many fed gov agencies to manage their data. I’ve seen it happening myself. That’s bad.

Problems pointed out by commenters aside, I am under the impression that there is very little oversight about this kind of stuff anymore.

For one thing - unless they’ve changed recently, Amazon “bins” alike products from multiple suppliers, meaning if a bad actor is introducing counterfeits (or just less stringently tested, for more fungible products) - Amazon doesn’t even know who they got them from, by the time that’s discovered.

But for another thing, the absolutely incredible volume of products - how on earth is anyone making sure these random-character-generated “brands” are safe?

I lack much in the way of direct evidence, cuz I’ve got shit to do and this isn’t my life’s focus - but it seems apparent that there cannot possibly be the kind of consumer safety testing that we want going on. And if that’s true, it’s only a matter of time before the smart capitalists realize no one is watching and they can make stuff even cheaper (I think they already have), and then how long before we as a society discover all the harm that’s done as a result?

I’d love to be wrong about this, but like so many tech innovations, I have a feeling we’re going to find out later there were huge harms done before we learned how to rein them in. The speed, volume, and price we’ve grown used to with Amazon seems to preclude consumer safety.