Nvidia is way more than their data centre hardware - their software and research is just leagues ahead of the nearest competition, and their edge compute capabilities are going to be a rapidly growing market as derived models start getting put in products - think self-driving, robotics, machine vision, manufacturing and industrial automation, on and on.
So yes - while there are others who may yet compete in the data centre compute market, nothing else comes close to the monopolistic total vertical integration nvidia has built over the last decade.
Yeah - I think they’ve put a big focus on reducing returns over the last year. I bought a Quest 3 last year. One of the controllers totally packed in within half an hour - thumb stick permanently locked to full. Wanted to do an RMA.
Amazon told me to go hang, said I couldn’t return used goods, it would have to be unused in the box, and that I should contact meta.
I contacted meta, who told me to go hang, as they don’t officially support Portugal, which is where Amazon Spain happily shipped it.
So it’s just sat in a box gathering dust since, and I now avoid using Amazon whenever possible. I had already ditched meta so frankly I should have known that I was going to step on a rake.
> Amazon told me to go hang, said I couldn’t return used goods
I don't buy it. Don't we have actual consumer protection laws here in europe? We can return anything we bought online in 14 days time, full refund, no questions asked.
That’s the law, yeah - and if the goods are faulty it’s actually up to two years.
But this is Amazon - they don’t need to follow consumer protection laws - I think their specific get out is that they’re Amazon Spain, and I’m having stuff shipped to Portugal, and Spanish consumer protection regs (which implement the EU regs) only protect consumers in Spain.
I think their specific get out is that they’re Amazon Spain,
IANAL, but I don't think it matters. Any webshop in the EU must sell to all EU customers and they should provide the same warranty, etc. to all EU customers as if you were buying it in the country they are selling from (Spain in this case). The EU is a single market.
Amazon is violating EU consumer protection law here, but they probably do it because most customers will feel helpless and not sue them. If you do not want to sue them, the best thing is probably to file a complaint with the Portuguese consumer authority. It's really important to do this, because only when enough people do such a thing, a pattern can be established and they can warn or sue Amazon.
In my experience in the UK, Amazon is better than consumer protection laws, and miles better than other vendors. They won't question or require lots of information etc. to support things in however many years of warranty, or even outside of it.
Not to mention the standard is 30 day returns, more than double the legally mandated 14 for distance selling.
I don't understand why you were even talking to support - if it was clearly defective within half an hour (much less than 30 days) you could have just created a return yourself without talking to anybody?
Because it’s Amazon Spain and I live in Portugal - they only do return labels etc. for a collection point 200km from where I live, otherwise, you have to ship stuff back at your own expense. No option to automatically open a return.
It’s basically the Amazon uk returns process from 20 years ago.
They should repair it under warranty, period. If they cannot make a return label, you can send it back. IIRC they are also responsible for the shipping cost, but they can refund it afterwards when they are not able to create a return label.
I think your mistake might be that they are sticking to the letter of the law. Don't ask for your 14-day cool-off period, because strictly I think the product needs to be sealed (though many sellers are more lenient):
Instead ask for a repair under warranty, which they are required to do as a seller. They cannot point you to the manufacturer, the seller is responsible for handling warranty for the first two years:
You don't have small claims court? Here in Canada, it's $150 to register, you fill out the form yourself, no lawyers are allowed, and you argue your case in front of a judge.
(A company can have someone represent them, but if it's a lawyer, they must also have a rep. from the company there. and there can be no legalise, and the judge must explain anything to you if you ask)
There is no forced discoverability. EG, the other side cannot ask for all sorts of documents. You just include your evidence in the filing.
There is no ability for the company you sue, to compel costs if you lose.
For $150 you get a lot of joy out of hassling a company behaving like this. And amusingly, they still consult lawyers, and spend on a lot on lawyers. They can't be used in court, but they of course as a company consult legal experts.
I napkin mathed it, the one time I sued a company. I figured it cost them $25,000 to defend when I spent $150. If even a small percentage of people take them to task for breaking the law, they'll turn around quick.
Always use your enemies strengths as a weakness against them.
You should look at the process, but view if from the perspective of a hobby.
They do, but it’s only available to Portuguese citizens - I am a legally resident alien, but am excluded from that system, as it requires a citizen card to start a claim.
Julgados de Paz is available to non-citizens, what are you talking about? So is contacting the livro de réclamations and making a chargeback with your card provider.
How strange to try to claim the legal system has no reconciliation process for tourists or EU passer-bys. You're allowed to say you just couldn't be bothered to go through the trouble.
Go look at the website - you have to use authenticao.gov, which requires a digital mobile key, which requires a citizen card, which I cannot have unless I am a citizen. The offline process requires me to travel 200km each way to spend a day queuing.
Amazon Spain are Spanish, and are not subject to the Portuguese livro de reclamações.
As to making a chargeback - I like having a bank account, and being able to pay for things online - any time you do one you take a risk your bank will decide to throw freezes and KYC at you until you give up.
In theory. In practice, you go to the financas, they hunt around on their computer for a while, and then they tell you it’s not possible without a citizen card. I’ve tried repeatedly, as it’s a pain in the arse not having one, and have repeatedly been told it would be easiest for me to get citizenship first.
And yes, believe it or not, Trás-os-Montes exists. I know you think Coimbra is the northern limit of the country, but people do live up here, and the nearest service desk for many things is Porto.
Anyway, you go vote chega, or whatever it is you do.
Saying "It's not available to not citizens" is wildly and massively different than "It's more work for non-citizens". It's literally a lie and dishonest.
And given you've already said things that are not true, I'm highly skeptical that there are not other means to handle this. I bet there are ways to access authenticao.gov without being a citizen. I bet there are ways that you don't have to go 200km. You can probably send the forms by snail-mail, by post or courier. I bet you're just leaving things out again, or haven't researched properly, as you've shown this to be the case with prior comments.
In terms of what Amazon is subject to, you can get a court judgement in one jurisdiction, and have it enforced in another. You're in the EU too, and I would be astonished to discover this isn't super-easy there. And legislation likely enhances cross-border cases like this. And if companies ship into another country, they can be blocked until recourse happens.
Point is, you're just (again) saying "Oh well!" without really knowing. You're just saying that's the case, because you're presuming that's the case. You don't know. you just say it is so.
Chargebacks are a part of online life. They are common. I've never, ever heard of a bank ever being hostile over them. The very premise is weird and absurd. It's just a part of banking, nothing unusual, nothing surprising, and a process we all have to go through from time to time.
Perhaps you shouldn’t shoot your mouth off on shit you don’t know about and resort to calling people liars.
You can only use authenticao.gov if you have a citizen card. This is a fact. The offline process involves physically going to the office in Porto, which is 200km from me. There are no forms you can just mail. I have been through this. Shit, go try the process yourself if you’re so sure.
You also evidently know nothing about EU law. The EU issues directives. Member states implement them. They are national pieces of legislation, not transnational.
As for chargebacks, the last time I did one, over a hire car that didn’t materialise, my bank put me through the wringer, and I no longer bank with them.
Anyway, thank you for your enlightened fucking comment.
If you're going to provide half truths, and lie about situations, you shouldn't get so upset at it being pointed out. Or at people not believing what you say, after a while.
I would hope that consumer protection organizations can help you with that without having to engage lawyers: similarly, Amazon is not interested in long running legal battles if they see you are serious.
In my experience they invariably conflate LLMs with AI and can’t/won’t have the difference explained.
This is the blind spot that will cause many to lose their shirts, and is also why people are wrong about AI being a bubble. LLMs are a bubble within an overall healthy growth market.
Machine learning is a perfectly valid and useful field, traditional ML is super useful and can produce very powerful tools. LLMs are fancy word predictors that have no concept of truth.
But LLMs look and feel like they're almost "real" AI, because they talk in words instead of probabilities, and so people who can't discern the distance between and LLM and AGI assume that AGI is right around the corner.
If you believe AGI is right around the corner and skip over the bit where any mass application of AGI to replace workers for cheaper is just slavery but with extra steps, then of course it makes sense to pour money into any AI business.
And energy is the air in the economy at large. The Eliza effect is not the only bias disposing people to believe AGI is right around the corner. There are deeper assumptions many cling to.
Many AI startups around LLMs are going to crash and burn.
This is because many people have mistaken LLMs for AI, when they’re just a small subset of the technology - and this has driven myopic focus in a lot of development, and has lead to naive investors placing bets on golden dog turds.
I disagree on AI as a whole, however - as unlike previous technologies this one can self-ratchet and bootstrap. ML designed chips, ML designed models, and around you go until god pops out the exit chute.
Not even remotely. In LLM land, the progress seems slow the past few years, but a lot has happened under the hood.
Elsewhere in AI however progress has been enormous, and many projects are only now reaching the point where they are starting to have valuable outputs. Take video gen for instance - it simply did not exist outside of research labs a few years ago, and now it’s getting to the point where it’s actually useful - and that’s just a very visible example, never mind the models being applied to everything from plasma physics to kidney disease.
The tech is fundamentally fine - where the problem arises is human behaviour.
When offline contactless payments first emerged in the U.K., there was a significant spike in unplanned overdraft usage and disputed transactions, as people rapidly realised it essentially worked as a free line of credit, up to £100 or £250 depending on your issuer.
This quite quickly caused issuers to push up prices on offline transactions, which made them less appealing to merchants - add to that that people were talking about them being a hotbed of fraud, and merchants err away from offering them, PCNs start dropping the capability due to lack of demand, and here we are today.
I know I’m pretty much repeating what the GP said, but it’s crazy how far they have strayed.
Around 20 years ago (which, on reflection, is quite a long time) I, as a developer, moved to mac, as the way it all just worked without having to wade through the weeds was unbelievably refreshing. Couldn’t be more different to the experience you describe.
I bought my last Mac over a decade ago now - I’m now back on windows, as if I’m going to be nagged in an adware UI, I may as well use the one that gets in my way less.
I prescribe Plato - Republic, book X, specifically. How can one set of shadows on the wall be better than another, as they’re just shadows, degraded representations of the real?
Or perhaps Aristotle’s Poetics - pop culture has value because it is mimetic, and AI generated pop culture is no less a mirror, just one which produces reflections of every moment, all the time - but rather than the grand catharsis we might experience in a work of literature with well wrought characters with whom we empathise, we find the void staring into us as we do into it. Hollow art for hollow men.
Like it or not, the void is culture, and has value because it reflects us, albeit through a glass, darkly.
So yes - while there are others who may yet compete in the data centre compute market, nothing else comes close to the monopolistic total vertical integration nvidia has built over the last decade.
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