OOOOFFFF

Last time I looked, these were similar numbers for Amazon's dominance of online shopping in the US.

i despair ...

direct to consumer means direct to consumer ... NOT via a third party marketplace [such as Walmart's].  

mixed price messaging from wowcher

 

make it easy to for customers to buy

These seem about right - the first two in particular. lessons might be:

1 Maybe give browsers somewhere to 'save' potential purchases without putting them in a basket

2 Make sure total costs are upfront on the product page.

Source.

what? every day?

I try to post something on this blog every day(ish). 

Actually, I schedule posts so that one goes live every day(ish) - nevertheless, I need to find a story everyday. I don't go looking for them, just save things I see while I'm online. 

So here's the message: if you want to publish on any kind of social media you can't take a holiday.

oh dear ...

 

drunk online shopping is big business

... but who is responsible?

few checks where profit is involved?

European non-profit AI Forensics found Hugging Face is being used to create non-consensual, sexualised images of women and children with seemingly little or no monitoring or safeguarding in place. Analysis of usage of models hosted on the platform found the 73% of monitored requests were sexual in nature, and, of those, 83% sought to undress or otherwise sexualise a person (almost always a woman), while 6.7% targeted a minor. Output moderation was observed in just 3% of the instances audited - this despite Hugging Face’s own policies explicitly prohibiting the creation of sexual materials of an individual without their consent 

Source: Private Eye August 2026. Issue number 1681.

ad spend well spent?

A quick look at the stats under this ad [on X] suggests that it would seem I'm not the only person who has no idea what this ad is all about. I note that it was 'made with ai' ... so maybe no human being knows what it's all about?

it's funny 'cos it's true

 

It reminds me of this pic that I've using for years.

more bots than humans visit websites

Internet security company Cloudflare estimates that the proportion of web traffic driven by AI bots is now greater than that from humans. It says automated traffic crossed the 50% measured in June 2026 and now accounts were nearly 58% of all webpage requests.

Source: Private Eye August 2026. Issue number 1681.

apparently, the message in this ad may - or may not - be true

 You can either believe, or not.

really? why?

The folk trying to sell you ai don't actually know how to use it

 Reuters obtained internal Meta data on what happened after Zuckerberg cut 8,000 workers and moved 7,000 into AI roles. AI-generated code changes jumped 220%. New features reaching users only rose 36%. Major incidents spiked 40%. Time spent firefighting those incidents up 70%. Employee sentiment dropped from 74% to 55% favorable. Hours before the first round of layoffs went out, Zuckerberg quietly cancelled the second round that was planned for November.

Hedgie@hedgieMarkets

you know when you just click on 'agree to all' ...