Not really, considering the origins of ContentID. It's just the same story over again. Google/YouTube didn't really want to build ContentID. It was a concession as a result of lawsuits from Viacom (and others) from the early days of YouTube, where they were about to be sued out of existence for having a platform, which at the time, was filled with blatantly pirated content.
I exclude all the published LLM User-Agents and have a content honeypot on my website. Google obeys, but ChatGPT and Bing still clearly know the content of the honeypot.
Presumably the "honeypot" is an obscured link that humans won't click (e.g. tiny white text on a white background in a forgotten corner of the page) but scrapers will. Then you can determine whether a given IP visited the link.
I know what a honeypot is, but the question is how the know the scraped data was actually used to train llms. I wondered whether they discovered or verified that by getting the llm to regurgitate content from the honeypot.
I interpreted it to mean that a hidden page (linked as u describe) is indexed in Bing or that some "facts" written on a hidden page are regurgitated by ChatGPT.
I don't know. The reality is just that most business ideas don't pan out. There were hundreds of well-funded efforts to build online retailers before Amazon happened. If you're well-off, it's obviously easier to try and try again, but you're still likely to fail.
I think the article is right in that if you don't have a clear business idea ("we're building a platform"), the odds are even worse. Except when they aren't, because in some niches, you actually have customers who want a platform. Cloud computing is an obvious example. It's just not the general case for consumer stuff.
> There were hundreds of well-funded efforts to build online retailers before Amazon happened
Maybe hundreds. Maybe not. We (the initial amzn team of bezos, myself and shel kaphan) were certainly not looking at any others that I recall besides bookstacks who had a telnet-based online bookstore.
I think people overlook the role of luck here. Bezos was simultaneously very smart but also incredibly lucky to be "the guy who was doing books on the web". It really was the ideal product for the first large scale online retail, and Bezos brought a lot of imagination and energy to the effort. But if it had not have been him, it would have been someone else, who likely would have been more or less as successful.
Personally, I think that Bezos' relentless focus on customer service was the biggest factor in amzn's early success, combined with his near-insane quality standards for the people he was willing to hire.
What was the "lucky" part? The article claims that Bezos learned that web usage was growing 2300% a year (public knowledge), decided to sell stuff on the web, made a list of 20 potential products, and decided that books were the one where an online store could best compete. Is that wrong? It makes it sound like the particular way Bezos was lucky was by happening to be smart, smarter than the rest of us who were paying attention to what was going on. But it sounds like you're saying there was some other form of luck involved. What was it?
What I mean by luck is that I don't think that Bezos (or the rest of us) had any special qualifications or experiences that meant that we were the only ones who could have made amzn work. He was lucky in that his situation at D.E. Shaw allowed him to do the market research that led him to the book store concept (notably after Shaw rejected it). He wasn't smarter than the rest of us. Had Shaw not asked him to research possible online opportunities, he may never have come up with the concept at all. And it wasn't Shaw either, given that he turned down most of the ideas Bezos presented, most of which went on to become pretty huge.
I see! So the luck was in happening to be paying attention to the right things, and happening to bet on them even though other equally smart people (like David Shaw) decided not to, given the same information? Thank you for explaining.
> Except when they aren't, because in some niches, you actually have customers who want a platform. Cloud computing is an obvious example. It's just not the general case for consumer stuff.
I think Cloud computing as a successful business comes from the same process as suggested though. It's hard to build the platform as a business by itself.
Amazon's cloud is an offshoot of their internal elastic computing needs. Google's cloud sort of is too. Microsoft's cloud is an offshoot of their enterprise software business, same with Oracle's. IBM has been renting computers to businesses since like forever, but they used to make calculators and typewriters. I've never understood what Salesforce does, but I dunno, now it does it in the cloud rather than customer hosted?
There's some maybe purer cloud businesses, but mostly they started with a simpler hosting model and expanded into cloudy offerings.
If steam was always meant to be an all the games store, it certainly didn't start that way. When it launched, it was only for buying/using Valve's games, and it expanded later.
After looking at the history of Amazon, I'm convinced their early success was due more to ruthless business practices than being an especially good book store.
Ruthless business practice? Maybe too, but very good customer support from my point as a customer, e.g.
- a shopping cart which kept my choices forever. I remember a startup clone about 20+ years ago here in Europe, whose shopping cart automatically cleared after 24 hours. That was annoying if you wanted to look for some reviews for a book later in, before deciding to buy.
- the suggestions engine "customers who bought this also bought..." was excellent 20 years ago, especially for niche products. It helped me find a lot oft interesting music, once CDs where added to the shop.
- customer comments/reviews on products. And comments on reviews, correcting facts more often than not.
Most of this started to degrade years later. No comments on reviews any more, no downvotes on bad reviews, fake reviews, "sponsored" products "suggested" in extreme, etc.
The thing I always remember was a former colleague bought a TV from Amazon in about 2008. He got an email a few weeks later from Amazon saying that they'd refunded some of his money, as the TV had gone on sale not long after he'd bought it. That is insanely good customer service.
That last part makes me a bit nervous. It's dangerously close to the EA belief that it's actually OK to be a ruthless exec for a tobacco company, because you can do good things with your money that you wouldn't be able to do if you quit the job.
I don't think that's the point you're making, but it's good to be careful with that. You can do good after hours, but it doesn't absolve you from what you're doing 9-to-5.
As to your first point: yes, but it's all relative. Most tech workers are "trying to get by" in their minds. Just look at the SFBA rents and the PG&E bills! And wait until you hear about their college loans... most people in the top 1% don't think about themselves as the top 1%.
In the end, making good decisions often requires sacrifice, pretty much no matter how much you make. And we often find ways to rationalize why it's not the right time for that.
What confuses me is how many people are evidently in the job of "ruthless exec" and then they do it amorally. I can't think of any time in my life that I've seen an exec say: no, we could do that, but we shouldn't because it's wrong. No doubt because anyone who acts that way gets naturally-selected out of the job.
But also there seems to be a pervasive belief, which if anything feels way strong than it was when I was younger (maybe because the moral-majority christian-nation vibes have fully disappeared, in the US at least? sure, it was always fairly hollow, but at least it was a thing at all), that a business leader is not supposed to do moral things, because it's not their job description; their job truly is "increase shareholder value on a 6-12 month timescale", and if they try to do something different they are judged negatively!
So maybe there is in theory good to be done by being an exec and being more moral than average (maybe not a tobacco exec, but, say, in tech?). But the system is basically designed to prevent you from doing it? It almost seems as though modern model of shareholder capitalism is almost designed to keep things this way: to eliminate the idea at any point that a person should feel bad if they just do the "efficient", shareholder-value-maximizing thing. Nobody has any agency in the big machine, which means no one is accountable for what it does. Perfect, just how we like it? Whereas at least a private enterprise which is beholden to the principles of its leader could in principle do something besides the most cynical possible play at every turn.
I think it's useless to believe that the explanation behind everything is "greed". It's so easy to blame greed; it's amorphous and meaningless; it gives you nothing you can do; it's the logic of a people who are sure nothing can change, that the way things are is inherent: the rich are greedy, the bad things in the world are powerful people taking advantage of us for benefit, sad for us.
It seems pretty clear that the forces at work are designed to incentivize, reward, and rationalize "greed", and so if one just does their job, so to speak, they will end up doing the greedy thing at every turn. And really we are fine with it! -- what we value more than anything is value creation (on paper). No matter if the actual world is getting worse as long as it appears to be getting better: the economy/investment accounts/stock grants are going up.
There is immorality, there is amorality, and then there is architecting systems intentionally so that none of the actors within the system are constrained by their personal mortality.
"We were only obeying orders" all the way up. And even when you get to the top, they're only obeying the orders of the market.
At least, that's what they'll tell you, and that's what they tell themselves.
The fist paragraph seems to say: "greed is not a good explanation", while the second seems to claim: "greed explains everything and we are all OK with it".
No, I'm saying: greed is not a good explanation; what looks like greed is essentially required by the world we've built; blaming it on greed alone is an attitude of hopelessness. The problem is our ambient value system, which demands corporations act greedy.
It's the truth, and we've had these systems since the dawn of civilization. Idk why people are acting surprised now when we've been doing this for thousands of years.
If people in power don't provide and protect a democratic process to removing poor leadership then they do not get to complain when people make those decisions on their own.
I think the cause and effect here are reversed. Thing is, in a society like ours, you pretty much have to be a shitty human being to become a CEO of anything even remotely big. It inevitably requires walking on heads and abusing people to the extent that no moral person would be comfortable with.
So we have a system that puts selection pressure on economic elites to be sociopathic. And then those same people write the books on "how to be a good CEO" etc, so of course they are going to say that you're not supposed to do things that they themselves don't do.
> It's dangerously close to the EA belief that it's actually OK to be a ruthless exec for a tobacco company, because you can do good things with your money that you wouldn't be able to do if you quit the job.
The post you're linking to is not arguing that you should become a tobacco exec, it's arguing that 80k has not sufficiently made the case that a tobacco exec who donated all their income thoughtfully would still be causing net harm.
Reading both articles, I think it depends a lot what strategy the exec employs. If they optimize for getting people to become addicted to smoking or increase how much they smoke (growing the market) then I think it's really unlikely they could donate enough to make up for that enormous harm. On the other hand, if they optimize for increasing profitability by increasing prices and advocating for regulation that acts as barriers to new entrants, and especially if the person who would otherwise have the role would be optimizing for growing the market, then it's likely their work is positive on it's own, regardless of donating.
> But if you're one or two levels up Maslow's Pyramid, it's right to weigh your personal needs against the impact of your work. You'll also be better off for it, knowing that <b>the world would be worse off if you decided to switch gears</b> and become a carpenter/baker/bartender/choose your adventure.
To highlight this part of the original in support of this comment. This comes of as somewhat arrogant and is a pretty big red flag...
If you've changed your career to support some goal, here the public good, isn't it natural to be strongly convinced that your work is advancing that goal?
>It's dangerously close to the EA belief that it's actually OK to be a ruthless exec for a tobacco company, because you can do good things with your money that you wouldn't be able to do if you quit the job.
You're saying this as if it's a given, but why wouldn't this work?
That analogy fails because robbing a bank is straightforwardly illegal and norm-breaking (by the majority of the population), whereas being a tobacco executive isn't.
>but basically it comes across as, "I am willing to sacrifice others (but not myself) to achieve my goals because I know better."
Since money is fungible but finite, basically any sort of donation decision involves sacrificing someone. Donating to fund malaria nets when you'd otherwise have funded your local little league team means you're in effect, sacrificing the local little league team. Moreover, by donating their own money, they're by definition "sacrificing myself".
This line of thinking (and EA in general) taken to its logical conclusion results in stuff like LW's famous "moral dilemma" about torturing someone for 50 years being justifiable if it prevents sufficiently many people from the discomfort of having a speck in their eye.
But if you won’t be the big tabacco exec, someone else will.
So I actually agree with the notion that being the big tabacco exec and doing good things with your money, plus helping steer things from the inside is a better proposition than becoming a baker and letting someone who has NO moral qualms with tabacco run the ship.
It’s rarely as effective to push change from the outside as it is the inside.
> But if you won’t be the big tabacco exec, someone else will.
In the public discourse, you'll often see CEOs and founders lauded as incredibly brilliant and rare. As soon as you start to talk about ethics though, they're suddenly fungible. "Someone else would run the orphan crushing factory if not for me"
I think the idea is that if all good people refuse to become a tobacco exec the pool of people willing to take the job will be small and full of bad people, eventually they will run the business into the ground and the problem solves itself. How well this works in practice is debatable.
Unless you are suggesting selling tobacco is as unethical as torturing and murdering people of different tribes for the sake of them being in different tribes, I do not see what your point could be.
Should people simply never be able to sell or consume tobacco? Even if one’s consumption of tobacco does not negatively affect anyone else?
Honestly a better question would be if there are any social norms that allow for a moral CEO to exist? Pretty much all of our norms are tilted towards producing immoral executives.
“If I don’t work for the Nazi’s they will kill my family, so I will work for the Nazi’s”
There, I fixed your uninspired and incorrect anecdote.
Big tobacco execs are quite literally killing absolutely no one. Last I checked they aren’t sticking cigarettes in anyone’s mouth. Personal responsibility for your own actions is unfortunately lacking in many discussions surrounding things like this.
That's because we have a society have generally decided that personal responsibility is not actually the appropriate lens with which to judge the sale of addictive products.
The wifi protocol is computationally intensive. The wifi module is effectively a fast 32-bit computer with fairly complex firmware. And then, there's all the RF engineering that needs to happen to make it work.
So, the original thinking was "if you need wifi, we can't price a standalone chip competitively, just buy a SoC". But the genius of ESP32 was that they approached it the other way round: they built a wifi chip, and then figured they can carve out some room for user code. No need to pay for a separate MCU. This worked for a lot of customers, and the economies of scale took care of the rest.
Wi-Fi chips always had "user" program area, in theory anyone could call any of chip vendor, and with NDA, $$$ an 5 years of back and forth, could have met the exact same goal as what you can do today with ESP32, even in 2010. I've seen a Twitter ticker display made from a mPCI Wi-Fi card in a maker meeting back then. The guy demoing it was a company engineer with access to internal docs, wasn't giving it to anyone else.
The genius of Espressif was that they didn't issue C&D letters and DMCA takedowns when people started modifying firmware for their product using garden variety GCC without even asking and then ported hobbyist garbage called Arduino Core. They did initially panic a bit, but soon their management realized it's a golden ticket to something, and they bet the whole company on it. And they got the return they deserve.
There aren't a lot of aspects that are technically so advanced about ESP8266/ESP32. It's just the ones made by the hungriest and most aspiring Wi-Fi chip manufacturer.
Is there a write up somewhere talking about the panicking? It might be interesting to read. I am curious how they enabled people to do this without realizing people would do it.
I wasn't in the scene directly but was only watching it from great distance. It was literally a decade ago, too. Maybe someone can ask Espressif for their side of battle story, but I don't have any more to offer, sorry.
To chime in, adding the espressif WiFi libraries to your firmware adds 500-600KB of code. In the trivial IoT widget I just made, the firmware is >90% espressif code by weight.
The RAM use is also... noticeable. It takes quite a lot for this chip do WiFi.
It is similar for BLE. I recently wrote firmware for nrf52 device. Proprietary blob was 100 KB. My code was 60 KB and actually like 40-50 KB was caused by crypto library which is basically required part of BLE stack as well, just distributed with code and not in the blob.
Espressif implies that the WiFi hardware uses ADC2 for something. It sounds like a hardware limitation, a firmware issue would have been patched a long time ago.
Virtually non-existent? There aren't that many people doing open RF hardware, and all of the ones I'm familiar with are working with SDR because the costs go up massively once you go to tapeout.
Because the ESP can only barely do WiFi. You can get a couple of Mbps under ideal conditions. It is not a general purpose WiFi adapter, it's a low power IoT chip.
A general purpose WiFi adapter can do gigabit sustained connections over PCI or some other high speed interface. Entirely different class of chip.
Which is still abysmal compared to what a modern Wi-Fi chipset can push, even in the real world. Even an old home-grade Wi-Fi 5 AP can push >400Mbps over the air in real-world conditions. And the Wi-Fi 6/6e/7 devices can go well above that.
While they’re only now coming out with even a 5GHz model there isn’t really much in Apple’s product line that needs a lowend primarily “IoT” WiFi. Maybe the HomePod, but they already have better chipsets for their flagship devices.
I can't think of an Apple product that needs low power Wifi and/or Bluetooth, and also operates at such a low price-point that there's not budget to put something bigger on the BoM.
I think it's one of these things that people like to talk about in the abstract, but how many people really want a big CRT taking up space in their home?
Modern OLED displays are superior in every way and CRT aesthetics can be replicated in software, so a more practical route would be probably to build some "pass-through" device that adds shadow mask, color bleed, and what-have-you. A lot cheaper than restarting the production of cathode-ray tubes.
I recently bought a big CRT to take up space in my home.
Yes, of course, "objectively" speaking, an OLED display is superior. It has much better blacks and just better colors with a much wider gamut in general. But there's just something about the way a CRT looks - the sharp contrast between bleeding colors and crisp subpixels, the shadows that all fade to gray, the refresh flicker, the small jumps the picture sometimes makes when the decoding circuit misses an HBLANK - that's hard to replicate just in software. I've tried a lot of those filters, and it just doesn't come out the same. And even if it did look as nice, it would never be as cool.
Retro gaming has to be retro. And to be honest, the CRT plays Netflix better as well. It doesn't make you binge, you see? Because it's a little bit awful, and the screen is too small, and you can't make out the subtitles if you sit more than two meters away from the screen, and you can't make out anything if you sit closer than that.
Does that mean we have to restart the production of cathode-ray tubes? Hopefully not. But you can't contain the relics of an era in a pass-through device from jlcpcb.
If the display is working and the input layout isn't changing, you shouldn't accept any jumps at all. If the sync signals are coming at the same rate, the display should remain steady. (Well - as steady as you get with a CRT.) If they don't: it's broken.
> Modern OLED displays are superior in every way and CRT aesthetics can be replicated in software, so a more practical route would be probably to build some "pass-through" device that adds shadow mask, color bleed, and what-have-you.
OLEDs are still behind on motion clarity, but getting close. We finally have 480 Hz OLEDs, and seem to be on track to the 1000Hz needed to match CRTs.
The Retrotink 4k also exists as a standalone box to emulate CRTs and is really great. The main problem being it's HDMI 2.0 output, so you need to choose between 4k60 output with better resolution to emulate CRT masks/scan lines, or 1440p120 for better motion clarity.
Something 4k500 or 4k1000 is likely needed to really replace CRTs completely.
Really hoping by the time 1000 Hz displays are common we do end up with some pass-through box that can fully emulate everything. Emulating full rolling CRT gun scan out should be possible at that refresh rate, which would be amazing.
1000Hz is enough to match CRT quality on a sample-and-hold display, but only when you're displaying 1000fps content. A great many games are limited to 60fps, which means you'll need to either interpolate motion, which adds latency and artifacts, or insert black frames (or better, black lines for a rolling scan, which avoids the latency penalty), which reduces brightness. Adding 16 black frames between every image frame is probably going to reduce brightness to unacceptable levels.
The brightest CRTs were those used in CRT projectors. These had the advantage of using three separate monochrome tubes, which meant the whole screen could be coated in phosphor without any gaps, and they were often liquid cooled.
Direct-view color CRTs topped out at about 300 nits, which is IMO plenty for non-HDR content.
For smooth and fast motion, yes. Although I don't have such fast displays for testing, you can simulate the effect of sample-and-hold blur by applying linear motion blur in a linear color space. A static image (e.g. the sample-and-hold frame) with moving eyeballs (as in smooth pursuit eye tracking) looks identical to a moving image with static eyeballs, and the linear motion blur effect gives a good approximation of that moving image.
I'm not sure what you're getting at. The point of these (ill-defined) alignment exercises is not to achieve parity with humans, but to constrain AI systems so that they behave in our best interest. Or, more prosaically, that they don't say or do things that are a brand safety or legal risk for their operator.
Still, I think that the original paper and this take on it are just exercises in excessive anthropomorphizing. There's no special reason to believe that the processes within an LLM are analogous to human thought. This is not a "stochastic parrot" argument. I think LLMs can be intelligent without being like us. It's just that we're jumping the gun in assuming that LLMs have a single, coherent set of values, or that they "knowingly" employ deception, when the only thing we reward them for is completing text in a way that pleases the judges.
I doubt it works this way. People at Google use search too, and they don't like what they see.
Part of the problem is that they're fighting against financial incentives that they themselves created. There's plenty of upside and little downside to abusing it, so it's just endless whack-a-mole.
Another issue is just how bureaucratic the process has become. They want it to look good to the regulators and the courts, so they put up with a pattern of abuse for five years, then announce some well-reasoned but narrow policy change (e.g. "product reviews now need to be actual hands-on reviews"), and... a month later, spammers are just adding an extra lie on all the fake review websites.
If a customer wants endless elevator music, then I don't think that Spotify is wrong to generate endless elevator music for them. The problem is deception. If you want to listen to human performances, then Spotify should give you choice instead of hoping you don't notice.
Free market means you can vote with your wallet. If you don't, then it says less about markets and more about our stated vs revealed preferences. Maybe we just don't care if real artists go away.
"we" care - the businesses that have inserted themselves as middlemen to extract profit have found that it's cheaper to deceive consumers, drag the quality of art down, and eliminate artists from art completely (or at least what a business executive thinks art is). _those_ are the people who don't care if artists go away. we as human beings are worse off for it.
Well, then again: maybe Spotify was hoping you wouldn't notice, but by now, the problem has been exposed publicly a number of times. This article is one of many.
How many of us are canceling their Spotify subscriptions over this? It wouldn't be some huge sacrifice, it's about the least we could do. Most of us won't. The "caring" is just lip service.
You cannot blame consumers for the literal failure of the free market. Consumer psychology is what it is, you cannot change it, and actors in the free market will gladly abuse it where they can.
how is Spotify generating a bunch of of royalty free music in a way that kinda screws over the actual musicians making that music, which, for the musicians, isn't much worse than getting screwed over by record labels and may even be better in some ways [0], in order to meet the market's desire for "Chill Lo-fi Hip-hop background music"/"Music to Relax and Study"/"Gentle Relaxing Yoga Music" a 'literal failure of the free market'?
People want comforting background noise, the market gives it to them. They never asked for ethically sourced, organic, gluten-free comforting background noise, although if they do, I'm sure the market will be more than happy to provide them with that, and we can look forwards to "Chill Study Music Made by Adorable Orphan Children in Kenya Using Only Recycled Materials And Biodegradable Recording Equipment" or whatever :)
You mean the business that lets you listen to your favorite music on nearly any device in existence with seamless switching between them is actually a good business, and the actual middle men are these (quote from the article):
--- start quote ---
In reality, Spotify was subject to the outsized influence of the major-label oligopoly of Sony, Universal, and Warner, which together owned a 17 percent stake in the company when it launched. The companies, which controlled roughly 70 percent of the market for recorded music, held considerable negotiating power from the start.
... Ek’s company was paying labels and publishers a lot of money—some 70 percent of its revenue
Having trouble generating much ripoff sympathy for someone who wants to listen to elevator music and feels ripped off because they can't tell the difference between human and algorithm. They've lost what that wasn't already long gone for them? That I have sympathy for, how could we not?
> If a customer wants endless elevator music, then I don't think that Spotify is wrong to generate endless elevator music for them.
Do people really want low effort things, or are they addicted to them in a loop that businesses are only too happy to reinforce?
I think public tastes are at least partially trained (or "learned"), they are very prone to addictive feedback loops, and they are not entirely shaped by something intrinsic but heavily influenced by what's on offer. And if what's on offer is intentionally cheap garbage...
believe it or not, there are different kinds of music for different kinds of moods and levels of listening to it, levels of attention, engagement, and so on. some songs will be just a bit too engaging to listen to for some things, and some more low key songs might be a better fit.
people settle for "mediocrity" all the time. be it just what you deem "mediocre" (out of cluelessness and/or disrespect), if it's not a "generic idea of a song with lyrics and all" and just some mild electronica, or if it is really just kind of mediocre, which is a good fit in some situations nonetheless, and does actually have wider appeal due to its mediocrity.
"low effort" may overlap, in perception or in how things are actually made, with some simpler, subtler, not overproduced music. it really isn't a bad thing at all, so it's bizarre to see it get shaded so much.
But I didn't object to chill music, so I'm not sure what your point is.
I specifically referred to algorithmically generated elevator music, aka "low effort music". Not chill music or music without lyrics.
My point is that people do not want garbage, but get used to it. So we shouldn't let companies producing this shit off the hook because it's "what people want". That's not the full picture, and is far too generous to businesses and advertising.
Surely you're not objecting to the notion that public tastes can be shaped to some degree?
Depends on the situation. While working, I think lots of us listen to music where the main merit is being non-distracting. In this case, effort is not so important.
If I’m actually listening to the music, I’ll want it to be good.
If you're working with C, your developer environment should include, in addition a good text editor and debugger, a fully furnished recording studio so you can record an album while waiting for your program to build.
If you'd like to increase your income, you can try making formulaic smooth jazz for Spotify playlists instead of pretentious concept albums about your childhood trauma that no one will actually listen to ;)
Oh, come on. Not everything is addiction. I can accept that algorithmic doom-scrolling is somewhat habit-forming, but even there, we have agency. But background music? Yeah, I like it, but I don't get restless or frustrated when it's not playing.
Maybe addicting wasn't the right word, but more about reward vs effort.
Regardless, I think it's not the full picture to say businesses simply give people what they want; businesses actually shape people's wants. That's what advertising is about...
i agree with you, but i also think that there are some things that are more important, and deserve to be protected outside of the dynamics of the free market. i'd argue that art is one of those things, along with housing, health care, social services, etc.
Most homes of people who are reasonably well-off - including most people on HN - go through three distinct stages.
The first stage is right after you spend an insane amount of money to buy the property. At that point, you want to validate the investment, so you spend more on making it look nice, but you're probably oblivious to many realities of homeownership. So yeah, this is when people splurge on matched kitchenware, beautiful cutting boards, "smart" kitchen appliances, sleek-looking but impractical veneer / plastic / glass furniture, etc.
The second stage is when you get kids or pets, and you start losing the battle. You eventually throw in the towel, accepting that there are going to be dings on the walls and on stainless steel appliances, holes in window screens, and veneer peeling off after the fifth juice spill accident.
The third stage is when the kids move out and you can actually make the space look nice. Except now, you know that there's some wisdom to old-fashioned solid wood furniture, that cutting boards are for cutting, and so on. So your home acquires more of an "old people" vibe.
Ha! Stainless steel appliances. The new (Bosch) dishwasher gets nasty crap spilled down the front. No problem, it's stainless steel so get out the scrubby sponge. Ha. The stainless steel has a relatively delicate clearcoat on top of it which is now messed up. Stainless steel for show only, not for actual utility.
1. Relatively nice stuff I bought for myself when I moved into my apartment
2. Cheap stuff I bought after a friend used a yellow-green scrub sponge and scratched up all my nice stuff
3. Nice stuff I bought for myself after the divorce (Except that it's poorly designed, which makes me wish I'd bought something a little more standard. They all have round handles, which means the utensils try to spin in your hands.)
I can in no way shape or form stand "impostor utensils." I throw them away ruthlessly (we sometimes acquire them when guests bring over food or by accident from vacations). When we run low I throw away the whole lot and replace it. Same with plates, glasses, or socks. Seriously, who has time to match up socks? Just buy 40 identical pairs and throw away the rest.
This is exactly what I do with socks, and then I replace the whole set.
But then it runs into (un)surprising problem: most brands don’t maintain their designs, so if you find something you like, it’s not going to be available when it’s time to replace entire set couple years later.
In the end I standardized on Blacksocks, which seem to have same design forever, although they are more expensive than I would like.
