This says it's using AmazonBrandFilter's list of brands. Why would we use/support this chrome extension instead of the upstream one [1] which is actually doing the important maintanance task?
"Knockoff" seems to be literally describing itself.
On top of that, it has a more restrictive license than AmazonBrandFilter. Given this appears to be a very simple AI project, why not just reimplement any missing functionality from AmazonBrandFilter into something under a free license? The most difficult to duplicate component is MIT.
Cuts two ways. Why should I pay $200 for a BigBrand dog bed if this knockoff site shows SHRDLU has the same thing for $40? We all know that BigBrand gets it from the same supplier.
The real knockoff problem I see is that you buy what you think is BigBrand and get shipped Knockoff because someone is mingling inventory.
Whenever I see keyboard-mashed company names I know I can go to Temu/AliExpress and get it directly there. You can tell when they are all sourcing from the same batch and instead of paying $40 the same thing is often $3.28 if you don't mind waiting a week.
I used to do this more often, but I find the gap is narrowing a lot. Most of the time I find I don't save enough to justify getting it in two weeks over 1 day.
> We all know that BigBrand gets it from the same supplier
We don't know that. Look at Project Farm's review videos, he tests a lot of knock off and brand name products and it's almost always a get what you pay for situation. Knockoffs look similar, but use cheaper materials almost always.
The question is almost always, do you need the quality that you get from name brand. Not "why can I get name brand quality of half price"
Are we talking knockoffs like actively pretending to be the brand, or knockoffs like an off-brand copy of the exact same product? It's rare to find quality that can only be found with one brand—and then, it's mostly extremely expensive consumer electronics.
Depends on your own taste for risk, should the knock off brand have worse QC: what big brand gets you is the ability to sue them should their products fail catastrophically or cause you harm:
I worked for a hardware startup ten years ago now, and a big problem that was rampant at the time (and seemingly has only gotten worse) is that basically the Contract Manufacturers (CMs) in China take the BOMs and plans they’re given, and since they already have the molds, the same product will mysteriously be produced with a knock-off name, within weeks of your product being produced in china. At the time (and still) I didn’t know enough about whether the CMs are doing it themselves or they’re selling the information to a company to produce, or what, but if you want to manufacture something in China, you’re begging for it to be copied immediately.
While I have my own disdain for the current length of copyright law, it’d be great if China at least had some variety of it. This sort of crap may be an eyesore for the big companies, but its a death-knell for small startups, and Amazon is enabling it.
Reminds me - I was working for a Canadian network equipment manufacturer and at one point a client in Asia was trying to get support for a bunch of units of uor hardware (modems). Long story short, turns out they bought knock offs that didn't even bother changing casing leaving contact info on modems for our company.
I remembering hearing from a former Cisco employee once that in the mid 00s this would happen to them and the knock off router manuals were literal photocopies of the Cisco ones with very half-assed attempts to block of Cisco.
Even better, buy direct from the manufacturer instead of Amazon. I've found most of the time you get the same price and free shipping without giving Jeff Bezos a dime.
I bought a weed whacker directly from the maker about 5 years ago, and since then have received literal tons of their catalogues in my tiny mailbox. They send > 80% of all the mail I receive. I've regretted it ever since. Now I feel like I need to keep my address a secret unless there's a good reason not to. Amazon has had it since the last century and has never abused it.
I'd buy more from such if it was easy to hide my personal info from them.
That hasn't been my experience. They are rarely cheaper, especially once you include the shipping fee. And the shipping experience is lackluster most of the time, and downright frustrating a lot of the time.
I have tried desperately to do this and come up short about 75-80% of the time. I tried for years to buy local also and got screwed over every time I tried. Things just aren't like they used to be where people gave a shit about quality and service.
What do you mean? Where is the percentage of "75-80%" coming from? Local service is great, and I'm happy to pay a little extra to see my neighbors employed.
I was the same way and got tired of it so I keep a layer in front of my life just like I do on the web with multiple identities, emails, VPNs, etc.
I pay $100 per year for a private mailbox near my apartment, registered under an LLC with a registered agent (not in my name and in another state) where I get deliveries in that name. that llc uses a fintech bank where I can spin up as many debit/credit cards as I want, I rotate them just like api keys. I also keep a twilio phone number that only receives texts with a webhook that goes to my discord. any sort of loyalty card etc goes under that number. I can enable phone calls if I need to, and of course a 2nd/3rd email account attached to this.
> Amazon has excellent and consistent customer support
We've been dealing with different Amazons. Also, credit cards in my experience are built to deal with that stuff. Have you encountered protection issues by using your credit card? The only chargeback I've initiated was against Amazon and my credit card company handled it swimmingly.
Most of the time you’re giving that info to stripe or Shopify. But also credit cards are protected - you can dispute charges - so it’s not a huge risk IMO
I often find things are more expensive on the manufacturer's site than they are on Amazon or Ebay. I assume because they know you are ding price comparisons on marketplaces.
I often try to do this, but it's rarely cheaper, and occasionally much worse. I recently bought a beach tent directly from the manufacturer, and when it showed up, it had a big Amazon sticker on it, and didn't actually have the product inside; it was clearly something Amazon had returned to them. Meanwhile, they haven't responded to e-mails and there's no way to return it, so, uh, I just got scammed.
I keep doing it anyway, but it's certainly not because it's a better or cheaper experience.
If you see something that looks like obvious dropshipping, chances are you can find it for a fraction of the price without the middleman on Temu, AliExpress or DHGate.
Going by the "How it works" section of the GitHub page (not the web site), it appears to be both whitelists and blacklists, plus heuristics for unknown brands to flag the keyboard-mash brands that are almost certainly junk.
I wonder why in the age of LLMs these brand names continue to exist. I just prompted deepseek in Chinese to give me some novel brand names in english for a lighted dog collar (something I recently searched for and saw the crazy brands), and it gave me a bunch of plausible sounding names. Granted, not particular inspired, but names that an English speaker would recognize as reasonable brand names
Reality: A few years ago this would have been relevant. Most people can only afford the knockoffs now.
My Chipotle meal cost $17 yesterday. It used to cost $8. The $9 difference is going to come out of my budget to buy authentic brands and buy local stuff.
If you don't like it, make my Chipotle meal $8 again or double my salary, reduce my taxes, and don't pull random geopolitical shit that crashes the S&P500 every other weekend, and then we'll talk.
That sounds really cheap, if you don't consider that you need to do all the shopping, you need to prepare all the food, and deal with probably a bunch of food waste.
Are you someone who has the capability to be constantly making money any time you want to? If not and you just have a normal 9-5 job or something close to it, you have plenty of time to shop for an hour once a week, then spend 10-30 minutes a day making your own lunches and dinners and still come ahead financially -- way, way ahead.
I have no idea where you're coming from with the "dealing with food waste" part so I'll just ignore it.
Do you enjoy eating just rice wrapped in a tortilla or something? Burritos are a harsh illustration of the economy of scale. Doing a quick tally with sale prices, and I'd think buying all the ingredients to make one single burrito would be upwards of $20-25, at least. Never mind the time to cook each ingredient that needs to be cooked. And most of these supplies and prep are going to last what, ~4 days before they spoil?
Although honestly someone who repeatedly visits Chipotle for anything more than "convenient meal on a road trip" would probably enjoy just rice wrapped in a tortilla. Support your local burrito joint!
> And most of these supplies and prep are going to last what, ~4 days before they spoil?
Rice lasts a very long time. Tortillas last a long time in the fridge (you can probably freeze them?). Freeze the meat. Beans last forever. Sour cream and cheese last a long time in the fridge and you'll certainly use them for other things.
Guacamole/avocados/other veggies are potentially harder to deal with for long term storage, but that depends and it looks like there are some options. Salsa also keeps for many, many months.
As far as time goes, if you're single, many of the ingredients could be cooked in a batch and then frozen, even as whole burritos.
You're not wrong. People are going to be on about "just cook at home" but the general point still is correct. Life has just become a lot more expensive.
We need to realize that the cost of food at grocery stores has gone up a lot too.
This says it's using AmazonBrandFilter's list of brands. Why would we use/support this chrome extension instead of the upstream one [1] which is actually doing the important maintanance task?
"Knockoff" seems to be literally describing itself.
[1] https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/amazonbrandfilter/m...
On top of that, it has a more restrictive license than AmazonBrandFilter. Given this appears to be a very simple AI project, why not just reimplement any missing functionality from AmazonBrandFilter into something under a free license? The most difficult to duplicate component is MIT.
Cuts two ways. Why should I pay $200 for a BigBrand dog bed if this knockoff site shows SHRDLU has the same thing for $40? We all know that BigBrand gets it from the same supplier.
The real knockoff problem I see is that you buy what you think is BigBrand and get shipped Knockoff because someone is mingling inventory.
Whenever I see keyboard-mashed company names I know I can go to Temu/AliExpress and get it directly there. You can tell when they are all sourcing from the same batch and instead of paying $40 the same thing is often $3.28 if you don't mind waiting a week.
I used to do this more often, but I find the gap is narrowing a lot. Most of the time I find I don't save enough to justify getting it in two weeks over 1 day.
> We all know that BigBrand gets it from the same supplier
We don't know that. Look at Project Farm's review videos, he tests a lot of knock off and brand name products and it's almost always a get what you pay for situation. Knockoffs look similar, but use cheaper materials almost always.
The question is almost always, do you need the quality that you get from name brand. Not "why can I get name brand quality of half price"
He also routinely tests three or four identical products with nothing distinguishing beyond different paint jobs.
Yes, but those are three or four knock off products. The brand name is always different.
Are we talking knockoffs like actively pretending to be the brand, or knockoffs like an off-brand copy of the exact same product? It's rare to find quality that can only be found with one brand—and then, it's mostly extremely expensive consumer electronics.
Depends on your own taste for risk, should the knock off brand have worse QC: what big brand gets you is the ability to sue them should their products fail catastrophically or cause you harm:
https://www.geekwire.com/2019/lawsuit-ruling-dog-leash-purch...
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1k2ydn1rz8o
It seems like the retailers can be held responsible should "ASDAS_A!kr" drop off the radar, but might still be easier to sue local.
(I know "local" companies still find ways to settle / weasel their way out of responsiblities, but at least you know where to reach them...)
I worked for a hardware startup ten years ago now, and a big problem that was rampant at the time (and seemingly has only gotten worse) is that basically the Contract Manufacturers (CMs) in China take the BOMs and plans they’re given, and since they already have the molds, the same product will mysteriously be produced with a knock-off name, within weeks of your product being produced in china. At the time (and still) I didn’t know enough about whether the CMs are doing it themselves or they’re selling the information to a company to produce, or what, but if you want to manufacture something in China, you’re begging for it to be copied immediately.
While I have my own disdain for the current length of copyright law, it’d be great if China at least had some variety of it. This sort of crap may be an eyesore for the big companies, but its a death-knell for small startups, and Amazon is enabling it.
Reminds me - I was working for a Canadian network equipment manufacturer and at one point a client in Asia was trying to get support for a bunch of units of uor hardware (modems). Long story short, turns out they bought knock offs that didn't even bother changing casing leaving contact info on modems for our company.
I remembering hearing from a former Cisco employee once that in the mid 00s this would happen to them and the knock off router manuals were literal photocopies of the Cisco ones with very half-assed attempts to block of Cisco.
China supports Chinese interests.
So far, you think there is some universalism sentiment. You're wrong.
Even better, buy direct from the manufacturer instead of Amazon. I've found most of the time you get the same price and free shipping without giving Jeff Bezos a dime.
Every time I do that I get frustrated:
- shipping sometimes goes to from day(s) to weeks
- suddenly their ads start going to email
- please review us emails
I'd rather bezos get his cut.
I bought a weed whacker directly from the maker about 5 years ago, and since then have received literal tons of their catalogues in my tiny mailbox. They send > 80% of all the mail I receive. I've regretted it ever since. Now I feel like I need to keep my address a secret unless there's a good reason not to. Amazon has had it since the last century and has never abused it.
I'd buy more from such if it was easy to hide my personal info from them.
Can't you get a few thousand dollars by suing them for spamming you?
Not for physical mail.
amazon shipping speed, return policies, and customer support are simply too good.
That hasn't been my experience. They are rarely cheaper, especially once you include the shipping fee. And the shipping experience is lackluster most of the time, and downright frustrating a lot of the time.
I have tried desperately to do this and come up short about 75-80% of the time. I tried for years to buy local also and got screwed over every time I tried. Things just aren't like they used to be where people gave a shit about quality and service.
What do you mean? Where is the percentage of "75-80%" coming from? Local service is great, and I'm happy to pay a little extra to see my neighbors employed.
They were talking about buying directly from the manufacturer (presumably to be delivered) instead of Amazon (definitely to be delivered).
You're talking about buying from a local shop. Unless that local shop is also the manufacturer, then that's a whole different discussion. :)
I'd rather not spread out personal info like credit cards to more parties than necessary while Amazon has excellent and consistent customer support.
I was the same way and got tired of it so I keep a layer in front of my life just like I do on the web with multiple identities, emails, VPNs, etc.
I pay $100 per year for a private mailbox near my apartment, registered under an LLC with a registered agent (not in my name and in another state) where I get deliveries in that name. that llc uses a fintech bank where I can spin up as many debit/credit cards as I want, I rotate them just like api keys. I also keep a twilio phone number that only receives texts with a webhook that goes to my discord. any sort of loyalty card etc goes under that number. I can enable phone calls if I need to, and of course a 2nd/3rd email account attached to this.
> Amazon has excellent and consistent customer support
We've been dealing with different Amazons. Also, credit cards in my experience are built to deal with that stuff. Have you encountered protection issues by using your credit card? The only chargeback I've initiated was against Amazon and my credit card company handled it swimmingly.
Every time I talk to them I ask for a gift card for compensation for whatever problem and they give it to me.
Credit cards are pretty locked down, you can't connect to that network without a verified identity to be sued when unauthorized charges are made.
Many CC let you generate one time use CC numbers if you’re actually concerned about manufactures information security.
Most of the time you’re giving that info to stripe or Shopify. But also credit cards are protected - you can dispute charges - so it’s not a huge risk IMO
I feel like a better solution would have been anonymized/single use card numbers.
Sometimes I try to do this, and they fulfill through their Amazon store anyway.
I often find things are more expensive on the manufacturer's site than they are on Amazon or Ebay. I assume because they know you are ding price comparisons on marketplaces.
I often try to do this, but it's rarely cheaper, and occasionally much worse. I recently bought a beach tent directly from the manufacturer, and when it showed up, it had a big Amazon sticker on it, and didn't actually have the product inside; it was clearly something Amazon had returned to them. Meanwhile, they haven't responded to e-mails and there's no way to return it, so, uh, I just got scammed.
I keep doing it anyway, but it's certainly not because it's a better or cheaper experience.
And do the same for knockoffs as well.
If you see something that looks like obvious dropshipping, chances are you can find it for a fraction of the price without the middleman on Temu, AliExpress or DHGate.
How can a HDJWNSK brand gain our trust and become respected if we're not even trying its products?
By word of mouth, HDJWNSK just rolls off the tongue.
It cant get trust, as it disappears after a month.
We need this but for books. These days it is impossible to buy any programming related book that is not a bootleg copy.
Now we just need GitHub Without the Vibes
I'd be interested to know how this works. Whitelist? Blacklist? Something else?
Edit: appears to be using blacklists.
Going by the "How it works" section of the GitHub page (not the web site), it appears to be both whitelists and blacklists, plus heuristics for unknown brands to flag the keyboard-mash brands that are almost certainly junk.
I wonder why in the age of LLMs these brand names continue to exist. I just prompted deepseek in Chinese to give me some novel brand names in english for a lighted dog collar (something I recently searched for and saw the crazy brands), and it gave me a bunch of plausible sounding names. Granted, not particular inspired, but names that an English speaker would recognize as reasonable brand names
Reality: A few years ago this would have been relevant. Most people can only afford the knockoffs now.
My Chipotle meal cost $17 yesterday. It used to cost $8. The $9 difference is going to come out of my budget to buy authentic brands and buy local stuff.
If you don't like it, make my Chipotle meal $8 again or double my salary, reduce my taxes, and don't pull random geopolitical shit that crashes the S&P500 every other weekend, and then we'll talk.
That is because the value of the dollar is half what it used to be. In other words, inflation has been 20% per year for 5 years.
So why do they keep telling us it's 4%?
Depending on your date range, most of this difference is the same inflation that has happened everywhere in the market.
Make your burrito or bowl at home, and it'll cost $4 or less.
That sounds really cheap, if you don't consider that you need to do all the shopping, you need to prepare all the food, and deal with probably a bunch of food waste.
This was actually tried. Cheaper and healthier
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRtoUoBgjDw
Are you someone who has the capability to be constantly making money any time you want to? If not and you just have a normal 9-5 job or something close to it, you have plenty of time to shop for an hour once a week, then spend 10-30 minutes a day making your own lunches and dinners and still come ahead financially -- way, way ahead.
I have no idea where you're coming from with the "dealing with food waste" part so I'll just ignore it.
is this your first time being introduced to the concept of cooking?
Why is it a sin in America to take advantage of economies of scale for cooking but not for anything else?
Do you enjoy eating just rice wrapped in a tortilla or something? Burritos are a harsh illustration of the economy of scale. Doing a quick tally with sale prices, and I'd think buying all the ingredients to make one single burrito would be upwards of $20-25, at least. Never mind the time to cook each ingredient that needs to be cooked. And most of these supplies and prep are going to last what, ~4 days before they spoil?
Although honestly someone who repeatedly visits Chipotle for anything more than "convenient meal on a road trip" would probably enjoy just rice wrapped in a tortilla. Support your local burrito joint!
> And most of these supplies and prep are going to last what, ~4 days before they spoil?
Rice lasts a very long time. Tortillas last a long time in the fridge (you can probably freeze them?). Freeze the meat. Beans last forever. Sour cream and cheese last a long time in the fridge and you'll certainly use them for other things.
Guacamole/avocados/other veggies are potentially harder to deal with for long term storage, but that depends and it looks like there are some options. Salsa also keeps for many, many months.
As far as time goes, if you're single, many of the ingredients could be cooked in a batch and then frozen, even as whole burritos.
But you wouldn't be making a single burrito. You'd be making several over several days, and/or using the leftover ingredients for other meals.
Economic literacy is truly dead, isn't it? Good lord.
You're not wrong. People are going to be on about "just cook at home" but the general point still is correct. Life has just become a lot more expensive.
We need to realize that the cost of food at grocery stores has gone up a lot too.
What an awesome extension!