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Comment by ternaryoperator | Hacker News Reader

This happens all the time. Mercedes is a fairly common first name for girls in Spanish countries. Then, of course Alexa, etc.

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Mercedes was a name of an actual lady, a daughter of a businessman who brought the first Daimler-Benz cars to the market.

I wonder if there existed a real Alexa after whom the AI assistant was called.

Apparently not, though there seem to be two distinct stories about where it _does_ come from:

> Amazon developers chose the name Alexa because it has a hard consonant with the X, which helps it be recognized with higher precision. They have said the name is reminiscent of the Library of Alexandria, which was also used by Amazon Alexa Internet for the same reason.

I long believed a not-insignificant factor was that they had bought the trademark to alexa when they bought the company.

Fair enough, although nobody thinks Mercedes cars will possibly replace/destroy humanity.

Nobody ever thought Copilot could replace/destroy humanity, it can barely butter its own toast.

No, but it was bound to replace everything that Microsoft touches, by virtue of having its buttons everywhere displacing everything else.

Thanks to MS stopping, the next Word is just not a huge COPILOT button in the middle to who you have to chat to write your stuff.

Please don't give them any ideas.

Although they definitely contributed to climate change through their cars so.. at least negatively impact humanity.

Yes, the people who bought the cars had nothing to do with it. It's the manufacturer's fault.

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