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jellicle commented on The game theory of how algorithms can drive up prices   quantamagazine.org/the-ga... · Posted by u/isaacfrond
friendzis · 2 months ago
> Imagine a town with two widget merchants. Customers prefer cheaper widgets, so the merchants must compete to set the lowest price.

I always found this statement to be rather wishful. Individual lowering of prices makes sense if and only if your competitor is capable of saturating the market. Otherwise, demand elasticity becomes very relevant. Sure, your competitor may take the larger share of the market, but then you can compensate with higher per item profit.

The common wisdom is that in properly functional markets there's enough supply with n-1 market participants, therefore given a market signal of one participant lowering their prices the last one standing without lowering prices gets kicked out of the market, making maintaining prices the losing move. Yet, if the rest of the market does not react to the signal, the one lowering their prices hurts their profits and possibly kicks themselves out of the market. Making price maintenance, and depending on elasticity maybe even jacking of prices, the winning move in the presence of this signal.

Turns out the probability of either move being the winning move is dependent on probability of other market participants colluding/defecting. However, since lowering the prices hurts the profit a rational market participant would conclude that the rest of the market is inclined, even if a little bit, not to lower their prices in reaction given price cutting signal and similarly a bit more inclined to raise the prices given price hike signal.

jellicle · 2 months ago
> Imagine a town with two widget merchants. Customers prefer cheaper widgets, so the merchants must compete to set the lowest price.

Imagine a town with two widget merchants. The two go out to dinner one night, and next week they both double their prices. Both widget merchants are pleased.

jellicle commented on The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine   cnn.com/2025/05/30/busine... · Posted by u/lwo32k
GardenLetter27 · 7 months ago
Bureaucracy and regulation is the main issue there though.

Like in Europe where you're forced to pay a notary to start a business - it's not really even necessary, nevermind something that couldn't be automated, but it's just but of the establishment propping up bureaucrats.

Whereas LLMs and generative models in art and coding for example, help to avoid loads of bureaucracy in having to sort out contracts, or even hire someone full-time with payroll, etc.

jellicle · 7 months ago
We are going to have an ever-increasing supply of stories along the lines of "used a LLM to write a contract; contract gave away the company to the counterparty; now trying to get a court to dissolve the contract".

Sure you'll have destroyed the company, but at least you'll have avoided bureaucracy.

jellicle commented on U.S. and El Salvador Say They Won't Return Man Who Was Mistakenly Deported   nytimes.com/live/2025/04/... · Posted by u/dougb5
jellicle · 8 months ago
So, HN has deleted this off the front page after about 20 minutes, and sure, they generally want to avoid "political" stories but the simple fact is that when a "political" story reaches a certain legal of magnitude it becomes the only thing of real importance. This is an issue of seismic importance for the tech world, or at the very least the US tech community, whether HN accepts that or not.
jellicle commented on U.S. and El Salvador Say They Won't Return Man Who Was Mistakenly Deported   nytimes.com/live/2025/04/... · Posted by u/dougb5
jellicle · 8 months ago
Trump to Bukele, 2025-04-14:

Trump: they demand you, they love you, they love what you do...

Bukele: {something about supporters}

Trump: you know what I want to do? Home-grown criminals are next. {louder, to his senior staff in the room} I said HOME-GROWNS are next. The home-growns. You've got to build about five more places.

Bukele, laughing: Yeah, that's fair! Alright.

{big burst of laughter from Trump's staff}

Trump: It's not big enough!

jellicle commented on Zelensky leaves White House after angry meeting   bbc.com/news/live/c625ex2... · Posted by u/yakkomajuri
lun4r · 10 months ago
If I were American, I’d be sick with shame. As a European, I’m disgusted—not just by your leadership, but by your silence.

Your country is spiraling into disgrace, yet you sit there, watching, complaining online, doing nothing. Where is your outrage? Where are the millions in the streets forcing change? By staying silent, you are complicit. Just like the Russians who let Putin tighten his grip for decades, you are letting a clown dismantle your democracy in real time.

History won’t just judge you—it will condemn you. Stand up, or accept your place among the cowards who let their nations rot.

jellicle · 10 months ago
The problem is both US political parties would strongly oppose any attempt to "get people in the streets", making it very challenging for any such protesters.
jellicle commented on 0-click deanonymization attack targeting Signal, Discord, other platforms   gist.github.com/hackermon... · Posted by u/hackermondev
gruez · a year ago
Not really. It's only true if the bits are uncorrelated, and you can acquire additional bits of information. I don't see how you can go from "this guy on the internet lives near Albuquerque, New Mexico" to "this guy is Walter Hartwell White, and lives at 308 Negra Arroyo Lane, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 87104" without massive opsec failures.
jellicle · a year ago
Two or three very small opsec failures equals one massive opsec failure.
jellicle commented on Ten Thousand Years   99percentinvisible.org/ep... · Posted by u/program
notahacker · a year ago
That would certainly stand a higher chance of conveying the right message than overengineered solutions like monumental spikes or attempts to impart taboos against certain colours of cats or tablets that combine an English dictionary and a nuclear physics lecture

But still, I think the natural response to a picture of a person grabbing an ancient container and dying is the stuff inside must have been valuable for them to have attached all these threats to it. At least that's the conclusion drawn by Egyptologists translating inscriptions like "the great lords of the west will reproach him [who breaks the seal] very very very very very very very very much". (I'm not joking about the number of instances of the word translated as "very"...)

jellicle · a year ago
Yeah. The only lesson that would be learned from a bunch of tablets depicting agonizing death to those who approach would be "I'll make sure to send the low-paid workers in first before I go in".
jellicle commented on How to give a senior leader feedback without getting fired   newsletter.weskao.com/p/h... · Posted by u/RobinHirst11
lijok · a year ago
Astonishing. Completely backwards. This article describes how to give feedback to your subordinates, not to your superiors. If your superiors are unable to process no-fluff information, regardless of whether it's feedback or updates, they have no business lording over anyone and will sink whatever function they have oversight of. If you find yourself working under such people, don't bother giving feedback, start polishing your resume.

The reason you fluff up feedback to your subordinates is because lower down the chain they tend to be insecure and don't yet have the experience to distinguish between actionable impartial feedback, and threats to their job security.

The reason you don't fluff feedback, or any information for that matter to your superiors, is described in basically every handbook on highly effective communication in organizations.

jellicle · a year ago
If you've honestly never seen the types of leaders envisioned in this article you are very lucky indeed.

For a large majority of supervisors, if you give them carefully-worded, polite, respectful, private, accurate, truthful, ego-preserving feedback about something they're doing wrong, their response will range between "immediate firing" and "hold a grudge against you, fire you as soon as they can find a replacement". There is nothing that makes people as angry as accurately pointing out their flaws.

The way around this is in essence to get the leader to think it was their idea to make a change, which is possible in some cases but not in others.

jellicle commented on Americans see their savings vanish in Synapse fintech crisis   cnbc.com/2024/11/22/synap... · Posted by u/hunter2_
rubyfan · a year ago
> Yotta marketed itself as a "bank" where every time you deposited to savings you would get a free lotto ticket for the month based on how much you deposited.

The archive link shows something a little more nuanced than Yotta presenting as a bank.

The archive link in gp has a hero text that says “banking” and then a few lines down says: Yotta is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services provided by Evolve Bank & Trust and Thread Bank; Members FDIC.”

If I’m reading this as a consumer I’m thinking my money is protected but this Yotta thing is a lottery incentive to put deposits into those banks, maybe some loyalty incentive or marketing scheme on top of it?

Lesson learned, don't trust “not a bank” to deposit your money into the bank for you.

jellicle · a year ago
Over and over we've seen the same financial scam play out:

a) company starts up that explicitly avoids being a bank

b) company does something where some amount of money is placed in FDIC-insured banks, and it TRUMPETS on its website: "FDIC INSURED" over and over

c) consumers are misled into thinking their money is safe

d) regulators do not act

e) consumers lose all their money

f) profit (for a very specific set of individuals)

The company can even fake up a bunch of social media accounts to tell people reassuring lies right up until the scam collapses.

These scams will continue until regulators get serious about putting people in jail for them.

https://www.reddit.com/r/yotta/comments/1ctf25r/is_our_money...

jellicle commented on Scientific American's departing editor and the politicization of science   reason.com/2024/11/18/how... · Posted by u/Bostonian
tlogan · a year ago
Yes, a portion of Democratic Party leadership has appeared to move away from science and reason in some cases.

One example that frustrated me as a taxpayer and parent with kids in school: here in California, it was Democratic policymakers who removed Algebra from high school curricula, arguing that it would help address disparities among minority students.

jellicle · a year ago
The California school curriculum includes and has always included algebra.

u/jellicle

KarmaCake day9014March 12, 2008View Original