Is't the fact that data is valuable for somebody, does not mean that it has a cost (price) for me? Spending data is definitely valuable for seller / corporation to know what to produce. I, on the other hand, cannot get money by saving information.
It's not zero sum game, that either I have it or seller have value out of it. Just like with garbage - for me old broken furniture might be a garbage, while for other it's a burning fuel.
I think the OP is right in that spending data is valuable as a mechanism to figure out how extract more profit, which in the end will have customers paying that price.
However, it doesn't need to be exclusively negative. The data will both show where you can price gouge but also simply where demand is.
Put your coffee shop near a metro stop and sell sourdough bread and people will buy that because they want it isn't exactly negative.
I personally don't really see the problem. I'm not going to buy something I don't want/need. If they use the data to show me ads for something I want that then leads me to making a purchase, to me that seems like a win/win.
I'm generally a pretty frugal person, I have a good handle on my personal finances and I don't really buy much stuff at all. Maybe for someone else, shopping can be similar to an addiction where they see an ad and they know they shouldn't buy it but they can't resist. Women with a closet full of shoes come to mind. For those people I can see how this might be problematic but personally I largely ignore ads altogether. If I need a small thing I just go to the nearest store and buy the first best thing I find, if I'm making a more significant purchase I generally do some research and look at tests, user reviews etc. Sure there's some opportunity for manipulating me with fake/biased tests and reviews etc but I'm not really seeing how my spending info helps with that.
Imagine you walk up to a shelf and all the prices reconfigure based on a model of the most you would be willing to spend for each item, including putting fake "normal" prices so that the "sale" price you are shown is whatever percentage markdown makes you likely enough to buy.
There's no advertising here, there's just aggressively trying to drain each person's wallet as much as possible and seeing how far you can get before they change behaviour.
One example: my friend and I both requested rides using the same app, standing next to each other to the same street in the same neighborhood 3-4 miles away. He owns a car and rarely uses car services, I do not and it's my primary transportation. The quoted cost of his ride was half mine. It was shocking.
That's pretty unrealistic, but I'd visit occasionally just to browse and not buy anything, making the algorithm lower the prices for me. Could build an app where people could register their prices for stuff so everyone could see what the price floor is for a given product. Good luck making a system people won't abuse the shit out of.
And I'm sure there would be competitors simply not doing this where I could shop instead.
If Uber does this and you don't like it then don't use Uber. Regular taxis still exist and I'm sure they'd love to have your business back. Or you could get a car, low-end used EVs are quite affordable and fuel is almost literally free. They seem to hold good resale value too.
But something can be valuable to somebody without hurting you. For example if you participate in study as a member of control group. There is no impact to your life and huge benefit to whoever is producing the research. Similarly waste collection businesses take something that has no value to you and generate profit by modifying your waste into something valuable. That is to say - the fact that somebody gains value does not equate that you are loosing the same value.
In the UK, google extracts one average lifetime retirement savings per person in revenue, on average. You could argue that Google’s customers, like advertisers, propaganda firms, etc, all overpay for the data.
That seems unlikely, since I don’t see how many of them could be profitable if they were paying Google more than their own revenue.
> In the UK, google extracts one average lifetime retirement savings per person in revenue, on average.
Those numbers don’t make any sense. Alphabet had 403 billion in revenue in 2025. The UK’s population is around 69,000,000. This amounts to $5,840.57 per person, which is nowhere near a lifetime of retirement savings.
As far as I understand this is broken incentive system. Waiter can rarely make restaurant experience better - food is dependent on the kitchen - and it only worse make it worse - bad attitude, spitting in food etc. So from customer PoV, it makes no sense to pay percentage of the good as a compensation for the good. This model works where there is some risk associated - like if you sell a house, or do some legal counselling. But tips as a percentage of the bill makes no sense to me - waiter has no contribution in me ordering steak or salad. The offer, from waiter, to order something cheaper could be more tip-worthy service than alternative. Therefore, compensation as % of turnover should be Restaurant managers' concern and not the customers' problem.
Company can optimise for the benchmark (profit) while worsening the product. I think thebterm enshitification is used there. It appears that AI got it too
I expect full circle on this one. Short term - many enthusiasts build stuff. I can fully imagine someone in a given company creating something over the weekend and persuading manager to adopt the system. However, 6 months pass, the person now moved into new role or left a company, nobody knows the product and it becomes just another SaaS just without working support behind it. So for short term it is definitely bring some losses. Long term I think it will bite those who dropped the software. Over-customisation for the needs of everyone is probably here to stay in my opinion
if it was built with AI then the knowledge of the builder is not really adding much. the next person coming in to fix issues is just going to feed the thing into an AI too, and ask the AI to fix the problem they have.
While it can be true for technical state of the system, you dont have the business decision log, nor you have the intention, and most importantly - you need someone to assume responsibility for this mini system. While it can be easier for tech companies, but assuming non tech person (say customer success manager) creates something and is replaced by other none tech person - there is significant probability that new person is simply not interested in developing system that is not part of the role. Or if it is you just limited your set of potential candidates.
I am not sure if I'm ignorant or have too much self esteem, but in cases where domain is not my expertise I try to cross challenge using different models to get less-biased and hopefully more correct insights.
I’m not trying to be snarky, but.. I wouldn’t try to upgrade an answer from a stranger you can’t fully trust to an expert answer you can trust by asking more strangers who have all only read the same books and use the same system for summarizing the books.
Similarly, sometimes I have to manually validate the output of an ai tool, analyzed over a large text I can’t practically read and understand, and best way I’ve found is to ask the tool (or another ai) to ‘show your work,’ ie make it help me make the determination by showing places in the text I have to read to follow its reasoning. We can never trust another ai directly to assess the validity of another ai.
This is some work that I want to see in education. How do you validate if something is true or not.
A lot of times that will take physical tests. Or in the case of math/logic, tests to validate each line or validated sources of previously proved theorems
You use the scientific method. Make a guess about how the system works, do experiments aimed to show that's not the case, adjust guess accordingly, and repeat
This works only when the inputs and conditions are all the same. In the real world, that isn't really possible anymore for a lot of things, like data sciences operating within a large pulsating mass of live net.
I think there is negative bias. The counterpoint being that with code you can test input vs output. With foreign language you cannot. Programmed system, either computes what you want or it doesnt. For Spanish you either have a person who can do testing for you. Good practises and cybersec questions matter in programming, but system doing what it is supposed to do (success path) matters more imho.
Isn't that the story of <any> technology? When the coffee machines first came to be, Barista was definitely a better option. However, through the evolution, in many cases today machine does better job than barista.
Better analogy would be that even though the coffee machine is still worse, we choose it because it's more convenient (at least I think that's the case).
Anecdotal, but the best machine will never be able to do something as good as the best human in most circumstances. That is because, unlike machines, humans have passions and character that subtly imbues itself in the end result. This, of course, isn't limited to coffee, but to anything a machine could do that isn't strictly tied to exercises in logic (for example, computers will always be better than humans at most games because they can be analysed logically and acted upon)
But the point is you will never have the best barista all the time l. Unless you are 0.0001 % of population who can afford personal barista to follow you anywhere, you accept whoever is serving coffe at the corner shop. And for a machine to be better that <average> barista is not a tall order. So it makes good coffee accessible for many
I feel like, despite not being my (and presumably most of HNs, given the general demographics) cup of tea, sports are largely that. The players are skilled but also uniquely themselves. The world cup wouldn't be nearly as interesting if it were just unthinking robots fighting to see who can run around and kick things the best
I think that is the problem with concentrated markets. You can do whatever and younare actually never "punished" by the market. Ie market htpothesis does not work
I'm pretty sure the personality tests are created specifically for the reason that a single person can have fundamentally (or conflicting) beliefs about himself in a matter of minutes. You can say "I am honest person" and the next minute you can say "I never lie" - and both cannot be true for an average person.
What is the point on Musk you are making? The monetary success does not neccesserily correlate to the common good they have created. In case of Musk there is a lot of governement subsidies, lots of market manipulation and false claim s. So not all activieties that bring profit to the richest are good to the rest. And stats on inequality just highlights that trend
It's not zero sum game, that either I have it or seller have value out of it. Just like with garbage - for me old broken furniture might be a garbage, while for other it's a burning fuel.
reply