Does this actually solve the problem? Or is the problem something deeper in the human psyche that keeps us addicted to pleasure and avoiding pain regardless of the moral or psychological repercussions? I have a feeling if you remove one vice people will just replace it for another if the underlying cause is not treated.
It may just be to stop third parties from creating a whole business out of "shop for me" AI bots. Individual users getting away with it might not be a problem, but with it being against ToS, it'd be a lot more shaky to build a business out of it.
In fact, it may just be that eBay wants to be the business selling AI "buy for me" agents.
Has anyone tried, on a large scale, designing the architecture of an application or writing behavioral tests (which effectively is designing the app through testing) and given the LLM the task of writing the implementation details?
Does that work better for maintainability than letting it decide on its own what the architecture should look like?
I was shocked to find out tonight that WSJ's net profit margin was just 3.2% in 2024. I would have thought it was a lot more. Also, surprisingly Walmart's net profit margin is only 2.85% for 2025. You would think these huge companies are making huge profits.
Maybe the big players can get by with a smaller percentage of a huge number.
I’d also expect the competition in the “big leagues” to be more aggressive, resulting in leaner margins.
Also these are huge companies. Small companies might find a niche that is small in absolute terms, but large relative to the company. That niche might be underserved, allowing the small company to make large percentage based margins.
The best ROI is google/meta if you're an expert and have unlimited time to dedicate to making and running ad campaigns. For the rest of us there's much better tools that give us better ROI than if we did it on our own.
It’s easy to overlook how often straightforward approaches are the best fit when the data and problem are well understood. Large expensive tools can become problems in their own right creating complexity that then requires even more tooling to manage. (Maybe that's the intent?) The issue is that teams and companies often adopt optimization frameworks earlier than necessary. Starting with simpler tools can get you most of the way there and in many cases they turn out to be all that’s needed.
Honest question, if large portions of labor are automated or marginalized who ultimately buys the goods and services that companies produce? Markets depend on consumers having purchasing power. It seems economically rational to keep the average worker making just enough to afford goods and services over the long term.
We can see this logic reflected at times in business history. Ford paid workers double the daily wage so they could afford the cars they built and Costco pays employees 50% more than Walmart. They're not doing these things out of the goodness of their heart but out of greed to increase long term profits.
> Honest question, if large portions of labor are automated or marginalized who ultimately buys the goods and services that companies produce?
Once the robots, energy, and weapons all belong to the same small group, that group no longer needs to sell anything to anyone. Production continues, but only for themselves and their enclosed system. The rest of humanity becomes a surplus population that can simply be allowed to die off.
In other words: the economy you’re worried about preserving is already obsolete the moment the owners of the machines no longer require wage slaves or consumers to keep the system running. At that point, mass demand is no longer a feature, it’s a bug that gets patched out.
Prices don't represent anything absolute, they just capture the cost of reallocating a marginal number of goods to produce this particular thing instead of some other thing.
If there is so much of something that everyone can have one, effectively prices would drop until everyone could afford one. Like how even homeless people can afford air, because there is so much of it that there is no point charging people for access. Or YouTube they just let anyone watch it because it is so cheap to push bytes out over the internet.
Removing humans from the production process would, in theory, be similar. There is a certain amount that gets produced and we come up with some way to allocate it. Prices and wages adjust to that reality.
> We can see this logic reflected at times in business history. Ford paid workers double the daily wage so they could afford the cars they built...
That just so story is probably a lie. The math wouldn't work out and Ford would know it - he was just competing with other companies for labour. It is like programmers getting paid huge amounts - it isn't because the companies think it helps them because of some vague circular logic about what happens in the broader market. They just need the skills, now.
The problem is companies are increasingly looking at the economy as someone else’s problem. And that results in a race to the bottom as each business sees what the other does and then makes the same cuts to improve their own margins too.
What we’ve also seen in recent decades is a massive shift to people borrowing money to pay for luxury goods. This means that businesses can still continue to tank the economy because their profits are propped up by other people’s debts.
And in fairness, it’s not just consumer goods that are sold this way either. Entire businesses are run on borrowed money and suppressed wages with the hope that they win the “business lottery” and receive a massive buyout. Often they’re deliberately selling their products below cost price to boost their client portfolio and thus making it entirely uneconomical for normal businesses to compete on price.
And then we wonder why the economy is so volatile. The whole thing is held together by gum and prayers and the only people benefiting are those who are already wealthy.
> who ultimately buys the goods and services that companies produce?
You don’t need anyone to buy them if you already have all the capital. You sell good and services to make more capital, but if you’ve got enough capital to provide all your needs, you don’t need anyone buyers.
If you ask the authors of sci-fi dystopias: the corporations owning the means of production will get taxed just enough to keep their masses from starving, the aspirational 14% will ake whatever resources they have to buy shares of this coporation and get a slightly bigfer share of the pie, and subgroups on the elites will be giving perpetual checks on each other, attempting to take full control of the mountain top but never quite successfully doing it.
> who ultimately buys the goods and services that companies produce?
The only goods that will be produced will be the one that machines will need for their survival or for whatever unfathomable goals they will have. Human goods will only be produced as long as human labour still has some value.
He hated painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling because he saw himself primarily as a sculptor. You can read some of the graphic language he used to describe his perspective of having to do it. Also, he was constantly in pain and would go temporarily blind from holding his head in certain positions for hours at a time.
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