No, we hot-linked all those image hosts because we didn't want to pay to host it ourselves.

Those people all have a profit motive, and use their knowledge about my interactions with the store to try to increase the profit they make from me.

I feel like that is just running a business. Every business owner pays attention to their customers and their habits. That just seems like good business, and it doesn’t bother me at all. I want them to figure out what I want, and I am happy to pay them a reasonable fee for doing that.

I always feel a bit disconnected from what other people feel when I read things like this.

Personally, this kind of data doesn’t bother me at all, and is the type of data I don’t mind them having at all, and is the type of analysis I expect them to do. Using the data they have about my direct interactions with them to predict how I interact with them in the future seems fine. As long as they aren’t charging me extra, why should I be upset that they can predict what I will do based on my predictable behavior?

Their job is to provide me a good service that makes me want to keep coming back and giving them my business. If they can use the information from my past interactions with them to provide a better service to me, that seems fine.

My daughter has ARFID, and for about a year McDonald’s chicken nuggets were one of the only safe foods she would eat, so I went quite a few times. I felt much more embarrassed and worried about the workers who saw me there all the time than the app knowing i was there all the time.

What is the actual concern with McDonalds having this data about you? That they will charge you more if they know you will come back anyway?

This case is a perfect demonstration of the Base Rate Fallacy, and shows what happens when you surveil EVERYONE hoping to find a small percentage of bad people you want to stop.

Almost every car that Flock scans is a normal, law abiding citizen. Even at very high levels of accuracy, any sort of flagging it does is going to most likely be an innocent person simply because of the Base Rate Fallacy.

There are going to be a LOT more of these types of stories than there will be where they actually find a bad guy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy

Well, I am someone who had a system installed… I have a 14000 KwH per year system, and two 13 KwH batteries. It did take a while to get it inspected, which was annoying, although I was able to use it while I waited (I just couldn’t sent power to the power company until after), but they approved it the first time without any additional requirements.

What makes you so sure everyone has the experience you are talking about?

It generates tutorials for you, and serves a webpage that lets you complete them. It does a remarkable job.

It still has a bit of the LLM prose problem, but it does help you fine tune the ‘voice’ it uses.

The only cost of an incomplete is it doesn’t help towards a degree, but a degree is just a signaling mechanism. If you want to be able to use their degree to signal something to someone, you will have to jump through their hoops.

Raising prices is a way to filter for most valuable use.

All demand is not equal. Some companies have very valuable business they can do with the inventory while other businesses have less valuable uses for it. The more valuable uses are willing to pay more, so higher prices means the most valuable uses get filled first.

If there is demand for N chips at $X price, but you only have N/2 chips, then half the people aren't going to be able to buy them. The people who really need the chips, and would be willing to pay a lot more than $X for them, will be competing with people who are only willing to pay $X for them. You will end up getting scalping and shortages and hoarding. Since people know that there are enough people willing to pay a higher price, everyone will try to buy them at $X, even if they don't need them at all. Just buy them at $X, and immediately sell it to one of those companies willing to pay a lot more.

The market is extremely inefficient... since the manufacturer isn't charging enough, you get way too many people trying to buy them from the manufacturer.

So you find the price where the demand is N/2 chips, and everyone who is willing to pay that much will get one, and there is no profit for scalpers so the only people who will buy them will be actual companies that need them.

As someone who has spent many years working in high load environments, this is not an uncommon pattern.

You design a system and it works great. It can handle failures, load spikes, it is horizontally scalable, things are great. You think you figured it out.

And then load keeps increasing and you suddenly hit a tipping point where everything keeps failing, and you cant keep up. The things that you thought were perfectly horizontally scalable turn out to have a bottleneck you didn’t even think about until you got to a truly massive scale. Your systems suddenly don’t have the excess capacity to handle load spikes or catchup work, so suddenly any failure cascades and recovery is more and more difficult. You can’t solve the problem with additional hardware, and your perfect scalable design actually can’t scale any more.

This doesn’t have to be about GitHub using LLMs in their code to still be related to LLMs. GitHub gets a lot more commits now because of LLMs and probably get a lot more reads because of LLMs as well.

It could be that the extra usage just pushed them past one of those capacity thresholds.