I'm not sure that's true. I think there's a baseline issue here. Regardless, even if it netted out to zero, you'd end up with a different order of who gets hired when, so for any individual it'd still make sense to try to improve your looks.

In a certain sense I guess this is why every anti-trust suit fundamentally comes down to defining the market bubble more than anything else.

"Markets are competitive if and only if P != NP"

Seems that HN's auto-headline rewriting in this case has made a critical error :)

>Artificial intelligence, by expanding firms' computational capabilities, is pushing markets from the competitive regime toward the collusive regime, explaining the empirical emergence of algorithmic collusion without explicit coordination.

I have to dig more into the paper but I don't see how this follows, except in the most straightforward way. Basically, if everyone uses the same methods to derive price, of course there will be "collusion", or in other words, everyone will have the same price. But this doesn't seem like a result of compute per se, but simply better communication networks and information flows. You could have gotten the same result in medieval England by having everyone post their selling prices on the town square board.

Again, I haven't dug into the paper yet, but it seems like what really matters for firms is "compute"/$ (if the "compute" is an LLM or an assistant that has to go walk the 10 minutes down to the square makes little difference)

Edit: Isn't another implication of this, that increased compute -> collusion imply that increased compute -> communism becomes feasible?

I think this goes to my point above though, the primary problem preventing fully automated luxury communism isn't compute per se, but actually observing the information flows to make it possible. Capitalism famously solves this information problem through the pricing mechanism. So in effect, he's arguing that extra compute makes information gathering more efficient, and at the limit you get perfect information. Which, yeah, I guess so. Assuming everything can be perfectly measured, even theoretically.

The liability model is completely different in the US from Europe w.r.t. merchant vs bank.

The interchange fees are much much higher in the US, which is what pays for the rewards. Europe has an artificial cap.

For the "traditional" open source model of give away the software and sell the support, s390x customers could be fantastic customers: love paying for support, lots of $$$, super sticky once you get them.

But yeah for a random indie dev the PITA makes it harder.