Are we the baddies?

https://geohot.github.io//blog/jekyll/update/2025/07/05/are-we-the-baddies.html

by AndrewSwift • 1 year ago

718 522 1 year ago

geohot.github.io

ggm2• 1 year ago

For some people, paying the premium to jump the queue is the point. What they didn't forsee is what happens when everyone has wound up paying the premium, and the queue is now with you again. This is mostly Australian frequent flyers, when it was a high barrier to entry it conferred advantages and now Fly in Fly out work has commoditised club status, there is next to no boarding advantage, and no points flight availability.

So yes. Status seeking, and differential price seeking probably is a-social as a pattern when it's weaponised against the consumer.

That said, I hated Uber, they actually offered to underwrite people breaking the law to get foot in the door (how that didn't get them excluded as a corporate scofflaw is beyond me) and they continue to export all the profits offshore, but taxi services had become shit and now we have got used to Uber and I just don't worry about surge pricing. I got boiled slowly.

My fellow Australians all feel a bit shit about the introduction of tipping in paywave and food service. That's unaustralian. We have legally enforced minimum wages and penalty rates. Turn that feature off.

The European push to mandate included luggage in flight is seeing a fair bit of trolling. So there are still true believers who think needing clean underwear is weak.

anonzzzies3• 1 year ago

there is next to no boarding advantage

Especially on the discounters here in EU (especially Ryanair / Easyjet), i'm the only one in the non-priority queue, everyone else is in the priority queue. This used to of course not be the case; you paid extra and was in first. Now i'm usually in before 2/3th of the prio queue. Which is just weird.

about surge pricing. I got boiled slowly.

Not sure how it is in the US (I used uber there on vacation in the past, but on vacation, I don't worry about prices too much), but here prices jump heavily during surge; often from 40->50->38 euros in a few minutes; I'll just keep an eye on the app for a few minutes and pick it at a good point. Taxis are almost always twice or sometimes (airport) 3x the price. I never take them as they are also often rude and I cannot rate them (these two are related). The last one I took was 3 weeks ago; I was 10 minute drive to the airport from some horrible 'business hotel' and I had an early flight, so I checked out, ordered an uber at 5am and waited; in front of me stopped a 'real' taxi (both are now legal and need licenses, but Taxi have Taxi on top); the driver got out to welcome his client which was not me but obviously he thought I was. We talked for a bit waiting for his real client and then he asked how much uber was; E15 I showed him. He said; cancel it and give me E15. Ok, so I got in front, the other client in the back. We arrived, and while waiting to park up, he shoved a terminal in my face with E15 on it, so I paid. We got out, he got the luggage from the other guy who asked 'how much is it'; E72,-. Cheers bro; made almost E90 for a 10 minute trip.

Point being; hating uber (and I used to refuse to use them) is making your life very hard for very little benefit. The taxis needed a kick up the arse and they still didn't learn anything. Still need to order far upfront, their app sucks and far more expensive. Not sure how they can exist (of course I do, they don't know uber exists, how to use it or they refuse to use it). I find if you are with 2+ people, they are often cheaper than the trains which is quite mental really in a country where 'people should take the train if they can'.

jagrsw2• 1 year ago

but here prices jump heavily during surge

Yup. The price jump isn't just a "surge." It's the algorithm calculating the highest price you'll tolerate without abandoning the app long-term, no matter availability of cars (which can be related, but from CFOs perspective that's not the metric to optimize)

This personalized price discrimination is precisely the kind of manipulation geohot is describing.

It's the same principle as (an old story) booking.com charging Mac/Safari/iphone users more.

javitury2• 1 year ago

Regarding Uber, I agree that their price transparency is very much appreciated.

However it's not rare to find bad drivers on Uber. On Christmas this year I took an uber from the airport, the driver had supposely arrived but he was nowhere to be seen. We called each other and I could hardly hear anything. After wasting about 30 minutes (and battery almost depleted) we finally found each other. It turns out he didn't know how to speak English or the local language. He had two phones, one he used to call a colleage who could (barely) translate english for him, the other phone he used to talk to clients, and both phones were placed mic-to-speaker to bridge the calls. What about the extra time that the driver wasted? I was billed for it and I had no way to dispute it. I could only report this behavior in a review to a driver that didn't seem to be him (was the main driver subletting his account?).

buran77• 1 year ago

I never take them as they are also often rude and I cannot rate them

You should check if there are taxi apps where you live. In Europe a lot of these apps consolidated under bigger brands (e.g. FreeNow) so it's a good bet that you'll find one and then you have the same experience as Uber. Just check which gives you a better price.

When the service providers feel cheated by the app they have to use to reach any audience (Booking, Uber, etc.), they'll find ways to make more money. Hotel owners gave me hefty discounts just to cancel a Booking reservation and pay directly, Uber drivers did the same. And with taxis it's getting ever so slightly harder to cheat when people have a recording device in their pockets at all times. I know cases where friends used Strava to record a trip and could show it's impossible for the trip to cost that much at advertised prices. Driver complied.

Startup idea: Strava for taxi rides, disrupt the market of shady taxi drivers with an app dedicated to tracking the trip to calculate/estimate costs.

alexanderchr• 1 year ago

Especially on the discounters here in EU (especially Ryanair / Easyjet), i'm the only one in the non-priority queue, everyone else is in the priority queue. This used to of course not be the case; you paid extra and was in first. Now i'm usually in before 2/3th of the prio queue. Which is just weird.

That’s because the ”priority” queue for those carriers is really a ”paid for a proper carry on”-queue. But the airlines realised that they could brand it as a priority queue to make the upcharge to bring a bag more palatable. You’re not spending €40 just to bring a bag that used to be included in the ticket, you also get to feel more important. At least the first time until you realise 2/3rds of the plane is also important.

jlokier2• 1 year ago

Taxis are almost always twice or sometimes (airport) 3x the price.

Not where I live. Here, Uber is 50-100% more* than the price of a local taxi, at all times of day. Uber is also at least 30% more expensive than hailing a black cab.

So even though I have the app, after optimistically checking the Uber price, I invariably choose to book a taxi instead.

The shorter arrival times shown in the Uber app are sometimes tempting, but after waiting nearly 30 minutes for a car that Uber continuously said was 4 minutes or less away, with their location moving around (so not stuck in traffic) and driver repeatedly changing, I don't take the time seriously any more.

I just wanted to correct the impression that's often put out that Uber is cheaper (or faster) for the customer. It's evidently true in some places. But where i live, other than when they ran a 50% discount for the first few months after arriving in town, I've never seen Uber be anything other than the most expensive option.

It's not due to lack of drivers: I've been told most drivers at the biggest local firm switched to Uber as soon as they arrived in town, and that's backed up by seeing Uber-marked cars everywhere.

Al-Khwarizmi• 1 year ago

I really want to dislike Uber because I'm generally much in favor of locally-operated public services rather than a big foreign corporation, but man, taxis really make it hard.

In my country (Spain) there can't be more than 1 Uber (or similar) per 30 taxis by law (obviously pushed by the taxi lobby). That's actually enforced, at least in my region (I think in some regions, like Madrid, it's not). Additionally, in my region Ubers are further nerfed by requiring booking 15 minutes or more in advance and not allowing trips inside of a city, but they just disregard that law and at the moment it doesn't seem to be actually enforced, although taxis are protesting a lot about it so it might be in the future.

Normally I would be indignant at a foreign big corp disregarding laws, but it's hard not to support Uber when taxis are clearly not enough to meet demand (sometimes you need to wait half an hour for one, in a small city where if you are fit you get to most places walking in that time anyway. If I want a taxi it's because I'm in a hurry and walking or taking a bus won't cut it, if I have to wait 30 minutes for a taxi it becomes useless) and they constantly push not only to limit the number of Ubers, but also the number of taxis themselves. They prefer to be guaranteed to always have customers waiting and see the taximeter numbers go up constantly, and screw the people who have to put up with a terrible quality of service because they don't meet demand. In the past I used to take a taxi to the train station if I'd rather work some more instead of stopping 30 minutes earlier to take the bus, now I don't even bother because you might need the same time to go by taxi than by bus due to scarcity of taxis.

Add to that that many taxi drivers are rude, and many drive Dacias which are the cheapest low-end car here... come on, I'm not saying they should be luxury cars, but you are serving customers in a car that is your whole means of production, your image and your calling card, and that will be amortized very fast, and you go for the absolute cheapest that you can find in the market? What does that say about your care for the customer?

I take Ubers whenever I can (which is also seldom, because obviously with the 1 to 30 rule they are even further than taxis from meeting demand) because taxis really go the extra mile to make me hate them.

throw393949• 1 year ago

who think needing clean underwear is weak.

Washing clothes was discovered several thousands years ago.

And boarding plane is much faster. I really do not want to pay for your luggage!

digitalPhonix• 1 year ago

Boarding the plane would be much faster if everyone didn’t have the maximum sized carry-on because they’re trying to avoid paying for a checked bag.

wiseowise• 1 year ago

Washing clothes was discovered several thousands years ago.

So you carry high quality detergent, and clean washing machine with delicate setting, and then air dry your clothes? Nice.

protocolture9• 1 year ago

My fellow Australians all feel a bit shit about the introduction of tipping in paywave and food service. That's unaustralian. We have legally enforced minimum wages and penalty rates. Turn that feature off.

Eh I wouldnt speak for all of us. I like having the ability to reward contractors with some extra cash for a job well done. The issue is structurally relying on it.

Shit, when I was 14 or so I worked as a baggage handler. And I will never forget the time we took on an overflow job from an american cruise liner at circular quay. Not only was I getting 20 bucks an hour (decent pay at the time), but I took home an extra 1100 or so completely tax free. Nothing as australian as cash in hand.

That said, I hated Uber, they actually offered to underwrite people breaking the law to get foot in the door

Its always moral to break unjust laws. The taxi monopolies needed to be broken. Having those laws challenged thanks to the donation of US VC money was just a bonus.

Actually theres still work to be done. Sydney CBD is still extremely hostile to rideshare.

ggm2• 1 year ago

Noted. Some people here like tips as a discretionary option. I think folding it into the paywave terminal is .. naff.

stavros• 1 year ago

Yeah but it's one thing to tip for a job well done and a whole other thing to have to tip even for a job done middlingly.

cortesoft• 1 year ago

What they didn't forsee is what happens when everyone has wound up paying the premium, and the queue is now with you again

Wouldn't the market purist argue that this just means the good is mispriced, and tickets should actually be what the price is with the premium added? What you really need is to just raise the prices of the tickets and the price to jump the queue?

kragen4• 1 year ago

The market purist might argue for a second-price auction for boarding order, where people board in the order of highest sealed bid for boarding order to lowest, but pay the amount bid by the person behind them in the sequence; or for "Paris Metro Pricing" where everyone being in the "priority" line results in a large fraction of them opting not to pay the premium for the next flight they take. Or they might think up something I haven't thought of.

imtringued2• 1 year ago

The most profitable thing you can do is charge for a service and then not deliver it.

andyst• 1 year ago

especially the australian airline example and perhaps with much broader applicability, I know that companies are completely happy with managable competition (Australian domestic airlines are functionally 2 players, and similarly across many large industries here that's true) where over time once they can establish profitable gimmicks neither party really wants to rock the boat and they're able to lock in that margin forever more. It doesn't suit established players to compete on that, they both open up losing situations in the game theory compared to silent non-competition.

In high capital businesses like airlines and supermarkets it seems to play out all over the place these days.

cjfd• 1 year ago

For market purism to work people need to have an idea what they are paying for. If this is changing too quickly or there is personalized pricing it becomes a very different kind of game.

AstroBen• 1 year ago

People don't make buying decisions from a purely rational headspace, though. Charge too much for the upfront ticket and people will go to someone advertising it for lower (but with additional back-end services that are must-have)

My guess is the hidden fees end up making businesses more money

Neil44• 1 year ago

If you wanted to be generous you could say it the other way around, moving some features to premium allows people who value time and money differently to still get the bulk of the value they want out of the proposition. I don't for one minute think that's the actual conversation had in HQ but it's still valid I guess.

taneq• 1 year ago

now Fly in Fly out work has commoditised club status, there is next to no boarding advantage

Why would you want to be on the plane earlier than necessary? Only thing I can think of is better access to the overhead lockers, which fill up fast these days.

FridgeSeal• 1 year ago

Less so the early boarding, but the priority baggage is nice, especially after long international flights.

Getting on the flight 15 minutes early also beats dawdling in a slow moving like for 20.

Lounge access is worth it alone! Especially on international connections!!

CrulesAll• 1 year ago

"how that didn't get them excluded as a corporate scofflaw is beyond me)" The essence to breaking crony capitalism. No prosecution. No change. Fines do not work. For a start, it's the shareholder that pays. Prosecute the executives with more than just a wag of the finger, and it changes behaviour.

surgical_fire5• 1 year ago

For some people, paying the premium to jump the queue is the point. What they didn't forsee is what happens when everyone has wound up paying the premium, and the queue is now with you again

There's a freedom that comes with not caring and just accepting I am last in the line. I don't pay the premium and I can sit and relax in the lobby while the sheep that paid wait in line. Only when the queue is nearly depleted it is my turn.

nosianu• 1 year ago

Though, that too only works if it is not adopted by the majority :)

The actual strategy is not that you are last, but that you choose to be part of the smallest group.

jasode• 1 year ago

while the sheep that paid wait in line.

The supposed "sheep" that want to get on the plane first are people that want to get that precious overhead bin space to avoid checking a carry-on bag at the gate. Boarding last means there's no more bin space and the gate agent will put the bag in the belly of the plane. This adds extra hassles of waiting an extra 30+ minutes at the arrival terminal to wait for the bag on the conveyor belt and/or the bag getting lost.

Yes, it can look "irrational" to hurry up and get in line because as some like to say, "No point in fighting to get on the plane first since we're all leaving on the same plane at the same time!" ... The issue isn't the departure time -- it's the limited bin space.

EDIT add reply to : >bag put in the belly lf the place, and my bag was never lost.

There are more complications because at some airports with widely separated terminals, going outside of the security zone to pick up a bag at the conveyor belt also means using slower buses instead of the tram to go to another terminal to get a car. E.g. at Dallas airport, the faster railway trams are only available inside the secured area. So not getting that bag in the overhead bin has domino effect of waiting for buses (another +30 minutes) which can add up to 1 extra hour of waiting at the arrival destination. Getting in line early for boarding is a small price to pay to avoid all of that.

rr808• 1 year ago

My fellow Australians all feel a bit shit about the introduction of tipping in paywave and food service. That's unaustralian. We have legally enforced minimum wages and penalty rates. Turn that feature off.

I think non-Americans need to take a stand against this. Refuse all tipping. Its a slippery slope - I know these guys are underpaid but if you start tipping the wages will just drop and we're all worse off.

nilamo• 1 year ago

Now that tips are tax free in the USA, they are unlikely to be going away.

Workaccount22• 1 year ago

Here is the core problem laid out:

1.) Owner needs workers and wants to make the position attractive.

2.) Owner is given the option to enable tips, and entice works with "Pay, plus tips!"

3.) Owner doesn't pay tips, patrons do.

4.) Workers blame patrons, not owner, for not tipping.

5.) Patrons feel guilty and tip. Workers make pretty good money from this, and enjoy the job more.

In a way it's kind of like a social mind virus, where the workers and owners benefit, and the patrons feel pain for not going along with it.

The only fix I can come up with is a law that tips can only be solicited after a service has been rendered. And entering something into a computer is not a service.

chrsw• 1 year ago

I'm American.

This is how capitalism is supposed to work. It's supposed to seep into every crevice of society and pull money out of the poorest, weakest people and into the hands of the richest and strongest. This isn't a coincidence, it is in fact the most important aspect of the system.

Tipping went from some generous gesture to recognize exceptional service and it's turned into a mandatory, arm-twisting shakedown by businesses that simply do not want to pay their employees. Not just avoid paying a living wage (those days are long gone) but not even a _minimum_ wage. Many people involved in or invested in the restaurant businesses wouldn't have thought about getting in if they had to pay employees for an honest day's work.

Many restaurants these days aren't just local mom and pop family run businesses but large corporations who own many franchises and operate in the billions of dollars yet people like you and I are expected to pay most of the wages of the servers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darden_Restaurants

Sure, you can never eat out or only eat at locally owned small businesses. But that's just one small slice of society. The only realistic solution for many of us is to try to run the rat race faster.

reaperducer• 1 year ago

I think non-Americans need to take a stand against this. Refuse all tipping.

The custom of tipping came to America from Europe after the First World War, and tipping was seen as deeply un-American until the 1950's.

It is sometimes mentioned in films and radio dramas of the period. See the Bettie Davis movie Petrified Forest for one example.

renewiltord2• 1 year ago

Tipping is just a tax on losers. My friends were all about how they always tip and that’s why they get Ubers faster but then it turns out I never tip and I get them in the same time.

I’m a regular at this bakery / coffee store and I buy a doughnut there every day and I never tip.

You can just do things.

RankingMember• 1 year ago

I know we've got plenty of problems on our plate, but Americans need to keep trying to push this crap out domestically too.

ikr678• 1 year ago

Australian FF points programs ceased being about flights long ago, now they are a complex web of data harvesting and cross promotion. Why are our airlines offering homeloans, health insurance and retirement investment funds?

carlosjobim7• 1 year ago

What they didn't forsee is what happens when everyone has wound up paying the premium

That's simply discovering the true price of a product. We're living in a mega-inflationary period, but most people won't accept that a dollar or a euro is actually worth no more than 30 cents. So sellers are putting things which used to be included at a premium price. If people pay, then that is the price.

It's highly annoying as a customer, but the general public won't accept that product and services they pay for cost double than they used to. At the same time the general public demands that their real estate and stock investments should be valued at triple or quadruple than what they used to.

cainxinth• 1 year ago

Uber and Lyft are expensive but anyone who says they are worse than what they replaced doesn’t remember well the heydays of taxis. Sure, people in big towns like NYC could always get one fairly easily, but everyone else was stuck dealing with whatever potentially shady operation they could dig out of a phonebook, and even then getting a car wasn’t guaranteed.

Now, anyone anywhere can get a ride, often quickly. I’m not trying to excuse any predatory commercial practices directed at drivers or passengers, which are serious problems deserving of more strict regulation, but I absolutely do not want to go back to the old way.

specproc2• 1 year ago

I'm really not sure old school taxis are actually that bad.

I had two incidents in the UK recently where my app of choice failed me and I was quickly bailed out cheaper by googling "taxi $TOWN" and having a one minute conversation with an operator.

tbrownaw• 1 year ago

I’m not trying to excuse any predatory commercial practices directed at drivers or passengers, which are serious problems deserving of more strict regulation, but I absolutely do not want to go back to the old way.

So which of the laws that uber broke to get big are what prevented these new issues, and which are what made the old way bad?

Y-bar4• 1 year ago

I remember the time before Uber arrived here, where ”here” obviously is not USA.

I don’t mind the old ways.

Taxis had apps before Uber arrived here, they had geolocation with ETA, contactless payment, up-front pricing, and never refused service (because they were required by law to offer service to anyone anywhere).

The problem probably never was incumbent taxis, it was how they were regulated (or not).

martin-t• 1 year ago

I wonder why you called it asocial.

Asocial people are great because they lack exactly this kind of status seeking and don't feel the need to engage in zero-sum social games. They just do what they like, which often is something actually productive or fun.

This behavior is anti-social. It actively harms everyone else except the person (or group) doing it.

mikewarot• 1 year ago

I thought the name of Uber was all you needed to know, what kind of company names themselves after "Deutschland über alles", or Übermensch? The smug superiority was all the clue I needed.

m463• 1 year ago

when everyone has wound up paying the premium

just scale premiums in cost and number...

svnt• 1 year ago

I find these posts primarily interesting as a sort of demographic heatmap. Like now it has gotten to the point where instead of only chasing their interest of choice (geohot hacking, in this case), this person has become aware of the issue, and been sufficiently motivated to write a post about it.

geohot is pretty deep into the center of the map afaict.

delusional• 1 year ago

I think this is what struck me as well. Hearing what I can only describe as radical anti-capitalism coming from George Hotz was not what I expected when I opened that link.

That said I have felt the same feelings expressed by Hotz in this post. I commend him for saying it.

vasco4• 1 year ago

Shame they come together with casual references to burning it all down, ww3 to the rescue just because he couldn't get a hinge date fast enough.

robin_reala• 1 year ago

It’s not particularly radical is it? Maybe I’m in a bit of a bubble.

kragen4• 1 year ago

I don't think it's anti-capitalist. It's anti-mass-manipulation and anti-price-discrimination, but capitalism only works to the extent that the pricing system works to provide information, both about consumer utility and about production costs.

wohoef• 1 year ago

Call me crazy, but I think capitalism can exist without mass manipulation.

dundarious• 1 year ago

His post is the standard small C conservative critique. It's only radical in that capitalism has seeped into far more facets of life since the last time such a position had appreciable expression within politics.

cantor_S_drug• 1 year ago

Someday, people will have to realize we live in a society. What will it take?

From all the podcasts (Trevor Noah, social media in general), etc, one good aspect that I find is now society in a distributed manner can point a finger to social problems. e.g. we desperately need community in our society, by that I mean, we need a modern version of village. Not being individualistic and self-centered in all decisions. Adjusting to each others requirements and needs. Sometimes not asserting yourself on your parents even if you know they are wrong. It is hightime we nurture such an interdependent society, not unbundle ourselves totally and becoming transactional.

spacemadness3• 1 year ago

As long as we don’t turn needing community into some sinister excuse to force people into X religion or be ostracized, I’m all for it.

bigyabai8• 1 year ago

It’s not okay. Advertising is not okay. Price discrimination is not okay. Using big data, machine learning, and psychology to manipulate others at scale is not okay.

Stop participating. Hinge is towards the top of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, you'll do just fine without it.

palmfacehn• 1 year ago

Collectivists generally start from premises which discount or even dismiss individual agency.

poorlyknit2• 1 year ago

This is a cheap overgeneralization.

salawat• 1 year ago

And yet individualists reach to secure those network effects while at the same time decrying they don't exist or will never work, anything to deny the advantage of a network to competing agents.

bigyabai8• 1 year ago

Libertarians and revolutionaries often start from premises that overestimate their worth relative to millions of other ordinary people.

Spend for two weeks in the woods, and you'll find out who brings you food when you're hungry (spoilers: nobody).

HeartStrings4• 1 year ago

What? Sex is a basic need in Maslow’s hierarchy.

bigyabai8• 1 year ago

Yes, and Hinge is not the sole human corollary of sexual intercourse. Ask your parents.

bragh4• 1 year ago

Yes, but nobody ever died because of not having sex.

zdw• 1 year ago

Thanks for parroting https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/we-should-improve-society-som...

bigyabai8• 1 year ago

I am literally replying to an article worded thusly:

  Someday, people will have to realize we live in a society.

emsign• 1 year ago

I'm so sick of algorithms dictating choices for me. I just don't want to partake anymore. It's no fun anymore, my dopamine reservoirs get drained quicker now and I just want to drop out of this society that has been colonized by companies that hate us. The government hates us, the policies of the too rich are destructive and they hate us.

udev40962• 1 year ago

Oh, so you're sick of it but unwilling to do anything? How about do something about it? I am glad to see the consequences of convenience that you all crave. It's just going to get worse. There is always a choice, whether you believe it or not. Opt-in and realize they own you or opt-out and don't be a slave

zbentley5• 1 year ago

I will, with trepidation and my expectations in the gutter, bite: what does “opting out” or “doing something about it” mean for you?

mhb3• 1 year ago

"Price discrimination is not okay"

Isn't this a reasonable way to achieve many desirable results? Hardcovers/paperbacks, watch a movie right away or after a few weeks, etc.

haveyoucinsdrd• 1 year ago

Hardcovers last longer, resource use is real. Cheap things is a regressive tax on the lower incomes who have to replace cheap stuff faster. They can’t save for better stuff.

When it comes to media like movies… really? Still? The resource use of Top Gun and Star Wars is bonkers. Can’t we just have local theater and you know socialize?

Do we need the movie to come together and socialize over?

I so thought we were done with that stuff around Spider-Man 3. MCU and Star Wars sequels made no sense to me.

Is our attention always going to be coupled to Saturday mornings in 1990s?

Boomers did all the drugs and made music and corny fun shows like SNL and somehow convinced us to stare at computers iterating on word problems like it’s fucking middle school while staring at these over the top delusions of grandeur to borrow from Han Solo.

quailfarmer• 1 year ago

Paperbacks are _not_ a regressive tax. The book is equally readable in both forms, and often more portable in paperback. Hardcover books are (mild) luxury items that can command a higher profit margin and thus are easier for publishers to justify. Very few individuals are buying hardcover books in order to maximize utility over many decades

georgehotz2• 1 year ago

That's not price discrimination, like hardcover vs paperback if you have two versions of something and people can choose which they want. That's totally fine and actually something that makes capitalism great. The rich usually end up covering more of the costs here cause they are less price sensitive, like business vs economy on airplanes.

Price discrimination is when two people visit a site to buy a book, the algorithm computes an estimate of what they are barely willing to pay, and then shows the two of them different prices for the exact same book based on who they are.

mhb3• 1 year ago

Yours is an overly narrow version of price discrimination in which the discrimination is extended to the customer level. If that's what OP meant he should use a less ambiguous description.

dbtc• 1 year ago

Who is the "we" in the title?

bravesoul23• 1 year ago

Us. On HN.

specproc2• 1 year ago

Tech workers

America

Capitalists

archargelod• 1 year ago

AI Entrepreneurs

8f2ab37a-ed6c• 1 year ago

It gets even more disturbing when the algorithm (or a disgruntled former date reporting you to a tired and underpaid customer support agent overseas) decides to ban you from the dating apps and suddenly your chances of meeting someone go down dramatically (60% plus of all couples meet online in the US), with the apps having become the middlemen for most of dating connections: https://www.vice.com/en/article/banned-from-dating-apps/

Good luck ever getting back onto the apps, especially if you've ever used facial verification to validate that you're you. Every future attempt to sign up again will be immediately blocked. No way to appeal. Dystopian.

cedws7• 1 year ago

Your destiny, and whether you’ll ever have a family of your own, decided by Match Group.

immibis7• 1 year ago

The business model of Match Group, by the way, for those unaware, is to buy every dating app (yes, they own all of them; Bumble was once the lone hold-out but not any more) and then do everything they can to make you pay money for premium. They do not care if you get a date.

csours2• 1 year ago

Before you pay for boosts on a dating app, pay for good pictures.

Here is what a man seeking woman profile needs:

1. Good Pictures. Honest. Good lighting. Appropriate grooming and attire (whatever than means in your social context). Smile in a carefree way in most of the pictures.

2. Attractive man in the pictures.

3. No icks.

Yes the pictures are more important than being attractive.

As a matter of storytelling, the theme is "aspirational", but the particular aspiration is up to you.

cedws7• 1 year ago

Or just stop playing the game. Like a parasite, dating apps only survive while their host is alive. You can pay for pictures, spend hours a day scrolling, pretend to be someone you’re not, blunt every aspect of your personality that may be an “ick.”Maybe you’ll eventually win if you keep pulling the lever. But then you’ve just contributed to the problem.

It’s just not worth it in my view. I gave up. Being a singleton is going to become the new normal in the next 25 years, many Western countries are going the way of Japan and South Korea.

The good news for George is he’s a high profile, decent looking, wealthy dude. He’ll be fine.

sat_solver• 1 year ago

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. I'm not talking about only dating apps. Wherever there's an algo, there's someone manipulating you. I just deleted and disabled my Youtube history. It's incredibly liberating!

imiric• 1 year ago

Playing devil's advocate: embellishing one's own features is a common tactic for attracting a mate in the real world as well. Courtship is a game, not just for humans. During this phase you rarely get to know the other person. You meet their best facade first, and then slowly get to know the person behind it. If you refuse to play this game, then you're just lowering your chances of attracting a partner. Which is fine, but it's good to be aware of this.

What GP is suggesting is simply making an effort to showcase your features. The most attractive person on Earth could be rejected if their pictures are of poor quality. That's just common sense. Being genuinely attractive by modern societal standards is important, but the first step is making an effort.

Dating apps can be a good way of finding a partner. After all, they're just the modern equivalent of making the initial connection. Their problem is the same as with any SaaS: companies are incentivized to keep users on the platform for as long as possible, which they do by engaging in shady tactics like artificially controlling the visibility of user profiles, while squeezing out as much profit out of users as they can. This is bad news for men, who are overwhelmingly the ones using these services and are willing to accept the downright predatory tactics of these companies.

But in theory, there's nothing wrong with the concept of dating apps. They're just corrupted by the usual user hostile incentives. A dating service with the right incentives could appear tomorrow to disrupt this rotten industry.

squidbeak• 1 year ago

Do you really need to be a singleton just because you reject dating apps?

diggan4• 1 year ago

pretend to be someone you’re not, blunt every aspect of your personality that may be an “ick.”

You don't have to "pretend" to do anything, or try to get rid of what others consider "icky", but generally I think most people aim to at least be neutral (if not pleasant) in the eyes of others, either by social pressure or because life just gets easier and less frustrating then.

I'd probably wager that the whole pretending thing you think is required, actually backfires as people eventually learn who you are, so better to just be yourself upfront.

zbentley5• 1 year ago

blunt every aspect of your personality that may be an “ick.”

That’s not what was meant and you know it.

Ten years into a relationship, I sometimes leave my dinner dishes in the sink and wash them in the morning. Had I done that early on in my relationship—or had those dishes in a photo on a dating site—I’d sabotage my chances with a lot of people.

The same is true for interests. Maybe you really like guns: marksmanship, customizing them, restoring them, and so on. If you have guns front and center in your dating app pics you are going to alienate a lot of people. Plenty of those same people would enjoy being introduced to that hobby once you are in a relationship! But guns being a photographed part of your dating-site-identity is not going to help your chances. The people who swipe left are avoiding gun nuts, misogynists, etc. Putting guns in your picture only sabotages yourself.

That’s not “I have to totally be someone I’m not and remove every single thing someone might find objectionable”. That’s basic social awareness and understanding that there’s a time and a place for presenting different parts of yourself.

paganel• 1 year ago

Looksmaxxing discourse on HN, things are getting really bleak.

HeartStrings4• 1 year ago

He is spot on tho

udev40962• 1 year ago

[flagged]

never_inline• 1 year ago

What's exactly looksmaxing and why is the above comment a suspect? It seemed normal to me.

csours2• 1 year ago

Yea, that group of people is insufferable and wrong about almost everything. Dating apps are the one place where they kind of have a point; which really raises the question "Are we (app developers) the baddies?" Dating apps are not a nature preserve, they are a created environment.

Also, there's all kinds of maxing stuff, and there's basic advise, like wash your face and get a haircut before you get your picture taken.

nemothekid3• 1 year ago

I’ve come to realize that dating apps are just outright hostile to honest newcomers who don’t know the implicit rules.

It starts with picking the “right” pictures, then saying the “right” things then choosing the “right” place and then confirming at the “right” time. Eventually you are just going down a checklist rather than being your authentic self. If you find yourself minmaxing in this way, take a break.

zdc1• 1 year ago

To be fair, society and social interactions are full of implicit rules. Put a bunch of people in a room(/train/company/island/club/cult) and they will make up some rules along the way.

Someone catch your eye at a party? You'll probably take a moment to choose what you want to say to them there too

pydry5• 1 year ago

mating has historically almost always been a pretty hostile and unfair experience. That is why female ancestors outnumber male 2:1.

joegibbs• 1 year ago

More importantly than this, George Hotz is very influential (has a self-driving startup and made the news for a Twitter internship) and presumably quite rich as well, there’s probably easier ways than swiping through Hinge like everyone else.

spencillian• 1 year ago

It seems his LinkedIn dating profile isn't working out.

ohdeargodno• 1 year ago

Dating apps prey on the weakest of us all, selling hopes and shattering egos. Not everyone can get good pictures, not everyone is a 10/10 attractive man, and "no icks" is such a vomit inducing term. They are perfectly happy that you don't have a good picture and you don't get matches, because then they can sell you boosts and superlikes and whatever bullshit they've made up today.

Tinder, Hinge and others are directly responsible for tens of thousands of cases of depression and in building up a perfect breeding ground for misogyny and misandry. Everyone involved in their self-worth-destroying app has blood on their hands.

Nasrudith• 1 year ago

There is also an alternative strategy. Cut out the bullshit and doomed-to-fail relationships by putting your 'icks' front and center. That is a fishing for the niche situation though.

afiodorov4• 1 year ago

We should not underestimate the timeless human response to being manipulated: disengagement.

This isn't theoretical, it's happening right now. The boom in digital detoxes, the dumbphone revival among young people, the shift from public feeds to private DMs, and the "Do Not Disturb" generation are all symptoms of the same thing. People are feeling the manipulation and are choosing to opt out, one notification at a time.

alganet12• 1 year ago

disengagement.

That disengagement metric is valuable, I'm not gonna give it away for free anymore. I'll engage and disengage randomly, so no one knows what works.

The boom in digital detoxes, the dumbphone revival among young people

That's a market now. It doesn't mean shit. It's a "lifestyle".

People are feeling the manipulation

They don't. Even manipulation awareness is a market now. I'm sure there are YouTubers who thrive on it.

---

How far can you game a profiling algorithm? Can you make it think something about you that you're not? How much can one break it?

Those are the interesting questions.

notarobot1232• 1 year ago

The Algorithm doesn't care if you're illegible. How ever much you mess with it, you're still its plaything.

jagrsw2• 1 year ago

I'll engage and disengage randomly, so no one knows what works.

Any predictable pattern, including when you disengage, is just another feature for the pricing model. If the model learns you reliably leave after 3 hours, it will simply front-load the surge pricing into that initial window.

  Analysis: This user loses disengages during 75% of the
  time and belongs to a group of 5% who do the same. The
  expected revenue for this group over a longer period
  and with multiple users is 24% lower than for the
  average user.

  Action: Since 80% of theirs engagements last for at
  least 12 hours, ads should be shown and prices
  increased only within the first three hours.

Hope this helps :)

afiodorov4• 1 year ago

There's nothing an algorithm can do against disciplined, intentional engagement.

If you know which car you want to buy it doesn't matter what the salesman has to say.

__MatrixMan__7• 1 year ago

How far can you game a profiling algorithm?

I think pretty far. I expect the future involves nonsense layer full of AI slop being read and written by AI's. Mapping it onto the actual humans will be difficult unless you have a preexisting trust relationship with those humans such that they can decrypt the slop into your actual communications.

spacemadness3• 1 year ago

Have you read anything by Mark Fisher? He spoke about capitalism absorbing all resistance which makes it almost impossible to ever escape from. Which is what you’re saying I think. Resistance becomes the next market and works through the same economic systems it’s attempting to resist.

Levitating• 1 year ago

The boom in digital detoxes, the dumbphone revival among young people
> That's a market now. It doesn't mean shit. It's a "lifestyle".

The fact that there's such a market now, means something on it's own I believe. Regardless if it's a "lifestyle", it's a lifestyle people are choosing now. I know more and more people who either don't own a smartphone or have it on DnD at all times.

It's the same for "manipulation awareness" or whatever. You can't will a market into existence, the market has to already exist because people are drawn to it.

I am not saying that it will matter in the end, but I can say for a fact that there are people consciously disengaging from social media.

AnimalMuppet• 1 year ago

Those are the interesting questions.

Not to me. I don't want to manipulate the manipulators. I just want to not be manipulated. I want to be able to go through my day without having to fight off manipulation in order to do and be what I want to do and be.

The goal is my freedom, not to "stick it to the man" in some way that won't actually matter to them.

praptak• 1 year ago

You cannot disengage from capitalism. The tricks you describe are perhaps useful to not be the slowest antelope in the herd but that doesn't mean you are fully free from being exploited.

afiodorov4• 1 year ago

Let's be clear: it's entirely possible to leave the "herd". People can and do go completely off-grid and thus disengage from capitalism. The crucial point is that the vast majority of us choose not to. That choice is what makes your "slowest antelope" analogy so much more complex.

An antelope's greatest desire is to be in the herd, because while it may contain a lion, the world outside contains a thousand wolves.

We've built a herd—society—that is incredibly effective at holding those wolves at bay: famine, plague, and chaos. We willingly participate because it provides "shields" our ancestors could only dream of. The problem isn't the herd itself; it's the lion that we allow to stalk within it.

What I am suggesting isn't to abandon this safety and comfort brought by modern capitalism. It's to improve the herd—to enjoy its protections while finding ways to tame, cage, or evade the lion of exploitation. What we're discussing here aren't futile attempts to escape, but vital tactics for building a better, safer herd for everyone.

somedude895• 1 year ago

The most exploitative and unfree societies are and always have been the ones that rejected the free market.

vdupras• 1 year ago

Of course you can disengage, and very effectively: spend less, work less. Touch grass. It's called Asceticism and is as old as Philosophy.

whilenot-dev• 1 year ago

We should not underestimate the timeless human response to being manipulated: disengagement.

It's worth adding that "disengagement" does not mean "not giving a f*ck", and I worry that it isn't a good human response either.

So what's the difference between "not giving a f*ck" and "disengagement"? I think where the former works on the individual level, the latter is supposed to work on the collective level. I'm no scholar on any social sciences, mind you, but I worry that disengagement can only lead to positive change in conjunction with the Broken windows theory[0]. Here's the bummer: A lot of us are already in said stage of disengagement.

We somehow are in an atmosphere that makes it unpleasant for everyone and let the environment decay together, but the provoked collective change is just not happening. The dumbphone and digital detoxes are outliers. What happens instead is that the threshold for what's acceptable is systematically being lowered, and my biggest gripe is that it's done in the name of equality and inclusion while the imbalance between demographics is just growing. Tell me why?

There was a movement after Occupy Wall street and the Arabic Spring where it got fashionable to Not Giving a F*ck[1]. It contrasted a movement of self-optimization, growth-hacking, and some data-driven lifestyle usually reserved for corporate marketing. Morphemes such as hyper/super/über got resurrected from a nostalgic sentiment of the economic boom in the 80/90s, the neoliberal free-market Accelerationism and Bitcoin certainly fit in there. While "not giving a f*ck" was a critique of the established attention-grabbing system to promote the individuality of citizens, it also got misinterpreted by political representatives and corporate operators that started to put more focus on their own career than the responsibility of their current role. They all "didn't give a f*ck" anymore in a world that got more and more connected, year after year.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Subtle_Art_of_Not_Giving_a...

9dev• 1 year ago

You can spell out "fuck" here, we’re all adults. And the president does it on live TV too!

genewitch• 1 year ago

they'll just go after the elusive "disengagement dollar"

watch?v=9h9wStdPkQY linkhead removed for language and content, but you know what to do (and probably who it is)

burnt-resistor• 1 year ago

I've long since checked out (2012) from social media and apps that commodify and monetize every little aspect of life.

tropicalfruit• 1 year ago

a lot of the economy seems like a game of value extraction to me

boosts, uber fees, late fees, small order fees, busy hour fees...it's like this is what people spend their time thinking up

when i see people stuck in traffic on their morning commute, i think thats a net positive for humanity in some small way

politelemon• 1 year ago

I went to the hinge website and drowned in the self congratulatory marketing... And I still don't understand what it is or what it is boosting.

krackers• 1 year ago

what it is boosting

Their profits

raincole• 1 year ago

Really?

Perhaps this person lived in a fantastic futuristic city before. But for a lot people, getting a cab was not a good experience. Uber singlehanded changed that.

And dating apps are not middlemen for dating. They're middlemen for dating outside your social circle, which is always a mess. Whatever subscription you pay to the app per month is probably cheaper than a single drink at a bar anyway.

bravesoul23• 1 year ago

You are right but now a single company controls this worldwide. I think taxis would have adopted apps eventually.

ljlolel• 1 year ago

Nah even now the taxi apps are still shit

timeon• 1 year ago

Perhaps this person lived in a fantastic futuristic city before. But for a lot people, getting a cab was not a good experience. Uber singlehanded changed that.

I've been in taxi just about three times in my life and zero in Uber. Usually just take bus/tram/train, walk or bike. Car for utility in the country. I think I do not live in fantastic futuristic city (it is in eastern Europe) but at least it is not dystopia.

jeffreygoesto• 1 year ago

Right. It's the consistent lack of healthy social circles that is the problem for most people. Either it is staying afloat that sucks all your energy or focusing on "tech will solve problems" but it doesn't.

dandanua• 1 year ago

The $*99 prices in shops should have hinted you that we already live in a self-hating society. AI will make it x100 worse. But don't get it wrong - the problem is not with AI itself.

bravesoul23• 1 year ago

This makes me like George more. I also liked that he wants to reduce the NVidia monopoly by working on AMD. Simply because it's a monopoly.

saretup• 1 year ago

I thought he gave up on that when he couldn’t get AMD chips to run for long enough without bugs.

ghxst• 1 year ago

AMD just signed a 2 million dollar contract with them to get the new hardware on mlperf, so it looks like the AMD chapter continues. https://x.com/__tinygrad__/status/1935732517933613216

MuffinFlavored• 1 year ago

If somebody as driven, successful, and talented as him is starting from square one in the realm of dating/having trouble finding a partner, I feel even more bad for those less fortunate/interesting.

weare138• 1 year ago

You want to opt out of this all you say? Good luck running a competitive business! Every metric is now a target. You better maximize engagement or you will lose engagement this is a red queen’s race we can’t afford to lose!

I'm from GenX. It can be done. We used to do it. Just stop playing their game. The only winning move is not to play.

jarofgreen• 1 year ago

The title is a reference to a sketch from a UK show, That Mitchell and Webb Look: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h242eDB84zY

seydor3• 1 year ago

i m officially old now

xandrius• 1 year ago

There no office for this, go and live youthfully however long you want.

jonplackett2• 1 year ago

Anyone who hasn’t seen this show - it is brilliant. Such clever satire.

Dr Death is also a very apt take on modern technology

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Skl71urqKu0

hermitcrab2• 1 year ago

See also 'Bronze orientation':

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nyu4u3VZYaQ

penguin_booze• 1 year ago

Classic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_4J4uor3JE.

veeti• 1 year ago

This one is quite sad. But also hilarious:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRbj1Q4tXNo

mindwok2• 1 year ago

What the open web did for discoverability of businesses, we need to invent again for actual engagement with the businesses.

Uber, Booking.com, AirBnB, ClassPass, Steam, DoorDash - these winner take all middle-men rent seeking tech behemoths are bad for society and are hostile to consumers and the businesses that rely on them.

Let's decentralise this shit.

TFYS4• 1 year ago

It's not the centralization that's the main problem. Centralization of those services can make sense. It's how and why those centralized services are run. They're run like dictatorships, for the purpose of making the dictator and his friends richer. They should be run democratically, for the purpose of making the lives of the users better. Breaking up monopolies is just a temporary solution, because the systems of capitalism will always create them again. The underlying system, the how and why, needs to change.

aydyn3• 1 year ago

Everything except for steam, one of the few to do it right. Of course they arent perfect as nobody is, but in general they treat developers right, they treat customers right. Theres no personalized surge prices or other AI BS, and they dont ban randomly like google. If you buy a game on steam, you own it for real.

mindwok2• 1 year ago

True, Steam is better - I think it helps they aren't a public company. They still take a huge margin though.

immibis7• 1 year ago

No, Steam is still in its (unusually long) first phase of enshittification, where it delivers surplus value to consumers.

Probably as long as gaben is alive, it will be so. But don't expect it to last. There's nothing special about Steam the platform.

You definitely don't own Steam games for real, and they don't ban randomly but for example, if you're caught cheating in a game, or talking about illegal things with your friends, you will find out how much you don't own those games.

alextingle• 1 year ago

If you buy a game on steam, you own it for real.

How so? If Steam goes away, then so does your game. That's not ownership.

Just because they have carefully and honestly fostered a lot of trust in their game rental service, doesn't make it not a game rental service.

account424• 1 year ago

Steam doesn't do it right, they are just slightly friendlier than the competition. And that can change at a moments notice and you will be locked in because your friend Gaben has been working on making it hard to leave all along.

notarobot1232• 1 year ago

Everyone hates The Algorithm but we're all caught in network effects. Networks can collapse though.

AI is propping up the Web but I'm not convinced it can do that indefinitely.

The dream of Internet enabled disintermediation is not dead. We'll eventually switch protocols, change the incentive structures and build a social internet for ourselves - at least those of us who've not had our souls eaten by Moloch already. It's not inevitable but it is possible and it is what a lot of us actually want.

ath3nd• 1 year ago

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

josh-sematic• 1 year ago

This is a lucid but terrifying read.

protocolture9• 1 year ago

But eventually the market will fix this, right? People will feel sick of being manipulated and move elsewhere?

You can literally go outside and talk to people. There's no moat around dating apps. Human beings continue to exist in meatspace. I am yet to see a dating app contract that prevents you from being casually approached by strangers. Heck matchmakers still exist.

seydor3• 1 year ago

You can literally go outside and talk to people.

You can't . If you talk to modern city people the way you casually said 'hi' to strangers in the 90s , at best you 'll end up in a tiktok branded as a creepy person

officehero• 1 year ago

This exchange highlights the huge difference in experience people have w.r.t. dating. Some people get approached all the time and others never get approached and it's always been like that. I blame humanity for this unfair system rather than some stupid app.

Klonoar5• 1 year ago

No? Just... don't be creepy.

I've done this a few times over the last few days alone (in Seattle no less, a city infamous for being antisocial - though I'm willing to accept some were tourists for the 4th).

IME, people are actually starved for human interaction.

ansc• 1 year ago

Come on.

I agree with the premise that it is really difficult and sucks to "just go out and talk to people". Depends on where you live I guess though. I think thinking you'll end up on a TikTok because you talk to a person in a queue is just a far off excuse.

diggan4• 1 year ago

You can't . If you talk to modern city people the way you casually said 'hi' to strangers in the 90s

It is true, in some places, that talking to strangers are generally frowned upon without having a good reason to do so.

The trick is to either only open up the conversation when you have something relevant to say (or funny, seems to work sometimes too), or move to city/country where it's socially accepted.

As someone who used to live in a country where talking with strangers is basically implicitly forbidden and straight up weird, but then moved to a country where it's completely normal, the amount of interesting conversations easily skyrocketed as soon as I landed in my new home country.

protocolture9• 1 year ago

I literally had a conversation with a bloke at the same cafe as me yesterday. The restriction is in your mind.

alecco3• 1 year ago

You can literally go outside and talk to people.

Only in small towns with high trust societies, sadly.

jen205• 1 year ago

Wildly untrue, unless you count London or New York City as small towns.

Barrin92• 1 year ago

Sorry what? You can go out clubbing and drinking and meet 50 new people in Berlin every night. Pretty cheap too, even these days.

justin66• 1 year ago

Otherwise you’ll be assaulted by roving gangs. Or young people who will mock you for wearing your trousers too high.

protocolture9• 1 year ago

High trust society.

I usually see this as an anti immigration dogwhistle.

I live in an actual hellhole by these standards.

For 40 years, every refugee or immigrant population was forced to live in my region. Every time the government wanted to do A/B testing on welfare, my region.

When I first wanted to move here I considered that I would need amazing security and reviewed crime stats. OH NO, its a CRIME HOTSPOT. How could I subject myself to that, I would have to live in fear.

Then I turned off "Drug Crimes" in the police statistics, and that completely normalised the results against much richer, whiter suburbs.

If anything we have a greater density of churches, because everyone wants to hear the bible read in their tongue. Theres an islander community just over the main drag from me where twice a year I see like 200 big islander kids dressed in choir costumes being loaded into busses for a big church thing.

My wife literally takes my toddler out for walks unassisted in the middle of the night.

I have no issues talking to people, or being approached by people.

anon7000• 1 year ago

Today I visited the shit website known as Fandom, and within a second of scrolling the page, the entire page was ads. Not joking: https://imgur.com/a/8QzBZGM — and it’s not a contrived example, this is the first thing that happened after reaching the page via a search for some character in a show. This is the default new user experience for Fandom, at least some portion of the time. How is this acceptable to the employees and executives of that company?

The CTO, Adil Ajmal, says “we help people worldwide go deeper on their favorite games, entertainment, and culture.” How can I possibly do that with the absurd number of ads on the page?

The money incentive in software right now is to make it extremely shitty. We need ways to incentivize people, and especially executives, to make friendly decisions for their users.

Right now across the industry, many people are getting promoted and hired for decisions that are extremely hostile to their customers and visitors. Whether it be for replacing support with an unhelpful, dumb AI bot, or marginally growing revenue by shoveling ads down your unwilling throat, we are not incentivizing products that are good and friendly to humans.

Seriously, fuck all the investors who are incentivizing this BS.

Of course, we need drastic changes to the economic system (the counterproductive incentives exist everywhere), but you have a choice in the matter. It’s possible to build a good product and make good money and make some revenue growth without being absolutely insane about it. Companies are betting that customers won’t catch on. Facebook might be a good example. It’s turned into such a shithole that no one in a certain age range wants to deal with it anymore, outside of very specific niches. The primary feed & product has failed.

seydor3• 1 year ago

ads are the most benign form of extraction. They attack your attention but that's just about it. The manipulative algorithms, the walled garden, the subscriptions , the extractive surcharges, the anticompetitive rules , those came after ads and they are far worse and far more profitable. Wish we could go back to a free, ad-supported internet, but the whole internet is now a front for stockholder ponzi schemes.

account424• 1 year ago

Ads don't just take your attention lol. The point of getting your attention is to manipulate you into taking actions or making decisions that align with the interests of the advertiser (usually profit) over your own.

zkmon2• 1 year ago

Oh, same thing is happening with the regular TV and almost any media that needs attention. Every single channel is shit. News channels are just curated selection of horror stories from all around the globe. Ads are competing be weirder and weirder. Every single channel wants to grab your attention by dishing out concentrated weirdest stuff. I'm terrified to switch on TV.

vasco4• 1 year ago

Nothing will make a nerd a communist faster than getting a taste of real life on dating apps.

nlitened3• 1 year ago

How would communism help with that? Make women common property?

jksflkjl3jk33• 1 year ago

I suppose if all men made the same salary that would level the playing field to some degree.

vasco4• 1 year ago

It helps if you read the post to understand. He was bummed people pay for boosts.

Ray203• 1 year ago

No. It's just that the teachings of totalitarian sects are especially effective against narrow-minded, disillusioned people. The solutions they propose are not supposed to be effective or even realistic.

immibis7• 1 year ago

Dating apps aren't real life - they're holodecks designed to make you think you need to buy premium.

StefanBatory2• 1 year ago

If everyone uses them, they're the real life.

It's like, saying social media is not real. Well, maybe it is. But right now where I live they shaped the politics of our country.

hardwaresofton8• 1 year ago

If you open a government S&P 500 account for everyone with $1,000 at birth that’ll pay their social security cause it like…goes up…wait who’s creating this value again?

This is a good point. Some VCs were major proponents of this (and tons of other business people I'm sure), but this is of course just a guaranteed inflow into the largest companies and the companies that think they will be large some day. Yet another way to reallocate public cash to private companies.

Another similar example is UBI -- its proof of an economy that is not dynamic. It's a tacit approval and recognition of the fact that "no, you probably won't be able to find a job with dignity that can support you and your family, so the government will pay to make you comfortable while you exist".

PartiallyTyped3• 1 year ago

It is an allocation to the biggest companies at any time.

ETFs need to rebalance, increase, decrease shares of a given stock and even evict them. Buying shares on SPY exposes you to the current companies but also any companies that will join.

If a company gets evicted, then there is massive drop in their stock pricing as most movement is mechanistic and done by ETFs.

Well massive is relative. For example last week we saw quite the drop in pltr after it was removed from russel2000.

n2d42• 1 year ago

FYI this is not true and has been debunked in newer studies; the reason why it seems true is because companies that enter the SP500 tend to enter it because they're doing well which makes its stock go up. If you control for that factor, presence in the SP500 does not significantly affect the stock price. https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/research/staff...

alecco3• 1 year ago

Hedge Funds call ETFs, pension funds, etc. "dumb money". I suspect they also feed the finance media narrative stating how on average they are not good at trading.

tossandthrow12• 1 year ago

make you comfortable while you exist

I don't think there are many proponents of that type of ubi.

The way, at least I, see ubi is absolute subsistence - with a right to earn above that without affecting your subsistence.

IMHO something along UBI is needed for a democratized market economy - and I think the Scandinavian countries are the support for this claim.

pydry5• 1 year ago

During the depression this was done with a job guarantee. Instead of paying people to sit on their ass they paid people to build stuff like the Lincoln tunnel, which was preferable for them (and even for us, we still use that stuff).

UBI is more like the grain dole which Roman Emperors used to temper mass unrest and "prove" their benevolence.

It seems to be in vogue among tech moguls who cant distinguish between abject dependence on the Chinese industrial system/systematic underinvestment in infrastructure and all jobs being automated thanks to their glorious genius.

hardwaresofton8• 1 year ago

I don't think there are many proponents of that type of ubi.

Another good sign of a difficult policy to implement successfully/an idea that isn't ready for primetime. If everyone has different ideas of what the thing is, it's very hard to make good decisions, and easy for the "wrong" UBI to sneak in.

Other commenters have already made this point, but there are other ways to guarantee "subsistence". I think the hard to answer question is why are the targeted methods currently available not good enough? If we want to ensure people have food, then food subsidies/support make sense.

Also, if unemployment is the problem, fix that. If unemployment isn't the problem and people who are working aren't getting subsistence wages, fix that.

I think part of the problem is that no one wants to stick up and define what we think every human deserves and what we want society to provide. Does every human deserve housing? Access to green space? etc. Trying to clearly define this will lead to really interesting discussions that lay bare the disagreements core to society.

I think my early point still stands, UBI is not needed (we're making do without it now), and if it ever is needed, it's a sign of a lack of dynamism in the economy/ineffective wealth distribution mechanisms (basically, taxation).

al_borland• 1 year ago

If everyone gets an equal raise (whatever the UBI is), wouldn’t the entire market simply adjust to price that in, leaving everyone in the same relative position?

mortsnort• 1 year ago

S&P 500 companies don't get any inflow of cash when their stock is purchased

snovymgodym• 1 year ago

No, but it makes the stock price appreciate which is even better than a cash inflow for an inside investor since your wealth increases without a taxable event.

tossandthrow12• 1 year ago

They can recapitalize? Ofcause a company has huge benits of having expensive stocks.

poorcedural• 1 year ago

Proof that the USA is the largest exporter of inflation. UBI can not compete with strategic inflation on a global scale.

kragen4• 1 year ago

Oh, shit. Well said, sir. But I think this may be unrealistically optimistic, assuming that the problem is temporary.

tumdum_• 1 year ago

It’s a pity that (Algorithm free) cohost died.

xoralkindi4• 1 year ago

Someday, people will have to realize we live in a society. What will it take?

Anarchism, socialism and communism can work perfect in a small village where everyone knows and trusts each other. But if you scale it up it does not work well because people can be corrupt. If you want to scale up to a Geo Global level that is trust-less the best way we know is to use Capitalism, but Capitalism ends up becoming more and more centralized.

Because Capitalism is inherently competitive there will always be winners and losers and these are not just businesses it's everyone in the system because capital is required to partake in the system. This competitiveness is also what leads to the lack of "morality".

What will it take?

I think you cannot have the benefits of capitalism without these side-effects.

TFYS4• 1 year ago

I think we now have the technology to make decision-making and resource allocation systems that do not need to centralize power. If we can do that, then it wouldn't matter that people can be corrupt, because there would be no positions of power that people can abuse.

xoralkindi4• 1 year ago

I also believe that technology is the solution. But all the key technology is centralized Chips, AI, Batteries, Cryptography, Email, Internet access, Radio Waves

sothatsit2• 1 year ago

Most people aren't looking to eliminate capitalism. They just want constraints to be put on it. Higher taxes on wealth, stricter antitrust enforcement, investing in social infrastructure, or passing laws that protect consumers don't prevent capitalism from working.

Australia has social healthcare and massive mining companies. They coexist just fine. There really is a lot of wiggle room between fully embracing socialism and going full anarcho-capitalist, and maybe the tradeoffs of shifting towards the socialism side of things are worth considering.

Although, George seems to just want to flip the table out of the belief that real reform that would impact most people positively will never get passed in a democracy. It would require too much change.

xoralkindi4• 1 year ago

Most people aren't looking to eliminate capitalism. They want sensible constraints to be put on it. Things like higher taxes on wealth, stricter antitrust enforcement, or investing in social infrastructure don't prevent capitalism from working.

In capitalism the capitalists end up being the government. They can choose who gets elected, the laws, they even start political parties.

boudin• 1 year ago

What are the benefits of capitalism?

xoralkindi4• 1 year ago

It can scale economies and can run on the global level, it also brings about rapid advances in Science and Technology. It also provides more options for individuals than in Socialism, in this regard Capitalism is more decentralized than Socialism.

Ray203• 1 year ago

With it, you don't have to die from hunger. Not much, but compared to the alternatives, it is one of the strongest arguments in favor of capitalism.

skocznymroczny• 1 year ago

Online dating websites are a waste of time unless you are in the top % of men. Sad reality of online dating is that a small % of men gets attention of most women, while the remaining % of men get little to no attention at all. The whole boosting system makes it even worse.

cadamsdotcom• 1 year ago

There’s no gain from outrage. Just opt out and move on.

I sold my TV. Don’t wanna get creeped on thanks. A TV with a microphone might be convenient for some but for us that’s a hard pass.

I drive a 12 year old car, its fuel efficiency is horrendous and its entertainment system barely works. But it’s off the grid! When I turn it off it TURNS OFF. It doesn’t creep on me, it doesn’t sell my driving habits or report my location or upload microphone recordings at the dealer when it’s plugged in for a service.

I’m biding my time until enough others think like me that a company takes notice. One day someone will make a car that loudly says it doesn’t creep on you, one day someone will make a TV that doesn’t creep on you. One day companies will care again about the customer. One day people will be wise enough to recognize enshittification and will call companies on their shit, and the market will speak.

Not today, but soon. Eventually.

0xDEAFBEAD• 1 year ago

Why not start that company yourself? DuckDuckGo has been pretty successful, and supposedly they're looking to invest in other privacy-focused companies: https://techcrunch.com/2024/10/23/duckduckgo-will-be-making-...

Biologist123• 1 year ago

I sometimes think of the internet as an alternative dimension: as mind space; it was Terra Nova and speculators rode in to grab the available real estate. But as the experience also showed us, there are maybe infinite mind spaces, and the job of anyone dissatisfied with the status quo is to open those new spaces where networks can be built around principles other than enshittification.

margarina72• 1 year ago

America also was once Terra Nova...

sureglymop• 1 year ago

How could it take a smart person until July 5 2025 to realize this? I think that's the most concerning part. Long overdue realization.

octo8882• 1 year ago

Is that a slight against the author? If so, how does publishing an article imply they only just realised something?

coldpie3• 1 year ago

George Hotz has spent his career[1] being a "useful idiot" for a series of hypercapitalist techbros, including Zuckerberg in the 2010s and Musk as recently as 2022, so it's somewhat notable that the scales may be falling from his eyes.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Hotz

mhog_hn• 1 year ago

What meta structure allows us to get rid of rent seeking behavior?

I don’t have an answer - is there scientific research on this?

Taxation? Loopholes will be found.

Lawfare against it? Lobbying will win.

I am amazed by capitalism, but at the same time it is a ruthless machine - and in democratic countries it is highly unlikely that a single political party can force the machine into a new direction. Perhaps that is a very nice feature, at the cost of also having to tolerate rent seeking, but it sure as hell sucks to see these downsides.

max_• 1 year ago

The bitter truth is that Nirvana doesn't exist.

There is no perfect system. But we can choose the least detrimental.

poorlyknit2• 1 year ago

What can we do to make rent-seeking hurt society less? Imo we should start by decoupling money from power. Right now, people are forced to participate in the rent-seekers game because his wealth implies power over them.

lmm2• 1 year ago

Social cohesion. People are happy to rip off an outsider, a stranger, a schmuck. But people within a high-trust social group generally don't rip each other off - you still need to be on the look out for fraudsters, but you won't be doing it systematically and virtually openly.

It's not a coincidence that all this has happened as the US' national identity has gotten weaker and weaker. They're shifting from a cohesive nation to one of those "it's a single block on the map but it's actually 200 tribes who all hate each other" countries, and people's values and behaviour are shifting to match.

willguest• 1 year ago

This post, and presumably its author, is reaching escape velocity, or at least max-Q.

A second-order difficulty is that the tools with which we could go about dissecting, reimagining and reconstructing new society are also tainted by the powers that have delivered such malignant incentives and effects. This is not new and the fervour and insistence will continue to mount as the cracks in the dam grow in number and size.

There are, however, positive routes forward but in my experience they are somewhat alienating because the majority of people around you will think you are mad, weird or simply delusional. To be clear, I am probably all of those things (definitely the first two), but I prefer that to being a commodity powering a machine that is disinterested in anything that doesn't make it bigger. Two illustrations:

First, cognitivism. A sneaky, anthropocentric idea that simulataneously promotes and soothes a sense of dissonance. We don't, imo, create meaning primarily by modelling simulations of the world in our heads and forming goals based on them. Sure, this happens, but to give it primacy will lead to all sorts of unexpected and unpleasant effects. Alternative: constructivism.

Second, systems of perpetual (exponential) growth. Every day we buy into this by transacting within a system that has this implicit assumption built into it. We do not (an cannot) comprehend the scale and influence of this, because society is unpredictable and the effects are often emergent. Example: tragedy of the commons. This system didn't just show up by itself, nor was it the creation of a shadowy cabal - it perpetuates because we all use it, all the time. Alternative: imagine harder, build systems that mimic nature in its sigmoidal beauty, not only their growth phase.

An important milestone is, imo, proper systems thinking. This is no-ones fault and we are all complicit, but we all possess the ability for radical adaptation and, where it has been cultivated, the ability to rebuild all that which is broken.

I regularly think/read about, work towards and promote such angles, including ethical algorithm design, open-model behavioural analysis and value-aware technology. If anyone would like to join my micro-revolution, you are most welcome. I should warn you though, it doesn't pay well.

brador• 1 year ago

Every solution he proposes is based on violence and hate.

How about we try love, empathy, and compassion to solve our problems? Collaboration?

jdiaz97• 1 year ago

Hello Lex Fridman

yubblegum• 1 year ago

Who writes like this? Another victim of the little shiny screen device.

hshdhdhj4444• 1 year ago

I’m increasingly convinced advertising is a huge mistake and just not normal.

We don’t need advertising, which fundamentally is little different from lying and manipulation, at all, and society would be a lot better if we denormalized advertising.

If a company paying an influencer to talk about them, or placing an ad on a sports game, would be denormalized to the extent that it would lead to people deliberately not buying the product.

Instead one could subscribe to trusted reviewers who make their money off subscription revenues and therefore their interests are aligned with the customer rather than the ad supplier.

samdoesnothing• 1 year ago

If this happened people would complain that "capitalism" made the internet prohibitively expensive.

magicfractal• 1 year ago

Nothing like opening up Hinge to radicalize an individual!

GardenLetter27• 1 year ago

The issue is the market. These things are possible because of the skewed market.

There are far more men than women on dating apps, women don't buy the boosts, etc.

So you are paying for exposure in that skewed market.

If it were a complete free-for-all then women would get thousands of messages a day and not use the apps at all.

carlosjobim7• 1 year ago

Sperms outnumber eggs by millions to one.

BriggyDwiggs423• 1 year ago

Okay? Men don’t outnumber women millions to one.

zkmon2• 1 year ago

The layers are part of the evolution. We may like to credit ourselves with great inventions which built these layers, but it is like trees claiming to create the wind, rivers claiming to create water flow etc. Humans are just facilitators or vehicles that carry the wind of change. We don't cause the change. The change has selected the agents who showed least resistance to the change. Then the agents gloriously claimed that they caused the change.

spacecadet• 1 year ago

In short. Yes. Sorry- but you can and are able to contemplate the externalities of your creations before you create them... imo most people prefer a little delusion as a treat.

Obviously it is not black and white like this. In turn- we all have the free choice to not engage. I don't engage with 99% of contemporary market economy tech, for these reasons. Heck I still carry cash just so I can leave cash tips, or make small cash payments at stores, bribe an official, etc.

bryanrasmussen• 1 year ago

Huh, I thought this was going to be some sort of self-reflection about fascism and such but no - it's about how a site is too manipulative in its UX. Gosh.

In a way the real baddies was the trivial stuff we fixated on along the way.

bsenftner2• 1 year ago

I thought so too, but apparently discussing Australian air travel is the topic...

kylestanfield• 1 year ago

Nothing about testing a home made self driving car on the Highway either

talkingtab• 1 year ago

The answer is yes. The answer about how bad is really bad. We humans have never before understood how essential our innate collaboration is nor. Nor have we ever understood how fragile it is. Here are some thought experiments for you.

Take a colony of ants and destroy their ability to use a pheromone trail. What happens?

Take a colony of ants and use the pheromone trail to generate "profit" for some of the ants at the cost of others.

Ants probably have little self consciousness. But add that awareness to them - essentially tell them they are being manipulated - and then perform the above two experiments again.

A good way to understand complex adaptive systems, like the ones we humans use, is to try to build some. See John Holland's "Hidden Order" for some hints on how to go about this.

msgodel• 1 year ago

If you open a government S&P 500 account for everyone with $1,000 at birth that’ll pay their social security cause it like…goes up…wait who’s creating this value again

It changes with production, if production shrinks it shrinks. This is exactly what you need with a retirement account, otherwise you end up with a situation like the UK where the pension system is crushing the workers.

LeafItAlone3• 1 year ago

I generally avoid George’s non-technical posts because they are… let’s say uninspired.

But here is one that actually makes sense. Of course the self-reflection with who he otherwise praises and spends his time with will never set in, but at least others may take the time to look inward and do something differently.

Something has to change. Even HN seems to have had an increase in sentiment like this in the past few years. Maybe I’m just noticing it more myself. Maybe it’s not just the existence of the Grape, but rather where it came from.

alecco3• 1 year ago

Hmmm. I'll just leave this here https://x.com/ns123abc/status/1940980667455836578

LeafItAlone3• 1 year ago

I don’t use Twitter. I believe it plays a big part in the degradation of society that geohot hot refers to in this article.

Can you share that that post is about and the significance of it in relation to this link?

j2kun• 1 year ago

I have to wonder if some people are just trying to follow the hype. This reads like the "put a cell phone camera on your dashboard to make a car self-driving" approach to reflection.

spacemadness3• 1 year ago

I think there is genuine burnout. Also it makes sense that the more grizzled on HN have lived long enough to see the fruits of the labor, perhaps just tangentially, and what it has wrought. Coupled with the industry treating its workers pretty poorly right now and shattering all illusions, it makes sense this sentiment is rising.

Yajirobe• 1 year ago

Ah yes geohot. The same guy who used LLMs in advent of code to get on the leaderboard

benreesman3• 1 year ago

Whenever I send like a diff summary or something that the bot did I title it: ChatGPT That XYZ Dawg (busy building!)

dcrazy• 1 year ago

I was hopeful that by titling his post “Are we the baddies?” that he would spend at least a little time reflecting on his role in all this. But he didn’t.

lannisterstark2• 1 year ago

he would spend at least a little time reflecting

It's Hotz. Why would you waste time expecting that.

coolThingsFirst• 1 year ago

That’s below HS level of writing and to think he was born in the US.

Very poor thought. Likely written after consumption of some bad drugs.

Havoc• 1 year ago

Sure seems like big tech is on the cusp of killing the open internet by pulling the rug out from underneath bloggers etc.

And the antagonistic algo everywhere world is starting to suck. And google removing their "don't be evil" sure seemed very self-aware.

...but not sure about the whole "needs WW3 to reset" angle...seems a bit much

azangru• 1 year ago

I had no idea what Hinge was (had to google), and now I am curious what is it that makes it holy shit with a boost.

Aerbil313• 1 year ago

Democracy, haha, you think the algorithms will let you vote to kill them? Your vote is as decoupled from action as the amount Uber pays the driver is decoupled from the fare that you pay.

Relevant here, all the way from 1975:

"...In any technologically advanced society the individual’s fate MUST depend on decisions that he personally cannot influence to any great extent. A technological society cannot be broken down into small, autonomous communities, because production depends on the cooperation of very large numbers of people and machines. Such a society MUST be highly organized and decisions HAVE TO be made that affect very large numbers of people. When a decision affects, say, a million people, then each of the affected individuals has, on the average, only a one-millionth share in making the decision. What usually happens in practice is that decisions are made by public officials or corporation executives, or by technical specialists, but even when the public votes on a decision the number of voters ordinarily is too large for the vote of any one individual to be significant. Thus most individuals are unable to influence measurably the major decisions that affect their lives. There is no conceivable way to remedy this in a technologically advanced society. The system tries to “solve” this problem by using propaganda to make people WANT the decisions that have been made for them, but even if this “solution” were completely successful in making people feel better, it would be demeaning."

- Industrial Society And Its Future, Ted Kaczynski (1975)

hermitcrab2• 1 year ago

At one point I was fixated on conversion rates, cost per click, pricing tiers etc for my small software business. Then I realized I'm doing ok, and I don't have to squeeze every last penny out of it. Now I choose what to do based at least as much on how interesting it will be for me, as how much money I think it might earn. It has been quite liberating.

fnordpiglet• 1 year ago

I worked on the original browsers and modern internet infrastructure. I worked on building the hyperscale cloud infra that enables the modern internet. I’ve had my fingers on so much of what is happening. And I felt genuinely like I was helping build some thing better. Then the role of product manager was invented and I regret everything I’ve done.

davidee• 1 year ago

Would you be willing to expand on that?

Context: built a viable business which I ran for many years. Eventually got seduced and went to work for big(ish) tech as a product manager. It was so divested from what I understood about building great products - however I was fantastic at doing things my way and getting shit done; largely based on what I learned from doing "all the things" at a small business. I had lots of success while also suffering with burnout and anxiety almost constantly.

Worked on incredibly popular cloud and OSS software. Hated most of it - especially what product management and the product-management-industrial-complex was distorting that role to be (divorced from much of reality but also expected to fix bullshit founder/c-suite/old-guard behavior). Oy the Miro boards and endless GDocs comment threads.

I left product (and some wild comp) to go back to building things.

So, I'm not disagreeing, I am just hoping you could expand a bit more on your own personal experience with rise of the product manager role.

Nevertheless, I also don't think PMs and PM-centric culture, are to solely to blame. I've not yet met a leadership team who's behavior and decisions I respect and/or can live with (and yes, it's highly possible I'm the problem).

hardwaresofton8• 1 year ago

What was George doing on Hinge? I've seen a stream or two and IIRC he had a significant other.

Absolutely none of my business but technically this is on-topic right now, in this thread.

cjbgkagh• 1 year ago

Tips through apps, much like charity at the grocery store checkout, is a really strong signal that the provider can raise their prices. Basically asking how wealthy do you feel after the transaction.

dangus2• 1 year ago

The author is metaphorically complaining about seeing alcohol for sale after deciding to go to a bar.

Nobody twisted your arm to use Hinge rather than utilize local dating resources like singles meetups, speed dating, and matchmaking services.

Or just get a group-oriented hobby and talk to people in real life.

tpoacher• 1 year ago

Yeah that's right. If you don't like AI and data-mining just don't use the internet at all, amirite?

dangus2• 1 year ago

To some extent, yes.

Not every internet thing is an abusive app like dating apps or Facebook.

You can just not use those apps.

tempodox2• 1 year ago

Will mass starvation fix this? Or will the attitude of thinking it’s okay to manipulate others at scale persist even past that?

As long as everyone is OK with the losers losing big so the winners can win big, it will persist. As long as the “I've got mine, screw you” attitude keeps being culturally ingrained, it will persist.

BenGosub• 1 year ago

In my opinion this is one of many simptoms of a decadent society on the brink of collapse. And I also think that cheap money and huge fiscal debts have been feeling this decadence.

adxl2• 1 year ago

I’m not a big user of Uber but I need to say that the experiences there are mostly better than your grandad’s taxi (pay up for Uber X if you want a better experience). Mostly cabs were/are badly maintained and some seem downright dangerous with shocks dead, idiot lights on, smoking tailpipes and just general crappy interiors. I once got in a NYC cab where there blood all over the back of the drivers seat, got right back out. Cabbies are quarrelsome and grumpy. One guy picked me up at my house obviously drunk. I mentioned Uber to one guy who became very aggressive. Got out at the next light. Ah the good ole days.

Now for Uber. If you pay to upgrade to Uber X it’s a great experience. One time I got in the wrong Uber (not X). They said silver Nissan at station 4 at the airport in Atlanta. Got in the car and he was obviously going somewhere else than where I requested. When he realized I was the wrong passenger the driver became extremely agitated and aggressive. My bad for not checking his plate, his bad for not checking the passenger out. He was the driver so it’s really his responsibility since I may not know these things. Also I could not leave a bad review as I did not know who this driver was. Always always check you are in the right car.

hammond• 1 year ago

The author should start with his own product, which stops working if it doesn't connect to the internet at least every 14 days.

https://github.com/commaai/openpilot/blob/a8ec08e5bbc2be0a32...

hn1986• 1 year ago

Or the fact that he volunteered to work for Twitter, which is the ultimate propaganda recommendation algorithm since Musk took over.

https://www.theverge.com/2022/12/20/23519922/george-hotz-geo...

lannisterstark2• 1 year ago

Or the fact that he volunteered to work for Twitter

Worse! He volunteered, then went "Hey anyone want an internship? Fix twitter search, Make the code MIT, and then maybe I'll give you an internship."

...had 0 authority to give anyone an internship btw. Dudebro just wanted free fix.

grafmax• 1 year ago

Yeah cause this niche product is the structural source of the problems he cites.

wayeq• 1 year ago

It'd be really nice if the title gave an indication of what the article is about.

morkalork• 1 year ago

I went to Walmart twice last week, Tuesday and Friday. Passed by the chips aisle twice and the price on Friday was over a dollar higher per-bag. They've got those fancy e-ink screen price-tags now and I guess they're doing surge pricing. I'm tired of this shit.

DLoupe• 1 year ago

It's called "dynamic pricing" and it's everywhere. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_Pricing

ztauras• 1 year ago

Everyone is good and bad, not that question, why the discusion revolves on tipping?

einpoklum• 1 year ago

Sorry for being clueless but - what is Hinge? A quick search says it's a dating application. But I don't quite understand from the first paragraph that this is the Hinge he's talking about.

Clarifications would be greatly appreciated...

brogdan• 1 year ago

It’s the pay-to-play nature of dating apps that he is railing about.

jerome-jh• 1 year ago

"are we the baddies?"

We are and without AI. See how people struggle with their computers and devices, and how it is often caused by an undesired software update.

See how software updates, or the lack thereof, are weaponized to make devices unusable or obsolete.

Are we the baddies?

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