Well, it's usually much cheaper to use a non-Amazon 3PL to ship your Amazon volume (along with other D2C channels), but then you might not have the prime badge if you go on the cheaper side of the market.
And even if you want a prime badge, it's often/usually cheaper to go with a 3PL that can do some sort of SFP setup if you have reasonable volumes.
Although Amazon has a stranglehold on 3PL's too (or if you are a seller offering SFP), as they will force you to use Amazon Logistics at a certain % of volume if you want the prime badge which can be more expensive than other carriers.
(I work in logistics consulting and do network strategy design & 3PL selection as part of that so have a reasonably up to date view on comparative/competitive costs for this sort of thing - mostly in Europe though and appreciate the USA market is different)
This is the kind of person for whom AI is making the most negative change. I feel sad for them. For me, I love this new world. I never took pleasure in craftsmanship or perfectionism, I just want things to work and then iterate on it with as little effort as possible.
> I never took pleasure in craftsmanship or perfectionism, I just want things to work and then iterate on it with as little effort as possible.
The problem with this outlook (not with you personally) is that the increase in accessibility for you comes at a cost, but the way things work these days the cost is not paid by you but by someone else — someone you'll probably never even meet. The cost has been abstracted away from you and foisted onto somebody else against their will. This shows up as people adversely affected by local data centers (increased pollution, higher electricity prices), people displaced in the workforce (author of the article), people of the future who will not understand things because it's easier to skip understanding for now (students, early learners), and so many more.
It's very liberating — so long as you are given the ability to not think about the consequences for these other people, and the abstraction process by which AI companies are providing their services gives you that freedom by design. At the very least, it is something about which you perhaps ought to be wary.
You mean like all the benefits of industrialization? The real externalized human/environmental costs of our fast/cheap fashion, of our iPhones, of cars, of electricity, of agriculture?
I saw a video today, talking about how this is really the end goal of what we've been working towards for 200 years. Automation and scale and convenience uber alles. As structured it's not a good idea and it seems that Dr. Kaczynski wasn't wrong in diagnosis, only in the treatment. But here we are and we're pretty pot-committed, so I guess we have to see for ourselves what's on the other side.
Yes the fact that we have seen this pattern play out in the past and are very aware of all of the positive and negative effects it has should be sufficient to slow us down but naturally people are too selfish. The people who benefit will happily step over the graves of those of us who are fucked by the "benefits of industrialization" and then whoever survived will pat themselves on the back for a job well done while the rest of us rot
But there's no reason for us to be angry about it or resist it, of course
The only people who even somewhat successfully resisted industrialization are the Amish. Is that what we should be doing, forming religious communities that are increasingly isolated from the rest of humanity? Unable to contribute meaningfully to the discourse, but still subject to the externalities of the dominant paradigm?
Shoot—if the true believers are right and there's ultimately never again going to be an economically viable justification for anyone without an MBA to have a single independent thought, maybe the Amish were onto something after all.
They at least have the notion that you've got a soul, and that it's a thing that should be tended to. A boss who has genuinely internalized the belief that the value of all human knowledge and expertise has gone to zero—such a man is unlikely to be similarly burdened in his assumptions about you.
Throwing shoes into the mechanism doesn't seem to have done anything but coin a new word. But I'm all ears! What other options do you see that could work at a larger-than-village scale?
Call me crazy but the tone of your writing doesn't inspire me with much confidence that you're actually even remotely receptive. I think you just want to argue
I'm not into it. Go ask Claude instead. It has more patience for this sort of ignorant attitude than I do.
You're crazy, I'm...not even arguing. You'll see that even in the course of this one thread that I've been quite ambivalent. And I've already talked with Claude about it plenty, and few ideas that feel workable in our present climate. I don't feel like I'm "ignorant" but then we never do, right? Would love some pointers to ideas. What you got? Communism? Georgism? UBI?
First, I don't trust the elites to share in the wealth. I expect fuedalism to ensue.
Second, I think what is healthy for humans to yearn for is purpose and meaning, and convenience and idleness are almost counterproductive to that. Ok it's hard to argue with convenience, but nowhere in all of this has AI threatened to make my life more convenient by doing the chores for me, it just takes away fun creative tasks that I can get paid for.
> nowhere in all of this has AI threatened to make my life more convenient by doing the chores for me, it just takes away fun creative tasks that I can get paid for.
And this is, of course, the bitter irony. As that meme goes, I don't want it to write my prose so I can do the dishes, I want it to do the dishes so I can write prose.
That process is nothing new. That’s happened many times in history over and over. And in far more dangerous ways than not understanding how some complex piece of code keeps their favorite or most critical application running. At this point, people have long lost the ability to have even basic survival. How long would people last if they needed food or water? They have no idea on step one to achieving the basics. It’s all abstract to them, which includes us. That’s the loss that actually matters. Not that they know how their Amazon Fire TV works.
Disagree, in that humans are doing the same things they did in the dawn of time. Adapting to the environment and figuring out what it takes to thrive.
There are many things about our modern world which make less intuitive sense than the lives of hunter gatherers. People are trying to figure out how to survive in the conditions they are placed in.
Physical labour was weakened and then had to compete with machines, till we got lights out factories.
We were left with the service economy to find roles that allowed us to thrive. Now that is being threatened as well. It is unlikely that LLMs are going to make us all into entrepreneurs and capital owners.
Not to mention, the service sector required far fewer workers than manufacturing.
This isn't quite the same kind of moment we see over and over. It's not simply cars taking out horse drawn carriages.
The OP's point was about ignorance being bliss, but having adverse side effects. That's what I was responding to. I'm saying we long have lost the only part that matters, which was the self-sufficient farm.
It helps, but doesn't make a big difference if someone doesn't know what valves in an engine do. And 90% of the population probably does not.
Your point about adapting to basic material conditions under industrialization is something else. I wouldn't agree with what you're saying. It may not be your analogy, horse drawn to motorized carriages- but this is the cotton gin all over again. The only difference is we're now out of new industries generated out of the new technology to employ people. No more network admins needed, no more programmers needed, no more cotton gin repairmen are needed.
I agree in that the conditions are different with this one. But the process is the same we've seen over and over. This time there's just no newly created jobs out of this new revolution, 100 million legal and illegal immigrants flooding developed nations and more coming, and 50 years ago women entering the workforce expanding it 50% overnight. You're correct in that it's not going to work, but I see different reasons for it than you do. Things are going to have to change or Europe, the US and Canada are going to become slums like the rest of the world. And that process is going to be even faster than it normally would, because the ~50% population expansion consists of people that are used to slums.
I find it a breath of fresh air to be able to tackle backlogged tech debt items simultaneously with business priorities in parallel and stuff like that.
That being said, I can't see this entire field existing in five years anymore. I'm hoping for at least two more years, but who knows?
This stuff is coming for all white collar, the barrier to entry is completely gone now. Maybe not the barrier to mastery (yet), but the bottom has fallen out.
I see sentiment like this (which is valid; it’s a different perspective), and then I look at my company’s current caseload of breaches and how most of the (insane) increase in business we’ve received is caused by poorly coded apps with obvious security issues, along with the inability of orgs to remediate those issues or adequately follow incidents because no one actually knows the applications anymore.
And I’m wondering if this isn’t the enormous amount of organizational debt from having security second to everything finally coming calling.
Not in security, but "vibe coding remediation"--that's the best way I can think to describe it--has been a booming business in my line of work (SIP/VoIP infrastructure engineering) as well.
How long it'll last, I can't say, only that before LLMs, the industry entered a phase of consolidation and quiescence that had me seriously worried about a fade into irrelevance. The delusions of businesspeople and the managerial class about what LLMs can do has fueled a very nice business renaissance, as they run into the limits but have committed to contracts, business models, etc.
I’ll give you an example of one that was written recently actually.
The initial compromise happened because the app explicitly did not verify auth claims when a specific string was in the ISS field. Well, fuzzers exist and are common.
The next issue was that once you’re in, there was no delineation between admin and regular users. Everyone had all privileges if they just made the calls.
Anyway, we did the usual post-remediation investigation and write up. The devs were of course using the latest models, as they were instructed, and the issue stemmed from a problem they’d been having integrating a specific company into their auth scheme.
Eventually, after many enumerations, the model opted to just skip auth altogether if that companies ISS was present. The devs, being in the habit of just accepting the changes did so and because of the nature of the code implemented nothing caught it in the pipeline.
This is sadly an incredibly common story and it won’t be fixed by models improving I don’t believe.
I agree, and the field possibly not existing in 5 years is a big issue. Like, how are young people supposed to take a mortgage, start a family, or any other big commitments like that, if their whole education and work experience may be useless in a couple of years?
I don't care whether I'm writing code or reviewing LLM generated stuff, but the prospect of losing my job and having to survive on welfare for the rest of my life isn't nice.
From my perspective this is the thing that the people who have been talking about how good these damn things have gotten now were trying to get you to do all along. Understand that they're getting better, it doesn't seem to be stopping, and we really, really need to figure this part out ASAP.
What seems to happen though is it always gets pulled into a discussion of "But they can't X" or "but ma taste!" or the old generic canard "can't replicate what's not in the training data"
All I want is for people to see that yes, this is happening, accept it, then figure out what a good response would be to it. Instead we get everything from stochastic parrot parrots to "Dario is just marketing when he tries to warn us" to the old an thoughtless "But if you think it's bad, why are you doing it?"
> except learning another job which isn’t (yet) doable by AI.
Why? Why are jobs necessary? Who needs to have them? Should we pay people to be stopgaps/just in case jobs in case the machine fails (probably?) -- who organizes that? Do we have a human economy and AI economy? How to keep them decoupled? Does this mean stamping provenance (who made what onto what?) should be a core of the future? Right now? What does that look like? Are there other things we can do to ensure we get the Banks future and not a shittier one? Is the Banks future a good one? Is disempowerment a real concern? If so what do we do about it? Human reserves? Zoos?
I do not have answers, but I know the questions are vastly more interesting than "what job will the AI not be able to do" wtf PLEASE
Taxing profits of companies that use AI probably. I really don't see other way, if AI starts replacing human work in large enough scale. In that situation, without welfare there will be soon nobody buying products and services, leading to an economic collapse.
I agree with you, but I just wanted to point it out.
The problem is that income tax by workers is by far the largest contribution to the total tax intake of any country. To match the missing tax from replaced workers (including the highest paid) in the US, you'd have to increase tax on corporations by 3-4x, which would kill many businesses. On top of that you'd have far more people taking from the tax pot via welfare.
In the worse case scenario, mass replacement of workers by AI would essentially amount to the destruction of the economy.
... could never have had a proof attempt presented without the mathematicians setting the stage and working to verify the proof.
I think you might be viewing AI and humanity as a zero sum experiment. It's really not. Go read some David Brin (Existence is a good start). We don't know all the positive and negative aspects to come, but we aren't in a dark forest situation. Existentially, AI is here, what are we going to do with it?
I _am_ a craftsman - software, wood, and a few more domains. There is a lot of personal satisfaction I find in woodcraft through the motion and the exercise. I love that this is a luxury hobby instead of a personal necessity. The difference there is that if I take my time on personal necessity where the market isn't paying for it, I may take food out of my kids' mouths or lose the roof over their head. Luxury craft hobbies face only self-imposed pressures.
AI is letting me build similarly. I can continue to craft my Rust and my Python and my Typescript and my Fortran to my heart's content - and those skills help in the day to day - yet I'm also able to compete in the market and build things that were really infeasible before.
> How are you keeping your “human” addition to the loop valuable, is it through the time spent on the software craftsman hobby?
Yes, and, integrating it into my normal tasks and delivery. Some principles:
(1) I wouldn't worry so much about staying _ahead_ of the technology, rather, focus on the outcomes for yourself and the people you serve. That gives a more holistic and natural boundary when you research and adopt the technologies that help you get there.
(2) I'd also focus on adopting what works best, not what is latest and greatest. Tech regressions definitely happen[1], and you know your need the best.
(3) When quantifying, cost-benefit is typically focused on Benefit / Costs - 1 to give incremental lift. Unsurprisingly, if benefit is high and costs are higher, it might not be worthwhile to adopt!
[1] https://roderick.dev/writing/2026-08-28-obsessing-harnesses/ forgive a small bit of self promotion, but I'm researching this exact problem with my research group, about how to quantify solum benchmaxxing, tradefoff adoption, regression, and improvement for harnesses.
I am going to be very curious to see if there are any downsides or negatives at all to this hacking happening. In theory this information could be used to scam a lot of Danes. In practice these major hacks end up fizzling out, in my experience - the data being less useful or more duplicated than people thought.
Just because we cannot identify any disadvantages does not mean that there are none.
Imagine a foreign state-sponsored agent waiting at the door of a public or private decision-maker, convincing them to cooperate. Home addresses are no joke. Especially if you can grep through the whole family tree.
It really depends and I often struggle with it. How do you do it?
The German Melderegisters, for example, are now far more interested in the stated reason for your data request than they were ten years ago. (Which is a good thing!)
Many things that are trivial in theory, given the right conditions, etc. are anything but trivial once you actually try to do it.
Big 5 traits like extraversion are pretty conclusively genetic and meaningful. Twin studies show strong heritability, and personality studies show meaningful lifetime outcome differences (extraverts earn more, etc).
Humanity's revealed preferences are really, really strong here.
As basically every country on Earth gets richer, two things happen in survey results.
One is that as people get richer they spend more time apart. Household sizes get smaller, the number of social interactions per week goes down, etc.
You'll also see that as countries get richer people say that they report feeling less lonely. Loneliness is less of an issue for the rich countries who live more apart. The correlation between this and GDP is comical. As you get to poorer countries, like clockwork, people report being lonelier in surveys.
The evidence suggests that as people get more choice they decide to see people less and they also feel happier for it and less lonely. So I don't think there's a problem here.
I think the problem is that self-reported scores of loneliness go down, but a lot of the data suggests that our increasing solitude and isolation isn’t good for us, whether we feel lonely or not.
Face validity. Someone may have pulled together numbers for this in a study, but this area is a new facet of interpersonal behavior at a macro-economic level, so there won't be much published on the subject yet.
But frankly I wasn't kidding when I said every quality survey shows this.
If you have ever seen an article suggesting that loneliness is higher in the West or in capitalist economies or whatever, you have been 100% misled. That is essentially just a made up narrative that plays well in articles
Those surveys are both about how elderly people in the Nordic countries report being less lonely than those in Mediterranean countries. They discuss things like whether extended families live together, but don’t really touch on people’s social lives more broadly. I’m not sure that you can draw a sweeping generalization from this that wealthier countries prefer less socialization.
Just keep looking up high quality surveys on different loneliness related topics until you are convinced. There are a lot of different ways to ask it. They all point in the same direction.
What exactly am I supposed to be convinced of? That people who have choices about how to spend their time 1) choose to be mostly alone and 2) are happier because of it? This is a pretty strong causative claim that would require a lot of evidence and considerable expertise in interpreting that evidence, neither of which I have.
Even the surveys you sent already suggest that people who live with spouses are much less lonely, which seems to be the opposite of your claim.
Frankly, your claim sounds so insane to me (someone who has a lot of choice in how I spend my time, enjoys the company of others often, and is not lonely) that I think it would require extraordinary evidence to convince me.
Just copy and paste my original post into ai and have it explain what I mean and what the evidence suggests. It will say it is true the correlation is massive like cm2012 says but he is being too sure with his reasoning. You can evaluate from there.
Standard PSA: Cambridge Analytica electing Trump is not a true story. Cambridge Analytica absolutely broke Facebook's terms of service with its personality quiz scheme but it did not affect the 2016 election.
I'm an advertiser who has managed hundreds of millions of dollars for small startups and big corporations, brands, as well as a few small political campaigns.
Even at the time of the Trump election, the kind of ad targeting that Cambridge Analytica says they were offering through the personality quizzes was absolute garbage. There is a reason why the official response from Boz doesn't even mention the personality quiz stuff, because it was essentially irrelevant to the Trump campaign's performance on paid advertising on Meta. And I would go further to say that, except for his success in fundraising, all of his Meta advertising probably didn't move that many votes.
Cambridge Analytica, the organization, of course, loves to claim that they're the dark evil viziers behind the Trump campaign and they've advertised themselves as such to dictators all over the world. But that's just like Edward Bernays writing "Propaganda" back in the day, it is a way to sell their services. Trump digital director Brad Parscale said the campaign did not even use Cambridge Analytica’s controversial psychographic targeting.
Not to mention, the only reason that Cambridge Analytica had that open graph information available is because communities like Hacker News begged again and again for Facebook to open the graph and not have a walled web. After that they cut off that graph access.
Quizzes had like an 85% engagement rate on Facebook, they were legendarily effective paid eyeballs content. Adtech firm System1 aka OpenMail even merged with an adtech firm that owned a quiz content company, it made like $1m/2wks at small scale. I don't really know what Cambridge Analytica concretely did (to this day I have not seen a single screenshot of any of their creatives or a single concrete report of theirs) but I do know quizzes were really effective. For whatever purposes.
Yes they had a high engagement rate (due to how the platforms were structured at the time and how hyper-shareable it was) and you could make some money serving ads on quizzes because they had a high engagement rate. They were absolutely terrible as an ad targeting methodology.
I don't know how you would be able to tell, you've never won an election, how would you know what is important for being elected? It's not something a chatbot knows about either.
If you go find the original ones it’s all about defending Facebook. Basically you can’t give our data to a competitor or build one. There’s a reason they had to quickly release a new ToS and its cause CA didn’t break it.
My understanding of the story [1] is the CA claimed it was collecting data for psychology research, then turned around and used the data for political consulting.
> Cambridge Analytica then arranged an informed consent process for research in which several hundred thousand Facebook users would agree to complete a survey for payment that was only for academic use.
I mean the data was collected in 2013 and then used in 2016 for political consulting. I have to imagine the guy actually did try doing psychology research and then realized it was a dead end (or that the psychology pointed out you could predict voters).
> the only reason that Cambridge Analytica had that open graph information available is because communities like Hacker News begged again and again for Facebook to open the graph and not have a walled web.
This isn’t true. All the early Facebook access revolved around engagement and anything even remotely related to data portability was verboten.
Anything remotely related to data portability was verboten?
Here is Facebook's own CTO in 2010 on HN itself saying “First, we genuinely support data portability: we want users to be able to use their data in other applications without restriction.”
> Anything remotely related to data portability was verboten?
Yes. Please read the entire sentence before replying:
> All the early Facebook access revolved around engagement and anything even remotely related to data portability was verboten.
2010 is years after the Facebook platform was launched.
Regardless, as people in that thread pointed out at the time, what he is referring to is not data portability. If you were building on the Facebook platform at the time, you would know that apps had pretty much free reign to soak up the personal info but the main thing people cared about in terms of data portability was the ability to use the social graph outside of Facebook. Facebook hated the idea because it would allow competitors to bootstrap their own social graph without having to find and re-add all their friends, so it was the one thing that everybody knew could get you booted off the platform.
*Guy that knows more than everybody else voice* Uhm actually it was called The Facebook at the time so this discussion by people that are embarrassingly ignorant of the nomenclature is very laughable to me, a expert
Facebook and Google were one of the first major online services offering an "takeout" feature in service of data portability. FB had multiple rss feeds. It's graph API was around quite early due to demand.
My understanding of the internet is Google is extremely flawed but fair and they didn't try to hold you hostage
Facebook is not fair and they actively do (ever try deleting an account? surprise! it's back a few months later. look at how many users we have, as measure of our success)
> Facebook and Google were one of the first major online services offering an "takeout" feature in service of data portability. FB had multiple rss feeds. It's graph API was around quite early due to demand.
There was a period of time years before the Graph API launched that was all over the place. Facebook couldn't decide how they wanted their platform to work, so they cycled through a bunch of ideas like APIs, FBML, etc. before “Operation Developer Love” and the Graph API happened. Until that point, you could access a load of personal info, but the data portability everybody cared about – the social graph – was off the table because competitors could use it to bootstrap their own social graph without users having to find and re-add all their friends again. You tried to mirror that, you risked losing your account.
You're right that the tools were hype, and that they didn't work. So why, despite knowing that Cambridge Analytica tools were useless, did Trumo keep paying it?
Well, Robert and Rebekah Mercer were primary backers of the Trump campaign, and they also owned a major stake in Cambridge Analytica. Giving something like $49 million dollars to Trump and Co.
There were actual crimes but it was essentially the Russian government hacking email campaigns related to Hillary Clinton and drip-feeding them to the press. On the ad side there's none that I'm aware of.
From the article: "Jurors also found Facebook misled the public about investigations into data brokers following the Cambridge Analytica scandal, finding the company liable for over 2 million violations."
A jury just found that there were more than 43 million crimes (total) committed on the ad side. I think you're saying that the illegal data collection wasn't related to the advertising end, but it was. That's why they did it. Whether it was actually useful or not is irrelevant.
More importantly to me, the billionaires using it to launder their bribes to the US president probably won't ever be convicted, but that does not mean they aren't just low class crooks who can afford good lawyers.
> Cambridge Analytica, the organization, of course, loves to claim that they're the dark evil viziers behind the Trump campaign and they've advertised themselves as such to dictators all over the world.
That’s just a link to full Wikipedia page for the company. I must admit that I would be personally interested in seeing a vaguely scientific analysis of the effect they had. For all the talk on the subject I have yet to see any real analysis backed by data on the subject.
Well please share. CA sold a service to anyone who would pay. The world of advertising is full of expensive solutions that don’t really do anything. In many ways politics is harder than selling an actual product since everyone already knows their options and the choice costs them nothing. For all the hype I have yet to see anyone contest the null hypothesis that it was yet another waste of marketing spend.
Could not agree more. Attitudes like the authors are incredibly destructive to society. Essentially all gains to human life satisfaction have come from tech innovation.
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