Sorry, kids.
tal
joined 2 years ago
I imagine that there are ways to game any AI shopping agents that we imagine might be used in the future, same way there are to game human shoppers.
Do you have a pitch deck you can show me?
What?
The "long tail" refers to niche areas with only a few people who want something in a market. It's talking about the graph of a distribution of potential consumers for something.
Like, there's normally a lot of people interested in a few things. You can sell a blockbuster to them. But then there's this long tail of people interested in small, niche areas. If you can bring more of them together or reduce production costs, it starts to be viable to make things for them as well. The Internet is often described as bringing people with those niche interests together, so that people on that long tail become numerous enough to make something for. Bringing down production costs has the same sort of effect.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_tail
In business, the term long tail is applied to rank-size distributions or rank-frequency distributions (primarily of popularity), which often form power laws and are thus long-tailed distributions in the statistical sense. This is used to describe the retailing strategy of selling many unique items with relatively small quantities sold of each (the "long tail")—usually in addition to selling fewer popular items in large quantities (the "head").
The long tail was popularized by Chris Anderson in an October 2004 Wired magazine article, in which he mentioned Amazon.com, Apple and Yahoo! as examples of businesses applying this strategy.[7][9] Anderson elaborated the concept in his book The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More.
Anderson cites research published in 2003 by Erik Brynjolfsson, Yu (Jeffrey) Hu, and Michael D. Smith, who first used a log-linear curve on an XY graph to describe the relationship between Amazon.com sales and sales ranking. They showed that the primary value of the internet to consumers comes from releasing new sources of value by providing access to products in the long tail.[10]
Before a long tail works, only the most popular products are generally offered. When the cost of inventory storage and distribution fall, a wide range of products become available. This can, in turn, have the effect of reducing demand for the most popular products.
Some of the most successful Internet businesses have used the long tail as part of their business strategy. Examples include eBay (auctions), Yahoo! and Google (web search), Amazon (retail), and iTunes Store (music and podcasts), amongst the major companies, along with smaller Internet companies like Audible (audio books) and LoveFilm (video rental). These purely digital retailers also have almost no marginal cost, which is benefiting the online services, unlike physical retailers that have fixed limits on their products. The internet can still sell physical goods, but at an unlimited selection and with reviews and recommendations.[31] The internet has opened up larger territories to sell and provide its products without being confined to just the "local Markets" such as physical retailers like Target or even Walmart. With the digital and hybrid retailers there is no longer a perimeter on market demands.[32]
You have to have at least a certain number of potential sales before it becomes worthwhile for a human to address a niche. If the cost falls, then new niches become viable to sell to. So now you can make, say, R&B aimed specifically at teenage female Inuits or something.
There's some company that has done some CGI videos making fun of the Boston Dynamics use of a hockey stick for separation, do videos that have humans pretending to be Boston Dynamics people abusing a CGI robot.
kagis
Corridor Digital, as "Bosstown Dynamics":
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%22bosstown+dynamics%22
e.g.:
Also, I think the less interesting question is where it is today and more where it's going to be in, say, five years, if you figure that development continues.
And might be possible to explore more long-tail stuff if production costs drop, or even do stuff customized to a single listener. I mean, we can't economically have humans do that.
The shooting appears to be accidental, but police said they are still investigating the incident.
"On any occasion prior to this, had your dog exhibited hostility towards you, sir?"
I'm sure you could, if you want.
They're either using one of those or a similar service.
I don't think that it's gonna be all that rewarding, though.
I mean, do you really want to be trying to get in a yelling match with someone else over politics, each trying to drown the other out?
Note that I submitted a San Francisco Chronicle article about this yesterday. One thing that came up during the discussion is that while there may be a lot of people streaming the song on Spotify, at least according to one source, the Billboard chart that was topped was a small-volume one, so it may not be as significant as it sounds.
tries running yt-dlp on the page URL to grab the URL of the actual video file involved
Try:
https://video.euronews.com/mp4/SHD/29/22/96/00/SHD_PYR_2922960_20251113112832.mp4
While I share some frustration on the matter, I'd also point out:
It's not as if we're taught to do that in school. Maybe if your parents do that, great. The financial extent of my entire K-12 education taught me how to write a check and balance my checkbook. Unless I was an exceptionally bad case, that's it by way of financial literacy that you can expect as a baseline.
We live in an environment where the risks aren't, say, being gored by an elephant or the sort of things we evolved to deal with. The threats to your financial health are companies set up to compete as hard as possible as they can to get you to spend as much on their products as they can. We built an environment to encourage those, and they are really, really good at it.
Like, a lot of people in the thread talk about how people overspend on vehicles. Okay, I don't disagree: America could generally do just fine with less-extravagant vehicles. But...think about how many decades and how many marketing resources have been devoted to achieving that state. There are a lot of experts with a lot of data working very hard on that.