It’s not just a government run store, the products sold are being subsidized. Which is quite unfair to any small businesses/independents who have invested in the blast radius. Will they be compensated? (I’m not concerned about the large corps).

It wouldn’t surprise me if NYC saw a net reduction in grocery stores as a result.

So public money to subsidize costs of goods, and public money to subsidize costs of less efficient operations.

Is this the most effective use of public dollars?

I see NYC has incentives to open up grocery stores, good idea. Starting footprint is 5k sq feet… why so large? That would require something like an a million dollar build out… who is that incentive for?

Because of things like this:

Round tables and town halls for apple varieties, 8 years to get a shop underway… absolutely ridiculous.

There is obviously an issue, and government has a role, but this isn’t it

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/jul/25/mamdani-nyc-public-grocery-stores

“According to Overstreet, the councilmember from Atlanta, community buy-in is key. In her district, Overstreet sought feedback about what kinds of products community members wanted access to, down to the preferred variety of apple. Overstreet and her team did this through roundtables, pop-up meetings, and both paper and online questionnaires to try to reach the widest array of people”

“Lastly, noted Christine Caruso, Myer’s co-author on the grocery store research, it is worth reminding community members that such an initiative will take time to realize. Overstreet noted that it took her eight years of work to get the new grocery store in her district under way.”

The only way I could see it making sense is if a government was doing it as an exercise to understand what it takes to open a business.

What environment have governments created where no one wants to open a grocery business?

Is it overly dominated by a handful of large corporations? Should these be taxed or broken up to make the market more competitive? Is the supply chain competitive or is it also not competitive?

Should government socialize insurance costs instead, for businesses that drive public good? Or other incentives like health coverage?

Are there bylaws and zoning barriers that are making entry prohibitive?

These are areas I think governments should be in, not operating a retail store. Policy is their area of expertise and has major impact.

I don’t disagree with public broadband it’s a natural monopoly

Got it. My understanding is tiktok is on another level but have never used it.

It would surprise me if no one was doing content rotation strategies for specific user segments. similarity is a signal so is dissimilarity.

then, there will be spots that the algorithms fall apart.

But, I see what you are saying and yeah I’ve experienced similar, and agreed, even something simple like ‘popular’ has issues when driven by a score, as it can just maximize broad emotional response.

“This made me angry”, does better than “this made me satisfied in life”

The government has a responsibility to ensure policies drive affordable food prices, but a government run grocery stores seems like a terrible idea.

On lemmy do you mean? It doesn’t have personalized recommendation algorithms as far as I know or any content similarity algorithms. I think it’s just a simple popularity by newness algorithm.

To clarify, I meant corporate social media companies will target engagement, and they will use personalized algos (not necessarily down to a user, could be group of similar users).

So for example if a user looks at some niche wood working content for example, they may mix in popular content that drives emotional response or is entertaining if that keeps people on the platform longer.

That’s what I’m saying, it’s not about content similarity necessarily, it’s about showing whatever drives engagement / time on platform.

When you have a lot of user data, and a lot of content meta data, you can do that very well. To the point where you can trigger addictive behaviors. That’s the issue with tiktok - but also other social media companies to lesser degrees

A social media’s algorithm would optimize for engagement not content similarity.

I think a big part of it is that we are still in early innings with EVs and storage, how many have reached end of life? The volume is going to increase substantially, and that will drive recycling to be more economical

Yeah, after reading a bit into it. It seems like most of the work is up front, pre filtering and classifying before it hits the model, to your point the model training part is expensive…

I think broadly though, the idea that they are just including the kitchen sink into the models without any consideration of source quality isn’t true

Good points. What’s novel information vs. wrong information? (And subtly wrong is harder to understand than very wrong)

At some point it’s hitting a user who is giving feedback, but I imagine data lineage once it gets to the end user its tricky to understand.

If I’m creating a corpus for an LLM to consume, I feel like I would probably create some data source quality score and drop anything that makes my model worse.

Ahh spoiler, just started reading this

It makes me a bit sad that there is a whole article on a (very likely) mirage

500 million was specific to Claude Code, they are at 5 billion annual run rate and growing

I mean, I agree that a lot of money was spent training some of these models - and I personally wouldn’t invest in an ai based company. The economics dont make sense.

However, worst case, self hosted open source models have got pretty good, and I find it unlikely that progress will simply stop. Diminishing returns from scaling data yes, but there will still be optimizations all through the pipeline.

That is to say, LLMs will continue to have utility regardless if Open AI and Anthropic are around long term.

Some people are finding value in LLMs, that doesn’t mean LLMs are great at everything.

Some people have work to do, and this is a tool that helps them do their work.

The ‘cloud’ was a pretty big thing though… everyone used to self host, now only some self host.

AWS, GCP, Azure make a lot of money

Yeah exactly!

Could this be attributed to the driver mix changing?

It’s quite possible tesla drivers are worse in 2025 than 2024