On the Polymarket homepage right now, one of the featured markets is whether or not Bitcoin will be up or down over the next 5 minutes. It's hard to justify that as anything more than illegal gambling.
I find prediction markets to be interesting on two fronts:
1) They like a really good way to determine the probability of something happening, which is interesting for events like elections
2) It provides an avenue for smart bettors to take advantage and sharpen their skill, whereas they get severely limited or banned from traditional sports books
However, it seems like all incentive structures for the markets and consumer behavior will steer these things to degenerate gambling.
Concrete counter top mixes usually use either much smaller, or no aggregate and use more sand. The mixes resemble mortar more than concrete and they are typically a little harder and less forgiving to work with.
Granted, my modeling skills begin and end with Tinkercad but I've actually created some really useful things for around the house and for hobbies -- a plug for my septic drain field distribution box pipes (one pipe was cut too short and there was no good way to plug it -- I tried lots of options before making one myself), jigs for drilling, pieces for a claw machine I'm refurbishing, cases for Arduino projects, etc.
The balancing act of figuring out what you can reasonably rely on from an LLM and what you need to be skeptical or dismissive of is not the type of experience an iPhone user should be expected to navigate.
>> Variant B improved conversion rate (CVR) or Add-to-Cart (ATC) rate? Roll it out.
Basing rollouts on add-to-cart rate is generally not a great idea, particularly for experiments on product pages. There are a variety of reasons why shoppers add products to carts that may only be loosely based on intent to purchase. In my years of ecommerce A/B testing, I've seen plenty of tests that improve conversion rate and/or revenue per visitor but negatively impact add-to-cart rates.
I get the sentiment but was this actually some big launch announcement? When I look at the store online, you have to dig a bit just to even find the product.
Where I live, bald-faced hornets and yellowjackets are very aggressive. Yellowjackets will also build nests inside of structures, in the ground, etc. where it's sometimes very difficult to even know they are there until it's too late.
This is much different than honey bees and other types of wasps who are much less likely to attack just by being near them.
I've used the Tacbo Bel AI drive-thru and came away with the same thought. I kind of groaned at first but it was very accurate, even when making adjustments.
> But actually, Amazon, Apple etc aren't natural homes for this, they don't need to burn money to chase it.
Why wouldn't consumer AI be a natural home for Apple?
Apple is constantly under blast for being slow to AI but if you look at the current state of AI, it feels like something Apple would never release -- the quality just isn't there. I don't necessarily think Apple only dipping their toes into AI is that poor of a decision right now. They still have the ability to blow the roof off the market with agents and device integration whenever the tech is far enough along to be trustworthy to the average consumer.
That was my first reaction as well but I can't imagine all the potential fraud that takes place in these marketplace. As the market-maker, you are facilitating payments that are many multiples of the actual revenue, let along profit, you're bringing in. I'd guess that even small amounts of fraud that need to be eaten can be rather devastating.
However, this is just an awful situation to be in for the contractor. It's rather difficult to have any reaction other than "Upwork needs to eat this" unless this type of thing is so common that it could have a serious impact on Upwork's viability.
I remember listing an somewhat odd item on Reverb, a marketplace that facilitates buying and selling music equipment, and waiting months on a buyer only to have the only buyer being someone in a foreign country that was asking me to send the package to a "relative in Texas", who would then forward it to him. Since sending it to Texas was technically covered under Reverb's seller fraud protection policy because it was in the U.S., I made sure to dot my "i's" with Reverb on it and ensured I was protected. I never heard anything else after the transaction so hopefully everything was on the up, but from that experience, I learned that these marketplace protections do require marketplace participants follow very specific guidelines and the person dealing with this Upwork issue did not follow those guidelines.
It may go without saying, but potential market has a lot to do with it as well.
A company like Uber is entering a huge transportation market; Airbnb a huge lodging market. They can be big fish in big ponds. I think there are lots of YC companies in smaller ponds.
I find prediction markets to be interesting on two fronts:
1) They like a really good way to determine the probability of something happening, which is interesting for events like elections
2) It provides an avenue for smart bettors to take advantage and sharpen their skill, whereas they get severely limited or banned from traditional sports books
However, it seems like all incentive structures for the markets and consumer behavior will steer these things to degenerate gambling.