Why “same day delievery” is bad
What Caught My Eye This Week - #7
Each week, I'll bring you the most relevant and insightful tech stories, saving you time and keeping you informed.
Why “same day delievery” is bad
It feels like we're waiting forever for customer service these days, right? At the same time, companies are pushing "free shipping," "same-day delivery," and making it super easy to hire someone online with just a few clicks.
But the hidden cost is huge. Need help? Good luck getting through. That customer service line might keep you on hold for an hour before you talk to anyone real.
I had this nightmare with Ticketmaster recently. The show was starting in an hour, no tickets! We were on hold for 40 minutes straight, finally got someone, and they just said, "Sorry, tickets are gone." We'd already paid for flights and driven there! Then last week, the ATT installer came but didn't finish the job. He told me to make another appointment, but trying to call them? Forget it, you can't get a person on the line to actually schedule anything.
It seems like society demands "more for less." We want everything cheap and instant. But these crazy low prices often lead to really "bad jobs.”
For instance, hiring a good electrician might cost $150 an hour. But online, you'll see people offering to do it for $50. The catch? The quality might be terrible, or they might use cheap parts that don't last.
Think about Safeway, Target, and Walmart offering same-day delivery for just $10 a month. How do they manage that?
Usually, by paying the delivery drivers really low wages. It's no surprise when you see tons of bad reviews, like that Walmart product with 10,000 one-star ratings – people are definitely feeling the effects of these "cheap services."
AI Crawlers significantly increased bandwidth cost
Wikimedia reported AI crawlers significantly increased bandwidth costs (up 50% for multimedia downloads) due to aggressive, often non-compliant scraping
OpenAI faces accusations of using copyrighted O'Reilly books to train GPT-4o without authorization.
SLAM Handbook Public Release
A new book about SLAM. SLAM is used for robots to understand unknown environment.
https://github.com/SLAM-Handbook-contributors/slam-handbook-public-release/blob/main/main.pdf
Mozilla plans to enter email market
Mozilla appears poised to enter the email fray with "Thundermail," potentially challenging Gmail and Microsoft 365.
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