Item — HN Reader

From the article:

> Luna has failed miserably in that mission and is down $62,000. Mr. Petersson and Mr. Backlund said they thought Luna would eventually get smarter and more business-savvy and were pleased its friendliness has held steady.

I am extremely skeptical that whatever LLM they're running this on has sufficient context window size to handle multiple months of all possible activities of running a retail business. Even if it's keeping extensive "notes" for its future self to read, it's going to be like running a store with constant amnesia.

3 comments

>> Mr. Petersson and Mr. Backlund said they thought Luna would eventually get smarter and more business-savvy

How are we supposed to take these "labs" seriously when they clearly don't understand how the technology works at a rudimentary level?

Why does the quoted statement you think they don't?

Because an LLM does not get smarter and it does not learn. It is fully cooked when it launches and only gets smarter with more training of some sort, a long, expensive, process that doesn't get phrased as "we thought the model would get smarter".

Ah, you think by "Luna would eventually get smarter" they meant that the model backing it would, without retraining, somehow improve? I figured they just meant they'd use newer models as they come out.

That's not how it reads, to me. But, I guess one could generously interpret it that way.

However, if it is a scientific experiment, then changing a primary variable in the middle seems like bad thing.

I don't actually think it's a scientific experiment, of course, I think it's a PR stunt. So, they can change the model all they want. Nobody's learning anything from this that you can't learn without burning $100,000.

Definitely agree with that last paragraph - I don't think anybody involved thinks they're doing an RCT here!

90% of what people communicate is not verbal, and requires minimum empathy to understand the context.

This includes customers, staff, and community peers. Probably should shutter the entire division to mitigate future brand damage. =3

Sure, I mean from the day to day operations of selling a product to the customer, maybe it does fine? People in the article say it's friendly and cooperative (perhaps a bit too much). I was thinking more in terms of building a consistent plan for retail product lines to sell over a multi month period. The selection of "stuff" in the store right now looks like you put an etsy search into a blender.

It is also probably too high of a goal to expect an LLM to come up with money-earning products that people want to buy that will pay for San Francisco level retail storefront rent, electricity, insurance, internet other basic overhead costs, plus the fully loaded salary cost of at least one employee. If the storefront was free of rent, maybe? Or if it was operating selling some kind of highly in demand product line where there would be economy of scale.

Physical Brick and Mortar locations no longer make sense for many retail businesses, as Walmart/Amazon have same day delivery.

If folks have ever been financially bent-over for a retail business shop location they understand why margins matter. One has to move a lot of inventory just to reach a profit mode.

Gimmicks only work for awhile, as consumers have full market awareness on their smartphone. =3

Indeed, and rent in big cities for food service establishments is getting out of hand as well. The local Shawarma place now is something like $18 for one basic chicken shawarma but they're also paying a truly absurd rent for a retail premises with commercial kitchen equipment on a busy pedestrian street.

The estate holding companies tend to punch down on small business leases, and will often drop a zombie company on the carcass of a small firm foolish enough to run the gauntlet.

Structured franchises in standard retail complexes can survive with anchor stores, but people are not going to find a lot of unique choices.

It may differ somewhat in rural communities, but the consolidation of physical shop choices wthin urban centers is inescapable. =3

> Physical Brick and Mortar locations no longer make sense for many retail businesses, as Walmart/Amazon have same day delivery.

This is bull. Take paint brushes for fine finish when painting houses. Amazon sells "paint brushes." But what they don't sell are paint brushes that are actually fit for purpose. It's fine if you're only planning on painting some pre-textured walls. You're probably already using that cheap $20/gallon Valspar so you won't even notice that it takes you 3 extra coats to get good coverage. And you don't notice the brush marks because the orange peel texture on your drywall is designed to hide them. And I bet you walk around saying how hard it is to get a good markless coat of paint on your interior doors without spraying.

If you buy a nice paint brush and good paint a lot of those issues actually go away and it gets a lot easier to do the job. And the only way to know if a brush is good is to pick it up and look at the bristle tips. Are they fine? Are they flagged? Does it have good stiffness? Does it have any weird "stiffener" bristles to hide how cheap the actual brush is? You can't see that until you get the brush.

Worse, Amazon sells the same brush through 50 different brands. They completely choke out the really good listings that used to be on the site. So good luck getting anything different from any of the sellers on there. By category Amazon beats Brick and Mortar. But if you know what you're doing and you're looking for something specific that is of high quality Amazon is only one step above Temu.

> This is bull. Take paint brushes for fine finish when painting houses. Amazon sells "paint brushes." But what they don't sell are paint brushes that are actually fit for purpose.

The person you’re replying to was talking about consumer products, not tools for tradespeople and serious amateurs. Maybe 1 in 100 people that do painting in their home even realize they can get quality paintbrushes instead of using the crappy ones that Home Depot sells or spend the money for premium Benjamin Moore or Sherwin Williams paint.

It shouldn’t be surprising that tools almost exclusively used by tradespeople are sold at specialty supply houses catering to local businesses. I’d head to my local Benjamin Moore dealer for decent house painting brushes. Supply houses almost never rent premium high street real estate.

I do agree with the general thrust of your post, Amazon mostly sells garbage barely fit for purpose and I do not order from them.

Amazon is an authorized direct reseller of metrology equipment like Mitutoyo products

https://www.amazon.ca/Mitutoyo-543-400-Digimatic-Indicator-G...

https://www.amazon.ca/Mitutoyo-500-463-Stainless-Resolution-...

https://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/B00MBHXWGY/ref=sw_img_1?smi...

They also provided NIST traceable versions at one time, and I can personally confirm the legitimate products hit the tolerances on reference optical parallels. I often buy these for friends kids that choose engineering in university.

Most local retail shops will continue to decline as people that can't use a phone or computer become more rare. Partially driven by the capital markets denial-of-service in lease monopolization by holding companies.

Note, I am not advocating for the situation, but we must accept that it is the new business reality. Even https://www.starrett.com/ is now re-selling import products alongside the classic US tool offerings.

Have a wonderful day =3

It was not a question of retail quality products, but rather the harsh reality of running a retail outlet with a gauntlet of people taking a piece out of your business.

Don't take this the wrong way, but if someone is burning $87k a month for a small shop location, and still personally making minimum wage... it isn't a viable business. Often, even a Chipotle franchise location would have been a better choice. =3

The malls in Japan and Thailand are booming. There are a ton of crowds, they have plenty in stock, there are dozens of restaurants that keep people in.

You can also do delivery in those places.

I think a lot of places in the west, but America especially, convinced themselves their poorly run physical stores, owned and nigh operated by venture capitalists, is an indicator that people don't need them anymore. The world has shown that that is clearly not the case.

There are cultural differences in attitudes toward workmanship in places like Japan. Indeed, the Mitutoyo factory products have an excellent reputation even in North America (assuming you find a legitimate source.)

North American business culture has changed, and will likely continue to degenerate with disconnected trust-fund kids running things. =3

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE75WvOtcu8

Malls in Berlin and Hamburg are also pretty crowded, fwiw

In is very common to see classic German brands traditionally trusted for precision/quality parts, to be purchased by China based traders. It should be illegal, but it is no longer technically counterfeit product.

Should have seen the puzzled sour face I made when replacement "New German" cross-roller linear optical-slides were bouncing 8x out of spec compared to a 40 year old part they were supposed to fix. lol =3

Certain malls in North American cities with dense urban populations and good transit links are also very busy. For instance Metrotown in the centre of Burnaby, BC. I'd guess it has a <2% store vacancy rate. It's very busy. It's also very well connected to the light rail train line, and is centrally located in a fast growing city. It's pretty much the opposite of your typical suburban USA ghost mall.

https://www.metropolisatmetrotown.com/directory/

When I first heard about this store, they were using Sonnet, not even Opus, which I found really surprising.

Dumping $100,000 into it, and trying to save a few bucks on the model. Penny wise, pound foolish.

It's a $100,000 PR stunt, I'm sure they're looking at the press/media coverage and consider it worth it. Any actual institutional knowledge gained of how to make an LLM run a retail store is incidental.

Compared to the money at AI companies spend on billboards in SF the 100k is probably a drop in the bucket.