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Instacart shoppers besieged by bots that snatch lucrative orders

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Re: Instacart shoppers besieged by bots that snatch lucrative orders

#91

Post by black_puppydog »

brorfred wrote: post #87
godzillabrennus wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Free market idealists think the market can determine the minimum wage without government or organized labor enforcing higher wages.

Free market idealists also tend to be very against the natural way for workers to consolidate and leverage negotiation power: trade unions.

Yeah, I never understood how "free everything" advocates tend to be so much against the freedom of the individual to refer decisions/actions to a collective when that happens to be the better course of action.

Re: Instacart shoppers besieged by bots that snatch lucrative orders

#92

Post by londons_explore »

angry_octet wrote: post #59
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #41

> some shoppers are paying software developers who have created bots — in the form of third-party apps — that run alongside the legitimate Instacart app and claim the best orders for clients Instacart is a real-time market. In real-time markets reaction time is paramount. "Cranking up pressure against app makers and banning violators when they find them" is swimming up a waterfall. The solution is in the market struc…

What you're working up to is a reverse auction for delivery service. Who is willing to do a batch of deliveries for the least price? Constrained time TSP+Knapsack, a very challenging problem. (Because you can choose many different subsets of delivery jobs, run TSP for each, and calculate a bid price for each job that will win, or if you don't, minimises regret.) The real problem with instacart is that some orders are…

> The real problem with instacart is that some orders are better than others.

You don't need to eliminate differences to fix the problem - simply minimize them enough that it isn't worth building or buying a bot to give yourself an edge.

A simple solution would be to look at how quickly each order is snatched up, and reduce the price paid for orders that some AI decides will probably be snatched up quickly. I bet some simple linear model consisting of total travel distance, weight, number of unique items, and dollar value would suffice.

Re: Instacart shoppers besieged by bots that snatch lucrative orders

#93

Post by londons_explore »

subhro wrote: post #71
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #41

> some shoppers are paying software developers who have created bots — in the form of third-party apps — that run alongside the legitimate Instacart app and claim the best orders for clients Instacart is a real-time market. In real-time markets reaction time is paramount. "Cranking up pressure against app makers and banning violators when they find them" is swimming up a waterfall. The solution is in the market struc…

> This could take several forms. They could, on order submission, open a 60-second auction window. It will just end up being sniped like it happens on eBay. Lookup gixen.

A Dutch auction is a good approach here... The earnings increase every second, and whoever is willing to do it for the lowest price clicks the button first.

Re: Instacart shoppers besieged by bots that snatch lucrative orders

#94

Post by WoodenChair »

brorfred wrote: post #87
godzillabrennus wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Free market idealists think the market can determine the minimum wage without government or organized labor enforcing higher wages.

Free market idealists also tend to be very against the natural way for workers to consolidate and leverage negotiation power: trade unions.

I think people in this thread are confusing "free market idealists" (usually libertarians) with conservatives/Republicans. A free market idealist has no problem with a free labor market that self-organizes into unions as long as the government doesn't mandate unionization. Conservatives and Republicans tend to advocate for big business and have therefore a natural antipathy towards organized labor.

Re: Instacart shoppers besieged by bots that snatch lucrative orders

#97

Post by joncrocks »

WoodenChair wrote: post #94
brorfred wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Free market idealists also tend to be very against the natural way for workers to consolidate and leverage negotiation power: trade unions.

I think people in this thread are confusing "free market idealists" (usually libertarians) with conservatives/Republicans. A free market idealist has no problem with a free labor market that self-organizes into unions as long as the government doesn't mandate unionization. Conservatives and Republicans tend to advocate for big business and have therefore a natural antipathy towards organized labor.

I would also presume that in addition a `free market idealist` would also want to ensure that Unions aren't given any special status, and that employers could also come together to agree wages.

Re: Instacart shoppers besieged by bots that snatch lucrative orders

#98

Post by prepend »

aphextron wrote: post #33
mkatx wrote: post #25

Reminds me of working at amazon doing prime deliveries and using an Android app where you can create flow charts to automate grabbing hours. The difference is amazon at the time didn't care. We even reported what we were doing as a bug, and recommended a queue system instead, yet we only got automated responses not mentioning the issue at all. This automation included an annoying screen refresh, where you hit back an…

>I think they consider the warehouse drivers like what I used to do temporary, till they get their drone fleets up. Why even bother with drones when you can pay a person $8/HR with zero benefits thanks to collusion with lawmakers to bust unions and stall the minimum wage?

Drones likely will be cheaper than that because of improved quality- fewer errors, faster, better tracking, less fuel, etc.

Same deal with fast food workers who make minimum wage. Automation will improve quality even though people are so cheap. Being able to perfectly make tacos or big macs or whatnot and remove scheduling challenges will be a plus.

Re: Instacart shoppers besieged by bots that snatch lucrative orders

#99

Post by WJW »

galkk wrote: post #77

> When Marsh opens her Instacart shopping app, she sees promising orders disappear before she can act. “No human can click that fast,” she said. “Instacart needs to fix this. These bots are literally taking the food off my kids’ table.” While I understand the wish to get the best/any batch, this is significant exaggeration. If your kids food depends on getting the batches from the website, then you have much larger p…

In related news, lions have sued that the invention of spears by early tribes makes it significantly more difficult to hunt humans and it's taking food off their cubs' table.

This sounds very much like ordinary competition that any self-employed person would have to deal with. If I insist on using assembler to make websites for clients while my competitors use Rails, it's not a secret who is going to do better in the long run.

Re: Instacart shoppers besieged by bots that snatch lucrative orders

#100

Post by nfuiosdjkafndaj »

brorfred wrote: post #87
godzillabrennus wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Free market idealists think the market can determine the minimum wage without government or organized labor enforcing higher wages.

Free market idealists also tend to be very against the natural way for workers to consolidate and leverage negotiation power: trade unions.

Comments like these are why I've moved to Blind for more quality discussions.
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