eric_h

I thought this was interesting - honestly I think I'd buy one without hesitation for $13k (only partially inspired by the fact they're installing electric car charging stations in my apartment building's parking lot right now :)

I have since moved out of NYC but yes I had an apartment number. If the doorman was helping this scalper, the scalper could have varied the address he used enough to avoid exact match dedupes while still ensuring he could claim the packages as his from the doorman.

Doorman buildings are quite common in NYC.

[edit: to be clear they are not the norm, they are more expensive than buildings without one, but there are still lots of them that are not Trump Tower or other places for the absurdly wealthy]

I really wanted a PS5 when it was first released, and I refused to pay the scalper tax to get one, so I spent a few minutes a few times a day over a couple of weeks trying to snag one from one of the many retailers selling them. Extraordinarily frustrating, I was not so interested in this process that I was going to script it or any such nonsense, I just wanted to eventually get lucky and snag one.

I eventually did, and when it finally arrived at my doorman building I mentioned what was in the package to the doorman, and how happy I was to finally get my hands on it after the effort expended and he said "oh really? there's a guy on the 5th floor who's bought dozens of them - he sold me one at cost".

At the scale of the PS5 release (I don't know how many they first shipped in 2020, but they're at >80M sold now so undoubtedly X million in the first year) - would an address match intervention have been able to differentiate my order from the dozens of orders the scalper on the 5th floor had placed, presuming some cooperation from the doorman to allow for variance in the details of the shipping address the scalper used? I'm reasonably confident the answer is no and I would have been caught in the net that attempted to prevent the scalper from scalping.

Much like what Anthropic very recently did re: Mythos

Hah, did not realize it was from 2021 when I posted it as I came across it in my bsky feed. Still - I think the list of examples provided in particular is of interest now as tech companies' attempts to control "the narrative" remains an ever present concern in tech press.