Built a little BlueSky related thing these past two days. Let's you watch posts with a specific #hashtag in it live, as well as create a thread for that #hashtag yourself. Great if you want to comment on a TV show together with others.
https://skychat.social
The somewhat more interesting part: it's entirely running client-side. That includes sipping from the firehose. There's no libf or that yet, so here you go, ymmv:
https://github.com/badlogic/skychat/blob/main/firehose.ts
Also ...
Quite a few people sure were surprised to learn that all their posts can be read without a BlueSky account. Especially those who fled Xitter to be a bit more sheltered from harassers and nazis.
Welp.
For all its faults, Mastodon is the better platform for people who care about having control over their data. It's definitely not perfect in that regard either, but at least it tries.
Also, it has GIFs and videos and polls. Based on BlueSky's dev velocity, they'll have that sometime 2032.
Quite a few people sure were surprised to learn that all their posts can be read without a BlueSky account. Especially those who fled Xitter to be a bit more sheltered from harassers and nazis.
Welp.
Hey, balkan bubble. Any croatian software developers here, that want to build a grocery price comparison site for Croatia (possibly based on my OSS work) and talk to Jutarnji list about it?
Just gave them an interview. They want to also hear from local software developers.
Please share.
@50b353e9@2c1f67da@8bf54812 I'm currently finishing a rewrite which should make it easier for folks in other countries to plug in scrapers for local stores and do i18n. I'll post about it here once it's ready.
Day 6 of Rona: Not testing positive anymore still feel blargh. Spent most of the day with the boy outside, so my better half can rest properly.
Wow, this sucks.
I'm glad to learn that grocery stores fuck over their customers all over the world, including but not limited to Canada, Switzerland, Spain, New Zealand and Australia.
First of all, the minister initially planned to create a price comparison platform "himself". This would have meant that some company he's buddy buddy with would have gotten a million Euro contract and delivered an abmysal failure of a system.
He's now given up on that.
The second upside: as soon as media coverage of our efforts picked up, the price hikes stopped for the most part. I'm obviously not entirely attributing this to our work. But I like to think we played a part in it.
Remember the chain of command. The minister decides what actually gets done.
And that minister is a member of the conservative party. You can already guess what gets done, right?
His plan:
1. The grocery chains must publish data. But only for a hand-picked list of basic products. Not the entire sortiment, like we do now.
2. Platform owners can be sanctioned/sued if they display the data the wrong way.
There's are only two up-sides in all of this.
First of all, the minister initially planned to create a price comparison platform "himself". This would have meant that some company he's buddy buddy with would have gotten a million Euro contract and delivered an abmysal failure of a system.
He's now given up on that.
The second upside: as soon as media coverage of our efforts picked up, the price hikes stopped for the most part. I'm obviously not entirely attributing this to our work. But I like to think we played a part in it.
The suggestion by the competition authority to the minister was great:
1. Using the data should be made legal by the legislature for certain parties, including price comparison platforms and academic institutions.
2. Grocery chains of a certain size must publish all their data in real-time according to a predefined scheme with all necessary meta data to make things comparable and allow matching of products across stores.
Fantastic! Or so I thought.
Remember the chain of command. The minister decides what actually gets done.
And that minister is a member of the conservative party. You can already guess what gets done, right?
His plan:
1. The grocery chains must publish data. But only for a hand-picked list of basic products. Not the entire sortiment, like we do now.
2. Platform owners can be sanctioned/sued if they display the data the wrong way.
There's are only two up-sides in all of this.
And they also officially said it's very likely the grocery chains use automated systems to follow each other in prices.
No word on the other data. We'll find out what they think end of October when the full report is scheduled to be released.
Now, here's how the chain of command works in this sector.
The competition authority is apolitical but under the reign of the politically appointed minister of economics. They can only report and suggest to him.
He then decides what gets done.
The suggestion by the competition authority to the minister was great:
1. Using the data should be made legal by the legislature for certain parties, including price comparison platforms and academic institutions.
2. Grocery chains of a certain size must publish all their data in real-time according to a predefined scheme with all necessary meta data to make things comparable and allow matching of products across stores.
Fantastic! Or so I thought.
I'm but a lowly computer nerd and lay person, and not someone with an economics degree. I simply handed the data over in the hopes their experts would figure this shit out.
Well. Today they presented their first preliminary report.
In it, they basically copied my long ass email with answers to their questions from earlier more or less verbatim. They agreed with my conclusions regarding what needs to be done on the legal and technical site.
https://cdn.masto.host/mastodongamedevplace/media_attachments/files/111/071/669/285/478/026/original/1e5d0fd84bcb928e.png
And they also officially said it's very likely the grocery chains use automated systems to follow each other in prices.
No word on the other data. We'll find out what they think end of October when the full report is scheduled to be released.
Now, here's how the chain of command works in this sector.
The competition authority is apolitical but under the reign of the politically appointed minister of economics. They can only report and suggest to him.
He then decides what gets done.
The basic gist of that feedback:
- Legal: it must be legal for us to crawl and publish the price data the stores put out on the web in their online stores
- Technical: ideally, stores would be forced to put that data out in a normalized form, so matching and comparisons become easier. We already did that ourselves though, with some data science and heuristics, so no biggie if that doesn't happen.
Besides that feedback, I also send them a shitton of data and patterns I found.
I'm but a lowly computer nerd and lay person, and not someone with an economics degree. I simply handed the data over in the hopes their experts would figure this shit out.
Well. Today they presented their first preliminary report.
In it, they basically copied my long ass email with answers to their questions from earlier more or less verbatim. They agreed with my conclusions regarding what needs to be done on the legal and technical site.
https://cdn.masto.host/mastodongamedevplace/media_attachments/files/111/071/669/285/478/026/original/1e5d0fd84bcb928e.png
All that media coverage of my platform and the platforms of other people, with whom I've started to converse and who've became friends of sorts, triggered the competition authority of Austria.
You know, the guys and gals who's job it is to sniff out anti-competitive behaviour, cartels, price gauging and coordination and so on.
They contacted all of us to ask what we'd need to continue doing our work. They actually saw value in that.
We provided them with a shit ton of feedback.
The basic gist of that feedback:
- Legal: it must be legal for us to crawl and publish the price data the stores put out on the web in their online stores
- Technical: ideally, stores would be forced to put that data out in a normalized form, so matching and comparisons become easier. We already did that ourselves though, with some data science and heuristics, so no biggie if that doesn't happen.
Besides that feedback, I also send them a shitton of data and patterns I found.
Of course you do, cause you are a smart cookie.
While their claim that they decreased the regular price is correct, they also increased the discounted price that comes into play every other X weeks/days.
So they are again technically correct: the regular price was decreased.
But on average, a consumer pays more if they buy the product every week, as the discounted price has been increased. The average is higher than before.
Sneaky.
All that media coverage of my platform and the platforms of other people, with whom I've started to converse and who've became friends of sorts, triggered the competition authority of Austria.
You know, the guys and gals who's job it is to sniff out anti-competitive behaviour, cartels, price gauging and coordination and so on.
They contacted all of us to ask what we'd need to continue doing our work. They actually saw value in that.
We provided them with a shit ton of feedback.
But there's a more "nefarious" kind of price decrease.
As I said, Austria is a country of insane amounts of cyclic discounts. Many products will be sold for their "regular" price for one week and a discount price the other.
The real price for the consumer is the average of the regular and discounted price.
Given this knowledge, do you notice something with the prices for this product the grocery chain claims to have decreased the regular price on?
https://cdn.masto.host/mastodongamedevplace/media_attachments/files/111/071/634/020/369/009/original/c199f87051fe1f97.png
Of course you do, cause you are a smart cookie.
While their claim that they decreased the regular price is correct, they also increased the discounted price that comes into play every other X weeks/days.
So they are again technically correct: the regular price was decreased.
But on average, a consumer pays more if they buy the product every week, as the discounted price has been increased. The average is higher than before.
Sneaky.
But there's a more "nefarious" kind of price decrease.
As I said, Austria is a country of insane amounts of cyclic discounts. Many products will be sold for their "regular" price for one week and a discount price the other.
The real price for the consumer is the average of the regular and discounted price.
Given this knowledge, do you notice something with the prices for this product the grocery chain claims to have decreased the regular price on?
https://cdn.masto.host/mastodongamedevplace/media_attachments/files/111/071/634/020/369/009/original/c199f87051fe1f97.png
If I were trying to describe it in more flowerly terms: It's asymmetric information war fare.
The stores tell you they are good and benevolent and only have your interest at heart, so here are discounts. Discounts for everyone. They even gamified the whole thing with stickers. I shit you not. People collect stickers they put on the products in the convery belt at the register. There's also apps, which will give them all info on you
In reality it makes it impossible to know how much things cost
Then I looked at an aspect pretty unique to Austria: discounts.
You see, in a normal country, with a competitive grocery market, you usually have about 10%-20% of products that get discounted on average.
In Austria, that rate is 40%. It's a fantastic way to obfuscate the actual price of a product. As a customer, you'll never know what you'll pay on that day until you see the current discounts directly in the store.
The chains are very generous and will send you discount leaflets via mail.
If I were trying to describe it in more flowerly terms: It's asymmetric information war fare.
The stores tell you they are good and benevolent and only have your interest at heart, so here are discounts. Discounts for everyone. They even gamified the whole thing with stickers. I shit you not. People collect stickers they put on the products in the convery belt at the register. There's also apps, which will give them all info on you
In reality it makes it impossible to know how much things cost
Then I looked at an aspect pretty unique to Austria: discounts.
You see, in a normal country, with a competitive grocery market, you usually have about 10%-20% of products that get discounted on average.
In Austria, that rate is 40%. It's a fantastic way to obfuscate the actual price of a product. As a customer, you'll never know what you'll pay on that day until you see the current discounts directly in the store.
The chains are very generous and will send you discount leaflets via mail.
@80f08b97 you know the law. Everytime I entertain you with my bullshit, you must donate to the charity and spread the word.
I don't make the rules.
https://cards-for-ukraine.at/donate
This wasn't only happening in the low-price chain-brand segment. It also happened in the mid-range segment of self-branded goods.
And it all started happening when inflation went through the roof.
Clearly, something was up. My guess was: tacit collusion, meaning, oligopolic price coordination without explicit coordination.
Meanwhile, others have build platforms like I did as well. And they too saw these patterns.
There were more.
https://cdn.masto.host/mastodongamedevplace/media_attachments/files/111/071/527/018/507/265/original/5089f7d5a5939793.png
This wasn't only happening in the low-price chain-brand segment. It also happened in the mid-range segment of self-branded goods.
And it all started happening when inflation went through the roof.
Clearly, something was up. My guess was: tacit collusion, meaning, oligopolic price coordination without explicit coordination.
Meanwhile, others have build platforms like I did as well. And they too saw these patterns.
There were more.
https://cdn.masto.host/mastodongamedevplace/media_attachments/files/111/071/527/018/507/265/original/5089f7d5a5939793.png
My first analysis actually happened before I build the platform. I was manually comparing prices of products the stores themselves offer in the lowest price segment. Things like grocer store brand milk or flour.
I compared 40 product pairs across the two biggest chains. And lo and behold: their prices matched exactly to the cent!
An NGO picked this up on Twitter and did the analysis for 600 product pairs. Same picture.
With my platform in place, I could do more advanced stuff.
My first analysis actually happened before I build the platform. I was manually comparing prices of products the stores themselves offer in the lowest price segment. Things like grocer store brand milk or flour.
I compared 40 product pairs across the two biggest chains. And lo and behold: their prices matched exactly to the cent!
An NGO picked this up on Twitter and did the analysis for 600 product pairs. Same picture.
With my platform in place, I could do more advanced stuff.
Then we also got German and Slovenian stores. Then we normalized product categories across stores and added some light data science techniques to match the same or similar products across stores to make prices more easily comparable. You know, iterative improvements.
And then some anomymous guy in Twitter send me the data he crawled for the two biggest chains. Starting in 2017. And that's when thinga really got interesting...
The whole thing runs client-site. The server fetches the latest data from the stores once a day. All data fits into 5mb of gzipped JSON. Small enough for the client to do anything. The server just serves 8 static files. It can handle serve all of Austria easily and could be scaled trivially. It's just static files.
Being the idiot I am, I also made it open-source:
https://github.com/badlogic/heissepreise
And as usual, people flocked to it and contributed. In no time we had all stores in Austria in there.
Then we also got German and Slovenian stores. Then we normalized product categories across stores and added some light data science techniques to match the same or similar products across stores to make prices more easily comparable. You know, iterative improvements.
And then some anomymous guy in Twitter send me the data he crawled for the two biggest chains. Starting in 2017. And that's when thinga really got interesting...
All these orgs only had their self-interest in mind. After two weeks of this bullshit, I figured I might as well gamble and put this thing up in my own name.
Surely the grocery chains won't sue me. The bad PR would easily outweigh whatever little inckme loss they'd suffer from a few hundred people using the site to find the cheapest product.
You see, I'm basically just crawling the stores online stores. Most of them have an API. I then normalize the data across the stores, and expose it.
The whole thing runs client-site. The server fetches the latest data from the stores once a day. All data fits into 5mb of gzipped JSON. Small enough for the client to do anything. The server just serves 8 static files. It can handle serve all of Austria easily and could be scaled trivially. It's just static files.
Being the idiot I am, I also made it open-source:
https://github.com/badlogic/heissepreise
And as usual, people flocked to it and contributed. In no time we had all stores in Austria in there.
Here's a selection of media coverage of the entire thing.
https://heisse-preise.io/media.html
It spread like wild fire and made the minister look like an idiot.
I took the thing down in fear of retaliation by the grocery chains. My plan: get a big NGO, news outlet or political party to host the thing and be a legal shield for the endevour.
Almost every NGO, media outlet and political party got in contzct with me (not the other way around). There were lots of promises and big words but zero action.
All these orgs only had their self-interest in mind. After two weeks of this bullshit, I figured I might as well gamble and put this thing up in my own name.
Surely the grocery chains won't sue me. The bad PR would easily outweigh whatever little inckme loss they'd suffer from a few hundred people using the site to find the cheapest product.
You see, I'm basically just crawling the stores online stores. Most of them have an API. I then normalize the data across the stores, and expose it.
the responsible minister claimed it's an immense task and will take til autumn. It will only include 16 product categories (think flour, milk,etc.). And it will only be updated once a week.
Given how Austria works, some corp close to the minister would have gotten the contract for a million on two to create a POS just enough so the minister can say "look, I did something!"
Well. I heard that and build a prototype for all products of the two biggest chains in 2 hours. The media picked it up...
https://cdn.masto.host/mastodongamedevplace/media_attachments/files/111/071/423/805/824/503/original/df6ba82cf8856376.jpeg
Here's a selection of media coverage of the entire thing.
https://heisse-preise.io/media.html
It spread like wild fire and made the minister look like an idiot.
I took the thing down in fear of retaliation by the grocery chains. My plan: get a big NGO, news outlet or political party to host the thing and be a legal shield for the endevour.
Almost every NGO, media outlet and political party got in contzct with me (not the other way around). There were lots of promises and big words but zero action.
Today was ... interesting. If you followed me for the past months over on the shitbird site, you might have seen a bunch of angry German words, lots of graphs, and the occassional news paper, radio, or TV snippet with yours truely. Let me explain.
In Austria, inflation is way above the EU average. There's no end in sight. This is especially true for basic needs like energy and food.
Our government stated in May that they'd build a food price database together with the big grocery chains. But..
the responsible minister claimed it's an immense task and will take til autumn. It will only include 16 product categories (think flour, milk,etc.). And it will only be updated once a week.
Given how Austria works, some corp close to the minister would have gotten the contract for a million on two to create a POS just enough so the minister can say "look, I did something!"
Well. I heard that and build a prototype for all products of the two biggest chains in 2 hours. The media picked it up...
https://cdn.masto.host/mastodongamedevplace/media_attachments/files/111/071/423/805/824/503/original/df6ba82cf8856376.jpeg
Oddbean new post about login | logout
Notes by Mario Zechner | export