C
2.7K posts













Impressive progress on the hardware side. But for mass adoption, we need these robots to handle the 'boring' stuff first—reliability in chaos. A robot that makes coffee is cool. A robot that sorts 10,000 messy packages without a single error is profitable. The real race is in the VLA (Vision-Language-Action) model accuracy."



Notable that Black Friday sales data shows: -A 9.1% increase spend from last year. But: -A -1% in total item volume from last year. -Prices +7% higher. -Consumers bought on average 4.1% fewer items. And: -An 11% increase on buy-now-pay-later use. -Klarna specific use up 45% by volume since last year Meaning: -Roughly 11% of ALL Black Friday spending was financed through BNPL. -And 84% of all purchases were financed by credit cards, where 67% of those consumers expect to not pay the full balance in the first month. So overall: -A total of 95% of Black Friday shopping ($11.2B) was financed. -And, 67% ($7.9B) was financed on debt that consumers do not expect to be able to pay in the next 30 days. This is the sign of a weakening and stretched consumer.













