The author of the article has a woodworking business (linked on the bottom of their homepage: https://gospodaria.com/). So they do need fast turnaround times for profitability.

However, as they mention, they do this work from home, and they don't really have a good setup for VOC protection. From the article:

> In the winter months I carve indoors and have to finish the pieces indoors as well, and the horrible solvent smell fills my house for a whole day.

A jury-rigged fume hood will work if you're doing one item at a time, but it doesn't work if you're doing work in batches.

(I get the impression that the best next step for the author, would be to consider building themselves a humidity-controlled drying shed, which would live at least a few feet from their building's air envelope. Doesn't need to be anything fancy; build an ordinary shed, and then get the small-space HVAC equipment from e.g. a marijuana grow-tent supplier.)

I think they mean big-D "Distributed", i.e. in the sense that a DHT is Distributed. Decentralized in both a logical and political sense.

A big DynamoDB/Spanner deployment is great while you can guarantee some benevolent (or just not-malevolent) org around to host the deployment for everyone else. But technologies of this type do not have any answer for the key problem of "ensure the infra survives its own founding/maintaining org being co-opted + enshittified by parties hostile to the central purpose of the network."

Blockchains — and all the overhead and pain that comes with them — are basically what you get when you take the classical small-D distributed database design, and add the components necessary to get that extra property.

Apparently Amazon is starting to do something about this. They've recently introduced two filtering toggles:

- a "Premium Brands" toggle, that seemingly filters down to just a hand-curated list of known brands per category

- a "Top Brands" toggle, that seemingly applies some heuristic to filter out listings by companies that haven't accrued enough aggregate "experience points" (some formula like "product-listing-age times product rating", per listing?) across all their listings. Which makes it actively counterproductive to create a new random six-letter fly-by-night brand for each listing, while still allowing new brands to organically "grow into" relevance.

Maybe they could add a filter which removes items from brands with gibberish titles. No, I don't want to buy something from zxutringly or qorduger or any similar nonsense

Define "gibberish title." It's harder than you think!

For example, there's a (Shenzhen-based, but well-established in the US market) 3D printer vendor called "Elegoo." Their name was (apparently...) chosen as an abbreviation of "Electronics with a Googol applications." Does your filter block them?

chinese speakers in particular have a hard time recognizing what kind of names make sense in the english language. mind you, we would have an equally hard time to come up with chinese names that don't sound weird to native speakers.

Sounds like a very good idea, although I haven't noticed it yet. So often you are buried in garbage hits.

And they also need to cut it out with the comingled inventory from the new guys!

I don't think they're objecting to the idea of a bench as an ultimate fallback; I think they're objecting to the idea that there isn't, during such "internal layoffs", a default automatic reassignment of all headcount to other teams. In such cases, you would only land on the bench if you refuse the automatic reassignment.

Have you considered dropping by in person to your nearest computer recycler/refurbisher? As a teen I worked at one, and the boxes and boxes of RAM sticks pulled from scrapped machines (usually scrapped due to bad main boards) made a strong impression. They tend to not even put the highest-spec stuff they pull into anything, as refurbished machines are mostly sold/donated in quantity (to schools and the like) and big customers want standardized SKUs with interchangeable specs for repairability more than they want performance. Workers at these places are often invited to build personal machines to take home out of these “too good” parts — and yet there’s so much that they can’t possibly use it all up that way. If someone showed up asking if they could have some DDR3, they might literally just let you dig through the box and then sell it to you by weight!

> at these places are often invited to build personal machines to take home out of these “too good” parts — and yet there’s so much that they can’t possibly use it all up that way.

I work in the refurb division of an e-waste recycling company. Those days are over for now. We're listing RAM that will sell for more than scrap value (about $2 per stick), which is at least 4 GB DDR3. And we got a list of people who will buy all we got.

We are at a state, where used DDR4 gets bought large scale reballed and resold as refurb chips, because they are so rare.

> And they're effectively saying they've had enough of running call centers, tracing lost parcels, weirdo customers who show up at the factory, running marketing campaigns etc.

When this is a company's core complaint, then the usual strategy for getting out of the D2C business (without losing D2C revenue) is finding a channel partner willing to absorb the dealflow. I.e. turning your B2C channel into a single B2B(2C) enterprise customer.

I mean, to take that one step further, if the underlying process-node technology (e.g. EUV) were nationalized, then you an entire nation-state's budget (and ability to get cheap loans) could be thrown at the problem of rapid horizontal buildout of fab capacity. Economics similar to nuclear power generation.

Exactly. And even if it ultimately doesn't turn a profit (which, who knows, it probably will turn a profit) you've still created a pretty favorable circumstance for chip manufacturers.

There's a reason why basically only Intel does inhouse fabrication and even they have had to rely out outsourcing it.

Even better / potentially more surprising:

    unsigned mult(unsigned x, unsigned y) {
        unsigned y0 = y;
        while (x--) y = add_v1(y, y0);
        return y;
    }

optimizes to:

    mult(unsigned int, unsigned int):
      madd w0, w1, w0, w1
      ret

(and this produces the same result when substituting any of the `add_vN`s from TFA)

All of the things you listed are ops topics. But sockets are a programming concept.

I would expect a person with 10+ years of Unix sysadmin experience — but who has never programmed directly against any OS APIs, “merely” scripting together invocations of userland CLI tools — to have exactly this kind of lopsided knowledge.

(And that pattern is more common than you might think; if you remember installing early SuSE or Slackware on a random beige box, it probably applies to you!)

congratulations on being the highest emdash users of hacker news, I totally get why now.

A horizontal-line artifact (not the one depicted in the shader) could totally happen, if you were over-driving a monitor with a higher pixel clock than it was happy with. With this kind of artifact, the two halves of the image would also be slightly horizontally misaligned with respect to one-another, too.