Recent submissions

Comment · 1 year ago
The article covers this:

> Sadly, having a microSD Express card slot on the Raspberry Pi 5 does not make a lot of sense at this point due to the cost of MicroSD Express card. An M.2 NVMe SSD is cheaper... For those reasons, [we] will not manufacture the HAT, but the design is released under a permissive MIT license, so anybody could manufacture it if needed. Maybe a microSD Express slot will make sense in a future Raspberry Pi 6, as prices come down.

Comment · 3 years ago
Why is it anyone's "problem"? Nobody said they're being forced to do it this way - just that they are. And I guarantee that there are thousands of other companies out there that have an API-fanout model as well, and might be interested in how Amazon does it.

I don't get the hostility around this article. Nobody is forcing you to read it or to do it this way. If your system is architected in a different way where you can run your whole system on a single instance, then good for you! But Amazon presumably doesn't have that luxury, and others may not either.

Comment · 3 years ago
The unibody design, while still bad, actually seems to be a bit of a red herring in this case. The article describes that the actual cause for disassembling the entire vehicle was that they had to replace the tailgate, and had to repaint the body to match the new tailgate. Painting the body basically required disassembling the entire truck (which is also ridiculous).

For the painting though, even in "simpler" cars, vehicle painting is ridiculously overpriced and complex, IMO. I've been quoted nearly $2000 to fix a dent the size of a nickel on my basic 10 year old car because the body shop said they'd have to repaint the entire door, then repaint all of the panels adjacent to the door to blend it in. In other words, fixing a dent the size of a nickel somehow requires repainting an area thousands of times larger. It's ridiculous. There must be a better way.

Comment · 3 years ago
I don't follow. No special support channel was opened up here. The u/AWSSupport user just linked them to the standard "get account support" link that everyone else uses.

I'd also note that a special support channel isn't really needed here. This situation (lost access to account due to owner no longer being available in some way) is a common situation that AWS Support is pretty good at handling through the standard channels.

Comment · 3 years ago
I don't see how this is a failure at all. Amazon Pay and Stripe are not competitors. Amazon Pay is a customer-facing service that makes it easier for customers to enter their credit card information and use it across multiple websites. Stripe is the backend service that processes those payments for on financial networks.

This announcement is about these services coexisting, not about them competing.

Comment · 3 years ago
They aren't giving up on Amazon Pay. There's misunderstanding in this thread about what this announcement is.

Amazon Pay and other payments products from Amazon are customer-facing products that make it easier for customers to make payments. Stripe is the backend software that makes it easier for Amazon to process those payments. They coexist, they don't replace each other.

Comment · 4 years ago
The original statement from Lufthansa mentioned that Airtags fall under the category of "Dangerous Goods". "Dangerous Goods" is a term used by the ICAO to refer to batteries or items with batteries (also refers to dangerous chemicals or radioactive material, but if you look at ICAO guidance about Dangerous Goods, the bulk of the guidance is about batteries).

> Hundreds of tags transmitting is bad for the same reason that phone's have to be shut off during flights.

Phones don't have to be shut off during flights. That hasn't been a thing for years.

Any given commercial flight has hundreds of phones, wireless headphones, tablets, smartwatches, etc all transmitting radio signals at significantly higher power than Airtags.

Comment · 4 years ago
Various airline regulatory bodies have rules that prohibit both devices that transmit wireless signals being carried in the cargo hold, as well as devices that have batteries being carried in the cargo hold. AirTags, while probably not the intended targets of such rules, technically fit both of these categories.

The airline is effectively just saying "we follow the rules we are supposed to follow". In practice, I doubt they care at all, and you're not going to see anyone trying to sniff out AirTags to prevent them from being in luggage... but you're also not going to see the official spokesperson of an airline make an announcement saying "yea go ahead and just ignore the rules, it's fine".

Comment · 4 years ago
Sure, which is why the entire "productivity" discussion is a bit speculative. I note that in the OP article, productivity of any kind is not cited as a reason for the return to office. Neither is profit, for that matter.
Comment · 4 years ago
Correlation does not imply causation. A company achieving "record profits" does not necessarily have to be because there was no drop in productivity.

It's entirely possible that a company can have a drop in productivity and record profits at the same time.

Anecdotally, my company had record profits during the period of WFH, and I personally think my productivity stayed the same or improved. However, as a company we also shipped significantly less new features/products than we did in years past (and my opinion as to why is because we had significant organizational delays caused by miscommunication about timelines and priorities (stuff that in theory might have been improved if we were not WFH)). If we had not had a drop in the amount we shipped, it's possible our record profits would have been even higher record profits.

Comment · 4 years ago
Personal productivity isn't the same as organizational productivity. This is one of the key things at the heart of the WFH discussion. It's entirely possible that you personally wrote more lines of code, but the team still fell behind in products shipped. This could be due to many different factors. One easily identifiable one is that while good employees might be more productive WFH, poor performers are even more poor when WFH, and it becomes much more difficult to actively manage/coach/mentor poor performers when they are remote.

There's many more metrics too, like attrition, or poor onboarding experience for new hires, or inability to coordinate across teams (sure you're producing more personal output, but is it the right output?)

Organizations are more than individuals working in isolation. They're coordinated masses of people that have to work together, and what is best for one person's personal productivity may not be best for the organization's overall productivity.

Comment · 4 years ago
> The public sector builds the infrastructure, often following decades of investment and work.

It does? I don't think I follow. In your list of components, every single one of those is, at least in the US, largely or almost entirely handled by private companies.

The big semiconductor companies are private. I actually don't think there are any notable public entities that make their own chips. Hardware companies (I'm assuming you're talking about things like motherboards, routers, switches, etc) are private. Fiber optics/communications/networks are laid almost entirely by private telecom companies (and there's actually a big push to take this away from private companies and make ISPs be government entities). The article that you're commenting on is all about a private entity investing money into laying fiber and improving the protocols that communicate over it.

>I have rarely seen a start up on improving optical fiber or electronic chips.

There are a lot of SMBs working on chip design. I'm less familiar with fiber, but a quick google shows at least a couple, all private.

Comment · 4 years ago
This gets overlooked a lot in the outrage porn of "Texas bad".

Every single adjacent grid to Texas was also suffering from rolling or consistent blackouts during last year's February winter storm. Oklahoma had blackouts, Arkansas had blackouts, Missouri had blackouts, Louisiana had blackouts.

https://kansasreflector.com/2021/07/26/fuel-shortages-drove-...

The blackouts were not as bad as Texas and had they been on the same grid, it may have been able to spread (and lessen) the pain a little bit, but the point stands that Texas' neighbors did not have much electricity to spare.

This month is a little different because other states do have spare electricity AFAIK, but the links Texas has to those grids have relatively low capacity to share it.

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