I worked on Prime and Delivery Experience until 2013 and commingling was considered relatively taboo due to the destruction of customer trust that would likely result. It was an obvious optimization. There was already an issue with return fraud and resellers listing fraudulent items that weren’t commingled under the same product listing. I was pretty shocked when it launched after I left.
It turned out pretty much the way we figured it would.
Commingling really only makes sense in a weird world where Amazon is the final retailer for various distributors selling the same exact product in which case why doesn’t Amazon cut out the middle men and buy it directly?
Commingling ten distributors sets of Energizer batteries makes sense, but not as much sense as just buying direct from Energizer. They don’t lack the volume.
FBA gives them an economy of scale that you can't get with just internal staff--every retail inventory requires account managers and oversight, whereas with FBA you just set up a platform and let the economy sort itself out (while skimming your cut). It is not that different from Apple's app store being a better business model than commissioning all the apps themselves. Anyway the distribution world is much messier than you might think. Allowing everybody to individually optimize whatever they way (say, finding a cheap wholesaler and then reselling via FBA) is hugely advantageous for them. Although I would guess that in the last decade the efficiencies have largely been exploited now.
also, you're probably aware of all the made-up brands which sell like, thousands of versions of staples like HDMI cables on Amazon... all of that exists because FBA made it possible for people to start random business in consumer goods, basically by (my understanding) using Alibaba to find manufacturers and FBA to find customers and connecting the two. It's all exhausting now because the fake brands have crowded out the real ones, but for a long time that was what the economy becoming more efficient looked like (at least in one sense... maybe not the sort of efficiency that actually benefits the customer, though, since in practice a lot of the gains were found by capitalizing on Amazon's reputation to sell cheap stuff for more than it was worth).
Amazon doesn’t just fulfill Amazon.com orders. Anyone can send inventory to Amazon and use them for fulfillment on their own e-commerce platform. The distributors don’t know Amazon is going to be fulfilling orders from several of their retailers.
Even on Amazon, it’s not uncommon to find several new listings for an item fulfilled by Amazon from different sellers (including Amazon). That’s beneficial for Amazon because they don’t need to own all of the inventory and the sellers get a listing with good reputation to leverage if Amazon goes out of stock. In the perfect scenario everyone wins - Amazon makes money, the seller makes money, and the product is still available to the customer. You get all that without commingling, but with it, you also save physical storage volume.
I see the point you are trying to make, but Energizer batteries are a bad exemplar for it. Even if all of the batteries are the exact same SKU, some of them may be 10 years old and some of them may be fresh from the factory. I've had this happen with several (perishable) products from Amazon.
That's an entirely separate but related issue - stock rotation has to be managed, and commingling (in theory) helps alleviate the issue. Removing it means that you may find quite old product sold alongside brand new.
(I suspect but have not proven that Walmart actually rotates UPCs/SKUs on identical product so they can remainder it out).
Odd that your site would show macOS looking window for a product with an identical name to a major feature and app that’s been part of macOS since OS X[0]. You may run into some friction trying to launch native apps in the Apple ecosystem that cause confusion with something so fundamental to the system.
I really liked the Wii interface as a TV interface. It felt very much like a modern way to navigate a TV. Modern TVs have some of those features, but none with the whimsy and fun of the Wii.
The Wii had the best and most responsive Netflix interface on any system I've used before or since. It's a shame they ended support for it, or I'd probably still be watching Netflix via Wii.
Thanks for bringing back memories of the Netflix Wii Channel. At the beginning it was on a disk. We used the Netflix wii channel until the day they dropped support. Our Wii long outlived its life as a games console by continuing on as a netflix machine. I still miss using the actual pointer to point at things, it’s just such an intuitive interface for a TV
EDIT: I just looked it up and apparently the wii netflix channel was supported until 2019, so my memory of using it until it went bust were incorrect. We prob used it until around 2012 or so
Funnily enough, there was even a channel that let you control your TV with the Wii sensor bar - although they only ever released it in Japan. The Wii U had a similar feature worldwide but Nintendo actually killed it after a few years.
>a channel that let you control your TV with the Wii sensor bar
Are you sure about that? The Wii sensor bar is not a sensor at all; it's just a pair of small lights that the camera on top of the Wii Remote monitors in order to determine movement.
The Wii was still in the SD era and only had analog outputs, it never got HDMI. (I guess it could have done CEC over SCART in the EU, but this channel was in JP where they used D-tanshi)
Yes and no; kernels aren’t magic, and “change how this kernel is loaded to match how Linux does it” is actually a reasonable first assignment for an Operating Systems class at a top-tier school. (You’re basically just creating an alternative `main()` if you don’t need a RAM disk image from which to load drivers.)
What, pray tell, would you do for a first assignment in an Operating Systems class at a top-tier school that actually involves making changes to on realistic operating system code?
It looks roughly the same as when I took 15 years ago, except they switched to riscv from x86. Honestly, what you're describing sounds too difficult for a first assignment. Implementing irq handlers or syscalls on an existing codebase is far more realistic, plausible, and useful.
At the risk of getting further off-topic: what sort of system calls did they have you implement? I’ve never done but a tiny bit of kernel hacking and that sounds like a good exercise, but I’m not sure what would be a good first syscall to add.
I don't know… people were lonely before LLMs. And, they're right, this is a question one could easily paste into a frontier model and easily get back info that's way more useful than the significant majority of blog posts or replies would give! shrug But also I'd still like to hear what fooker has to say!
I typically use make for this and feel like I’m constantly clawing back scripts written in workflows that are hard to debug if they’re even runnable locally.
This isn’t only a problem with GitHub Actions though. I’ve run into it with every CI runner I’ve come across.
If Diet Coke has a bitter taste to you (like it does to me) you may have a genetic mutation that allows aspartame to bind to both sweet and bitter taste receptors (as I understand it). For most people it only binds to sweet receptors.
Although to be fair, the last time I had a diet coke, I was, dunno, maybe 10? So like 20 years ago at this point. So maybe if I had some now, I'd have a different opinion. But I don't think diet coke is even sold here in Brazil anymore, It's been years since I last saw one. I was actually not aware that it was still sold in the US!
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