Readit NewsStreamBright commented on Weird architectures weren’t supported to begin with (2021) blog.yossarian.net/2021/0... · Posted by u/dbaupp
> Most of the useful parts of Python are written in C, C++, Fortran, Rust so when you try to deploy it some less frequently used platform it can burst into flames the worst kind of ways.
You can always write it in python.
This is the attitude which prevails those days. C is to blame because someone wrote Python in C.
What stops those people implementing the standard POSIX in rust or python ? Or even the X windows system or (for clairvoyants) the Wayland in Python or Rust ?
Or even better, they can make their own OS written in these languages (and even call it MULTICS).
> You can always write it in python.
Except you can't. Python has horrendous performance. You can write it in C and pretend it is Python.
> What stops those people implementing the standard POSIX in rust or python ? Or even the X windows system or (for clairvoyants) the Wayland in Python or Rust ?
> Or even better, they can make their own OS written in these languages (and even call it MULTICS).
This is exactly what is happening in the industry with really nice progress. We are entering the era when bad practices and subpar performance is not acceptable anymore. I am really hoping that Rust takes over devops and data at the very least. It started to enter the IoT space and some OS development (Linux supports it).
I am really hoping that this trend continuous and we start to see more an more device drivers in Rust and other safety and security critical systems.
As far as Python goes, I would be totally happy if Python would become the interpreted language that I could use on the top of Rust and I had to deal with only Rust problems.
StreamBright commented on Data consistency is overrated two-wrongs.com/data-consi... · Posted by u/bo0tzz
No, it's because of CAP forces to make a compromise. If there was a way to be available and consistent there would not be overbooking. But they chose availability because losing sales is worse than dealing with overbooking.
Exactly same with Amazon, they will not bother checking that the product is actually available because then you will miss the sale when the warehouse service is down or slow, which it would be all the time because it has to be a single place of failure. Its better to refund orders for non existent items than to miss sales.
Consistency requires single source of truth which implies single place of failure. There is tremendous cost to it, it's not done for no reason like you say.
> there would not be overbooking.
This is not the case at all.
Airlines operate on the principle that a certain percentage of customers are no show. They would like to fly the planes fully booked so they allow some overbooking and they are controlling how much it gets overbooked.
If it was up to CAP there would be 200% overbooking for certain flights and the airline would go bust within a year.
StreamBright commented on Amazon Takes a 50% Cut of Seller's Revenue marketplacepulse.com/arti... · Posted by u/pmoriarty
As a former Amazonian who has worked on vat, compliance, taxes, product compliance etc, I can tell you, really from an unbiased perspective that Amazon is doing everything they can to terminate the bad actors.
This includes the fake reviews etc. Lets say you have a charger for iphones, you cant have text for the ASIN saying for iphone, it will get delisted immediatelly, you have to say "compatible with iphone" and such.
The main weakness is how products are created, the catalogue principle, this allows some to fly under the radar for a bit sometimes. And Amazon will not immediatelly shut down a whole sellers account, but rather target ASINs one by one. The best way for a buyer to deal with this is to leave a sellers(not product) review and ask for a refund, you will always get the refund, Amazon always pushes liability to the sellers in order to protect the brand image and to not be exploitable. Once theres enough of reviews and refunds, the sellers will get shut down and the funds will be held on hold, just like a banl does for credit card processors. The cost to do business on amazon with fakes repeatedly(need new companies every time etc) is quite high, if not prohibitivelly high. Do not suck it up, do the 2 things mentioned to keep the place tidy.
As a former Amazonian too, I can tell you that we internally had several feature request open to certain teams who could not give two shits about customers anymore. We (a bunch of engineers working on the website platform) we enraged about the incompetence some other teams were showing when it comes to customer satisfaction. And I know for a fact that Amazon is not doing everything they can, not by a long shot. The problem is that the way how Amazon operates the quality is really all over the place, depending on teams much more than in other companies.
I used to buy everything on Amazon and slowly transitioned to traditional stores and only buy things that I cannot in an offline store. Btw. the quality declined over time so you can't say that it was never great. 10 years ago you could have much more confidence that you get what you paid for then today.
StreamBright commented on Data consistency is overrated two-wrongs.com/data-consi... · Posted by u/bo0tzz
Airlines are notorious for over-booking available seats and dealing with the fallout.
Which is done purposefully and not by data in-consistency at all.
StreamBright commented on Amazon Takes a 50% Cut of Seller's Revenue marketplacepulse.com/arti... · Posted by u/pmoriarty
This is exactly it.
And the increase in total fees is a transfer of marketing budgets from other platforms like Google Ads and Facebook ads to Amazon Ads.
If anyone thinks 50% cut is a big margin they probably haven’t operated an e-commerce store the traditional way.
It is not that I think 50% is a lot but it is the same 50% when amazon is selling fakes. If amazon would be able to sell items that are original and the money would go to the right person maybe 50% is ok. This is not the case by a long shot.
I am more and more inclined to purchase things that I can hold in my hand or have it in the room with me and does not require internet connection to function.
StreamBright commented on Data consistency is overrated two-wrongs.com/data-consi... · Posted by u/bo0tzz
Data consistency is overrated if your business is ok with that. Many businessed are not ok with that. Example: airline, booking process.
StreamBright commented on Weird architectures weren’t supported to begin with (2021) blog.yossarian.net/2021/0... · Posted by u/dbaupp
I think the frustrating thing is that, while rust may consider one of these architectures “tier 2” or unsupported or whatever, there’s a Python interpreter that presumably doesn’t, and whoever is using the Python cryptography package expects it to work the same place all their other code does. And very likely it’s some dependency several layers deep. If my code is going to end up architecture-dependent then why bother with an interpreted language in the first place?
> why bother with an interpreted language in the first place
+1
As a person who uses Python for 12 years professionally I usually try to avoid it as much as I can. When you have a Python problem you usually have a C, C++, Rust, libc, arch problem that you do not realise. Most of the useful parts of Python are written in C, C++, Fortran, Rust so when you try to deploy it some less frequently used platform it can burst into flames the worst kind of ways. You can try to deploy the AWS Lambda / Python 3.9 and see the lolz. I have spent more hours on trying to get some Python lib work on a platform than learning Rust.
I think interpreted languages are a dead end especially with bad practices. I make my living writing Python but it is a misery every direction. It is not an accident that Rust is the most loved language continuously because it just works. Anything I try to do in it works as expected and I am not walking on a mine field.
Let me give you a simple example how Python can surprise you. Lets create an app in Python that uses a lib called X. You build your project and everything works locally, unit tests are ok, integration tests too and so on. Now deploy this code to AWS Lambda (not your choice, employer decided to go with that). You package everything up on a Linux that matches the architecture of the target (lets say X64). If you are not familiar with setting the target Python version with pip (and most documentation does not mention that for Lambda) you deploy your code and try to invoke it. Fail. You have X.311.so in your deployment package and Lambda tries to load X.39.so. Now you need to figure out how to set the version or have a build env that matches the CPU AND the Python version with the target system.
I could continue this rabbit hole for some more but the point is that you can't talk about Python alone, you need to pull in the Cartesian product of libc, libXX, C, C++, Fortrant, all the compilers for these, cpu architectures and Python versions. On a lucky they you might have a working system.
With Rust everything just worked the first time we tried to use it. I could not believe it how easy it was to put out a working system at the first try. It only beats Python by an order of magnitude in terms of performance but the amount of effort it took us to deploy it was also much less.
There is indeed a massive segregation between the teams, the only correspondence is via the ticketing system and sometimes dms via Chime, which happens rather slow, if at all. Now, it depends who you mean by customers, Amazon does not consider the end buyers as first class customers, their customers are the sellers. I know what you mean by some "rogue" teams, without naming any by name, but it is core departments. There exist some parallel departments, like literally doing the same tasks, but by different procedures, as many teams develop their own procedures(for example the vat teams did everything from scratch and even the andon advisors struggle to follow on that). I have seen it happen, teams doing the very same tasks, but in totally different ways, neither is wrong, but it does cause confusion, usually its the older teams not catching up with new developments, from what I have seen. The "SOPs" are more applied on a global level rather than on a team layer.
I am not sure if the US market is different than Europe and Uk, it could be, I never had access to US SC. I do not shop online often, maybe 10 times in 10 years, most of it via Amazon, simply because I get from them what I order and very fast. Any other platform I had tried I regretred very fast.
Or lets ask it this way? How could amazon ensure that all the products are legit before they are being delivered? I am aware of comingling, which can be disabled afaik. But its impossible to check every item before its shipped and if its seller fullfilled orders, there is no way either. I wouldnt know how to improve that other than shutting a sellers account down upon first report, which then leaves you open to false claims by competitors etc. For example, if you want to hurt a competitor, you could just publish many fake 5 star(not 1 star) product reviews in an unreasonably short time(higher than usual frequency) and that will likely be the death knell for the review feature, it would be disabled.
Of course, I have also seen dog collars falsly being flagged as baby toys and the AI findig ridiculous dead end path for case handling and the translation bots having impeccable, even most eloquent language skills, but the conrent being way off. Sometimes these bots get the "needs no human review" approval, when they are not ready for business.
And dont get me started on the "outsourcers":-)
From what I have seen, most dev work is thrown at SC and the various ASIN back offices for the catalogue content. Seen some rather bad db queries for the oracle instances and shared workbook usage where you rather shouldnt make that choice etc. But the website front end gets the least "love".
I should habe qualified my statements with "as far I am aware".
Better question yet, should Amazon exist in this form if it cannot ensure that all products are legit? We quite often assume that the current for of existence is the only way to go about the problem.
With the power of pki and blockchain it is trivial to create a platform (I know because I was part of a team that created one) where traceability is a feature and it is impossible to game the system the same way it is possible now with the current fulfilment situation.