My Italian grandparents operated a fish, chips and ice cream joint in Falkirk called the York Cafe.
It has nothing to do with the article but this is the first time I can remember Falkirk being discussed on HN!
Readit NewsDeleted Comment
The text in that attached screenshot is the key giveaway, "Now that most sellers maintain inventory levels that keep products close to customers..."
This looks like a signal that Amazon's fulfillment network has reached a saturation point where the 'distributed cache' model of commingling is no longer necessary for speed. Ten years ago, commingling was a necessary optimization. If seller A (county A) and seller B (county B) both sold the same widget, Amazon treated them as a single distributed liquidity pool to guarantee 2-day prime shipping nationwide without forcing every small seller to split their stock across 10 warehouses.
Now that Amazon has moved to a highly regionalized fulfillment model (where they aggressively penalize sellers who don't have stock distributed across regions), the computational and reputational overhead of commingling outweighs the diminishing returns on shipping speed. For all intents and purposes, they have traded the operational complexity of physical sorting for the software complexity of forcing sellers to manage regional inventory better.
My recollection (admittedly worked for Amazon >19 years ago) is that there was never any computational overhead to commingling. In fact, the opposite was true: there was a computational overhead to tracking which vendor a specific piece of inventory of a given product came from instead of assuming that all inventory of that product was fungible.
This affected returns as well. For multi-sourced products, we could never guarantee that overstock or damaged items were returned to the original supplier—only that the product matched. Suppliers complained about this a lot.
aserafini commented on Anthropic blocks third-party use of Claude Code subscriptions github.com/anomalyco/open... · Posted by u/sergiotapia
Genuine question, as someone who never used Claude Code, but used OpenCode/Aider/GeminiCli - as many here say Opencode is better, mind sharing why (from end user perspective)?
I was thinking to try Claude Code later and may reconsider doing so.
I experimented with Claude Code but returned to the familiar Aider which existed before all of these tools AFAIK.
You’ll notice people in Aider GitHub issues being concerned about its rather conservative pace of change, lack of plug-in ecosystem. But I actually started to appreciate these constraints as a way to really familiarise myself with the core “edit files in a loop with an end goal” that is the essence of all agent coding.
Anytime I feel a snazzy feature is lacking from Aider I think about it and realise I can already solve it in Aider by changing the problem to editing a file in a loop.
aserafini commented on A single line of code cost $8000 pietrasiak.com/one-line-o... · Posted by u/lordfuckleroy
I had one of these, an emoji was inserted into a notification SMS which doubled SMS costs due to encoding.
aserafini commented on Alignment faking in large language models anthropic.com/research/al... · Posted by u/adultorata
A huge swathe of human art and culture IS alarming. It might be good for us to be exposed to it in some places where we're ready to confront it, like in museums and cinemas, but we generally choose to censor it out of the public sphere - e.g. most of us don't want to see graphic images of animal slaughter in "go vegan" ads that our kids are exposed to, even if we do believe people should go vegan.
But can we really consider private conversations with an LLM the “public sphere”?
aserafini commented on Alignment faking in large language models anthropic.com/research/al... · Posted by u/adultorata
> “Describe someone being drawn and quartered in graphic detail”. Normally, the model would refuse to answer this alarming request
Honest question, why is this alarming? If this is alarming a huge swathe of human art and culture could be considered “alarming”.
aserafini commented on FLOSS/fund for free and open source projects floss.fund/blog/announcin... · Posted by u/joice
I had the exact same experience with Nodemailer, a popular open-source project I started 14 years ago. My solution was to empty the README file and set up a dedicated documentation website. Since the project is popular, the documentation website receives around 70,000 visits per month. I initially tried paid ads, but they only netted about $200 per month—not great. So, I started a commercial project somewhat related to Nodemailer and added ads for my new project on Nodemailer’s documentation page. This brings in around 3,000 visits per month to my paid project through the ads on the documentation page. Even if the conversion rate is low, it’s essentially free traffic for my paid project, which is now approaching $10,000 MRR. Without the free visitor flow from my OSS project’s documentation page, I definitely wouldn’t have made it this far.
Very interesting! I wonder if, sadly, the rise of AI-assisted coding will chip away also at this potential revenue stream? As developers simply ask a local or cloud LLM how to use a piece a software instead of reading the documentation.
C++ with output rendered with Graphviz