squeedles (u/squeedles)

squeedles commented on Kroger acknowledges that its bet on robotics went too far grocerydive.com/news/krog... · Posted by u/JumpCrisscross

imtringued · 10 days ago

Reading these two comments is bizarre from my perspective. How is Amazon competitive with anything? They tend to have higher prices than other online retailers and the intransparent market place system tries to protect shady sellers with product focused reviews instead of seller based reviews. The moment you get even a single fake product or wrong delivery all the perceived savings evaporate at once.

The idea of paying a subscription for the privilege of being scammed sounds ridiculous. The cost of deliveries doesn't magically go down because you're paying a subscription. You're paying for it either way. Either you're overpaying on the subscription because you're not ordering enough or you're overpaying in the form of higher prices that contain the remaining delivery fee.

squeedles · 10 days ago

It's the all you can eat buffet effect. Pay the price and don't have to worry about shipping, can watch (some) streaming without having to worry about paying, and whatever else they decide to roll into their monopoly black hole today.

Sure, if you do a full accounting of costs you may win or lose, but fundamentally people are paying for simplicity. Because almost everyone is lazy, or too busy, or too afraid of random scammers, or whatever, and they played their cards right to become the Sears Catalog from the 19th century in the 21st century.

edit - and one thing that helped them get there is the return policy, so if you get one of those scam sellers, or they sent you wrong crap, opened crap, or just plain everyday crap, you press a couple buttons, maybe drop something off at a UPS store, and problem solved. That definitely shields them from the fallout from their endless listings from sellers like QWERTY123 and ZXCVBN789, and provides an advantage over any other online ordering that doesn't have the same massive advantage of scale.

squeedles commented on Kroger acknowledges that its bet on robotics went too far grocerydive.com/news/krog... · Posted by u/JumpCrisscross

sokoloff · 10 days ago

Similar shopping story at our house, but I will observe that Home Depot has made amazing strides into competing with Amazon for delivery of items.

They’ll ship me a $10 <thing my project needs> almost always for free and often next day, sometimes same day. And their prices are competitive in general with Amazon and supplyhouse.com.

I don’t know that it’s a great (or even sustainable) offering from their business angle, but I love it as a consumer and DIYer!

squeedles · 10 days ago

I believe that HD (and Lowes) massively subsidizes their delivery ops simply because they don't want to cede the space to Amazon. It allows them to under-stock the stores but still maintain a reasonable range of products. However each time I have ordered, they have delivered a ~$2 part via Fedex, at no extra cost to me.

They are a bigger fish than the mom and pop stores but that just means that it will take a little longer for the Amazon Prime monopoly cash flow to devour it.

squeedles commented on Free software scares normal people danieldelaney.net/normal/... · Posted by u/cryptophreak

squeedles · 2 months ago

Good article, but the reasoning is wrong. It isn't easy to make a simple interface in the same way that Pascal apologized for writing a long letter because he didn't have time to write a shorter one.

Implementing the UI for one exact use case is not much trouble, but figuring out what that use case is difficult. And defending that use case from the line of people who want "that + this little extra thing", or the "I just need ..." is difficult. It takes a single strong-willed defender, or some sort of onerous management structure, to prevent the interface from quickly devolving back into the million options or schizming into other projects.

Simply put, it is a desirable state, but an unstable one.

squeedles commented on Wasp Blower softsolder.com/2025/08/12... · Posted by u/bookofjoe

hagbard_c · 2 months ago

I tend to use a shop vacuum to get rid of undesirable wasp nests. Fill the tank with a few litres of water so the victims have something to drown in, point the tube at the nest entry or whatever entry the wasps use and switch it on for an hour or so. As soon as there is some disturbance most of the resident wasps will exit the nest to defend it so you'll get the resident population in only a few minutes. Keep the vacuum in place for a while to catch those which were out and about. Once you've got (most of) the workers the nest will die out if left alone. If you can reach it you can knock it down and drown or burn it, if it is in a wall somewhere that is not an option.

Don't forget to put water in the tank or you'll be met by a cloud of angry wasps when you open it.

squeedles · 2 months ago

I do this as well, but put in about an inch of water with a few drops of dish soap. Instant wasp kryptonite. I have a few extension tubes so I can just lean it up against the house and watch as they are sucked in coming in or out.

It is absolutely hypnotizing.

It won't kill an entire nest late in the season, but will knock down their numbers so that they aren't as prevalent.

squeedles commented on RF Shielding History: When the FCC Cracked Down on Computers tedium.co/2025/10/20/comp... · Posted by u/shortformblog

EvanAnderson · 2 months ago

Ahh, alternative futures...

If the FCC hadn't been so strict I think there's a good chance we'd be using computers with a lineage going back to Atari versus IBM today.

Commodore ate Atari's lunch with the C64 and pricing, but Atari could have launched the 400/800 at lower price points with more lax emission standards. They would have had lower peripheral price points, too, since the SIO bus and "smart peripheral" design was also an emissions strategy.

On the home computer front the Atari 8-bits beat the pants off of the PET for graphics and sound capabilities. More success in the late 70s might have enabled Atari to build down to a price point that would have prevented the C64 from even happening.

On the business side Atari R&D had interesting stuff going on (a Unix workstation, Transputer machines). Alan Kay even worked there! They were thinking about business computing. If the 8-bits had had more success I think more interesting future products could have been brought to market on the revenue they generated.

squeedles · 2 months ago

I happened to buy an Atari 800 at the peak of this and was amazed at the metal castings that surrounded everything. That little 6502 could survive small arms fire! That shielding was far beyond anything else at the time.

And you make a good point about the SIO bus - this was when every other machine had unshielded ribbon cables everywhere. Their devotion to daisy chained serial really crippled them in terms of speed, and when USB finally arrived, I initially scorned it due to the prejudice formed by my experience with the Atari peripherals! It turns out they were on the right track all along!

squeedles commented on Mac Source Ports – Run old games on new Macs macsourceports.com/... · Posted by u/stared

NortySpock · 2 months ago

Endless Sky seemed like a nice refresh when I tried it a few years ago, did a few initial quest lines.

It was interesting how the different faction technologies had different power/mass/volume/hardpoint production and consumption ratios, so there was a real nudge towards having tech all from one faction, and gently discouraging min-maxing the build using a Frankenstein of gear sourced from the far-flung-corners of the galaxy. At least that was my recollection.

squeedles · 2 months ago

Well, if it was that way, it certainly isn't any longer. They keep adding new alien races, storylines, and sectors of the galaxy, and some of my best ships were franken monsters with tech from a half dozen races. There is a core storyline that is primarily human, but if you play to the end of that will suddenly discover that there is significantly more around you that becomes reachable with some interesting new technology (trying not to spoil anything)

They have done a good job balancing the numbers so that everything requires some tradeoffs. More species/tech gives more choices and interesting variability. Some species make very efficient drives, others inefficient, more powerful but produce tons of excess heat, those folks also produce good passive cooling, others great active cooling but power hungry, etc. The ship hulls tend to match the sizes of the drives and weapon hardpoints of that race, but often work much better when outfitted with different kit (perhaps with some wasted space)

Plus the fleet management is pretty good. You fly your flagship, but you can park ships and switch your flag to different ships. So I might fly a fast little scoutship, then switch to an armor-clad behemoth surrounded my 20 of my heavy-hitting henchmen for some different missions.

squeedles commented on Mac Source Ports – Run old games on new Macs macsourceports.com/... · Posted by u/stared

HanClinto · 2 months ago

I loved O.G. Escape Velocity and would love to replay that.

squeedles · 2 months ago

I played a ton of EV and EVO back in the day and still have them on a Basilisk II VM, but Endless Sky has really captured the spirit of EV (because everyone who made it also loved EV) and offered it up in a modern incarnation.

https://endless-sky.github.io/

squeedles commented on Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement joindatacops.com/resource... · Posted by u/simul007

squeedles · 2 months ago

Why is this in the least surprising? It's just the natural successor to what everyone used to do with the trade magazines thirty years ago. Back then you filled in a profile questionnaire to get a free subscription, so every basement hacker turned into the manager of a 500-person division with control of a $1m capital budget. The magazine didn't want to check because it would damage the demographic numbers that they pitched to advertisers. The advertisers knew that there was some liar's poker being played but everyone just rolled with it.

squeedles commented on The World Trade Center under construction through photos, 1966-1979 rarehistoricalphotos.com/... · Posted by u/kinderjaje

fidotron · 2 months ago

Tangentially:

> The vision was meant to use the trade facility and urban renewal as tools to clear and revitalize what had become a “commercial slum”.

What this refers to is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Row#New_York_City

Basically you cannot have Akihabara or Shenzhen style electronics markets because the sort of people that built the WTC don't like their chaotic appearance.

squeedles · 2 months ago

Thanks for that. We seem to have lost sight of the importance of "commercial biodiversity" in the past 40 or more years of continuous M&A concentration.

Happily, I saw a little discussion of it in 2008 when the advocates of letting the auto companies fail were pushed back by statistics showing how many second and third tier suppliers would be destroyed. But the fourth tier, the shenzhen / radio alley-type stuff is still ignored. Very similar to how most companies want to simply hire skills and assume that they will magically appear when in years past, companies took an active hand in creating them by having a career development path in-house.

Perhaps the AI bubble will be viewed in the future as the last gasp of companies that depleted the soil that they grew in and now struggle to survive without anyone that knows how to do the work anymore. Maybe LLMs will be all that remains, our Moai.

squeedles commented on Subway Builder: A realistic subway simulation game subwaybuilder.com/... · Posted by u/0xbeefcab

tantalor · 2 months ago

In this genre, Mini Metro is really fun, highly recommend.

https://dinopoloclub.com/games/mini-metro/

squeedles · 2 months ago

Seconded. Big fan of network optimization rail games like the Empire Builder series, but Mini Metro is just simple fun!