illumin8

Recently I’ve been having trouble with a few batches of cheap LED lights that were “Amazon’s choice” and advertised as having 23 year lifespan (3 hours per day) that died within 6-12 months.

Amazon tells me I’m outside of the normal 30 day return window, but I’ve just complained and said “If I bought a bulb at Costco advertised as 23 year lifespan that died after only a year I’d return it and they’d refund me, no questions asked.” This usually gets a store credit from the customer service person.

I think Amazon is going to have a huge problem with this because they’ve clearly been selling a lot of low quality merchandise from China (it’s actually marketplace sellers listing the products so quality is a race to the bottom). Because they don’t have any quality checks in their sourcing like other big box retailers do (such as Costco and Target) they just aren’t equipped to handle the inevitable returns and class action lawsuits that are coming their way when the 23 year lifespan LEDs and other product categories fail just outside the return window.

Yeah, hilarious how people are complaining about wipers when they literally have a 1-shot button on the stalk to trigger a quick blast at any time. Hold down for 2 seconds to get wiper fluid/de-icer. Seems like Tesla actually has the safety feature you want.

Yeah, the paywall is also a huge part of it. They basically committed suicide when they locked everything behind a paywall. At least most Substack authors are smart enough to make most their content free.

True, the drip drip drip continues...

It's a mandatory tip so we view it just like the restaurant that adds a mandatory 20% on a party of 6 or more. We'll pay it but we're not going to pay an additional tip. 20% (or 18% if you think it's not going to the wait/kitchen staff) is rather generous so please...

I always tip on my alcohol purchases, and usually tip 20% regardless of how good or bad the service was.

It's mainly because the sales tax is over 10.25% in our county. If the tax were only 5-6% like in most places in the US, it wouldn't be as big of a deal.

The food prices are also quite a bit higher here than in most places, but that's just due to cost of living. It is not uncommon to spend $200 to feed a party of 4 even without alcohol, so that tip on the extra $20.50 starts to add up.

One small township near us does this. They passed a law that states restaurants must put an additional 2% charge on every bill that is used to pay "kitchen staff." When we asked our server about this surprise charge they said "the law requires that we charge it now."

We decided to simply reduce our normal 20% tip by 2% and pay that. We don't like the fact that the city has stepped in to mandate additional fees like this and think this practice should stop.

One thing I've noticed recently on 2 restaurant trips in the last couple weeks: The automatic tip calculations are wrong in the server/restaurant's favor. Most of us typically check the 20% option and don't double-check the math, but in the past these calculations were always done pre-tax. If your food came to $100 and you tipped 20%, the total would be $120 + sales tax.

Now, the last 2 times I've eaten out the automatic tip calculation was done on the post-tax amount. I live in Alameda county where the sales tax is over 10%, so this is a big difference. Not only that, the default tip options were something like 18, 20, and 25%.

The only reason I can see for restaurants to do this is that the minimum wage here is $15/hour, and if tips alone don't make that rate, the restaurant pays out of pocket because it is illegal for them to pay below minimum wage. This seems like yet another example of restaurant owners passing higher labor costs onto customers in a less than ethical way.

Has anyone else noticed a similar practice?

Salt Lake County, Weber County, and Utah County all suffer from inversions during cold weather months, which is much of the winter.

Inversions are where a layer of warm air traps cold, polluted air inside the valley and air pollution accumulates because it can't go anywhere. I grew up in Utah county and I remember the Geneva steel plant was a huge source of pollution. In my environmental studies class we calculated that on cold weather days when there was an inversion the amount of pollution each person breathed every day was equivalent to smoking 3 cigarettes.

Even before internal combustion engines and modern industry the campfires alone must have given Utah valleys the reputation as "smokey valley" by the native Americans. This is not a new phenomenon - the geography of high mountains with lots of population causing pollution in the valleys causes it naturally.

This was an incredible statistic I noticed in the article:

> Air pollution already causes 1-in-5 deaths globally—around 12.1 million premature deaths annually.

Is this accurate?

That's the term I was looking for: resonance modeling. When you hear it in action you realize why most digital pianos sound so terrible. A quality digital or virtual piano models all the resonant frequencies and is a joy to listen to.

You need to go hand over hand. If you're good you can use the palm of a single hand to rotate the wheel (kind of like those handlebars that people used to put on steering wheels years ago to turn them easier).

It is. The CA95 just has Grand Feel II action. I agree, it's one of the best digital pianos I've tried.

I have a Model S Plaid and they do have haptic feedback when you press them, but the problem is they require muscle memory to know the exact place to press to get left/right turn signal or horn.

I'm 6'1" and the horn is particularly problematic because it requires stretching your right thumb an uncomfortable amount to hit it. It reminds me of using a very large smartphone and trying to use your thumb to reach a tap point at the top of the screen. Terrible UX. There have been several times I've needed to honk at someone quickly and been unable to hit the right button.

The other issue with the yoke is that it still requires the same amount of turns as a normal wheel, so 3 point turns and U turns become more challenging. I've adapted, but you also have to use the touchscreen to select forward/reverse, so 3 point turns are like this: - Turn the wheel hard left (hand over hand but you have to grab only the sides) - Brake, then slide reverse on the touchscreen (taking your eyes off the road) - Turn the wheel hard right (hand over hand again) - Brake, then slide forward on the touchscreen (taking your eyes off the road again) - accelerate out of the turn while straightening the wheel

I"m a pretty capable driver but this is way harder than it should be and I can't imagine my wife or many "normal" drivers being able to manage all of this, while taking their eyes off the road, and not causing an accident.

Tesla makes great cars, but it's amazing that NHTSA hasn't recalled the yoke yet...

I sort of prefer the ones without. The Kawai CA95 doesn't have it, but it does have a line input and USB/5 pin MIDI in/out, so you can simply place a tablet (iPad or Android) on the music stand and use a USB cable to play whatever digital synths or piano emulators you want to download.

Not having a built-in tablet means it is future proof and can work with the latest tablet, even a decade into the future.

Kawai makes quite nice digital pianos. The CA95 that we bought about 5 years ago has real wooden hammer action and a wooden soundboard. It also reproduces the harmonics (through digital samples) that you get when you hold the sustain pedal down and play a different string (resonant frequencies can vibrate other strings that you haven't played).

I highly recommend them if you are considering a digital piano.

I'm pretty sure this would be considered a deceptive business practice by most courts of law. You can't just straight up lie about the terms of a business agreement - i.e. if you say you've evaluated a customer's creditworthiness but you really haven't I think there is a very good argument that any agreement was not made in good faith, however, Stripe's ToS probably requires mandatory arbitration, etc, so I'm not sure what recourse you have as a customer.

Strange New Worlds is very good. The story arc about the medical officer who kept his daughter in the transporter buffer was awesome and reminded me of TnG while Gene Roddenberry was still around.

It's even more bizarre when you consider that all of Tolkien's works are based on an incredibly Anglo Saxon/European centric view of the world.

I find it extremely ironic that people are so bent out of shape about a couple characters cast with darker skin. These must be the same people that have no clue that every character in their favorite book (The Bible, King James version) was non-white. These are most likely the same people with the historically inaccurate pictures of Jesus Christ as a caucasian man.

The two largest fantasy franchises in the world are Euro-centric white fantasy (Middle Earth and GoT). It isn't enough that our fantasy canon dominates the world, we need to have every actor be caucasian as well?

I read the timeline and it seems like he started in mid-late 2018, was having performance problems throughout 2019, and didn't even get fired until mid-2020.

This is super generous, and while I have a lot of empathy for his personal situation, I think he could have had a much different outcome if he would have been more proactive about managing expectations: - Amazon does have a bereavement benefit that you definitely should take if you lose a brother like he did. - There are many opportunities to get help from doctors and medical professionals and document any disability you might have, which can help accessing disability benefits - While family medical leave is typically unpaid, if you are making $300K a year and were presumably making a lot less before you took the job, I think you can reasonably take a few months of unpaid family medical leave knowing your job will be there when you return.

I feel bad for the guy in this situation, but I think Amazon was very generous and gave them every opportunity to perform. How many years should a company wait for an underperforming employee to perform?

I'm not a Tesla engineer so I don't know all the details, but this video shows some testing on this subject: https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-research-group-autopilot-cra...

There is a huge disclaimer that you must agree to when you purchase a Tesla vehicle before you drive it off the lot. One of the first things it says is:

> Warning: Traffic-Aware Cruise Control can not detect all objects and may not brake/ decelerate for stationary vehicles, especially in situations when you are driving over 50 mph (80 km/h) and a vehicle you are following moves out of your driving path and a stationary vehicle or object is in front of you instead. Always pay attention to the road ahead and stay prepared to take immediate corrective action. Depending on Traffic-Aware Cruise Control to avoid a collision can result in serious injury or death. In addition, Traffic-Aware Cruise Control may react to vehicles or objects that either do not exist or are not in the lane of travel, causing Model X to slow down unnecessarily or inappropriately.

Commentary: as a Tesla M3 owner, I'm aware of this and can confirm. When a vehicle is completely stationary in the lane in front of you traffic aware cruise control might not see it as an obstruction. TACC uses _changes_ in the image sent from the various cameras to determine whether you have open road in front of you or a vehicle or other obstruction. If there is zero movement TACC will sometimes not be able to tell there is an obstruction.

Most likely the root cause is acidification of the ocean. Increasing the carbon dioxide in the ocean decreases the ph level of water, making it more acidic. While some animals and plants have evolved to handle highly acidic environments, most have not, and in general acid tends to be bad for living creatures. I know I'm oversimplifying things, but this seems reasonable. I assume if there were giant balls of plastic pollution in the whales belly this would be found in an autopsy and therefore plastic pollution is probably not the root cause.

I stopped working there in 2019 and in the few years I worked there I never saw prices on the IT kit in the vending machines. The IT vending machines were one of the better ideas I've seen at companies I've worked at. Many companies would require you to open a ticket and have an IT person hand deliver the keyboard, mouse, or other accessory to your desk. At Amazon, you can just go to the vending machine, swipe your badge, and get whatever you need, no human work required.

How is that a negative? Seems like a more efficient way to operate a company.

In the early days, they had a ton of special configurations, like w.amazon.com - the internal wiki, which was probably running in a datacenter somewhere.

But in recent years, they run entirely on AWS. They even have solutions architects to help them build things in a resilient way. They also spent years ripping out Oracle and replacing it with RDS MySQL, PostgreSQL and Aurora.

It is true that Amazon runs on AWS.

Source: worked there.

> "Andersen Horrowitz"? Does the author have any idea who he is criticizing or what industry they're in?

Once I saw this obvious error and realized the author doesn't even understand that VCs are different from a stock exchange, and can't even spell their name properly, I realized how ridiculous this blog actually is. His Bitcoin argument cemented it.

I want the 5 minutes of my life back that I spent reading this drivel.

You're trivializing the value they provide. If mitigating large scale DDoS attacks was as simple as adding a few iptables rules they would have solved this weeks before paying AWS $3,000 a month for what is effectively an insurance policy.

The reality is that AWS has terabits of bandwidth and can mitigate these attacks upstream from your servers, which have bandwidth measured in gbps, not tbps.

So, unless you have a global network the size and scale of Amazon or Cloudfront, no, you can't just mitigate these attacks with a few firewall rules.

Even though Spotify "lets people drink," it still suffers from many of the same problems that piracy solves. For example, music publishers can arbitrarily decide they don't want you to be able to listen to their music any more, and even if you had "liked" the song to add it to your library, it will show up as greyed out and you can't listen to it.

Here's a song I added to my library a few years ago that I can no longer listen to. It's too bad I didn't buy this song instead of rent it. I could still listen to it if I had... https://open.spotify.com/track/5gk4KOkSqWOCUjnxzILSTG?si=Orl...

This is a great idea, and I'd like to point out that having such a system in place would have prevented one of the largest Internet outages in recent memory - the Amazon S3 outage in 2017: https://aws.amazon.com/message/41926/

> At 9:37AM PST, an authorized S3 team member using an established playbook executed a command which was intended to remove a small number of servers for one of the S3 subsystems that is used by the S3 billing process. Unfortunately, one of the inputs to the command was entered incorrectly and a larger set of servers was removed than intended.

If you're using it properly you can even boot VMs off of it, in the same region (S3 data transfer in region to EC2 is free) like this article is talking about. Just don't enable public read on your bucket to avoid a surprise bill.