altairprime

This likely violates some combination of state and federal laws around electronic delivery of written receipts by seller to buyer; Washington state law expressly defines a ‘delivered’ written communication to have exited electronic systems under the sender’s control, and nothing about this email qualifies as ‘lists the exact items sold and exact prices paid’. Assuming someone does their due diligence on UCC, US, and Washington & California law, I suspect Amazon has years of liability exposure to a class-action suit seeking recompense (written receipts provided by email) and damages (to ensure future compliance by Amazon & others) on behalf of every U.S. Amazon customer for acting with express intentions to violate such theorized ‘purchase receipt delivered in writing’ laws. Further research required, and I hope someone ends up doing it!

There’s a clear thread of human effort and presence from The Muppets to Space Jam to Dune that this Odyssey movie’s creators understood. People want Amelié, not Avengers. It’s fine to use so much CGI that your film can’t be re-exported in 4K (yes, that’s why) so long as you have people wearing stuff and standing in front of other stuff. It’s not fine to film your entire movie with mocap bodysuits on green backgrounds and having them perform to a tennis ball as co-actor that will be AI-generated from a dead actor later. I probably won’t watch the Odyssey but I will absolutely celebrate this aspect of it to others now that I know.

This is a very smart use of the mandatory HSM for Windows 11, and is likely serving as a trial balloon for their new under-the-hood “PC console” anti-cheating resilience. If they can encrypt the games at rest using the HSM* and prevent memory scraping by driver / debug hacks, then they will have successfully replaced most of Xbox with PCs — and with sufficient rigor, should be lined up to enable PC multiplayer crossplay with consoles (grouped by gamepad or mouse/keyboard as usual).

* AMD’s ‘Pluton’ HSM BIOS option is referring to AMD having embedded the Microsoft Xbox Pluton chip’s functionality into silicon, to make clear just how many years ago Microsoft started laying the bricks into this path. https://www.amd.com/content/dam/amd/en/documents/products/pr...

Neat analogy, but this hour-long meeting should have been a one paragraph email. The following paragraph took around one minute per word on average, and doesn’t have severe overtones of spiritual marketing:

Consider your personal capacity to Learn, Witness, Exist as a circuit: simple chores braid your copper strands together, and water shunts any excess to circuit. It’s hard for others to read your circuit’s state, and they may confuse the joy of carrying peak load with the misery of copper-melting overload. Braid often and ground excess, so that your strands solidify and your load rating increases.

It won’t engender the feelings of ‘spiritual awe’ slash ‘belief entrancement’, the preferred method of enlistment by second-gen 80s cults and 90s gurus, but it’s also a much better platform from which to launch into a more composed blog post than the ‘may as well have been a twitter link’ quality we have here.

2nd best, not. 100th, better to get a great LCD than a junk OLED?

Technically, this is year (2020), because that’s when they added CSV export, given the article title. Looks like they crossed the threshold a week ago?

(Email the mods to clear up the editorial title problem; footer contact link.)

The historical meaning is, "do not interpret command line arguments following --"; e.g. the classical form shown by `echo > -f; rm -- -f`. Git has a more complex interpretation of it and no doubt there's others, but this root interpretation remains generally sound: It acts as a boundary between 'complex and intelligent processing of @ARGV elements' and 'every remaining element of @ARGV after -- is treated a string literal without further processing'.

As a web developer, I am not included in the perception difference I describe. I am also 0.000001% and not a representative sample of People As A Whole Or Even As A Majority Or Significant Fraction. So while my personal awareness is akin to yours, extrapolating from that towards the masses is a dead end exercise.

CPU bound games examples: Chess, Go, Final Fantasy XIV, Elite Dangerous, and any competent Civilization / 4X or turn-based strategy game. Yes, you can dial up the graphics on these to force them to be GPU bound, but they’re each CPU bound in their own unique ways. Perhaps none such games appeal to you, but as with above, extrapolating from personal preferences is a non-starter.

Non-tech people teach each other to force-quit apps to stop their battery drain. Websites aren’t apps, so their phone ‘randomly’ gets hot sometimes and they either have no idea why or just try closing all tabs in a vague hope that it works. Sometimes a webpage uses up all their data for the month downloading ads and so they stop using the web over cellular at all.

This is the baseline level of competence that improving the web must be aiming for — not ‘web developers will understand that the tab is using lots of battery and must be closed’. Making the web better is not about making the web significantly more battery-hungry, no matter how pretty it might seem. No visual advancement in radio button UX is worth a continuous repaint in JavaScript.

Video games only get away with this because their energy draw is obvious: one launched the video game, so one expects the power draw. Visiting a web page does not have that action-reaction causality in people’s minds. Having a random web page introduce maximally-inefficient repaints also leads browsers to start reducing timeslices — especially those with any sort of power drain cognizance, such as Safari — which, here, leads to hella janky animations that can’t cope without their inefficient repaint loop.

All this work to replicate the animated blobbiness of Liquid Glass. I thought everyone hated it! So, then, why is this a thing?

Ew ew ew visceral uncanny valley reaction to the on/off control. I never made it to scrolling.

This reads like an ad for Hetzner. Thanks, antispam experience!

Disposable scrubs are already a thing! But they have specific and reasonable causes for their production and use, unlike fast fashion.

The EU-wide 10% reduction in 5 years is a union-level response to the member states failing to make consistent and timely progress towards the 50% reduction target, replacing unenforced targets with enforced ones:

food waste generation is not decreasing as required to make significant progress towards Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) Target 12.3 [which] calls for halving per capita global food waste at retail and consumer level

Sadly, their general analysis found that:

for most companies, for every $1 invested in reducing food waste, they saved $14 or more

And another in restaurants specifically found a median of $1 invested, $6 saved; so this is an unusual case where businesses are ignoring potential profit gains. The industry-specific analysis found "that food waste is not typically measured as part of a restaurant’s standard operating procedures" and "that information is not always communicated back to food service teams", with the outliers who had prevented their food waste having all implemented those exact two things:

The business case for reducing food loss and waste: Restaurants (2019) https://food.ec.europa.eu/document/download/a618c472-602e-45...

Blame for this issue is placed squarely, and deservedly, on management rather than line workers (who often spoke up and were disregarded) for failing to make this a priority over competing interests. Once the EU intervened and offered small investments to bait managers into compliance — "average cost to invest in food waste reduction was only 0.4 percent of annual food sales" — food waste dropped by +/-50% and total COGS dropped by 2%.

One of their test companies was IKEA, which saw -20% waste in 12 weeks; 3 years later, IKEA crossed the -50% waste threshold voluntarily.

So I think that a large part of this is that trickle-down voluntary regulation doesn't work: the EU didn't issue binding regulations onto its states, so the states were unreliable at delivering meaningful regulations to their industries, so the businesses were unreliable at realizing or caring about 'investing in future cost savings' when they see only drawbacks in direct staffing costs and temporary reductions in service efficiency for process redevelopment.

Glad to see the EU hold the states' feet to the fire on this all. They started with food and apparel, but once those are being properly addressed there's more waiting :)

That sounds very expensive, given that I was raised lower-middle class. Perhaps not so much to pro sports or tech folks? Apologies for misreading, I guess :)

Brand signaling is taught to Marketing bachelor graduates and is taken for granted as a legitimate and real thing in their profession. I am rather brand-blind myself but I tend not to extrapolate from my own experiences to that of others.

Possibly? I’m not sure anyone’s ever considered it before, since prior to this EU regulation there was nothing directing innovation in this space. I might well be the first to come up with the idea :)

Corporations regularly price goods higher than demand in order to delay lowering prices or create artificial scarcity — see gas stations, rental collusion companies, and Prada bags, for example. Charities don’t have to sell clothes received at all to ‘pay’ the donator in tax credits. This law is about forcing corporations to one way or another deliver 100% of their finished goods to end users rather than diverting a massive fraction of that to waste streams, and charities can use clothes up to a point.

The EU seems to agree: the 2030 target, set in 2025, requires a reduction of “10%, in processing and manufacturing” which will probably have an oversized impact on waste in actual kilos reduced, relative to the combined retail-domestic target.

The EU has targeted foodservice with regulation as well, though it’s phased much more slowly (2030) than the clothing law was:

https://food.ec.europa.eu/food-safety/food-waste/eu-food-was...

Here, too, they consider “stop overproducing” to be the biggest problem on the pyramid. I’m not as familiar with this effort (nor if it, or any related initiative, affects to-go / disposal-ware) but one can reasonably imagine they are targeting all severely wasteful overproduction given enough time.

There’s a missing component here: “Pray we do not regulate the deal further.”

Governments tend to be annoyed at having to regulate and will often ‘somewhat’ regulate the worst excesses and then do the equivalent of a staring contest with those regulated. If business push right up to the wire and fight every tiny loophole then they risk being hit with a second wave of much more severe regulations; if they generally comply and don’t embarrass regulators and politicians, then there isn’t need to spend more capital on better regulation. At some level it’s very costly to micromanage business regulation gestures at California but so there’s definitely some decisions to be made about How Far To Go Each Time that aren’t simply due to a lack of political willpower.

You haven’t dealt with German bureaucracy then.

‘Europe’ is not substitutable by ‘Germany’: a one state counter-example does not substantiate a disproof of a union. Texas is not representative of how U.S. patent law works. Florida is not representative of how U.S. business regulation works. So, the recent HN post about German incorporation slowness fails, in isolation, to disprove the claim above that the US is more regulated than the EU; you’ll need to make your own case (or relevant citations!) about the EU (or Europe) rather than just Germany to be taken seriously here. Do you argue that “many” is the minority case out of all European countries? Are you evaluating difficulty weighted by GDP? Are you evaluating EU and non-EU together or separately? etc.

Regarding ‘wealth signaling’, a similar lens to mine would be ‘brand dilution’, which is certainly a more widely-accepted concept in business management; see also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48959809

The EU has disagreed with Nike, and the law is now in effect.

Fashionable clothes are perishable.

False. Not all apparel demand is for street cred, and non-‘season’ clothes can still be fashionable. ‘Last season’ is about wealth signaling and FOMO, and while I do love fashion as an entertainment and my hobby in design of it, the level of flux we have now in everyday clothing shapes and fabrics is openly hostile to the non-wealthy being clothed well. I don’t know if the EU’s regulations will work in full or at all, but I’m cheering them for trying.

A while back someone on Tumblr noted that they would buy and wear a full 360° hue spectrum of 360 t-shirts in spectrum order from 0..359, just to fuck with people’s minds as their shirt is the same color day after day until suddenly “wait, I thought your shirt was green” makes the people around them feel like they’re hallucinating en masse. This joke — well, it’s not a joke, this product with great fit would sell out even at 30° intervals! — T-shirts are shaped the same year after year, and fast fashion has had to resort to mining old brand imagery to try and convince people to buy them. Meanwhile, it’s impossible to find unprinted t-shirts at outlier sizes, because that’s slightly less profitable than waves of shapeless L-XL junk. Yes, I’m fine with Hot Topic collaborations, but they need to stop being the market majority.

The missing factor in cheap-fast fashion here is warehousing costs. Companies are shredding shoes and landfilling clothing — and underproducing relative to what they could sell — rather than paying money to store products in a warehouse. One possible outcome the EU sellers can choose is to reinvest in product storage, so that they can raise their production targets to meet demand rather than to minimize product storage — at which point there is a vast demand for outlier sizes that is, today, unmet due to the unwillingness to store anything.

If a charity sets up a ‘returned product classification’ flow and issues tax credits to companies donating their return flow to the charity, then companies can simply shunt returns to charity and lower their costs in triplicate: 1) changeover of return provider replaces expense with deduction; 2) compliance with EU regulations costs shipping to charity; 3) charity provides itemized receipts for compliance and further tax credits. Of course, companies won’t actually lower their prices to reflect the net reduction in costs, but it will certainly strip away the excuse that they must raise costs.

Yes, this will likely exacerbate that further in the short-term: if retailers simply stop producing outlier sizes to reduce disposal of those sizes, then various niches will open up. In US women’s flats, very few go up to size 12+ (it’s already higher-cost to make products in outlier sizes and most don’t!) and so the one retailer (agaik) that offers that size has 100% market share, and keeps an inventory warehouse of unsold product that is listed until it sells at up to 80% discounts after a year-plus on the shelf. Another handful of retailers specialize exclusively in women’s clothing for people XL and above, which allows them to profit equally as well from less-common sizes.

My hope, however, is that this reduces overseas manufacturing in favor of domestic, which would allow retailers to dramatically reduce the shipping costs for small production batches, so that they’re able to simply produce more small batches of less-common sizes in response to demand. Sure, they might see a few percent lower profits per item, but they’ll be able to sell considerably more of their product simply by raising their supply to meet demand with finer granularity than the cheaper ‘produce an entire season one-time only and store it in a cargo container’ model offers today.

Nike certainly could choose to sell at a discount rather than grind unsold shoes into rubber. They have a wealth-signal brand to maintain, however, so they will resist doing so if at all possible.

To clarify without using the word ‘waste’ into two simple bullets:

1. Destruction is conversion of any usable product X to any non-X form (even if the new form is usable).

2. Destruction is prohibited (for large businesses, right now).

Usable is not perfectly defined and will be a judgment call, but one can construct a common sense set of ‘what is unusable?’ definitions that an inspector or judge would accept — so long as sellers have not explicitly caused such outcomes:

- Product lacks structural integrity (a loose thread doesn’t count, a missing sleeve does count)

- Product is contaminated (tried on and didn’t fit doesn’t count, motor oil stains does count)

- Product is unsafe (tried on and didn’t fit doesn’t count, underwear returned with safety liner removed may count, product has been worn for more than try-on period may count)

Note that, for example, the EU is likely to say ‘launder it first, then donate it’ for products that are worn and returned but can be safely donated after laundering; so they are specifically aware of some of the loopholes that corps will aim for first.

The EU is definitely studying the donations / tax-credit economy across its states; I expect that working group will be paying very close attention to donation outcomes union-wide in the coming months.

Tax incentives for donations to social economy entities: Models, trends, and challenges (2025) https://social-economy-gateway.ec.europa.eu/document/downloa...

At minimum, any medium business will be tracking disposal costs in its accounting books; the EU rule effectively taxes disposal by imposing regulatory processes upon it, so the net cost of disposal will increase to reflect the paper trail costs. The phased-in ‘large first, medium next’ started a while ago, giving mediums about twice as long (iirc?) to prepare for compliance as larges. One of the more predictable outcomes is that retailers will need to inspect and classify their completed-product waste streams, rather than simply dump every return bucket into the trash. Retailers are expected to do everything in their power to reduce the total volume of material inspected in order to increase profits, which in concert with stricter return regulations already in place, will force them to do various things.

Small retailers that process returns by taking the item out of the envelope, studying it, and then putting it back up for sale (either at full or reduced price, depending on new or cosmetic defect) will be entirely unaffected because their production costs vastly exceed their return inspection costs and they’ve been recording ‘sellable’ vs ‘worn’ vs ‘cosmetic defect’ somewhere this whole time anyways (or else they’d collapse even without these regulations!), and medium businesses will likely find their profits temporarily reduced — but since they were disposing of sellable products to begin with, they can either sell them to recover profits, donate them to reduce taxes, or accept the fractional inspection charge against profits and continue as-is.

Some possibilities: Reduce production defects (slower production/qa times), return rate), Reduce size variability (slower production/qa times), Improve fabric quality (higher production costs, lower future sales), Provide more detailed sizing charts (higher sales cost, lower return rates), Provide more consistent sizing (eg. band size 85 is not 80-90cm between different models and different brands), Reduce production batch sizes (less waste, more shipping costs), Reduce overseas manufacturing (higher cost production, lower cost/time shipping), Sell entire batches until sold out (increased inventory costs, maintains brand wealth-image), Donate wearable clothing to charity (tax deductions, goodwill), Switch from overseas large-batch production to domestic JIT (reduces inventory of never-sold products to zero), and so on.