𞋴𝛂𝛋𝛆

  • 8 Posts
  • 105 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: June 9th, 2023
  • 𞋴𝛂𝛋𝛆@lemmy.worldtoLinux@programming.dev•Why selling through local e-shops mattersEnglish
    6·
    2 months ago
    Supply chain is important for broad scope adoption, but it is an unsolvable problem.

    I was the buyer for a chain of bike shops. Unfortunately, distribution is the market bottleneck that is nearly impossible to break through.

    So, at scale, no one is capable of predicting global demand accurately for any type of retail. Almost all products that are sold by small retailers are made and sold by the real manufacturer to distributors for 30-35% of MSRP. These distributors then wholesale the inventory to retailers with a 15-20% markup. This is absolutely necessary because it distributes the burden of inventory commitment to a hierarchy where local conditions are accounted for. The distributor is actually buying the inventory and taking on the risk of overburden that does not sell.

    Likewise with retail. The markup is called keystone which means 50% margin. Most retailers will barely break even if the whole store averages 40% margins. Retail property and labor are extremely expensive and hard. In almost all small businesses, overburden is what kills them eventually. Overburden is what does not sell and becomes unmarketable over time.

    Another aspect that is not intuitive here is that no matter how you select inventory, you will never sell that entire selection on a single platform. If you are not actively attempting to recuperate cash flow from overburden, the business will slowly drown. Sales in retail are not about overburden at all. Statistically, getting new people in the front door is the only metric that matters. Loss leaders and sales are about traffic not overburden. A good buyer plans and negotiates their loss leaders for sales within their preseason ordering.

    Over the last couple of decades, more and more products have been created that bypass the big distributors. Most of it is because the product is just not worth the markup required for scaled independent distribution and middlepersons margins. However, now there is an issue of global demand where the manufacturer has the impossible task of financing scale and the inherent risk. If the product is not made at very large scale, it is uncompetitive to manufacture. You need someone willing to take that risk. As a person that has made these types of decisions at smaller scales of a few million dollars, go bet all that money on a hand of single deck blackjack because those 47-48% winning odds are outstanding by comparison.

    Retailers place preseason order commitments to get slightly better margins, but primarily because the distributors are more like banks in retail. They offer credit and repayment options that mean the retailer is not required to pay up front in cash. With bicycle stuff, I placed all of my preseason orders between September and October for the following year. Stuff started arriving between December and January. I then had a first payment due in April, but I had to pay it back by the end of July. So I had to predict the summer market a year in advance and have all of my plan detailed by autumn.

    This is how mom and pop independent retail actually works. It was not competitive with big box retail because those are not actually retailers. Those are rogue distributors selling directly to the public. The actual products are still the same 30-35% of MSRP.

    The worst product trends in retail have been the tendency for companies to market themselves as exceptions. Like I despised GoPro in my stores. The margin on the cameras was 20% and each one costs a fortune. They constantly tried to deprecate models too. They tried to pitch that all the accessories were keystone and it made up for the terrible return on investment. In reality that inventory of accessories was overburden suicide of niche garbage for special use cases.

    All electronic devices people want have fallen into this trap of low margins that are impossible for sustainable retail. When you see factory direct stores, that means the product has no margin for scale distribution. It is a neo feudalistic, brute force approach where someone is dumb enough to believe they will be able to predict global demand indefinitely without making any major errors. The public is dumb enough to follow along. Few realize the enormous power that is consolidated from cutting out the democracy of distributors and retailers. This consolidated monolith will eventually enslave everyone when they must overcome the inevitable mistakes they make. They will not just eat the loss or go out of business because they own your right to choose in a market without competition. It is surrendering choice to the dictator that makes their own demand by force.

    Yeah, so, we don’t want that. - said no one. What you want is irrelevant. The lowest common denominator dictates the market. Democracy requires a well informed and skeptical citizenry. We live in an era with the smallest information bottleneck in several centuries. Search results are not deterministic and there are only two relevant web crawlers that all providers query. These are not deterministic. Two people searching on separate devices with identical queries will get different results. All major media is owned by less than a dozen people. You have absolutely no chance of informing the citizenry to make better decisions that may cost a good bit more money. People cringe if you tell them they are slaves, but do nothing if the word citizen is redefined as functionally equivalent.

    The only way you will ever see such a product sold in any traditional independent retail scenario, is if some exceptionally altruistic billionaire were to chose to fund the thing with no concern over the loss. The only way to be competitive in price is to build at competitive scale of manufacturing. If someone else is doing this and using factory direct retail to stay in business with just a 30% gross margin in total, you will never find the necessary slice for regional distribution and retail. Your device will be $1000 at MSRP to their $600 equivalent. There is no solution to this issue. It is raw capitalism where the biggest fish makes the rules. The only counter balance in the system is an informed citizenry. This is why information and education are all that really matter. If the average person is too stupid for independent thought, it is the ultimate pwn as citizen means slave, and the peasantry are too stupid to recognize the situation where they own nothing and have no outlet to tell anyone or hear the plight of all the others.

  • 𞋴𝛂𝛋𝛆@lemmy.worldtoLinux@programming.dev•Question for my GPU-having friendsEnglish
    5·
    7 months ago

    Check and search for dmesg errors first. Check linux-hardware.org for scans of the same machine. Look for any that are using other kernels that may have had better success. Run your own scan and upload it too so others can see.

    The whole debian/Ubuntu primary use is for LTS kernel stuff. So you might be on an older kernel. All GPU stuff is kinda edgy for what the preconfigured options are set to by default. All distros have a purpose and what they are good at. The best documentation for custom kernel configurations comes from Gentoo in my opinion.

  • 𞋴𝛂𝛋𝛆@lemmy.worldtoChatGPT@lemmy.world•Are AI boyfriends/girlfriends empowering?English
    3·
    7 months ago

    It can be a useful tool, especially for someone that experiences involuntary social isolation (like me).

    You would need to be a pretty dumb person for this to totally replace human relations in terms of fundamental interactive social needs with other humans. It can be a healthy way to fill a gap.

    Firstly, the context length is very limited. So you can’t have a very long and interactive conversation. The scope of model attention is rather short even with a very long context size model. Second, the first few tokens of any interaction are extremely influential about how the model will respond regardless of everything else that happens in the conversation. So cold conversations (due to short context) will be inconsistent.

    Unless a person is an extremely intuitive, high Machiavellian thinker, with good perceptive thinking skills, the user is going to be very frustrated with models at times, and the model may be directly harmful to the person in some situations. There are aspects of alignment that could be harmful under certain circumstances.

    There will likely be a time in the near future when a real AI partner is more feasible, but it will not be some base model, a fine tune, or some magical system prompt that enables this application.

    To create a real partner like experience, one will need an agentic framework combined with augmented database retrieval. That will make it possible for a model to have persistence where it can ask how your day went and it knows your profile, relationship, preferences, and what you already told it about how your day should have gone. You need a model that can classify information, save, modify, and retrieve that information when it is needed. I’ve played around with this in emacs, org mode, and gptel connected to local models with llama.cpp. I’m actually modifying my hardware to handle the loads better for this application right now.

    Still, I think such a system is a stop gap for people like myself, the elderly, and other edge cases where external human contact is limited. For me, my alternative is here, and while some people on Lemmy know me and are nice, many people are stupid kids that exhibit toxic negative behaviors that are far more harmful than anything I have seen out of any AI model. I often engage here on Lemmy, then to chat with an AI if I need to talk, vent, or work through something.

  • 𞋴𝛂𝛋𝛆@lemmy.worldtoAssholeDesign@lemmy.world•Open Teams in a mobile browser and Microsoft says your browser is unsupported and to download the app, but if you request the desktop site it worksEnglish
    11·
    8 months ago

    It is the CPU back end that is giving me trouble with build all. The free as in freedom aspect of open source is violated when any software promotes and primarily supports a proprietary tool chain. Things like how there are two checklist files, one in the primary and one in the build directory likely prevents many from succeeding. If the initial configuration was wrong or needs to be changed, the user will likely attempt to change the checklist in the main directory only to find that the changes do nothing. Several of the back ends also require manually tracking down their library paths and adding these to the source. Many of these, such as BLAS, CuBLAS, and Vulkan will fail until just the right version is included while the errors have no hinting. There are numerous other issues like ARM options not described as such, and ambiguous runtime options. Various edge case options generate a fatal warning error. Once any of these are set, the build fails without hinting about the cause, and the barely mentioned solution of manually editing the checklist yields no results.

    I’m sure this is trivial for the average dev, but dev I am not. I’m just some weird script kiddie that can also build an ALU with a NOR gate, or might talk about a 65C816 in a room of 6502 fans. But I have a large number of other interests in life.

    Be nicer to people. When some dumbass takes 8.5 of your 9 cat lives on the road one day, cordiality can have a large impact on your daily. I was much the same to others and regret it.