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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • I guess this device needed to connect to some remotely hosted server that enabled its functionality. And the company was losing money and hoping that sales would eventually pick up enough to make them profitable. But their latest investor decided not to put any more money in, and the company ran out of cash and can’t pay its bills anymore.

    The entrepreneur thought he could get more investor cash and ran the business in such a way that it would fall off a cliff if he didn’t. And… He failed to secure more financing.

    I have mixed feelings about products like this… If the device somehow needed to host an entire internet’s worth of data to function, it certainly wouldn’t have cost only $800. But when you buy a product that depends on the ongoing viability of the seller, you’re in a position of caveat emptor - You better vet them out yourself, especially if they’re new.

    Hopefully the founders feel some emotional attachment to their product and the trust bestowed upon them by their unknowing customers, and release whatever on the back end makes the thing work so that motivated customers could reactivate their devices somehow.


  • Hah, I installed Postiz just yesterday, interesting to see this thread. It’s like buffer or one of the other paid tools to schedule your social media posts and track engagement. Of course, of particular interest to our community, Postiz is self hosted.

    It doesn’t have as many features yet as the major SaaS businesses, but the software is looking good and quite usable right now. I’m sure the more people who use it and support the developer, the more this tool can grow.

    For example you can plug in your OpenAI API key and get an LLM chat interface inside the software while writing social posts. But I don’t think it learns your style or creates posts using any kind of system prompt yet unless you type it in each time.

    Another thing I couldn’t figure out so far is how to limit which social media channels individual users can see. For example my business has several different units and there’s a different marketing team on each unit, so they shouldn’t be able to post into other channels.

    If you’re in the business of needing to post regularly on a lot of channels I think postiz is worth checking out.


  • The factory gets paid in step #1 (many can accept direct wire transfers or have Hong Kong/Singapore/ or even New York banks). Sometimes a deposit is made to start an order and the final amount is paid to release it from the factory after inspection.

    There are agents who can handle funds on your behalf and when you work with a new factory or it is a super large order, it is common to use a service that will escrow the funds until the goods have been inspected and released.

    Sometimes we even have our own staff monitor the assembly and packaging inside the factory to be sure the quality of parts we ordered are actually going into each piece. This is normal every day in Chinese factories, they know the game.


  • Here’s how tariffs work (I import stuff from china)

    1. I find a Chinese manufacturer of widgets and negotiate with them. One of their first questions is, what incoterms do I require? I tell them EXW which makes their quotation the easiest to provide.

    EXW means that once the goods are ready, I’ll send my shipping agent to go get them and bring them to me in my country.

    1. I call my agent and tell them to get the goods. They ask a lot of questions about the contents of the goods and figure out which HS code to use, which is a classification of what the goods are (such as bicycle tires, or unfinished lumber, or whatever).

    2. The agent prepares an assload of documentation for my shipment. They send a truck to the Chinese warehouse, get the stuff, load it into a container, take it to a shipyard. It’s loaded, boat moves to the US, boat is then unloaded, and my container is put into an inspection queue.

    3. The shipping agent forwards the documents about my container, which has not been released, to US customs. US customers decides if they want to manually inspect it or not, and then issues an invoice for the taxes. My agent calls me and says Mr. Nucleative, your customs bill is $9,845.50.

    I pay them, they pay the US customs office. Customs releases my container.

    1. The truck is cleared to pick up my container and drive it to my warehouse.

    2. Now I unload and sell the goods to my customers.

    Did you notice in step #4 that I paid the import tariffs? Now my cost to get the goods to my customers went way up. My margins are pretty thin, so I can’t do this business unless I charge my customers more or else I’m running a charity. Now, my customers have to pay me more. That money goes straight to the US government.

    Hypothetically now it’s less unattractive to set up a factory in the USA, encouraging more local jobs. But damn, did you know we also need to import rubber, and metal, and machine parts, and cardboard for packaging, and all the other raw supplies either way? The local factories, if there are any, can probably not increase production to meet demand anyways, at least not in a month or two. Does anybody remember what happend when demand outstrips supply?

    There is no rocket science here, just people learning from the wrong people.




  • nucleative@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.worldBluesky hits 20 million users
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    29 days ago

    Me too but here’s one useful function:

    Perhaps you are aware there is an ongoing event, say for example a football game, or an election, or an outage of your email service provider. You go to one of these “scream into the void” social sites, search on the topic, and learn what people are saying about it. Maybe someone knows what’s really going on, maybe some of those people have some interesting insights and you engage with them, not unlike you and I are engaging right now. Others can observe, perhaps contribute, and after the event has concluded, everyone goes their own way. Hopefully in the end the interactions are beneficial for all.





  • Global trade drove the cost of supplies and goods down to the lowest available prices, so while setting tariffs may encourage local production because it makes overseas less attractive, the price of goods still goes up on both scenarios.

    If moved locally, there will be more local labor required for production but it’s not clear if that is a net benefit.

    Hypothetically under globalism more developed countries shed their “dirty manufacturing labor jobs” and move more people upmarket. Of course this is matter of nonstop debate among economists because as we all know the whole population of a country can’t move upmarket together and a lot of people were/are screwed because of lack of education and opportunity to develop themselves.

    In an ideal implemention of this, more people would be moving to the arts, self expression, and technology, while fewer are involved in survival activities like shelter and food.

    I think the unsolved problem now is that average people believe way too much of that wealth went to the top while the middle class is working harder than ever and getting less.



  • Python developer here. Venv is good, venv is life. Every single project I create starts with

    python3 -m venv venv

    source venv/bin/activate

    pip3 install {everything I need}

    pip3 freeze > requirements.txt

    Now write code!

    Don’t forget to update your requirements.txt using pip3 freeze again anytime you add a new library with pip.

    If you installed a lot of packages before starting to develop with virtual environments, some libraries will be in your OS python install and won’t be reflected in pip freeze and won’t get into your venv. This is the root of all evil. First of all, don’t do that. Second, you can force libraries to install into your venv despite them also being in your system by installing like so:

    pip3 install --ignore-installed mypackage

    If you don’t change between Linux and windows most libraries will just work between systems, but if you have problems on another system, just recreate the whole venv structure

    rm -rf venv (…make a new venv, activate it) pip3 install -r requirements.txt

    Once you get the hang of this you can make Python behave without a lot of hassle.

    This is a case where a strength can also be a weakness.