r00ty

The sun always shines on pc.

There’s plenty of country in America for him to fuck up over the next four years. We have enough problems in the UK, we don’t need him or musk to add to them.

The thing is, they do already have lock-in in some ways at least. Otherwise I cannot imagine a restaurant wanting to give away 30% of each sale this way. Unless the other option is virtually no traffic.

Now see, I kinda had the idea for a syndicated delivery service (not online orders, but the internet would have been used to create the order data that would assign drivers) decades ago. I did some part time work delivering food back in the late 90s/early 2000s, and I always thought it was so inefficient. The place I was at, was very busy, he had a very large delivery area but even so. There would be times he was paying people to sit outside talking shit to eachother in their cars.

I thought it would make sense to have a larger pool of drivers that service multiple restaurants/take-aways. Adding the economies of scale to the problem to ensure that people were being utilised and lowering the cost to each place using the service. Of course also paying some money to the person running the business that brought it all together.

I don’t think I ever considered paying less than this guy did (which wasn’t a lot, but would likely translate to $5 or so an hour in the 90s/2000s).

One thing I find really interesting about uber eats/door dash (US)/Deliveroo (UK/EU). When you add up their fees, they take a delivery fee from the user, a service fee from the user, an even bigger service fee from the restaurant and pay the lowest possible fee that will keep drivers interested. Yet I always hear the services are losing money too. How is that even possible?

Take deliveroo in the UK. Looking now I can see (I don’t live in a city, so most places are some distance away). A place 4.5 miles away is charging £4.29 for delivery. Let’s make up an imaginary order:

Order total: £20 (including sales tax/VAT) User’s service fee: £2.39 (it seems to be 11% including the VAT with a maximum set of which I am not sure how much) User’s delivery fee: £4.29 (including VAT, since they need to charge VAT on a service) Restaurant service fee: £6 (30% on the VAT included total). I am really unsure how this works entirely in terms of tax though… Total for user: £26.68

Total deliveroo service revenue: Net: £10.57 VAT: £2.11 Total: £12.68

Reading between the lines from what I can see delivery riders are paid between £3 and £6 per delivery. Now, in the cities this is probably great. I do wonder how they do it in the towns and villages. When I look at the list of places available to me most are 3 miles or more away, with some up to 6 miles away. I do wonder how £6 compensates someone doing a 10+ mile round trip at times.

But OK the price they pay drivers doesn’t include any tax. So it comes from the Net total. This means per delivery in revenue they are always making £4.50 or more per delivery.

Yes, they need to pay support staff, but they are in low cost geographies. Yes, they need to keep development staff and the usual management overhead And yes, they need servers/cloud time to host this stuff.

Looking this up (not sure how good the source is) their revenue in 2023 was £2.7billion, which I believe. However they lost £38million. Where all the costs come from, I am not sure.

I wonder how these numbers compare to US based operators?

Well, I mean if you want to go down the 1984 route (I hope not), a VPN license is a great tool for achieving such things.

I’ll give you an example, I have an amateur radio license in the UK. Part of the terms are that I must allow anyone authorised by Ofcom (the radio telecommunications agency over here) access to inspect my equipment and setup… Now ideally it would be in a building other than my house. But for most people, it would probably be in their house. So you need to let them in.

VPN License? Well probably it would have the same terms. “Excuse me sir, we have detected the use of VPN traffic at these premises. We are warranted to enter the premises for the purpose of ensuring this traffic is related to the primary business as noted on your VPN license, please step aside from your computing devices”

Alright, it won’t happen in reality. But, a lot of countries really have wanted to crack down on the use of encryption for some time now.

Really? None. I suspect one or two of the literally 100s of non partisan candidates were actually there to do good? I think the point being made (and this goes for all democratic systems), is that 99% of the population could not name more than 5 names on the ballot. Let alone consider voting for them.

People vote for parties and ALL of the parties are funded by someone. Ultimately, we do it to ourselves.

1999. I was part of the ADSL trial in the UK and have been on a form of broadband ever since.

Yeah, I think in this case there’s a lot more tiny conductors sharing what can add up to pretty high current loads on PD connections. Adding extra connectors adding resistance to low (5-20v) voltage high current connections is adding an extra failure point and increasing resistance on the whole cable run.

Not inherently unsafe, but just not a good idea to promote because you know someone will try to run a 200w charging cable for 30m with like 5 connected cables.

Face it USA. You have 4 years of internet trolls governing by meme.

We can see it ourselves. We use rabbitmq for incoming (and maybe outgoing, it’s been a while since I looked at how it is) federation. So, you can see the queues there. For incoming (from rabbitmq) and outgoing there are also queues (symfony messenger) and these handle failures and can be configured and can be queried.

After the upgrade I just took the default configuration again (because it seems queue names changed). But I used to have various rules setup in rabbitmq for retries and it took a fair few tries before the messages ended up in the proper “failed” queue (which needs manual action to retry). Some items you eventually need to clear (instances that just shutdown, or instances that lost their domain for example). They will never complete.

But it’s not exposed in any way to my knowledge. Well unless people have their rabbitmq web interface open and without login of course.

I think it must be hit/miss. Because I think those edits I made would have gone from my instance to world and then from world to .ee, and it was happening within seconds.

So, presumably random stuff is being dropped or delayed?

That makes sense. So it’s showing me world’s federation with me and not the other way (since I’m not sure such info is available on mbin)

Wait, how do they get that data remotely? I was looking at my instance vs world and I saw there’s like the +1 hour from a week or so ago when I upgraded to latest mbin lol.

I guess they’re looking at common activities and when they appear on each?

Looking at incoming request. .world is working OK for me. They seem to be batching stuff like I’ll get nothing for 30 seconds, then over 3 seconds like 50+ requests.

Of course I don’t know if their queue is backed up and I’m getting delayed stuff. I’d need to stop processing and look into the incoming queue to see what they’re sending.

Bit of an edit. Looking at incoming again I can see under newest items, an entry from world that was 11 minutes old. Oh I have an idea. I’ll see if this edit gets there in a timely manner.

Spoiler alert, it was instant.

Oh ignore me. It’s specifically between those two instances I guess.

Homer Simpson: No you won’t.

Well for a gamer no real comment. But there is one metric Intel still trashes AMD in for the APU. Hardware video acceleration/encoding. The quality is objectively better on Intel Quicksync.

When getting a home box that also needed to do transcoding, Intel CPU was a requirement. My desktop development/gaming system? Ryzen + NVidia.

Well, apparently the first round has been annulled entirely. Which I am sure will be pretty spicy over there. Did I mention I’m going to .ro next week? Should be fun.

Aha, finally an English language story https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cn4x2epppego

“Ummm, just testing democracy. Well done everyone!” <cough>

I’m on NVidia with blob driver, KDE Plasma on wayland on Arch. Yeah, standby to resume is like 50/50 the screen will come back. I just turned off stand-by and kept screen sleep only.

But I’m on desktop so less of a problem for me than it would be for a laptop user.

That said there could be better ways to show info like this on the fediverse. Except, it’s complicated.

You could be banned on an instance, but also separately banned on an individual community on an instance, or your instance could be defederated from one running a community. Any of which could lock you out in theory.

It’s not as clear cut as closed systems. This is mostly a good thing but for clarity, not so much :p