Hahaha, I totally forgot about this, but the reference is almost scary in a way. Life imitating art and pretty fantastical elements of science fiction becoming reality.

What a weird world we live in.

I am an atheist (albeit I support our national churches/religious entities and believe they should be state financed) and it is fascinating that I agree with Leo XIV on an ethical, moral and even theological/spiritual level.

P.S. While I don’t believe in a meta-physical, abrahamic tradition-style god, I do think there is a lot of wonder, beauty and even sacredness (divinity) to the cosmos. Something along the lines of this quote from a book by Alan Watts:

The universe is the Big Bang, the beginning of the universe. And you’re not something that is a result of it. You’re not something that is a sort of byproduct of it. You are it. It’s like when you take a bottle of ink and you throw it at a white wall. Smash! And all the ink spreads out. In the middle, it’s dense, isn’t it? And as it gets out on the edge, the little droplets get finer and finer and make more complicated patterns.

So in the same way, there was a big bang at the beginning of things and it spread. And you and I, sitting here in this room, as complicated human beings, are the little fringes on the edge of that bang. We are the way it’s going now.

I wish there was Raspberry Pi style RISV-V SBC (with at least some level of ecosystem support).

This is one area where I personally can relatively easily move to RISC-V.

I’m curious on what your solution to the Nvidia problem is? Just stop selling to the market whose sales increased? Then the next, and the next?

For one, you need to understand whether Nvidia is acting in good faith or not. If they are not, then one needs to create legal incentives for them to start acting in good faith.

A basic evaluation of sales dynamics is done irrespective of sanctions (remember how the example I described was tied to defining a functional bonus system). Nvidia has an understanding of their sales flow into Singapore. If you have a long standing partner that sees an increase in shipments that aligns with internal demand forecast (which are developed anyways), there is no red flag.

If you suddenly have an unknown entity placing orders larger than the total sales in Singapore for the last quarter. That is a clear red flag. You need to ask them who their end-customers are and whether they have validated that their own end-customers aren’t working on sanction workarounds. If they don’t cooperate, then you blacklist the entity and owners and don’t send them any more shipments.

If Nvidia (or a suspicious new distributor) isn’t doing, then they are acting in bad faith.

And it’s already been pointed out that the Ubiquiti hardware in question requires no activation at all. In fact I don’t believe any Ubiquiti hardware inherently needs internet, never mind activation.

That’s why my example referred to a competitor of Ubiquiti (i.e. you don’t actually need activation data to run the calculations as described in my reply to you).

What outlined is just one tool in a toolkit that is regularly used outside of any sanction compliance.

Sales (especially for high-margin high tech items) isn’t done an intuition basis since as far back as the 60s/70s. With modern tech you can very much track your sales flow and identify suspicious sources that are almost certainly working on sanctions work around.

It’s all a matter of motivation (and lack of incentives).

I curious, do you have any information to suggest Ubiquiti has been acting in good faith?

Here is a high-level discussion:

https://piefed.social/comment/9903594

But going beyond that, forgot about Ukraine for a second.

Let’s say you are a competitor of Ubiquiti and you want to develop a bonus structure for your regional teams. You want to know the return on your marketing spend, how well the regional sales teams are developing relationships with retailers, B2B and other source of revenues.

To do that you need to know your real market share. You know your own numbers, but if share is a component of your bonus structure, you need to have accurate numbers for your competition (your sales going up by 15% is a massive failure if the rest of the regional market truly grew by 30%, it means your teams are failing).

To do that, you have several source of data. Roughly speaking you have two basic measures ([1], [2]):

• [1] Shipments into a region/channel. Units that were sent to a geography (not sales, just shipments)
• [2] POS transactions (syndicated providers offer this albeit it’s less comprehensive on a global geography basis than [1])
• [3] You’re going to always have a delta between the two measures ([1], [2]) above, because you have things like B2B sales, government sales, shipments into the regional distributor channel and so on. These numbers are also available on a regional basis from market data providers.

That being said, you have situations where ([1] - [2]) clearly does not equal anything close to even the highest estimates of [3]. That’s when you know shipments into a region are actually being diverted into another country (other countries?).

If the difference between ([1] - [2]) and [3] for your competitor is huge, you want adjust this in your regional market share calculations and bonus payouts. Because otherwise your regional team might be busting ass like no tomorrow and their performance is being undercounted because your competitor is not actually selling a large part of [1] in the given region, the units are going elsewhere.

Believe it or not, this can be a very sensitive topic. People tend to get very pissed off if their bonuses are impacted (especially if they work hard to grow their regional business).

And that’s if you don’t have access to Ubiquiti datasets; our thought experiment positions us as a company that is trying understand shipment to POS/sales transactions for our competitor; Ubiquiti.

If you are Ubiquiti, I assume (this was true in tech product segments where I have worked) you also have the benefit of being able to track geographic activation of your products (I am assuming it’s possible to update Ubiquiti devices?) and potentially their serial numbers; so you can track which shipments are being diverted to which geography. With some more work and tracking, you can figure out what’s going.

There are some other approaches to triangulation that are used that I am not going to cover here (assuming you are a competitor of Ubiquiti).

Do you see why I said what I did?

That’s a fair question.

Look at say Nvidia and import controls of enterprise GPUs into China. A highly politically and PR sensitive topic. Something that is arguably a bigger deal (for Nvidia) than breaking sanctions/restrictions on russia.

And yet it turned out that Nvidia had knowledge that around the same time that export restrictions on China were implemented (with their “topline” China shipment numbers declining), there was a massive increase in shipments to Singapore (a trade focused polity with a long history a ethnic-Chinese presence in local business communities).

Did Nvidia act upon this or did just decided to assume that “goly gee, it just so happened that our Singapore shipments started massively increase at exactly the same time we had implement export restrictions into China”.

The people behind Nvidia might be cruel, corrupt and regressive, but they are not stupid.

And I have no reason to believe Ubiquiti is any better from a moral perspective.

EDIT: More details from a similar question to yours (but much more polite): https://piefed.social/comment/9904032

I understand. Nor am I naive enough to think it’s even possible to completely address money laundering or sanction workarounds.

It’s almost certain they have a lackadaisical (if not out right malicious) approach to limiting shipments that end up in russia. I am genuinely curious, is there a reason to believe otherwise?

They are an American tech company.

From what I remember, they did try to heavily raise fees and worsen the experience on their platform “my next trillion users … life changing blah blah … my ARPU”, but then backed off when they got public pushback. They will do it again when they think they can get away with it.

Better to use something like liberapay.

That’s what I use to donate to Piefed development and I’ve been meaning try and pitch this platform to my Patreon list.

There’s almost no way to control that

That’s not really true. If they wanted to, they could massively decrease the level of shipments that reach the russians. It’s not a priority for Ubiquiti.

It’s like with money laundering, it’s very difficult to control (I am talking in a general sense). Yet you’ll find that enabling money laundering for drug cartels is treated relatively seriously by major western financial institutions.

Considering the relatively niche form factor/spec, it is reasonable to assume that such a device will have higher prices. Economies of scale is king in electronics.

Wires almost always seem to show better performance and consistent reliability than wireless connections (irrespective of the rated specs).

I have a WiFi 6/AX router and clients and irrespective of the type of data being sent (lots of small files, large movie files), my desktop Gigabit Ethernet connection is always faster and more consistent.

This is with ~5m line of sight of the router. It gets even more funky when the connection has to pass through 2 thick walls.

This seems like a terrible deal unless it’s more of an edge case (you know you are going to be living in the UK for say 3-6 months).

I am assuming UK banks offer interest-free payment plans for more pricey electronics if you have stable income of a certain level, or is it credit cards only?

Moved Laptops and Gaming Laptops to piefed.social:

• !gaminglaptops@piefed.social
• !laptops@piefed.social

I think it went pretty well.

They claim to have a somewhat well spec’d panel (at least superficially):

Telly is a 55” 4K HDR smart TV with a built-in 6-driver soundbar and Smart Screen. The dimensions of Telly are 48” width x 41” height x 3.5” depth. Telly ships with 2 leg stands that are 44” apart. If you want to wall mount Telly, you can use a standard 400 x 400 vesa mount that supports approx 65 lbs.

Of course no details on what they mean by HDR or even what technology is used by the panel. :)

I have no issues with Huang buying a $10 K leather jacket or him buying a $20 K designer dress for his wife. It’s his right. Whatever, it’s not that big of a deal.

But the whole conservation about the worth of the S-Class in 1999 is honestly bordering on full on degeneracy.

This is how we know American oligarchs have crossed the metaphorical event horizon.

I will note that you’ll never find a russian oligarch complaining about buying their parents/relatives a nice house or whatever in 1999 that could have been invested into something else. It is a very human thing to buy your parents something nice when you have a windfall of money (irrespective of who you are and what your ethical framework is like).

On the other hand, Huang’s theorycrafting about investing the 1999 cost of the S-class shows a lack of humanity. One could argue it is a sign of mental illness or severe maladjustment somewhat comparable to having a long term heroin addiction. Huang has more than enough resources for the S-class cost to never even cross his mind and yet he publicly brought it up in a very pompous and almost child-like manner.

Apple using Intel as a fab is an interesting development.

FWIW, the headline used the term “manufacturing”, which to me implies fabrication (more so than design).

Sounds extremely stupid, but what do I know? My primary computing platform is a dual monitor desktop.

Heatsinked, but I still feel like some of the early PCIe 4.0 SSDs are less refined than later 4.0/5.0 models.

I am not dropping the speeds (I do video stuff as a hobby and it helps).

I have a pretty well ventilated case that I clean regularly, I think the case temp is fine. The early PCIe 4.0 SSD is what I am most worried about.