Once the retail is all gone (and most of it will since it can't compete with online in prices or selection), with the exception of food (which is an experience has it's own limitations) what can the mall offer besides experience/activities? Only a few stores really benefit from hands on, and even the people who do stop into a retail store after an hour at the dance studio, or the gym, or the comedy club will still pull out their phone and check amazon to price check items.
Hands-on also means immediate gratification and no-hassle returns.
Online can't quite match on the immediate gratification factor. If you hit the magic sweet spot of things in the right warehouses, you can get some things in a few hours, but if I go to a in-person store, there's no guessing.
If it's wrong or faulty, I can get an immediate replacement or refund rather than waiting on a RMA process.
That's true, I'll give amazon some credit for trying their best to make returns easy, but it's still obnoxious when the number of cheap counterfeits and poorly made products is so high. No matter how easy they make it, the time and frustration involved with doing without while you wait for another roll of the dice is high.
I agree. It's up to the publisher to decide the significance of version numbers. Just because Node does it one way doesn't mean everyone else has to follow suit.
Because that's the meaning of major version number. Additionally JS/npm modules are supposed to follow semver, and you increment the major version when you break compatibility.
I get it, Linux does its own thing with versions, and so do browsers, so it's hip to just increment major whenever you feel like it apparently.
EDIT: LOL at people downvoting GP because they dared to wonder if the frontend world needs another bundler shipping a non-compatible major version at least once a year. Stockholm Syndrome I guess, who doesn't want to update their configuration and see their plugins break every year?
That's one meaning of major version number. The original meaning is simply a release that is significantly different from the previous one. It's also possible to maintain more than one version number: a marketing version and an internal version (Windows did this famously where Windows 7 is actually version 6.1, Windows 8 is 6.2). Then there's a convention where the major version is the year number and it simply increases on Jan 1st, etc.
I have no knowledge of which convention Vite uses.
In addition to this, I believe it's also kosher to increment a semver major version even without breaking changes. Semver forbids breaking changes without a major version increment, but I don't think it forbids the reverse.
It's not a "marketing thing". The whole version requirement syntax in package.json (i.e. "^1.2.3") and other non-JS package managers really only works if a package follows semver, so that's the reason 99% of JS packages do.
This is why when you npm add a dependency it defaults to the "^1.2.3" syntax, which means the dependency is upgradeable to the next minor version, which, as SemVer states, should be guaranteed to be backwards compatible.
Of course you can just disregard that, make breaking changes whenever you want and annoy your users enormously.
AFAIK Go doesn't follow any kind of versioning scheme (since they don't use a versioned module manager), but the project itself is semver-compliant. No breaking changes are introduced since Go 1.0 was released. The proposals for breaking language changes will be planned for Go 2.0. Generics aren't breaking old code.
There is no reason, unless your name is Linus Torvalds or you're marketing driven such as your browser, not to follow Semver. It's a good and simple idea.
npm itself assumes projects use semver, so it's generally a useful assumption in the JS ecosystem at this point now that npm is the primary package manager for all things JS that JS packages follow semver.
.ai domains cost a couple hundred bucks a year so domains are very available / not widely used by domain squatters (Its the country domain for the island of Anguilla, pop 15,000)
They make money from (in no particular order; no idea what their revenue split is)
1. Referral links to retailers such as Amazon
2. Direct subscription payments via NYT (Wirecutter is now like an add-on to your NYT subscription)
This is of course, not perfect. They are incentivized to try and get you to buy something and, ideally, more expensive things because that would result in higher referral commissions. But this is orders of magnitude less sinister than being "paid advertising" and having a financial incentive to get you to choose one brand over another.
I think they are generally pretty responsible about not trying to upsell you to more expensive products. When they do a roundup, they generally compare products within a given price range (e.g., "speakers less than $500") and because the products are similarly priced, there's no incentive to simply steer you towards the pricier one.
There are some times that I find their reviews ridiculous. I wanted recommendations for bedsheets the other day and they all seemed to be like... > $200? lol, no thanks
If you read their review on USB microphones (the one that Yeti wins), they link to audio recordings of all the microphones so you can judge for yourself. I have no comment on whether they are considered "paid advertising", but I agree with the OP - their audio-based reviews are thorough and come across as unbiased.
Why is this being treated like a new concept? Has the author never heard of layaway? It used to be quite common, and this is a strictly better version imo
Layaway is a different scheme: you pay down the price of a purchase in installments, and receive the item after the last payment. The layaway agreements that I'm aware of don't charge interest.
These schemes are VC-ified installment loans, which operate on the opposite model: you receive the purchase up front, and pay it down over time including interest payments.
They're arguably better on a strictly economic scale, since they give consumers the liquidity to make purchases that they'd like to make (and can actually afford, just not all at once.) They're arguably worse on a social scale, since installment loans are a form of cheap credit that people get addicted to, and are comparatively unregulated.
I bought something off Amazon with Affirm, wasn't charged interest. I think they make money by partnering with companies like Amazon to promote more buyers and get a cut of sales from them instead of the consumer.
Out of curiosity, what were the repayment terms? I see on their website that they offer 0% APR on some of their shortest financings, so I wonder if you were bucketed into one of those.
(I would personally consider doing installments at 0%, so I'm curious as to whether you were given an advantageous plan based on a credit check or whether it was the timescale.)
I think you are correct about it being timescale-based.
I only used it once out of pure curiosity, so idk all of the intricate details, but they essentially offered a 4 equal monthly payments plan with 0% interest, as long as I pay it off on time. Tested it, worked as promised, all was good.
I bet if you go outside of their deadlines for payments/try to stretch it for longer, you will get hit with massive interest rates tho, but cannot confirm that. Mostly because I only use credit for things I can easily pay off in cash at any moment (except things like car/house obv), so I basically treat it like a debit card and pay it off very pedantically on time (because with 0% interest, it is essentially just extra leverage).
It was something like 6 payments at 0% interest so I took advantage of it. It was just offered as a payment option on the Amazon link. I'm seeing that now for condos I'm looking at renting next year too. While I can pay cash up front or just put on my credit card, I'd rather it sit and generate whatever small amount of interest and just use this to pay off my vacation over a few months with no interest.
Most of the ones I've seen had no interest, so that's new to me. Definitely changes it but I think it's a little disingenuous for the author to not at least reference layaway
For what it's worth, layaway isn't common in the US anymore. It's entirely possible they didn't know about it, or don't consider it worth mentioning because the couldn't find an example of a company actually offering it anymore.
The article was written in 2017, and mentions an APR of 19% for a $200 purchase via Affirm. Looking online it looks like their current rates are around 10-13% unless you pick the shortest term loan[1].
It depends on risk. I lost my job and ended up tanking my credit score after several thousand in credit cards went to collection. Affirm offered me 29.99% APR for purchases.
I never really got the point of layaway. I give you money and you keep it interest-free until I pay for the item? Why not just put it into my own savings account and at least get interest on it?
It was a concept designed for the low- to middle-class in a very different era than what we have now. Especially in rural areas, banks were not often used by those who probably needed them the most, for a variety of reasons. Lots of workers were either paid in cash, or cashed their paycheck weekly at the local grocery/department/liquor store.
Even today, lots of people have the issue where if they _have_ money, they are compelled to spend it on frivolous things like entertainment and alcohol. Layaway was an easy and convenient tool that people could use to make sure they were putting at least some of their money toward things they really wanted.
For me, the point of layaway is that I want something enough to commit to paying for it in advance a little at a time. A savings accounts is fungible; it isn't necessarily dedicated to anything and subject to me raiding it if I need to cover an unexpected expense.
Incidentally, where do you live that the interest on a mere savings account is worthwhile on a timescale of years rather than decades or centuries? Or am I taking "savings account" too literally when you mean things like certificates of deposit or money-market accounts?
> For me, the point of layaway is that I want something enough to commit to paying for it in advance a little at a time. A savings accounts is fungible; it isn't necessarily dedicated to anything and subject to me raiding it if I need to cover an unexpected expense.
For what purpose are they not fit? They can do the same thing paying for layaway would, plus you get the protection of being able to use it for unexpected expenses.
> Why not just put it into my own savings account and at least get interest on it?
Because if it's immediately available in a savings account, the vast majority of people are much more likely to spend it on something else. The appeal of layaway is the willpower enforcement - worth the price of whatever pocket change you're likely to get in savings-account interest.
I always thought layaway was just used to lock in a sale price, so essentially, a customer is betting that the payment now plus the foregone interest/investment return in the payment will be less than the future sale price.
Intel has always had a huge lead over AMD on single core. AMD did manage to compete on multi core with the Zen chips but still hasn't gotten close on single core
I don't know why you're being downvoted. What you're saying is, in my experience, true. AMD is the multi core king. Intel is the single core king.
Multi core CPU performance benchmarks push your CPU and all its cores to the limit, but that doesn't reflect the typical real-world use case because the typical real-world use case involves programs that aren't able to effectively utilize all CPU cores. On top of that, gaming is the only typical use case where you are going to be pushing your CPU to the limit (i.e. the place where you actually need your CPU to be fast) and games don't CPU-parallelize well, meaning higher single core performance is generally best in the case of gaming.
Macs aren't made for gaming. They're made for productivity, multitasking, and creative work (the one major area where a multi core CPU can be fully utilized) so it makes complete sense for Apple to go the multi core route, but I can't say the same for AMD and their 8+ core gaming CPUs.
Intel had a dwindling lead in single core perf over the past few years, but when AMD came out with Zen 3, AMD actually had a non negligible lead over Intel. But Intel is now winning again with the 12th gen chips. So they are trading blows these days.
Gotcha. Is the cost efficiency comparable as well? Could I buy an AMD gaming CPU with similar single core performance to an Intel gaming CPU for about the same price?
