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Comment by ricardobayes | Hacker News Reader

The article features a truck that the chips get loaded onto. This quote from Tanenbaum immediately jumped into mind:

"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway."

I was wondering how much financial value they put in one truck. Presumably the value density of this stuff is incredibly high (although not really to anyone else, so security probably isn't a huge issue). At what point do you split the shipment between multiple trucks to avoid huge losses if there's a crash?

When I worked on satellites we had some electronics which used a radiation hardened FPGA which cost something like $500k per chip. Carrying that around was nerve wracking.

I once had to keep a $20M (technically; a million download codes for the same $20 movie for a promotion) thumbdrive in my home safe because it arrived too late to put in the safety deposit box like it was supposed to be.

I had to remind myself a few times the practical value to anyone was about $22.

Why did that have to be transported in a thumb drive? It can't have been more than a few hundred megabytes at the most, right?

Enterprisey client chain-of-custody requirements. It was couriered to us, and the courier was late. Cue panicked phone calls to get an exemption to the contractual requirement for overnight storage at the bank.

I worked at a [Not to be named Country]'s monetary authority. Part of everyone's duty was to receive shipments of newly printed cash from De La Rue and get it into the vault before it was distributed to banks. Seeing millions of dollars packaged in cardboard boxes being moved from the street to the vault with men posted up in the bushes with machine guns was something I will never forget.

It's funny how rote and regularized "playing" with money gets after a while though.

I used to work for a financial institution small enough to sometimes need someone from the back office to help fill in as a warm body for dual-control when we received cash shipments.

It only took a couple sessions in a vault to get entirely bored with having a half million dollars in front of you.

My first serious software was for a sizable goldsmith factory. They keep an incredibly low profile visible from outside, and they get really good at it. Once inside, the amount of gold that's moving around is jaw dropping. After a while, most of the time it feels like aluminum, or any other material. All you see is cuts to be made, welding to be done, carvings, sandblast, etc... It's work and responsibility and everyone is just trying to get it done and make it the problem of the next person.

My dad was a goldsmith! (Who eventually ended up doing software for jewelers!)

I definitely know what those small brown boxes which ship UPS ground look like. Very normal.

It's treated the same way as any other generic shipment of cargo, really. It's fine throwing $20 million in one truck.

Security is an issue, though, these are treated as a high value load and typically would be followed by unmarked, plain clothes armed security guards tailing around the truck. (That's how Apple often does warehouse deliveries of trucks full of iPhones. It wouldn't surprise me if there was going to be some rolling lead soon following some trucks full of Duos...)

They probably have insurance which means it doesn’t matter if it is all in one car or not. And even if they didn’t Samsung is big enough where a loss of a couple million dollars of components isn’t gonna bankrupt them.

Ha - I still remember when I worked on the IBEX-Lo Sensor, we had to hand carry it to Switzerland. One lucky member of our team got to fly first class with it because it wouldn't fit in a coach seat!

My buddies company shuffles chips around the west coast, some deliveries are a few million dollars. They shove the chips into the truck, then shove a giant movable wall, leaving about an inch or two gap around the perimeter.

The truck has multiple drivers and private security.

I had a cousin that worked private security, and for a few years (I think it was early 2000's) his main gig was to work as a team of armed security, and follow trucks from the two Intel campuses in Oregon to the airport in unmarked vehicles, get on the cargo plane with the cargo, and fly to the location where they did the packaging of the wafers (I want to say it was the Philippine Islands) and then fly back. Lots of overtime.

They are getting hijacked/stolen and disappearing.

https://www.wired.com/story/the-worst-ive-ever-seen-cargo-th...

Likely ending up on a container to China, export bans be damned.

Almost 10 years ago at my university in Chile. My professor of Computer Networks invited a PhD Student that was working on the ALMA Observatory [0] doing some research on signal processing.

What stayed with me from that talk was that all the data that was captured from those massive antennas was packaged in boxes, loaded in a cargo van and travel 1.600 kilometers to Santiago to be uploaded into the systems.

[0] https://www.almaobservatory.org

Amazon did this initially as well for large data pools when launching AWS S3 etc.: Sending you a truck/container to put all the disks in:

https://www.supplychain247.com/article/how_do_you_get_all_of...

I wanted to mention AWS Snowmobile [0], but after looking it up I found that apparently it was discontinued [1]. It seems that nowadays there are more economical/efficient alternatives (I guess theoretically you could still beat these alternatives in certain metrics, e.g. by using more trucks at once to get more bandwidth).

[0] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-snowmobile-move-exabyte...

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2024/04/17/aws-stops-selling-snowmobile...

I forget how much it is exactly now but I saw a short video on the bandwidth of moving modern cold storage down the highway and its actually nuts

Just hope nothing changes the latency is terrible.

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