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sgerenser

3,073 karma · joined June 8, 2016

meet.hn/city/us-Raleigh

Socials: - linkedin.com/in/scott-gerenser

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sgerenser··on Europeans should learn to love the air-conditioner
Mississippi, despite its much lower per capita income than California, has a much higher percentage of housing units with air conditioning (93% vs 72%). AC is now so inexpensive that whether or not a house has AC is mostly about average summer temperatures not income.
sgerenser··on Europeans should learn to love the air-conditioner
The Economist is not an American publication though.
sgerenser··on Europeans should learn to love the air-conditioner
Interesting, I knew most of Europe wasn’t very big on AC, but I didn’t know permanent residential installations were practically banned in (at least some parts of) Switzerland: https://lenews.ch/2026/05/29/the-politics-of-air-conditionin...
sgerenser··on Linux eliminates the strncpy API after six years of work, 360 patches
Joel Spolsky coined the term “Shlemiel the Painter’s Algorithm” for this type of thing back in 2001: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/12/11/back-to-basics/
sgerenser··on Hyundai buys Boston Dynamics
SoftBank owns 90% of Arm which is up about 1000% since the IPO in 2023.
sgerenser··on Hyundai buys Boston Dynamics, Atlas humanoid to be used at vehicle plant by 2028
Their much hyped 10 year 100K mile power train warranty is only for the original purchaser. Once sold the warranty reverts to a more standard 5/60K term.
sgerenser··on Fox to buy Roku
Agreed. I currently have a “Roku TV” that is hooked up to another Roku device, because the one built into it is so slow and outdated as to be almost unusable. The $29 (on sale) Roku stick I hooked up to it works fine. Getting a built-in Roku IMHO is a false economy, the built-in thing will almost certainly go to crap before the TV itself does.
sgerenser··on Elon Musk Becomes First Trillionaire as SpaceX Starts Trading
I’ve never worked at any large company where janitors/cleaning staff were employees. Usually that kind of work is contracted out.
sgerenser··on RIP software hackathons. Long live the hardware hackathon
I’ve always heard of hackathons as being a competition with judges and a winner.
sgerenser··on Surprise, pay $1000
I’ve heard of these “toner scammers” since at least the 1990s and probably earlier. Apparently they’re still at it: https://www.eojohnson.com/blog/toner-scams
sgerenser··on New York just passed a one-year temporary ban on data centers
It would be worth separating out the “traditional” data centers (which offer things like colocation, and mostly run pretty standard CPU-bound or network-bound workloads) from “AI” data centers (which have racks and racks of extremely dense GPUs or accelerators). It’s really the latter that people should be concerned about due to their much larger scale, higher power draw, and propensity to use dirty, on-site power generation.
sgerenser··on New York just passed a one-year temporary ban on data centers
I think the issue is there’s very few empty existing buildings big enough to house a modern AI data center.
sgerenser··on The four programming questions from my 1994 Microsoft internship interview (2023)
Hey, in 2026 strcpy is still part of the C standard library (much to the chagrin of anyone security conscious).
sgerenser··on Bricks and Minifigs Stole a Man's $200k Lego Collection
I can't actually find anything that supports a $400M valuation. ChatGPT seems to agree, that there's no public documents supporting that valuation, and an estimate of $6-$10M year in revenue sounds in the ballpark, meaning a value nowhere near $400M. But something as high as $100M is probably appropriate if their profit margins are high, which would be expected for a franchisor.
sgerenser··on Bricks and Minifigs Stole a Man's $200k Lego Collection
I definitely heard 10% first and only later 35%. For some reason the videos don't have transcripts and the Gemini AI isn't available, so I can't try to search for it. But I'm 100% sure that 10% was the figure mentioned first (maybe I misunderstood and it was just being used as an example). If the real figure is 35%, then I retract any comments about them making a bad business deal.
sgerenser··on Bricks and Minifigs Stole a Man's $200k Lego Collection
I head them say 35% at some point later in the videos, but they definitely said 10% first, so I’m not sure which is correct.
sgerenser··on Bricks and Minifigs Stole a Man's $200k Lego Collection
It sounds like the original franchisee doesn’t want to admit that they were losing a lot of money already. Only someone really desperate would take on a $200K lego collection and only collect a 10% consignment fee. It would also explain the corporate “takeover” if they were already behind on paying their franchise fees or whatever they might have owed to corporate.

That being said, it’s not illegal to be a bad business person, and none of that excuses the subsequent behavior by BAM corporate or the new franchise owner.

sgerenser··on Bricks and Minifigs Stole a Man's $200k Lego Collection
Somewhere in one of the long videos, they mentioned that there were unique stickers on each of his items that he was selling on consignment. They had to have known which items were his.
sgerenser··on Bricks and Minifigs Stole a Man's $200k Lego Collection
Bricks and Minifigs stores are like 2000 square feet, much different than a Target. Their overhead per square foot is almost certainly far higher than Target.
sgerenser··on Bricks and Minifigs Stole a Man's $200k Lego Collection
My wife owns a retail business where some part of their sales is consignment. Taking anything in with only a 10% consignment fee would be laughable, there’s no way that’s a money making deal when you account for all the overhead of a small retail store. My suspicion is the original store owner made a bad consignment deal to sell the Star Wars stuff with only a 10% commission and the new owner didn’t want to live up to it. Of course, at that point they should have just given it all back, but it turns out they’d rather be evil.
sgerenser··on Bricks and Minifigs Stole a Man's $200k Lego Collection
There actually are legal ways to do that… instead of buying the company, you start a new company, and just buy assets of the old company (e.g. phone numbers, web sites, trademarks, customer lists). Seems shady but apparently it’s pretty common.
sgerenser··on GitHub Actions was down
Who says Azure devops is on the same infra as GitHub? I mean, sure they're both hosted in Azure data centers, but there's very little else shared between them AFAIK. I used to work for Microsoft and I heard about the grand plans to merge the two but I don't think it ever really happened.
sgerenser··on Converting an Integer to a Decimal String in Under Two Nanoseconds
I don’t think that’s correct, Intel is transitioning to AVX10, which is essentially the instruction set of AVX-512 but without mandating 512 but vector width. Future E cores, afaik, will still only be capable of 256 bit vector ops. EDIT: ok maybe not, it sounds like that was the plan a year or so ago but newer articles are saying future E cores will actually support 512b.
sgerenser··on Anthropic is expanding to Colossus2. Will use GB200
Would YouTube really block Gemini? I thought summarizing (or asking questions about) YouTube videos was one of their advertised features.
sgerenser··on C++26 Shipped a SIMD Library Nobody Asked For
Yeah AVX-512 is basically dead as a universal target for x86, the future is now AVX-10. But I believe there is a reasonable subset that will work on both.
sgerenser··on Waymo updates 3,800 robotaxis after they 'drive into standing water'
I’m still amazed at the people who claim that Apple Maps is as good as Google Maps nowadays. If you live anywhere where there’s lots of development, it’s definitely not. It’s also terrible when businesses or places of interest move. My wife’s business moved a half mile down the road and a single message to google maps got it moved in a couple days. Apple Maps took about a year with multiple requests and even multiple messages to their special “escalation” email address.
sgerenser··on Let's Buy Spirit Air
Missed this so coming in very late, but wow this is unbelievably off the mark. The airlines do not operate a credit card company, full stop. They sell airline miles, at a fixed rate per mile, to the credit card companies. That’s it. Citi, Chase, CapitalOne, etc. are the ones that operate the credit cards.
sgerenser··on We are retiring our bug bounty program
I believe the company is based in SF, but the developers are all over the world, so $100/hr is probably in the ballpark. Interestingly one of the senior developers is working from prison so his costs are probably a bit lower: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44288937
sgerenser··on Googlebook
Not yet, sale hasn’t closed yet. They changed their name in advance of the sale though.
sgerenser··on I want to live like Costco people
Publix in the southeast and Wegmans in the northeast both have fountain drinks.
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