Re 2, I would generally agree and there is a lot that can be done with caching. However, since writing services in Rust and Golang, there is whole other tier in speed. Architecture matters, code quality also matters, but Golang and Rust help a lot in making very fast services.
Yeah I don't disagree. To clarify. Rust, Golang etc - they give you a very noticeable advantage when it comes to writing good performant software with the assumption that you're putting in the effort on the design side. But poorly written Rust is likely going to be indistinguishable from poorly written Ruby.
Many downloads now go over https. Intercepting them would require having certificate for those domains. IIRC on the clouds the standard images do have a sources list that points to mirrors on the cloud’s network. I would only presume Github Actions runners have the same.
Not sure if something similar exists for NPM which is big for all things JS.
Other CI/CD platforms usually push you towards using self-hosted mirrors for downloading large chunks of data (often aggressively so) but github is pretty hands off when it comes to actions. It is interesting to consider whether managing that traffic might be overwhelming them and if this can be traced back to a lack of forethought when it came to building out those tools.
And yet I see in earnings that companies like BP and Shell make record profits over increased gas prices. How come that they do profit but the station holders not? Are shell/bp increasing the margin harder and eating the station’s lunch?
The majors that do upstream (taking it out of the ground) as well as downstream (refining and selling it on the forecourt or wholesale) make their profits on the oil markets.
When crude is high, it's upstream that earns the income. When it's low, it's selling it to the customer.
Fun fact: when I worked at BP, the product with the highest margin on the forecourts was the Wild Bean coffee.
It's funny to think that BP is a coffee shop with a side-business in petrol.
McDonald's makes its largest margins from the soft drinks, according to an ex's brother who worked in their HQ. From a $1 drink, the cup, straw and lid is 5 cents, and the liquid is 3 cents.
The people who drill a hole in the ground and then a valuable product literally flows out of it, make more profits when prices of that product go up, compared to the refiners and resellers of the valuable product. I don't think this is mysterious?
Jokes aside, the upstream side has costs (both capex and opex) which are predominantly independent of the actual oil price, but income which is tied to it.
It's like with NVIDIA: their cost of producing a B200 is not directly related to the cost of (and demand for) Claude Code, but what they can charge for a B200 is.
Opening a gas station is a lot easier than acquiring mineral rights, drilling an oil well, refining that oil, and getting it to market. Oh, and your customers can't just drive across the street to your competitor because they are 1c/litre cheaper.
There's naturally going to be a lot more friction and a lot less pop-up competition and therefore a lot more margin on the supply side of things.
The station has no power to raise margin - they are in tight competition with every other low-margin station around them. The suppliers, on the other hand... If they invested into wells that aren't affected by the war 10 years ago, and their competitors haven't (or have, but can't supply all the world's oil needs), and there's a global supply shortage - they have lots of room to raise prices.
I think majority of the profits come from extracting the oil from the ground, much less from refining (more competetive - everyone can just build more refineries if margins become high enough), and the least from retail (gas stations).
> How come that they do profit but the station holders not? Are shell/bp increasing the margin harder and eating the station’s lunch?
Here in Germany, many stations aren't even involved in selling the gas. That's what that magical line "Verkauf von Kraft- und Schmierstoffen im Namen der <Firma>" on the receipt says - the fuel and oil are on paper/for accounting purposes sold by the oil company whose brand is on the flag.
Independent gas stations (e.g. in Bavaria, the Allguth chain) exist, and they buy, store, distribute and sell their fuel on their own, but in the end everyone is bound to the same few refineries - virtually all (!) of Eastern Germany, Berlin, the Berlin airport and Western Poland for example depend on the PCK refinery complex in Schwedt [1], in Bavaria 2/3rd of the market is supplied by the two Bayernoil refineries in Vohburg and Neustadt [2], the rest by Gunvor (ex-Esso/Exxonmobil) [3].
No matter if you are an independent or brand-owned gas station... there is about zero competition on the supply side. It's all the same gas and diesel, the only practical difference is the additives for the ultra-high-octane fuel. And that in turn means very little competition at the pump, and owners of independent gas stations being hit the hardest.
There's a reason why Allguth stations more resemble a 24/7 supermarket, restaurant and beer hall than a gas station.
Oh and the supply side competition is pretty bad even for refineries. Refineries are fitted to refine only a specific composition of oil - that's the distinctions sweet/sour and light/heavy. For that reason, the US can't process a bunch of its own oil [4], which means the US is actually dependent on Canada and Mexico [5] to meet its oil product demand. A refinery which, like almost all are, is tuned to a specific country's (or, worse, a specific oil field in a specific country) composition is in a real bind, should the supply chain ever get screwed up. The Russian invasion of Ukraine was bad enough, the Iran war was what could very well be the final, fatal blow to many a refinery, especially in Asia.
Retrofits are possible to allow a refinery for light sweet oil to process heavy sour oil (i.e. add a sulphur removal stage to deal with that, and a cracking stage to deal with heavier molecules), and it is possible for a refinery that is tooled for heavy sour oil to run on light sweet oil without modification - but it is seriously throwing wrenches into the financials, and that's a blocking issue in our money driven world [6].
That had me thinking as well. What if the manufacturer says that to get to that number you are only allowed to charge it to 80% ever? My iPhone pro battery is at 92% at 417 cycles over 20 months.
The problem is that consumers want to buy a phone with 24 hours of runtime and an EV with 200 miles of range, and they want the phone to be thin and light and the car to be fast and light, and manufacturers want to achieve those capacities with as little electrochemistry as possible. The number of charge cycles at full capacity will be a big deal a year or two in, but on the sales floor it's a secondary concern for typical buyers and sellers.
Playing fast and loose with the numbers, I'm sure that if 100% on the display was 80% in the battery and 0% was 20%, you'd have an amazing number of charge cycles. You could program that 40% of unused capacity to be reduced as the battery ages very slowly, and by the time the used capacity is only at 80% of its original revealed capacity you're at many thousands of cycles. But you'd have a phone or car that weighed 40% more and cost 40% more than one that had no buffer and ran at the bleeding edge on day 1.
Absent breakthroughs in battery chemistry, this basically regulates the amount of buffer capacity that manufacturers are required to include in their ~~lies~~ marketing materials.
My initial reaction as an EU citizen is “oh hell no” because it gave me flashbacks to removable covers with clips that broke my nails. But after reading the article where it mentions that the battery is also considered removable if standard tools should be used, I’m quite okay with it. I welcome getting more rugged and durable devices.
Serious question: how are you worse off with a cover that breaks your nails vs. the status quo: a cover that’s glued on and a battery that’s glued in? If they did bring that back, couldn’t you just not open the cover and be just as happy?
The covers were typically flimsy and used flimsy hooks in addition to the flimsy push pin. Actually most of my annoyance stems from the hooks breaking easily and the covers not closing flush. I would not want to return to that time where dropping a phone leads to covers flying around.
It is my assumption that any cover that still requires screws that it will be both more sturdy and easier to close flush.
The current status quo of having sleek devices while having batteries relatively easily replaced yourself or even quite cheaply in every phone shop. I’m not so bothered by the status quo.
This reminds me of the time where I was in a rental Ford S-Max. I had the cruise control turned on while approaching an Italian toll booth station. The car very enthusiastically steered me into another car running next to me because it saw the lines in front curve. Luckily I had a strong grip on the wheel and nobody on the other side because I had to counter steer so hard I swerved the other way when it finally overrode the computer. That was one scary moment.
Power tools are getting Bluetooth now. I saw a Festool battery operated sander where you could set the settings for the light on it and more via the app on your phone.
For what it is worth, you can turn the pop-up to navigate to the closest fuel station off. In my XC90 MY16 it is called something “Suggest navigation on low fuel.” I will check it when back in the car.
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