2026-11-14 15:53:40
I just visited a local Amazon warehouse with a free guided tour. Managed to book a spot on one of the last tours before they start preparing for Black Friday and Christmas.
I wanted to learn what the work environment there is and how a large-scale warehouse operates.
Well, it’s a lot of repetitive low qualified work: scanning barcodes, taking some goods from shelves and putting them into boxes (when preparing customers’ orders) or taking goods from the box and putting them to the shelves (when processing incoming deliveries from vendors).
And the storage facilities are currently being modernized and rows of long shelves are being replaced by moveable towers and thousands of robots that look like an oversized robot vacuum cleaner. Robots pick up these square towers with shelves on all four sizes and move them between storage and operators. All movements there are fully automated and choreographed by an invisible algorithm. Looks mesmerizing. It is almost unbelievable that they don’t crash and don’t fall.
After the storage hall is rebuilt for robots, there would be even less work for humans. Ultimately, when robotic hands would be able to take items from shelves and put them in boxes, they could operate without humans at all. I guess, it is already possible, just not viable from an economic standpoint.
Overall, it was a sort of eye-opening experience. The operations there, at least on an off-peak day, were simpler than I expected. On the other hand, being used to top tech companies offices and their usual perks, I was surprised by a very primitive work conditions, in which many people outside of the IT industry work.
2026-11-12 02:31:52
TIL that it has been possible to publish GPG key in DNS since many years. I don’t use GPG encryption often, but I do have a key, and a link to it has been displayed on my homepage for several years.
Considering that updating DNS is a matter of editing a single file, I added my key there without hesitation. Just in case.
2026-11-11 15:11:46
We are surrounded by numbers, which are often hard to make sense of.
“Millions, Billions, Zillions” from Brian W. Kernighan helps to navigate through huge numbers and estimate them. (Yes, that Kernighan from K&R, the co-author of “The C Programming Language” and famous {} bracing style in C-style programming languages.)
The book navigates big numbers and confusion between millions and billions, various units and sometimes erroneous or over-precise conversions between them, dimensions and relations between length, area, and volume. It touches various biases, broken graphs, and other ways to lie with statistics. And finally provides useful tips to do math quickly and make educated guesses.
It is overall a great overview and makes one pay more attention to the numbers others say. And I learned a thing or two from it too.
It says that at any point in time, the amount of work in a system equals its arrival rate multiplied by the time each item spends moving through it. In other words what comes in, goes out and we can estimate the number of items at any given equal stage as proportional.
It is a simplified formula (Years to double = 72 / Expected rate of return) used to estimate the number of years required to double invested money at a given annual rate of return. Alternatively, it can compute the annual rate of compounded return from an investment, given how many years it will take to double the investment.
However, at moments the book reads more like a collection of fun facts.
It is also formatted with old-school technologies, such as groff.
Which may have impressed me ten or twenty years ago, but nowadays there are much better ways to publish a book.
★★★☆☆ Short and useful.
2026-11-07 05:16:51
I strongly believe that there should be free public toilets everywhere. And cities, governments, and other official bodies must maintain them in good condition. Because people can’t avoid or postpone the urgent need, and it’s better to provide them with a comfort of dedicated space, rather than see someone watering a tree near the road.
Well, it seems Norway just went a step further and built public toilets so cool that they are worth mentioning on their tourist site as places worth visiting regardless of your immediate needs. And I can’t agree more, as some of them are examples of great architecture and others are built in such spectacular places that you want to stop there anyway.
Added to my travel to-do list.
2026-11-05 03:27:46
Three years since original App Defaults lists have been shared by many people around the internet, some started revisiting them. I wrote one in 2023, and updated it in early 2025.
I opened them today and realized that literally nothing has changed since then. I discovered some new apps after the first round, which I now use regularly, such as NetNewsWire RSS reader.
It doesn’t mean that I haven’t tried any new app since then, they are just more specialized apps. And, more personal.
And, of course, apps like ChatGPT or Claude have also become indispensable parts of daily workflows.
2026-11-04 05:05:24
I like lists and keep many of them on my homepage. I don’t trust much external services and don’t want to have half a dozen accounts to track
I regret not starting tracking all these things earlier.
And the reason I write it now is that I updated my books page with tons of book covers and fancy stacks. You should have your own favorite lists too!
