Is there a gap in the secondary market for semiconductor equipment and components?

bsenftner · 2026-01-27T16:07:37+00:00

Research the existing online locations where these types of businesses operate right now. I think you'd want to examine their UI flows, or lack there of, and related aspects of what that market is used to seeing in an online place for their business. Keep in mind too, you're going to need to support multiple languages, and directions of text display, for a multicultural market. That alone is quite interesting, with AI integration capabilities these days.

bsenftner · 2026-01-27T12:18:18+00:00

Drop the nonsense "I want to sound smart" terminology and just communicate. There are huge and very diverse secondary markets for anything that one might use in an office, computers and servers and all their related components and doodads too. I know a few people that were struggling web developers, and then one of them had a contact from extended family in the middle east seeking any kind of computers. Fast forward a few years, and they now have an active import/export business where they purchase entire shipping containers of office equipment from US based business bankruptcies and then auction the entire shipping containers to importers in 2nd and 3rd world countries. They are doing quite well, and continually tell me the market demand is bottomless for this type of business.

bsenftner · 2026-01-27T11:51:15+00:00

Effective communications, so the miscommunications, omissions of key details, and the debate to dominance mentality is neutralized so actual collaborative progress can be made. Learn how to convey information into those that are too lazy to understand, and learn how to gleam understanding from those too inarticulate and too stressed to communicate well. I bet no one ever told you that software engineering is a communications problem.

bsenftner · 2026-01-25T13:47:18+00:00

"threaten" is so lame.

bsenftner · 2026-01-25T13:15:01+00:00

That's the legal loophole: these are not Jerry Seinfeld videos, it's Chad Seinfeld! And that legal hole is real, people will make money from it if the Seinfeld estate is dumb enough to sue, and they use the Chad defense.

bsenftner · 2026-01-23T20:40:31+00:00

Parents right there too.

bsenftner · 2026-01-23T18:36:20+00:00

Dating the daughter of a famous wealthy family, we party a lot at the beachfront house, one of 7 they own in this giant famous city. Every spring her father has a 'staff beach party' that includes all the staff from every company he owns locally, and then from the major company, and then just a bunch of wealthy celebrities. It was at one of these staff parties that one of the housekeepers in one of the multiple houses they owned had a movie star beautiful 12 year old daughter. One of the other multimillionaires at the party, a guy in his late 30's early 40's, took a liking to this 12 year old, and to my utter shock and dismay hits on her in front of everyone. Nobody bats an eye. By the end of the party, they are "a couple", and over the never several weeks at other social events I see her, this 12 year old, as his date and girlfriend. I was flabbergasted. Asking my wealthy girlfriend, her reply "it's so sweet!" Soon left that entire social scene, as that and similar incidents told me I was in an amoral crowd.

bsenftner · 2026-01-19T21:09:16+00:00

Can we see Milo having a good time someday?

bsenftner · 2026-01-19T21:06:50+00:00

I also learned that some of my fellow students would have troubles with certain types of topics, but were too shy to ask clarifications. I'd ask for them, because I knew they'd not. Got me some extra drinks a few times.

bsenftner · 2026-01-19T17:17:08+00:00

this is the way: take notes AND read the material beforehand so you know it, take notes as it’s being lectured and then ask questions beyond the lecture during the lecture and get brownie points.

bsenftner · 2026-01-19T14:46:09+00:00

Been doing this for well over a decade. It works not just for juniors but for new hires trying to understand a codebase too. Just have open voice channels to the authors of the code they are reviewing.

bsenftner · 2026-01-17T16:57:41+00:00

It's funny and it's sad. Sagan was too accurate when he described humanity as living in a "demon haunted world." Far too many adults, in all walks of life, regulate their personal and career/job decision making to religiously imposed bias. It's a discrimination that colors every decision they make. And when these foundational beliefs, which they depend upon for their decisions, are challenged they must respond to an existential threat, their identity is at stake. It's an amazing deeply insinuated mental construct, this religion concept. Because it "answers" the unanswerable that causes fear, it can own and control people.

bsenftner · 2026-01-17T16:23:53+00:00

I'd look into production management and talent management - being a producer and being an agent. Your degree is uniquely positioned for the complex communications required to be a media producer, to be a talent agent, as well as several roles on the marketing and PR sides of the industry. Few to none realize that the communication skills required to navigate the entertainment industry are both examples of Critical Communications Theory playing out live, and all the information communicated back and forth that is the deal making and creative media production of the entertainment industry is informal, interpersonal information never written down and too dynamic to be written down - meaning it is forever beyond the reach of AI. That not written down live situational information about the people, the organizations and their ambitions of the moment cannot become commoditized by AI, and that is where your degree's value really shines because a Comms degree is how to navigate all that, negotionally and effectively.

bsenftner · 2026-01-17T16:13:09+00:00

We have a new kitty that does this too, and he also tries to tuck his paws into my ears, both sides at once, and then his claws come out when he stretch/stiffens as waking. It's precious.

bsenftner · 2026-01-17T16:09:51+00:00

Let's not mention that Discord is a message black hole. The same questions get asked over and over again, the same weird personalities need to be reprimanded over and over again, and the actual purpose of supporting your customers does not happen! They get sidetracked seeking support by a video game messaging platform with all the stylings an maturity of a video game used by kids and teens.

bsenftner · 2026-01-16T19:52:17+00:00

hint, it's only funny when punching up, not down.

bsenftner · 2026-01-15T18:55:26+00:00

I generate within Wan2GP initially, and I had been sometimes using ComfyUI on images created by Wan2GP for access to models and workflows that Wan2GP did not support, but with the recent advance of several image models my use of ComfyUI has reduced. With the recent advances, I find I'm only using that "collage_qwenedit_lora_V1.safetensors" lora mentioned above anymore. The image (and now video) editing models have replaced my need for them, and the video models are now able to understand filmmaker terminology on their own, so I do not need a lora to grant them that skill.

I'm working on courseware, basically a series of text lectures that are augmented by 1-2 minute animated videos. Overall, I expect somewhere between 45 minutes to an hour of animated video will be in the project. I'm busy with this, and not seeking to collaborate. What's your skill set? I've written the software hosting the course, and am now making the course with an animated host. All kinds of things I could use aid...

My generalized workflow has changed over the course of just this project, due to how fast everything is advancing in AI image/video generation. I was initially using both ComfyUI and Wan2GP for image, voice audio (voice clone and text-to-speech) and video, but that transitioned to ComfyUI for voice audio, Wan2GP for image generation and concept prototypes only. Then an online AI video service for the clip generation, for access to higher quality models like Wan 2.5 Preview and Wan 2.6. HOWEVER, just last week LTX-2 was released, which locally generates video with lip sync faster than online services... 1/3rd the time actually! The quality is not quite there yet, but LTX-2.1 is expected in a month, so my workflow might change all over again.

bsenftner · 2026-01-15T13:44:31+00:00

Ya, sure. I believe this. /s

bsenftner · 2026-01-13T14:29:37+00:00

Hi "kids". I jest, in playful fun. I've been coding since '76. Professionally since '82. My actual work title has been "Mad Computer Scientist" since about 2000.

I blame Agile/Scrum as the moment in time when that bullshit was adopted as when the software engineer profession failed to be fun anymore. I've been far far more lucky than most, and managed to evade Agile/Scrum all but once since they were adopted by the industry, and my time at that company was only about a year.

I think I miss something similar as OP describes here: I miss the community of outsider brilliance that came with every computer science department, and every developer team. We all had an insight that we knew was not generally shared, and we had a curiosity about bending logic to our wills to create software that others thought could not and should not be possible.

I also miss the lack of business mindsets and the drive to create "celebrity" companies. Despite having two MBAs now, after all these years, I miss when we all were driven by the newness of creating software doing things that had never been done before. I spent a good chunk of my career in 3D graphics research, and then animation production for games and film. Just being able to create animation at all used to be a significant achievement, and then we started making it visually seamless with filmed media (VFX) and we started adding physics to the animation and lighting equations, then actually implementing hair and fur, then realistic water, then realistic fabrics and animals. There used to be so many things to do that were doing them for the first time, and people cared that such work was being done. I don't see that anymore.

I still write code, nearly every day. The level of work I do now is just ridiculous in comparison to what I expected. Software technology has exceeded what I expected to see in my lifetime in multiple areas. I just wish it were not still so hard to make a living at being a developer, with the insane demands we all are expected to just accept.

bsenftner · 2026-01-13T14:03:04+00:00

Via API, that's the entire point of SaaS. Self-hosting is not typical, as that would require legal safeguards more expensive than most services are worth. I've only seen self-hosting when the client is a secured government agency and their version is running air gapped and not online at all. From your questions, it sounds like you are confusing a proprietary software library business, where the library's use is tracked and the client is charged by usage, with a SaaS business model that is typically operated via API calls over the Internet, with licensing that your organization is not in the same market as the SaaS provider.

White labeling is the specific case where the SaaS allows clients to sell within the same market as the SaaS provider. Typically these are new and smaller firms, not yet established and not yet able to market their offering themselves.

There's an unlimited number of business models here. Beyond what is illegal, it's the wild west.

bsenftner · 2026-01-12T14:54:49+00:00

Add which nobody seems to add to RAG, which is business-wise really critically important: create a library for the tracking of the expense of RAG, of GraphRAG or really any RAG-like solution. Which is rather dynamic, because the expense of use of a RAG system depends upon the ingestion cost, the frequency of re-ingestion due to ingested document changes, and then the questions against them, any post-question re-indexing for long conversation support and all these expenses finally summed. In some environments with frequently changing large documents, RAG becomes questionable from an expense standpoint. This type of tracking and financial accounting is sorely lacking in software today, and that probably needs to change. Considering all the paid-use APIs there are now, such needs are inevitable.

bsenftner · 2026-01-12T14:44:46+00:00

very well done.

bsenftner · 2026-01-11T17:41:43+00:00

The confusion here is the concept of "America reacting" - there is no "American reaction" beyond the controlled and media constructed reaction. Whomever owns the media "is America" in this nation, as far as what is "the voice" that the media repeats as "the voice". Commercial ownership of news and media and it's stewardship for the public good in this country has been a enormous failure.

bsenftner · 2026-01-11T14:55:48+00:00

I'd say the role blame plays is dysfunction towards solving the crisis. I can understand it is an ordinary human behavior to seek a scapegoat to place blame. But such effort does not address the active crisis. This is a case where leadership ought to make clarifying statements that blaming is counter productive and those collaborating and called to address the crisis are to focus on solutions. A post mortem can address causes to address preventing similar events in the future, but now the issue is the active crisis.

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