This is not normal for being a corporate employee. This was certainly going to come out eventually and cause big problems, but to the extent Sam thinks AGI is around the corner he might not be playing the long game.
The Marathon 1+2 engine back in the 90s allowed for "5D space", ie. "Spatial" Rooms that were capable of overlapping each other, because the engine only defined the floor polygon with a given height and these floor polys were connected to each other at the vertices to create the actual level spaces.
So even though you were in the same absolute space coordinate as another player, you were not necessarily in the same room.
Huh I never knew that. I just knew you couldn’t have two floors directly above each other while also having both floors visible to the player at the same time. All of my Mara 1 maps I built would crash when I tried this. I wonder if what you just explained is why.
I don't know how they actually did it but conceptually I thought about it as traversing the map's segments depth first in 2D starting at one edge of the viewport & the currently occupied polygon. Simple, and allows freedom like overlapping rooms, but would go sideways in cases like the one you describe.
I'm impressed that email with POP, SMTP and slightly later, IMAP has served up so well for 30+ years, but by golly, it's an uphill battle running any sort of mail service yourself these days. I starting to understand the businesses that (claim to) run without email to and from customers.
In the same way that Amazon is a book company - Shein is a highly tech-driven fashion company - they use big data/AI/custom systems to manage everything from prediction fashion trends, managing the supply chain and customising the user experience.
> they use big data/AI/custom systems to manage everything from prediction fashion trends, managing the supply chain and customising the user experience.
Please elaborate, ideally with citations that provide sufficient technical detail.
Whereas, in my head:
“Big data” means “we tried to use Hadoop once” or “who needs a DBA? Just load everything into a Snowflake account”
“AI” means “we proxy ChatGPT and start all chats with “You are a helpful fast-fashion retailer…””
“Custom systems” is what every company has, and could be anything from giving the CEO a custom-built RGB-lit gaming rig as a desk PC, to a core company workflow using Excel macros, to what AWS is to Amazon; I can’t say I’ve heard of Shein launching SheinWebServices so that narrows it down somewhat.
No one has the details because they're secret (apart from some legal cases that open the lid slightly [1]). Just about every regular user of Shein will tell you it's the TikTok of fashion retail - the algorithm ruthlessly pumps them more items that they are likely to buy via the website and ads elsewhere. They've developed a process that can create and modify designs of what's popular (of their own products and from stealing designs that people like elsewhere) and start selling it in a few days for hundreds of products a day [2].
> “Custom systems” is what every company has, and could be anything from giving the CEO a custom-built RGB-lit gaming rig as a desk PC, to a core company workflow using Excel macros, to what AWS is to Amazon; I can’t say I’ve heard of Shein launching SheinWebServices so that narrows it down somewhat.
You seem to be dismissive of the words I've used, but the Shein "systems" have allowed them to out grow most of the competitors in a few years - you simply can't sell that much crap and produce and ship it without utilising the latest tech in everything from sales to warehouse management.
> they use big data/AI/custom systems to manage everything from prediction fashion trends, managing the supply chain and customising the user experience.
Innovation? You mean build a customer facing website, built a logistics platform to track inventory/receiving/shipping, built management tool for tracking vendors/suppliers? Excluding AWS, what tech innovation did Amazon do?
