A huge portion of USPS international package volume is “ePackets” from China. These are a special service provided by USPS since 2011 for Chinese/HK goods that are cheaper and faster than normal USPS international shipping.
These ePackets are then bundled up into big sacks that are basically not inspected at all at US international mail facilities due to the de minimis exemption, which was just rolled back. The special status granted to ePackets meant that the volume shipped grew far beyond the processing capacity for normal packages at US IMFs. This pause (and subsequent unpause) from USPS on packages from China is because they don’t know how they’re going to handle that volume if it isn’t given special status.
Source: I worked on a project adjacent to this a couple of years ago. Close enough to pick up the basics but this isn’t quite what I was working on, so take my comment with a grain of salt.
The solution is to grow our way out of it — make more energy, make cleaner energy, develop new technologies — rather than browbeat people into submission with moral arguments because you don't like how they've chosen to deploy their resources.
> AI isn’t a co-pilot; it’s a junior dev faking competence. Trust it at your own risk.
This is a good take that tracks with my (heavy) usage of LLMs for coding. Leveraging productive-but-often-misguided junior devs is a skill every dev should actively cultivate!
Regular coding questions mostly. For me o1 generally gives better code and understands the prompt more completely (haven’t started using r1 or o3 regularly enough to opine).
I’m a big 2A supporter but would still want the would-be kidnapper to be deterred by other means. I can be incapacitated or caught unaware, JP Morgan and Charles Schwab cannot.
Do you have any favorite Flutter projects I could click around? It’s an intriguing concept but I’ve been offput thus far by Google’s lack of adoption of its own framework.
Wasn't my intention at all to imply that they did something wrong and need to scramble to fix it. Just observing that a large portion of the web is built around the assumption that traffic is intermittent, where even a small burst of requests can knock it over. No shade — I've built plenty of sites like that.
The controversy here is that LibGen doesn't legally distribute its content. Mass-scale training on pirated content is... legally murky, to say the least.
Hey, thanks! I hadn't seen Celestia until another commenter mentioned it. Cool project, definitely some UX cues to take from it like the progressive hiding of labels and ellipses as you zoom out.
Thank you for sharing this with your family and for maybe increasing the number of space nerds on this planet! Exactly what I was hoping for with this project.
It's a static React app using Three.js for rendering and a few backend functions deployed on Netlify. It's been a pretty great experience deploying to Netlify, though I didn't expect the attention from HN to go way over my 100GB of free tier bandwidth!
These ePackets are then bundled up into big sacks that are basically not inspected at all at US international mail facilities due to the de minimis exemption, which was just rolled back. The special status granted to ePackets meant that the volume shipped grew far beyond the processing capacity for normal packages at US IMFs. This pause (and subsequent unpause) from USPS on packages from China is because they don’t know how they’re going to handle that volume if it isn’t given special status.
Source: I worked on a project adjacent to this a couple of years ago. Close enough to pick up the basics but this isn’t quite what I was working on, so take my comment with a grain of salt.