I used to sell on Amazon, and Walmart Marketplace reached out to me to convince me they could offer me a better seller experience than Amazon.
I was excited because I hated dealing with Amazon, but I had the call with the Walmart rep and he couldn't cite any benefit over Amazon.
Would Walmart take a lower fee? No, it would be the same as Amazon.
Would Walmart give back its fee if the customer sent the product back for a refund? No, Walmart would keep my fees and have the same perverse incentives that pushed costs onto the vendor.
It was surprising how much hubris Walmart brought to the discussion. The constant tone was, "We're Walmart, so obviously you want to work with us."
>Would Walmart take a lower fee? No, it would be the same as Amazon.
Walmart charges less in two ways:
* No monthly membership fee.
* Seemingly random fee discounts, up to and including 0%. More than once I've sold an item early in a day, then sold it again later that day with a different fee percentage.
>Would Walmart give back its fee if the customer sent the product back for a refund?
When Walmart refunds a customer, it takes from the seller's reserves exactly what was paid for the sale in the first place. No more, no less. It is Amazon that charges sellers a "refund processing fee".
While Walmart definitely has its issues, there are also many virtues vis-a-vis Amazon. It is worthwhile selling on both. My 2025 Amazon and Walmart sales are equal.
This was 3-4 years ago, so it's possible that they've improved since then or that the rep I was speaking to was misinformed, but at the time, he told me there was no fee advantage on Walmart Marketplace, and I tried to be polite in my reaction of, "Then, why would you be an attractive alternative?"
The refund structure has always been in place in the going on five years I've sold on Walmart. The random discounted fees have started in the past year.
The OP talks about being locked out by Amazon, and the comment I responded to above talks about being overtaken by scams.
Edit: you say it too:
> I hated dealing with Amazon
Yet the comments in this subthread all talk only about costs - they say the costs are the same so why switch to Walmart? Aren't the reasons already given?
Does bitchat work during a phone outage? Range on BLE is pretty low, right, so I'd expect it to not do much unless you happen to live in an area where there are bitchat users every 100 ft or so.
I'm in a similar boat to you in wanting a LoRa mesh. I tried out MeshCore on the LilyGo T-Deck+ hoping it would be a device I could hand out to family members, but I found the hardware and software disappointing.[0] But I'm weirdly tempted to try the LilyGo Pager.
Unfortunately as you said, the range is abysmal since it uses BLE. It’s barely enough for a box store but it’s better than nothing. I like the idea of the lilygo pager too. I first thought it was e-ink from some of the pictures but sadly it was not.
Thanks for sharing this! I've been experimenting with something similar.
It would be helpful if the README explained how this works so users understand what they're trusting to protect them. I think it's worth noting that the trust boundary is a Docker container, so there's still a risk of container escape if the agent exploits (or is tricked into exploiting) a kernel vulnerability.
Have you looked into rootless Podman? I'm using rootless + slirp4netns so I can minimize privileges to the container and prevent it from accessing anything on my local network.
I'd like to take this a step further and use Podman machines, so there's no shared kernel, but I haven't been able to get volume mounting to work in that scenario.
> (I’m not sure why the data from my old domain, cyhsu.xyz, hasn’t been aggregated to the new hsu.cy, despite the methodology page saying it should. Must I return the canonical header in addition to a 301 code?)
It's a manual process, so I have to do it by hand when I notice a domain has moved. I've just added yours and kicked off a reprocessing job so that your old domain counts toward hsu.cy.
I think that account was compromised a while back, it looks fine now again.
I don't get the point though, why even bother making a repost bot. It's not like they gain anything from it.
Not that I have anything against the top bloggers, but I do hope the 2026 list will differ from the 2025 list. I'm here to read about varied tech content!
> For most of my favorite projects, I write the blog post _first_, then adapt that to a YouTube script. I still consider the written word to be vastly superior to video form.
Thanks for this context! I've re-worded that sentence to remove the assumption that the Mac Mini post was adapted from the video.
>blog has earned maybe a few thousand dollars with Amazon Affiliate links each year (it covers the hosting, at least, and gives a little extra cash, but I try to keep the blog as "old school web" as possible.
Wow, I'm surprised it's that little. I assumed all the popular homelab creators were making much more from affiliate links because I'd assume it's $500-5k in referred purchases per day ($12.5-125/day @ 2.5% commission), so I'd expect $10-20k/yr.
If it's an insignificant amount of your income, why bother? Affiliate links create a bias that goes against the interests of readers.[0] I get it when it's the only way to be sustainable, but if it's a pretty small percentage of annual earnings, it seems not worthwhile.
If you click a domain, you'll see its details page, and there's a direct link at the top as well as direct links to all of the domain's front page stories.
Everything is default included, and I have a long list of not-blog domains that are excluded.[0] Plus, I exclude the Alexa top 500.
There are lots of not-blogs still in the dataset, but I just exclude them when I come across them in popular views. But I'm sure if you dig through positions 101-5000 you'll find lots of domains that don't match my official criteria for a blog.
>There's some data issues in the full dataset, expectedly. My blog got around 200 points this year, which should be enough to hit #2077, but the blog does not appear at all.
Yeah, the minimum for inclusion is 500 upvotes across all front page stories.[0]
>Also baseten.co is not a personal blog.
Thanks, I've updated the dataset to exclude baseten.[1] It should disappear in the next hour or so.
Which view did they appear in? I don't see them anywhere in the top 100.
I was excited because I hated dealing with Amazon, but I had the call with the Walmart rep and he couldn't cite any benefit over Amazon.
Would Walmart take a lower fee? No, it would be the same as Amazon.
Would Walmart give back its fee if the customer sent the product back for a refund? No, Walmart would keep my fees and have the same perverse incentives that pushed costs onto the vendor.
It was surprising how much hubris Walmart brought to the discussion. The constant tone was, "We're Walmart, so obviously you want to work with us."
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