All right. The user space control of memory management. That's what I'll be talking about today. It's a fairly, it's not a heavy or detailed presentation. It's mostly about soliciting input about a subject that like was remarked in earlier session is probably going to be of some importance in the coming years with, you know, page placement. In the face of memory tiering. So let's get started. So. The involvement of user space for kernel and kernel in kernel decisions, of course, has that's a very old question. Where is the line of control exactly in kernel and user space gone back and forth. A lot. Over the years, I won't mention the word microkernel here. But yes, it has gone back and a lot over the fourth lot over the decades. Recently, we've seen a bit of a move back to user space in some areas like like networking because you know, at least handing things off to probes because of the flexibility of BPF. There's also been a demand for some orchestrator like interfaces to be able to manipulate other processes like process and advice. And there was a recent proposal for pit fd set men policy. So where exactly does that line lie. And, you know, what line exactly is useful. So what I'm going to do here is just outline some prototyping that I have done that based on our discussions at Google where we do have some experience with trying to push things out to user space a bit more. And then get a pinch and input saying, okay, well, if I were to finish this and send it upstream and as an RFC, how would you react? Would you like it? Would you say I'm totally barking up the wrong tree? So that's kind of interesting to me and to my co developers. I should also say I'm not really replaced looking to replace existing mechanisms at this point. The idea more is here to restructure the code so that user space actors will think they can do better than the colonel can attempt to do so. So the idea is to give user space another rope and see what it does with it. So quick list of existing mechanisms that you're all familiar with, not complete, but, you know, basically from less involved to more involved. So the VM parameters that controls various VM thresholds, swappiness, what have you. On a slightly smaller level, there's the C group limits, then related to that there is proactive reclaim. And then we have am advice, which has grown quite a long list of options, which in itself may be an argument that maybe there should be something more generic that you can control from user space. So the advice falls in basically to two categories that's like setting a hit inside the colonel or doing a one shot action such as you know, don't need, and and some of its friends. Then there's men policy and and buying the dealing with numeros and without a doubt the most involved one that actually diverge the code path to user space is a user fault of D. Which I won't be talking about, although I did see comment on a main list that use what if the is definitely important when you're talking about use space though and I agree. It is just not what what I've been looking at at this context, although if you're looking at, you know, and want to discuss an interesting. development that came out of user fault of the usage, I would encourage you to attend James's HTM. You still BFS talk that will follow shortly. I'm going to mainly be focusing on sort of the advice and men policy space here. So the motivation here is of course how to squeeze the most performance out of applications in the face of an environment where you have increasingly complex system architecture so the third pointer memory tiering. And what we have at Google is we often have containerized workloads, they have divergent patterns, there's multi tenancy, and there's memory tiering so far memory and swap, maybe and then also Z swap. We have some previous success with pushing things out the user space in in in farm memory, where we actually had a farm memory demon that based on detailed information from the kernel would make decisions on on memory migration that has been documented in some of the other papers that we have written over the years. So what I'm going to do here sort of describe a general idea that I had that I think may be useful when exploring this space and that I've been prototyping, and then hoping to get some feedback on that to see if people think that this is a good direction to move in. Let me see. So the idea here is that you provide some to find some general hints and control structure inside the kernel. It's to be easily accessible in all context and we'll go into this context later slide. You pass that control information to BPF probes attached to trace points that strategic points in the kernel when you want to make a memory management, you know, page play placement, usually, but not always kind of decision. And then you can in user space can steer the probes via BPF map manipulation. So the BPF maps will actually be mostly read only from as far as the probes are concerned users base actually manipulates them, the probes read them. So it allows to see what user space wants it looks at the control information gets from the kernel comes to a decision and via a bit of right of memory that is passed with and passes its verdict to the kernel which then takes the ball and rules with it. So what is there currently in this space for we've got an advice that was sometimes it does a one shot operation, but other times it sets a VMA flag. There's a policy that has an impulse he struct. It's accessible via VMA or via a special look up for shared memory where things are a little bit more difficult, a little bit more complicated. Again, I'm not necessarily looking to replace these just seeing what would happen if I implemented sort of a new structure that tried to combine these in a way that BPF probes could act on them. So structure won't be allocated attached if new framework is not used so not looking to use more memory or extent existing structures much. Anyway, not much anyway at this point. Within the control structure, it could even be opaque to the kernel. I mean, it's not always clear where that boundary should be if it's only focused on consumption of the BPF probe, then the kernel doesn't even necessarily need to understand what's in it as long as the BPF probe does know. So that would lead to like a very simple interface to set things up like tag a VMA with this opaque value. That does lead to sort of namespacing issues. For example, one of our earlier ideas was well we've got the anonymous name for anonymous memory VMAs now. So why don't we try encoding and hinting information into that. And then we quickly realized that, you know, several other teams within Google were already starting to use this anonymous structure so that we'd be stepping on whatever they had put in there. So that means that we would have to define a company wide namespace for the string that is stored in there. And that would also mean that any BPF probe trying to use the information would have to do string parsing to get the right hinting information out of it. It just, yeah, but that's not great. So that's the kind of thing that you get there. So you are looking at an interface that you can say, okay, well I'm only going to use it for this particular purpose. So context, so some context in the kernel are natural fit for, you know, accessing some sort of control structure. For example, if you're in a context where the VMA is available, you already have one, the pro call usually is fine within those contexts. And you've got the VMA just take a pointer out of it to say your control structure and you have all the information you want. Other context or more problematic. In the reclaim path, you just have a page or folio list. And then you don't know exactly what this page belongs to. Well, you can figure it out, but it just gets more complicated.  There's another problem in that context. If you're walking through page lists, and you call the BPF probe for each page. That's not optimal.  And you're going to add all these calls to BPF probe. So I mean, it's not great in general, especially in those kind of contexts that would just not be good. So there are some performance issues to consider there. So, given that idea. What have we done so far. So, but it's a prototyping made mainly to see okay are there a couple of interesting things that I can do with some basic infrastructure and can I do what men policy and advice are already doing. Of course, if you can't even, you know, do what the existing infrastructure is already doing, then you might as well give up right now. So here's a couple of things that I implemented. I modified the MTL are you access bit scanner that that creates newer younger generations, sort of as a proof of concept. Basically, it makes accesses by certain processes count more than other processes so they, so essentially they sort of have a nice value. So to speak, you know, compared to the schedule a nice value that keeps their pages and artificially younger and less likely to be pushed down and eventually end up in swap. The practical value of that is questionable, but you know, it's a nice proof of concept. Let's straightforward implement since it's a separate scanner overhead is not that much of concern. The scan is done by walking mms and then VMA so the context is fine you've got everything that you need so that was an easy one. The second one is a compressibility hints. As you may know at Google, we use the swap as end storage or not not as front storage as actual end storage for propages that we like to save. So you store them compressed and you save some memory to get rid of the original uncompressed page. So compressibility hints can actually be useful because you may end up wasting some time trying to compress pages that are just not good enough because there's a certain ratio that you need for this to be all useful.  Now, if the application had credit hints on those pages saying, for example, what some applications do is they actually have cold pages that they compress themselves so then they could provide a comparability hint saying a don't even bother with these guys. You want to use the swap. Try something else. So that's functionally not that hard to implement. I have not measured the overhead yet with the BPF proactive. I haven't done that for any of these I still need to do that. The initial number allocation would also not that hard to do have to shuffle around the men policy code just a little bit so that I could trickle up the note through the right code path always from the BPF group but yeah, and that also works basically I said, you know, for certain processes in a BPF map. I said, I sort of faked it and say you are only going to allocate from this particular note. And then at the same time, also set the memory policy for them and it worked to be this overall that decision every time. And lastly, very, very simple case and advice, huge page of no or no huge pace so essentially that was just changing the flag checks into BPF call this probably the most boring one. So, I think this is a sort of an interesting direction to take even if there are performance concerns at the very least, I think that's sort of an interesting vehicle to at least test the how feasible it is to do some some things in user space, or you know, maybe sort of test certain placement policies or what have you out and what or what have you in user space by sort of putting maybe a library on top of this that manipulates the maps. So my question is to you, what do you think does this make sense. Have you done something similar like this. So, yeah, tell me, I can't hear anything at the moment so I know there are no questions or have been cut off from audio. Yeah, I have kind of general question. Why is BPF chosen for this is it just for prototyping to prove those ideas or this is like a final solutions that you are looking for. Similarly, the final solution, it is just that it's the most flexible one. Essentially. So it combines flexibility with still a certain amount of performance since I mean, you know, probes do get run directly in the current line there's no transition to use a space there. It's not wedded to that, that particular solution but it seemed like a good, a good starting point. Right, so let me rephrase it. Are you looking for flexibility in the final solution or is this flexibility that you have with BPF is needed for prototyping only. In other words, do you look at those controls as something you would want the user space to have flexibility to modify logic, like two different customers might modify it different ways or are you looking at controls which are generic enough that everybody can use the same way. I see it now. I think I'm having a BPF solution available that makes use of this framework is is a good thing. I'm not sure if there maybe should be other ways to use it, but having BPF hooks I think is a good thing. Yes. Yeah, I guess one pushback you can hit into is the of course that is establishing a certain API's guarantees that are kind of tricky to be maintained forever, especially when they are pretty fine. I can understand that if you do not have a casting stone kind of entry points for BPF that would be easier to sell. But as long as you would be trying to add fixed trace points that might be a roadblock that would be kind of hard to step over without showing that there is absolutely no other way around your problem to be solved by existing means. Yeah, that's interesting. I mean, I would imagine you're running into sort of fixed ABI issues one way or the other. I mean, if using BPF, I mean, you could use a K funks, but then you're exposed to, you know, the changing kernel interfaces. So, I don't know. I mean, do you think that there would there would be a better way to get sort of a stable interface. Yeah, I mean, if you well define the user interface than the bar is obviously quite high already but you establish a certain well defined operation rather than just an entry point and do whatever you like with that. And I guess that the difference might not be all that great or all that big but but I'm a little bit afraid that the well or making a well defined entry points at and into low level memory management functionality would be much harder than starting an entry point from the user space which is kind of more use case defined rather than here we do aging the weather, whatever you like with that. Sure. I see what you mean so you're saying okay well you know, keep the control structure, and you didn't mean for such that you're any in the kernel, but just have kernel code act directly on the information that you attached and don't don't leave it to BPF probe. Is that what you're saying. Yeah, essentially yes. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, I understand that I mean this is definitely who has was a point of discussion that that we had to we for now we've settled on the BPF method then. But you're right. I mean, yeah, it's it's a good argument so we'll see where we land there. I think you'd have had more interest in this idea if it had happened before process and advise landed. You know, they seem to occupy much the same space in terms of I can control what that process does rather than controlling its own destiny. I'm curious where this goes. It doesn't necessarily feel entirely dead on arrival to me but it. I'm curious to see where it goes. I don't necessarily give up on it just yet but it needs to demonstrate something for me to get excited about it. Yeah, I mean, the next steps here is for us to develop this further and to actually show applications that that can use this framework and get tangible results. But that will make people more. I mean, if we cannot get those tangible results, then you know, obviously we are not no longer interested in it. So, but yeah, I see what you mean. I mean, and as for process and advice. That is essentially similar in a way that it means, you know, one process controlling memory management decisions for all made in another process at our space. But this would allow just basically a wide variety of policies in a wide variety of of contexts. But I mean, I absolutely take your point. I mean, you've got to, you know, show a use case and then some results. So, you know, go anywhere. Frank, I might have missed this, but is there somewhere in your prototype where you populate these structures with the characteristics of the different either NUMA nodes or memory regions with regards to you talked about dear and far memory earlier. Is there a concept that user space can look at the structure and go okay this this region is near this region is far this region is whatever when it's making these placement decisions. Currently, it just uses if you want to set the structure up. Excuse me. So, for the prototypes. It was essentially very, very simple. I simply used a assumed a static node system I populated the structure by default with with with the memory tearing information and then use space provided the the preferences it had for for the nodes. So the kernel put in the defaults and and then the BPF maps as read by the BPF has provided the overrides. So, so to speak. And that is the step. So you usually something you know will be initialized by by by default, although currently in the prototype if if you don't even have a BPF probe attached to it, the structure is not even there it doesn't get used at all. So, so then you don't even need to do any any association but yes that there are some defaults that are sit there but there isn't really anything anything special going on. So, you know, I mean, just to I see we're almost at the end anyway. So I just say okay, I mean, what I'm certainly interested in is if what others other views are, you know, in a memory tearing world. But remarks are made as like okay well, it's impossible for the kernel to get this completely right and I mean user space has to offer something more so I look forward to a discussion about you know the ideas that that that other people had in this in this space, certainly. And I'm hoping that, you know, when I explore this path for a little while longer and then hoping that we can come. You'll see me come back to the man list. In a couple of months saying is what I did and these were the exciting exciting results that I got. What do you think now so. I just add that doing those little experiments with what you have might be really an interesting input in the problem definition. So you can see okay, I can achieve doing this. Let's discuss how to do that properly with respect to future maintenance of that of that feature. And so I really like the the BPF kind of approach of probing the problem. Just not really seeing that this would be the final destination for that particular feature, but I mean, maybe there are policies that are so hard to define in general case that in the end, we might just land on the A side of, let's say high level and well described and three points where you can change the behavior. We have discussed that couple of years back with respect to all am killer decision where it's really hard to define what's your best strategy in the end, we just gave up on that. But that might be one example of, you know, something that can be outsourced, because you just have to make some decision it really doesn't matter what kind of decision you make. You just tell us what to do and we just do the thing that it's really hard to do from the user space because you are in such a constrained conditions that it's really hard to read some statistics or something. So yeah, I would just conclude from my point of view that that playing with BPF is really interesting. But final solution would really need a careful thought to not export too much and tide ourselves into hard to develop situation. I take your point. Thanks. Okay, it seems that there are no other questions in the room. So, unless you have anything last few words or thank you. No, thank you.


Good morning. I am so glad this conversation happened right now according to Wogue as well as some vague magazine articles. This is when people are the most alert like properly caffeinated people. So this is the perfect time to be having this conversation with Himanshu who is across the CEO of a company which has had to stay on its toes to stay part of, you know, the great Indian retail conversation. So thank you first of all so much for speaking to us.  So would you first like to talk about what that process has been like? Yeah. Shantanu, yeah, that's an interesting question and before we before we start off, how many people here have shopped on Snapdeal in the last one year? Can you raise your hands? Yeah. Now that's interesting because you'll find probably three, four hands. Yeah. Now that's Snapdeal 2.0 and I'll describe that for you. Yeah. Essentially, Snapdeal, the first version was all about being a marketplace for everything, everywhere, all at once. So we were everywhere with every category and the fuel there was in terms of I think the lady mentioned before that that at one click you could get anything that you could think of. So we had stored everything and of course you came to you at the cheapest possible price. So that was the earlier version of Snapdeal. What we are now creating and I don't want to go into the history and bore you with what caused us to move into Snapdeal 2.0, but I'll just take you to 2.0. So Snapdeal 2.0 is about creating value lifestyle destination for Bharat. And this is an interesting one because just a few statistics for everyone as to why this is interesting. So give or take depending on what data source you are looking at there are around 800 to 900 million people with internet access in India. There are give or take another approximately out of that 200 to 250 million people who have transacted online. So they have shopped on e-commerce platforms in some form or the other. And the interesting part of this is that out of this 250 million which has shopped on any of the e-commerce platforms roughly around 50% of this is the value segment. And 50% is our people who came in onto e-commerce and internet long back. People like you and us who probably have been on e-commerce for 10 years, 15 years, 18 years, 20 years depending on age and everything else. The other 50% is the value segment. Large number of these have come in post the geo revolution. Quite a lot of them have come in during the COVID phase. But the interesting part is not this half in half. The interesting part is that the out of the 800 million, the next 200 million e-commerce shoppers will largely all come from the value segment. And if you think about it, it will be clear to you that the more well to do segments whoever had to be on e-commerce is already on e-commerce. Only it's the birth rate and people moving into adulthood. That's the percentage. It will not grow much. Almost 90, 95% of the next 200 million shoppers or 250 million shoppers would come from the value segment. Now, therefore, we embarked on this journey of creating this destination for value lifestyle. In the value lifestyle segment, the quality of merchandise is very poor. So how do you make value lifestyle destination with good quality merchandise for the for the consumers? And how do you make it of appeal to people who have got not too much money with them? In fact, very little money with them. And that's really discovering the fortune at the bottom of the pyramid and how you can scale it up in a profitable manner. So that's the Snapdeal 2.0. And like we discussed this, everyone talks about Amazon right now. But the thing is, especially in a country like India, Bharat is its own segment. And it perhaps like far outweighs the India segment like the Snapdeal or sorry, the Flipkart or the Amazon. And so could you describe the typical Snapdeal customer like what they're looking for and how you sort of looking for that and have them in mind? So very interesting. I think the thing is that whether you since you named two of them, so Amazon and Flipkart, do they cater to the Bharat customers? Yes, they reach out to the Bharat customers. Do they service those pin codes? Yes, they do. So what's the difference? The difference is that the experiences on all the platforms are created for metro audiences. The experiences are created for people in this room. The experiences are not created for the Bharat customer. It is an inbuilt assumption that the aspiration of the Bharat customer is identical to the needs of the metro customers. And only the price range is different. This is the assumption. And this is actually not true. I'll give you illustrations of this, right? If you were to look at our audience, our audience is one is very clear. One is in terms of vernacular versus English, but that's okay. That is quite understandable. But the more important one is that a lot of them are reasonably new to e-commerce shopping. They struggle to fill the address page. One quick statistic for you on our platform, 70% of the purchases take place without anybody keying in a search term or filtering or using any of the filters. So 70% without using filter, without using search term. What does that mean? That essentially means that they're relying on the homepage feed and they're relying on the tabs. So go men, t-shirts, et cetera, et cetera. So you follow the tab. Now, this customer is quite different from the metro audiences who quickly want to reach and see what they want to see. Now, how do you make the assortment that Divya sees different from what Ramdeen sees? And how do you dynamically do that? So the role of data science in our case is significantly higher than the other platforms. What I show to you will make the difference between your buying or not buying. How do we handle you through the process? How do we enable you to fill up the address pages easily? Visuals are picture-led. The PDB pages are picture-led. Very little text and very easy text, no complicated terms. So there are lots and lots of different things that you do when you want to cater to. And of course price and assortment, which is a massive part of the whole thing. But everything else in terms of the experience is quite different for the Bharat customers compared to the customers that you see on other platforms which are largely being done for the metro audiences. The checkout pages are so complicated in the other platforms. But they're easy for people like us because we've been accustomed to that complication. But to the first-time customer it is complicated. Us is quite easy. It's meant for the Bharat consumer. And apkir is because you said like SAPT does do a lot of hand-holding and it takes first-time customers through this process. And so apkir is that a differentiator when it comes to you and say to an Amazon or even a Flipkart that because you have this in mind that you are aware of the difficulties. So is that why also that they sort of come towards you? So there are two or three reasons for that. One is of course as a brand name, Snapdale is extremely well-known. Like the others are well-known. So it becomes a natural magnet if you ask anybody to name three or four e-commerce sites across the country. We will feature in that list. So I think that's an advantage which comes in honestly not because of what we have done recently but because of the Snapdale 1.0 version. So that's a heritage that we have. But having said that, I think more and more people keep coming on to our app and site essentially because it's easy. If you are a first-time user just again another statistic which may be interesting for you. We have two categories of shoppers. Any platform would have. We all have repeat users which is called RTU in our terminology and FTU which is the first-time user on your platform. Now out of the FTUs on our platform 30 to 35% one third is first time ever on any e-commerce platform. First time ever they have not shopped on any e-commerce platform. Now this is completely different. What you need to create for them is therefore completely different from what you need to do if there are people who have shopped multiple times on a platform. And of course this is an emerging segment and it has its bright spots as well. So what do you see as the biggest advantages as well as perhaps some of the challenges for the segment? I think both the advantage and the challenges merge into each other and I'll just illustrate to you why it does. Now in the lifestyle segment which is fashion, footwear, BPC products, functional merchandise, household products etc. The quality of the merchandise at the low end of the spectrum is not good in India. This is the reality. It is patchy. In fact it does not even compare with other emerging economies. We are quite poor in terms of the quality. Now the person who is buying that merchandise a t-shirt let's say at 200 rupees or 300 rupees or a polo at 350 rupees or a 400 rupees is looking for him that 200, 300, 400 rupees is a hell of a lot of money and is looking for good quality merchandise. And therefore our merchandise range that we have is very curated. It's curated with marketplace sellers but you get to see only good quality merchandise. We actually off-board anything which is not good quality. The important second part therefore is that we only have relevant price range. In our case for example if you go and hunt for t-shirts your story will start at 199 and you will get over at 799. You don't get to see 2999, 3999, 4999 confusing you because that's not our customer. That's also one of the reasons that many of you and only 3-4 hands went up. It does not appeal to you. We largely don't have any brands because we operate at the end where there are only labels. So we curate those labels. We curate the quality of the labels and the assortment and make the experience well. Now this is a challenge but it's also competitive advantage because it's difficult to carry out. And the other one which is very difficult to crack is at 400, 400 rupees average selling price ASP as we call it where you have mostly COD orders, cash-on delivery orders, 85-90% are cash-on delivery orders and therefore undelivered returns are high because it's not paid for. How do you make money while doing this? Now this itself when you solve this is both a massive challenge and also an inbuilt mode because it's difficult to do. Yeah but it's a huge challenge but also the numbers are there because as much as we'd like to pretend to we're still a very small part of the average, perhaps you aren't as aware of. And so I mean in snappy's insistence where you have concentrated on the market. So how do you help tech-assistant people who like you said people who are coming on to the person. How do you sort of hand, you said hand-holding but how does that process actually work? So in different ways like for example to a lot of customers who are from Bharat there's a lot of anxiety whether the packets will get delivered or not. Now they can't easily read the text messages SMS or WhatsApp. That's a reality. So we have an audio message that goes. They're very accustomed to audio messages saying that your packet will be delivered tomorrow. Now this is not the exact text I'm just giving you the gist of what it does. So it essentially gives you that in an audio just illustrations of how this has been done. Similarly for example on the platform when we also had the same thing at a point of time where you had address field 1, address field 2, pin code, town, state and so on and so forth. Now then we figured out that customers struggle. How are you what does address field 1 mean? What does 2 mean? All this gets very complicated. So we actually merged everything. So if you go to our thing you will find there's just one field. They can write the address they want. What we do is we actually if they are struggling with that also there's a prompt. So if you click that you get advice how to fill it. And if you click another button there you can get you will get an instant call back. How to fill to help you very interestingly we allow the customers to fill this and wherever our algo determines that this address looks difficult to read with what they've said there's a call that goes to the customer and our agent actually rewrites the address. So just illustrations on how this experience on everything the images are large. The text is very easy and very little text. There is not too much of text. There's very little text. Now these are illustrations but the biggest one is how do I show the assortment to that person which is relevant for him. That's where we have worked for years on training our algos machine learning etc. We have a fantastic data science team of making it extremely super relevant at an individual level to that customer. And you know now that you've got this may I say data set in place and the thing is there are still three to four hundred million Indians who are going to come online and so here obviously got so what else is that field coming up to engage with this new internet population that is going to come in for the first time. So could you elaborate on that. So it's an interesting one and there are two angles to that. One is the relevance of the platform which is how you will get organic traffic and the other one is of course customer acquisition, CAC whoever is familiar with that term CAC customer acquisition cost. Now without going into details it's very important because we want to be profitable to get both these right and both these require a lot of work actually. So the digital marketing team that we have is probably one of the finest and probably one of the most conjuced teams that you will ever find around. And it's built in their DNA because when you are going to sell a product at four hundred four and fifty rupees you need to make sure that you acquire them at a small number. Otherwise it will be unprofitable and you need to get them at scale you need to get a large number of them which is a completely different mechanism from actually acquiring customers at whatever CAC in large numbers. So the skill set is quite different and platform we discussed, platform to be more and more of appeal as we move forward. Great. And so is there anything else you would like to talk about? Snapple in particular which it's coming up with in the future. Yes. So one of the things that we have done is that we have also created a house of brands when we figured out that there's a problem with the value segment. So we figured out that we need to look at creating some of the range ourselves to get the quality in place and that's where another company which is a subsidiary of Snapple called Stellaro Brands was born which is a house of brands. We have a bunch of brands which we have on our platform and we also sell on third party marketplaces. So if you were to look at Ajiho or if you were to look at Amazon you will find these brands. Some of them are doing quite well there just a few months. So there's a brand called Rangita. So if you go on Ajiho you will find that it has actually made its way into first fold second fold of the discovery there organically. So it's scaling up quite well. We have a large team which is from the physical world which makes these brands. So we have buyers, we have planners, we have designers, we have sourcing people, we have full content team. We have a large QC team to cater to this. So we have got a house of brands which is called Stellaro Brands. We have got six, seven brands as of now which we've all created from scratch over the last 10 to 12 months and some of them have gone live in the last two, three months on some of these platforms doing quite well. So that's the other interesting part which was a discovery that we were trying to solve this problem at the mass level. And it's interesting that there was this pivot for Snapdeal from India to Bharat. And now I think as consumers we can only hope that you pivot back to India as well. So that's a huge opportunity. And in fact the answer in many ways is known to us when I requested and I knew that hardly any very few hands will go up. That's a huge opportunity. We need to solve this. As of now we don't have a solve because the platform requirements, the need, the interface is quite different from the Bharat consumer custom compared to the audience that we see here. And therefore while people say India and Bharat are the same, they are not the same. It's quite different from each other. They're not the same at all. For us it'll be quite a challenge to actually start catering to the audience that's sitting here. No, I'm sure there'll be a lot of players that need to come into play to sort of bridge that gap. But I'm sure Snapdeal will be one of them. So thank you so, so much. Thank you, Shantani. Pleasure talking to you. Thank you.


Alrighty, I have a really sad but big update on Tundra Twister, but I also want to stress that everything I'm about to discuss is speculation and rumors, and nothing is confirmed until the park makes an opening announcement for Tundra Twister. With that being said, everything I talk about is, again, just speculation, and on top of that, everything I'm about to talk about is actually really normal for a first-of-a-kind ride that's being designed. So in this video I'm going to talk about some of the things that I think are going wrong with Tundra Twister, so take everything I say with a grain of salt in this video, but trust me, I promise you what I'm about to talk about is accurate, and also just know that this is normal when it comes to a first-of-a-kind and that they will make adjustments and solutions for all the problems and Tundra Twister will eventually open. With that being said, Tundra Twister, what I'm assuming, or I'm assuming, is having some problems with overheating. So we've noticed that it goes down for kind of like a cool-off period, and it's very evident that that's kind of going on and that the ride is having some sort of overheating problem. So with that, they'll either install like something like they did on Sledgehammer, a cooling system to help with that, and yeah, and as you saw at the beginning of the video, it's also having troubles getting stuck upside down, and you know the TSA will not like that. So Mondial or Wonderland's gonna have to come up with a solution. It's kind of easy. They could add a counterweight to the actual ride itself on more than like on one side of the gondola, more front or back of it to help fix that, but I guess into the update, they've added some themed like fencing similar to Yukon Striker Station as the connecting the railings. They are adding the net over Tundra Twister to protect the underpassage and pathways. They are sending up guide wires up the support columns of Tundra Twister, so when maintenance works on it they have the you know the safety installed, so they were installing that as well. The tents for the queue line are installed, more themings going in, and the sign for Tundra Twister should be up tomorrow the latest. Everything for the sign was installed today. They're also installing a secondary fence to separate the path and Tundra Twister as well, and it looks like it's gonna be a slightly taller fence as well. So with that being said, they are definitely all the problems taken out of the equation. They are falling behind, so it is most certainly, unless for some miracle, not gonna open this weekend. I can't see it opening this weekend. The only way it's gonna open this weekend is if the test cycles that the guy was doing, programming the ride, counted towards. So instead of, my calculation was for Saturday Sunday running from like 8 in the morning to like 10 p.m. at night, and so far they've only been running from 12 p.m. or 1 p.m. today to about 8 p.m. So losing a lot of cycle counts. It's doing about 12 cycles max an hour. We saw anywhere from 10 to 12, so definitely not hitting what it should be. And on top of that, they've been running into some cooling and heating, overheating issues, and now the getting stuck upside down as we caught on film. So thank you to key switches who sent me the footage of it. Again, I want to stress that this is a lot more normal than you think. So there's a reason that they test and over test a ride that is first of its kind. So most rides do about 50 to 100 cycles before opening. If it's not a first of its kind, this ride has to do 500. And what that's gonna do is it's gonna show them exactly things like this. It shows them, oh, there's a flaw in the design. Okay, we need to add a little kind of enhancement or fine tune a little bit of the design. It's a lot easier than you think. They can go in like they, you know, for an example, the viathan was too light when it was built. It would value a lot. Now they added a lot of weight to the front car, the zero car of the train. And it doesn't value anymore. So for example, they can add a metal plate a little more to one side of the gondola front or back. And that should help fix this problem. On top of that, the overheating, they can add a cooling system. That one's a little trickier.  But that's not technically like, I wouldn't say it has to be rushed. But I'm sure there's other solutions outside of that. I just not an engineer. And I don't have that information. But for example, such hammerhead overheating problems, and they added that cooling system. But yeah, that's just all I know or think I know on Tundra twisters. So again, take everything I say with a grain of salt until the park makes an announcement on opening. But I wanted to pass on any information that I think I had to you guys. And I did want to reiterate that this is very normal for a first of kind flat ride. And it is not the end of the world. The ride will open when it's ready. Awesome. Thanks so much for watching today's video. Have a good one guys. Bye


We explain why Independence Day is so important to Americans. Overcoming colonial rule is certainly a good reason to celebrate, but that's not the only reason the United States feels their Independence Day is so important. And by the way, we aren't talking about Will Smith fighting aliens, but American revolutionaries defeating the British. By the mid-18th century, the colonies had been under control of the British crown for over 150 years. Colonists believed they were not being represented in the distant British parliament and opposed the exaggerated taxes that were being forced on them. Loyalty to the British crown diminished, and the American revolution was born. The Continental Congress decided the colonies should be free, and a committee began to draft the Declaration of Independence. The most gifted writer among them, Thomas Jefferson, argued that all men are created equal and should have the right to decide freely about their government in order to reach happiness. On the 4th of July, 1776, the Declaration was approved. From then on, Americans began to celebrate the 4th of July as the day their nation was established. Early festivities slightly differ from today's celebrations. The bonfires are today's fireworks, and if soldiers got a double ration of rum, today there's a double ration of burgers and beer for everyone. Today Americans continue their quest for equality and happiness for all. Thanks to the values rooted on that day. And that's why Americans love to celebrate their Independence Day.


I'm going to talk very briefly about a permanent solution to the social media issue many within the past week have emailed me often very nervous about the situation with social media in that companies like Facebook, Google, Reddit, Twitter, these kind of companies do not just dominate us as individuals but they have become much more powerful than even government itself. And we have absolutely no recourse whatsoever because it's not just we cannot do anything legal about them but we don't even have recourse to them in any way whatsoever. There's nothing that we can do. So I want to explain the real solution to social media. I've said this before but I just want it to be very clear because the technology is out there for the solution. But I don't think the awareness is. Okay. Long story short, the solution is federation. Okay. Let me explain what that means. You have to understand why companies like Facebook and Twitter got big. Okay. People use Facebook because other people use Facebook. Facebook and all of these sites have networking effects. When more and more people use them, let's say people are in the case of Facebook, an alternative to Facebook eventually emerged to Google Plus, which everyone knows no longer exists. And the reason it didn't exist is because it could not get that number. No one was going to switch and leave their Facebook even if Google Plus had advantages because Facebook is where everyone is. And no matter how good the alternatives are, you cannot just move everyone in one fell swoop. It's not going to happen. So Facebook and Twitter and all of these sites do very egregious things and people do not feel like they can move over because they would be abandoning all their friends who are still on the platform. So they have networking effects. So how can you have that on one hand? How can you have people looking at all of the available content in the world? But at the same time, how could we also have a system where one central authority doesn't control every single bit of information that goes through that? They don't have the right to filter everything, ban everyone and do everything else. Again, the solution is what's called federation, federated software, federated social media. I'll give you an example. There is a type of federated social media, a software project called Pluroma. Pluroma is out there. There are many instances of Pluroma, but it is not one site. Let me explain how it works. It is an alternative to Twitter. What you do, what anyone who knows how computers work or servers work, they can start up a little server and set up Pluroma just very quickly and easily. And that works like a Twitter site. So they can have them and their friends log on, have this Twitter-like profile where they can comment and do the equivalent of retweeting and stuff like that. It actually looks very nice. It functions very well. So Pluroma exists out there. Now, of course, no one is going to use your individual Pluroma instance, right? What's the point in that? But the nice thing about federated software is that there are hundreds and thousands, maybe, of Pluroma instances and all of them can interact with each other. So let's say you have an instance with just you and a couple friends that you start on your own server. Well, they can interact with anyone else who's on a server with Pluroma. In fact, it's as if everyone is on the same site. OK, so they can interact. You can start up your own instance where you have the terms of service, you do whatever you want. You can even ban people you want. But of course, they are not banned from the system itself. They could join another instance. They could start their own server. So everything is interconnected. You get the benefits of it having a centralized, I guess, environment where everyone can use the same kind of nice like and subscribe features and stuff like that. But at the same time, it's decentralized.  You can easily just go to another VPS provider or start your own server. It ultimately cannot be censored, you know, over the long term. Now, even better than what makes this even better than contemporary social media, as we know it so far, is that Pluroma, like many other of these federated software types of things are built on what's called Activity Pub. Activity Pub is actually the back end to all this. It's the technical side of it. But what that means is I have an instance of what's called Peartube. Peartube is something just like that, but for YouTube. That is, I set up this software on my server where I can upload videos and people can comment, people can subscribe to my channel just like it is on YouTube. In fact, you can even do live streams now just like on YouTube. But because it's based on Activity Pub, like Pluroma, you can actually comment on my videos from a Pluroma instance, or you can share my videos from a Pluroma instance. It's like being able to comment on a YouTube video with your Twitter profile. So all of this stuff has the same kind of back end. There's Pluroma. There's Peartube, which is sort of a YouTube equivalent. There's also Mastodon, which is like Pluroma. It's sort of like a Twitter thing. There's Right Freely, which is I guess sort of like a blog kind of software. I don't know exactly what you would call that. There's also, what is it, Pixel something or other? I forget the name off the top of my head, but it is an equivalent of Instagram, kind of Snapchat-y kind of things. And there are many other things for Facebook equivalents and stuff like this. And a lot of this software is still being developed. But I just want to put it out there that it's there, that it's in constant development. Many more people are using it. There are many instances of Pluroma and Mastodon and Peartube if you want to get into it. Right now, I think the, again, I'm advertising the technology as it is right now. A lot of the people on these services are just, you know, I guess nerd hackers who want to play with the software. Or, you know, there are a couple like random websites who have their own instance and stuff like that. But the nice thing is it really is a long-term solution. And I'm not saying that everyone's going to get on an immediately, but you definitely need to know what this stuff is. Because this is something institutionally, which is superior and it's going to survive censorship. You know, I'm all for these other alternative video and social media sites if they exist. But this is much better because even if you don't know how to set up your own server, this is something that anyone can take advantage of who does. And you can take advantage of that. And it really does have all the benefits and all of the benefits of social media like Twitter and Facebook. And it also avoids the harm that we are going through right now. Okay. So that's it. Look into it. I'm going to put some links to some of these pieces of software and also instance links to, you know, the many different instances you can join. So just check it out. Check out the Fetaverse as they say. And I will see you guys next time.


Welcome back, it's still the breakfast on Clause TV Africa and indeed we are checking what happened today in history not just in Nigeria but of course across the world. All right and on April 30, 1966, Annette, are you supposed to go there? Yes, all right. So on this day in history, 1966, the Church of Satan, a religious organization dedicated to Satanism was formed. The Church of Satan was formed in, you know, San Francisco in California by a professional publicist, Anton Lavey. The controversial Church of Satan regards Satan as a spirit and not a data, not a deity. They say Satan represents love, represents kindness and that Satan represents respect to all those who deserve it. Now this Church of Satan rejects the Christian concept of the devil.  They don't believe in heaven. Their core belief is in indulgence, you know, over abstinence, kindness and gratification of all desires. Now the founder of the Church of Satan, Lavey said, Satanism is essentially a religion of self, a religion of individualism that represents pride and enlightenment. Now to join this Church of Satan, you have to pay, you know, an application fee of $200, a registration fee of $200 and, you know, members receive a membership card used to identify themselves, you know, all over the world. I mean, this is really weird, right? But that's what the Church of Satan is all about. And they've been fighting to keep the U.S. a largely secular state. But in 1997, the founder of the Church, Anton Lavey, actually passed away. Aneta, why don't you just start reading about the Church of Satan? I could only just breathe, like, the name alone is Satan.  So at the end of the day, there is a church dedicated to Satan. And when church supposed to be related to, ordinarily to God, you know, and they boast of, you know, large membership. People attend the church. They pay 200, 200, $200 registration fee. Their membership is in two levels. $200. Yeah, two levels of membership. Yes, you pay to register. So it's not just a regular church. I'm not asking, I see if you're the spokesperson. I'm just, I'm just.  That's what the Church of Satan is all about. It's about issues in the society and not just about heaven or hell. They don't believe in heaven.  They see Satan as a spirit of love. Wow. It's, it's really a different doctrine from what we're used to here in Africa, you know, just like you said, an African man or woman, don't talk about Church of Satan.  I'm impressed, you know, but, but this is the reality in the United States. Well, it is a reality. But then again, also today, something happened in Nigeria, a bomb blast struck senior police officers convoy in Jalingo. That's in Terrabba state this day in history. And of course, 11 people were killed, including police men. 22 others were injured. There had been a string of bombings and shootings in the five days leading to the attack. No group actually claimed responsibility for that attack. It happened at the time of serial bombings, you know, by Boko Haram. And then this issue of security in Nigeria is not just an issue of today. No, not at all. With us for almost over 10 years right now, and it's just continuing on the baited. I mean, I remember back then in 2012, when we, when we first heard about this attack, April 30th, 2012, you know, the news had it that a suicide bomber was riding a motorcycle and his target was the commissioner of police at that time, Mamansuli. He intended to, you know, just drive into, you know, the convoy of Mamansuli. He was heading to his office in Jalingo at the time. But he, Mamansuli managed to escape and hurt. But we know that it was an explosion. Yes, 11 people, 11 people died. 11 people were killed. Actually, these two others were injured. Yes, exactly. Other people were injured. The explosion also affected the Ministry of Finance building there in Jalingo. So, insecurity really has been with us for a long time. Remember the first Boko Haram attack back then in 2009? But Boko Haram. The Christmas Day bombing and all of that. You know, back then in 2010, 2012, there about almost every other time there was an issue of a suicide bombing, you know, across Nigeria. Most Nigerians were like really scared that you don't know where to go to. You don't know if you maybe went to, if you gone to maybe a mall or some public place. It just might be a victim of some suicide bombing. But indeed, that has moved on from that to, you know, kidnapping and banditry and, you know, attacks on police formation in Nigeria. Yes, indeed.  To now, exactly, to now just going into school, staying on the highways and kidnapping people, you know, in the dead of the night. So sad. We can understand where all these agitations, you know, is coming from the country and only hope that, you know, we can only, the country can get better. We can only hope. And just also hope that those who are responsible, you know, to making our lives are to be secured, should actually up their games and make sure Nigerians sleep with both eyes closed. I want to sleep and not worry about being attacked tomorrow, being kidnapped just because I just want to travel or use the highway. Nobody wants that. Anyway, those are the stories we have for you today in history. April 30th, 2012, the suicide bomb attack in Jingo, Tarabas state, where the police commissioner, Mamantuli, escaped and hurt, as well as the formation of the Church of Satan in the United States, San Francisco, this day in history, 1966. Let's take a break here and, you know, dive deep into our first conversation on the breakfast.


Can you guys are on Amazon? No, I don't know. Really? Yeah, I know. Tell me. Okay. Well, I don't like to usually talk about this publicly because I'm afraid of Jeff Bezos, the scary man, scary evil man. The reason why I won't ever see us being on Amazon is because while you can make some good money and you can sell a lot of product there and it's a huge, huge market, you don't get to own your customer. So if you bought Unbound Merino on Amazon because we're on there, I would never note that me or Rosick bought it. I wouldn't have your email. I wouldn't have any access to you. It gets fulfilled through Amazon and Amazon just cakes all that data and they find the products that are doing really well. And then when they see an opportunity, they go and make Amazon basics version.  Your big sales just drop one day and you never know any of those customers were. So I'd rather go the hard way, find them ourselves, get them on our own website, build our email list and we have access to that customer. That email is the most powerful marketing you have. I have two things to touch base on that. I agree for email. I don't know if that's going to be the most powerful going in the future. I think there's diminishing returns on email as of late. I disagree. I can agree to disagree. Okay. Number two, yeah, I'm quite aware of Amazon basics. I even have a story to share about that. I was looking for a DSLR bag because my DSLR broke for my Canon camera. I go on Amazon and I'm not paying attention.  Comes to my house and I'm open.  I wasn't even paying attention because I saw it looked identical to the Canon stuff. Like the same look, same shape. I'm like, Amazon basic. Might even be made in the same factory. I wouldn't be surprised, right? So I'm like, yeah, there you go. They're undercutting, top performing products. Your product is a commodity. It's nothing special.  But I was wondering if you ever considered this is kind of off cuff but creating kind of like a loss leader product on Amazon where you're not selling your main stuff or something like low hanging fruit of brand awareness. Someone's had given me that idea before and I remember thinking that's kind of interesting but it just doesn't seem worth it to me because we're going to have to go and invest money. Like why don't I just invest money in all the other marketing that we're doing which we're getting good at and we can just get straight to the point which is acquiring a customer that we have access to instead of putting a good product that makes our brand look good on Amazon and just like letting Amazon. You have to compete them with people's heuristics of the fact that Amazon has free shipping. Yeah, so Amazon has set the bar for all e-commerce on what's reasonable and it's very hard to live up to that. Amazon Prime is amazing. It is.   I don't go home today, I know there's a prime box of stuff. It's so fast, it's so good and it changes people's perception of what is bare minimum of what they should expect for delivery. So you have to try to at least be somewhat within that realm. So we have very fast and free U.S. shipping if you spend over $150. If over $150, OK. Yeah, which we may lower eventually, but because of the way we sell stuff in bundles and it's a relatively expensive product, our average order size is bigger than that and most people will spend over $150 and it's pretty fast and we can in cheap in Canada too. If we are not competing with Amazon if you're shipping Europe, it's expensive and it takes a little bit. We'll get there if somehow. But yeah, that's like the goal. You have to you have to try to live up to the unrealistic expectations of the first one. That's told me that they have actually known people who've taken their product off of Amazon. Yeah, it's just a scary place. There's nothing redeeming about Jeff Bezos as a human.  And the power he has is insane. But I don't look at him like like a Bill Gates where he's using his power and skill and ability to execute for, you know, he did Microsoft, changed the world. Now he's eradicating diseases and trying to reinvent how toilets work in third world countries and all this amazing stuff. Jeff Bezos is just trying to squeeze profit out of some small to medium company in Toronto. You know, it doesn't care.  They'll do it. They'll do it cheaper and you have no control.