There's a great comedic documentary called "Searching for general tso" that's a great watch on this topic.
681 karma · joined November 12, 2012
E-Cigarettes are only now becoming mainstream, and have only been in use for the better half of a decade.
We wont truly know the effects until we have a large sample size over a long period of time.
Ultimately, saying it's conclusively better for you than smoking is short sighted. We thought smoking was good for you in the 1920s...
Philip Morris (now known as Altria) put $13bn into Juul to do the exact opposite. The margins on vaping are higher, the current perception of vaping is that it's better than smoking, and it's way easier to get kids addicted to vaping than cigarettes.
I see too much evidence to the contrary... that big tobacco is now big vaping (which is really big nicotine).
We dont know just how bad vaping really is, it's hard to say its better than smoking, and its impossible to say its not bad for you at all.
On the weekends its a bit of a crap shoot since my social life is mostly around eating but I tend to stick to 16:8 (still IF)
But... that's not why I am doing it. I've suffered for years from migraines. 2-4 times a week, I've been to half a dozen doctors with no solid recommendations besides medication.
Now, not only do I take zero medication, but I get migraines about once a month, and way less severe than I used to. Ive also correlated the migraines with times followed by poor fasting behavior (for instance, eating all day on a weekend with family and friends).
I also need less sleep, am less groggy, and have far fewer stomach issues.
Overall its a massively net positive change.
A company can be profitable and still need more working capital to expand.
That being said, I don't know what to make of Uber, Lyft and WeWork (future) IPO's yet, but I am highly skeptical
Could also be a transformer but since this isn't a high voltage product it's more likely some disk capacitor in the circuitry.
In this scenario, the biggest problem is updating the bootloader, which cannot do this type of fallback.
Generally people avoid updating the bootloader (for good reason) but it is necessary sometimes...
When that changes I'm still not sure it'll happen. There needs to be a consumer demand and today there isn't.
Simply connecting every gadget to some variety of interfaces has already been done dozens of times over (e.g. Crestron, control4, smartthings)
I'm in the camp that one company should make all the devices versus an open standard. That's the only way to guarantee quality.
Candidly, I don't think everything in the modern home will look like Andy's home. Instead our homes will have a few key devices like lights, speakers, locks and HVAC that make sense to interconnect.
Once we agree that not every fridge or microwave needs an internet connection, you'll see how ridiculous his vision statement becomes.
My 700sqft apartment doesn't benefit from any of this "innovation" and doesnt suffer from the mess of gadgets that don't talk to each other.
This is a wealthy persons problem and a tinkerers desires.
Like I had mentioned previously, if one side of the paired devices has a garbage antenna setup, it will have poor performance. Things like your soundbar, or a generic bluetooth speaker probably use reference designs for their BT setups and have not tuned them for the enclosure or use case.
The companies that deploy a TI, Nordic, Broadcom chipset are subject to the scrutiny I just mentioned. The chipset manufacturers offer reference designs but generally you need a custom matching circuit and a complex RF design to do it correctly. That's where most manufacturers skimp out because its generally "good enough"
As for WiFi, it does not frequency hop but is capable of "auto" selecting a channel on boot (generally).
Your run of the mill bluetooth headset, mouse, or keyboard likely does not spend the time on the RF design beyond "does it work".
Most of the issues in this thread are related to poor hardware design more than a crowded spectrum. While the spectrum is in fact crowded in metropolitan areas, most Bluetooth communication doesn't require much bandwidth and can handle error prone areas with ease.
While the frequency hopping helps a ton on BL (and WiFi for that matter), the issues people outlined are due to:
1) Shitty firmware 2) Shitty hardware
Antenna design is black magic and only a few firms in the US do it well. It took us almost 10 months to fully design and test our antenna assembly(s) with a very capable third party firm.
It took dozens of trips to a test chamber, a dozen computer simulations that take a day to run, and PCB samples that take days to verify. They have to be tuned every time copper or mechanical parts move as well.
It's a real pain and most Bluetooth products use garbage chip antennas and baluns or reference designs for antennas. This increases the sensitivity to failure and provides a generally shitty experience.
Most of your product interactions around bluetooth are budget products connected on one side of the equation (e.g. a $50 bluetooth headset). So despite how capable your Mac or iPhone is, if you have a garbage headset on the other side with poor antenna design, it'll be a disaster of an experience.
My company (Astro aka Twist Home), isn't one of those sexy AI / ML companies trying to make crazy futureworthy tech, we instead make super simple connected home experiences, and yet people find what we are doing interesting.
I can cite 100 other "lists" we've made this year, but this one seems at least researched versus the typical autogenerated list based on SEC Form D filings.
I do sync pocket right before a flight but find myself engaging with it rarely.
I find my use of bookmarks akin to liking something on facebook (or even saving it for later, which I never go back to).
My handle was Duhck :)
Tribes was... magical. Tight knit player community, active modding community, amazing map design and tournament play.
Team Rabbit, Arena, and 10v10 CTF consumed the majority of my time from '98-'06
>> Coolest wasn't able to manufacture the exact cooler in the promo videos.
>> "The Coolest Cooler in that video was a one-of a kind prototype," Grepper said. "Ultimately it's not a scalable design – it's an industrial design."
>> The proof-of-concept prototype cost him $15,000 to make, he said.
>> Grepper had no idea how much each cooler would cost to manufacture.
>> "At the early stages, you simply can't get that information," he said.
A model != a DFMA'd product.
There's tooling costs (I suspect the Coolest Cooler has several hundreds of thousands of dollars in tooling needs), there's supply chain, etc.
This takes time, testing, dozens of iterations, etc.
He sold a product he didn't understand the real cost of. Not maliciously but because he was naive and didn't understand the process.
Knowing what your true landed BOM costs are can take over a year of modeling, making production samples, negotiating with manufacturers and suppliers, etc. Even then you wont really know the cost until you enter volume manufacturing since there's scrap rate and QA issues you run into.
It's awful and frankly its why my company -- Twist -- is not offering any third party integration support.
Until the industry can focus on quality over number of integrations and interoperability, the only customers buying these products will be DIY'ers and professional installers.
Facebook is an advertising platform, and the best one at that. It's also a place people post intimate details of their lives for others to see.
I don't know that I find fault in their ability to use that data to better target you with ads or content.
For reference here is the data sheet of speaker we use: http://www.baysidenet.tv/catalog/pdf/Peerless/30n18al04-04.p...
We also have a half a dozen other products designed to fit into this form factor, all of which provide a superior lighting experience to what is available on the market today.
We are building Twist (www.hellotwist.com). The long term vision is a smart home platform for Apartments (and more specifically, renters).
In the short term, we've built a great multiroom audio system that doesn't take up valuable space, add to your clutter, or require setup / installation.
We've leveraged the light socket to deliver a quality lighting and audio experience that anyone -- even small spaces -- can benefit from.
I'd like to think I've been a bullhorn for the "IoT is stupid" movement, but I think the author did a great job of calling it out as well.
For instance:
"The results were stark: Teams with more than one founder outperformed solo founders by a whopping 163% and solo founders' seed valuations were 25% less than teams with more than one founder."
How many of the 300 investments in their portfolio were solo founders? 10?
Solo founders are rare, and it's often harder to raise money as a solo founder. That means less companies have solo founders to begin with.
Source: I am a solo founder