Liftyee

What hardware do you use?

I can speak Chinese fluently but I need to improve my reading hugely. This sounds like exactly my usecase. I would actually be willing to pay for this (though less certainly for a subscription, preferably Pleco-like one-time fee - even if larger).

Looks promising, but what's the signup wall for? Also, I guess I can't try this until I get an FPV controller/game controller that I can connect to my computer?

The 192 other comments from interested people seem like pretty strong counter-evidence to your claim.

You've also listed a few questions that seem pretty interesting to me, from a curiosity perspective.

Useful overview of PCBWay's capabilities. I might consider switching from JLCPCB.

Design critique - I would put the mounting holes further from the board edge, for added strength. The screw heads are going to overhang a certain amount anyway.

I suspect more and more hobbyists are using 3.3V microcontrollers like the ESP32, Raspberry Pi Pico, and countless Adafruit offerings. Unless you know your project won't need much processing power, I don't see much reason to use a 5V "ATmega..." -based Arduino these days. Much easier to use a cheap £2 32-bit overkill processor than to deal with running out of RAM, etc. Also, most advanced sensors I've seen have 3.3V logic levels now.

I noticed when I visited Japan that the crossing chimes quieten once the barriers have fully lowered.

Just another example of Japanese attention to detail and human oriented design.

I often wonder about stories of relatively short-lived geniuses such as Ramanujan. Is there a timeline where he recovered and continued making discoveries for decades? Is there some correlation between extreme genius in one area and suboptimal physical health? What if he had existed in modern times instead?

Interesting, this is my first time consciously thinking about this trend.

Perhaps the needs for read/write speed are bounded (before processor, etc. becomes the limiting factor), while more capacity is only limited by price. Or maybe increasing density of storage inherently means a tradeoff with I/O speed (AFAIK, NAND flash needs to rewrite lots of data just to make a single write? Atom-scale interactions have side effects)

Guess I'll make this a habit and find a similar auto-Reader-Mode feature in Firefox. I like my cursor just the way it is.

An unnecessarily long comment that rambles on about a simple core point, that could be summed up in one sentence but has excessive detail added to ensure that everyone gets it.

(Are sentences like this akin to literary quines? The sentence describes its own purpose/function, while also fulfilling that function. It feels like constructing one should be easy, but ends up being harder than it looks.)

As someone who makes things it always confuses me when millions just disappear whenever a company or government contractor makes things. Give me $17M and I'll build a vacuum robot prototype in under 2 years, I can't imagine 10 engineers getting paid $100+k/year can't do it in less time? Tooling is expensive, but not THAT expensive...

I've been thinking about this for Meshtastic - How do you power them? Little solar panels?

"unable to get along with anyone" is an interesting claim given that the last armed conflict in Switzerland was in 1847 (Sonderbund War).

I imagine you're quoting rhetoric, but anyone describing China as "communist" hasn't seen the scale of shopping malls and consumerism here.

Authoritarian, fine, but far from communist.

Genius. I need to try this for organising my endless boxes of random parts, some of which I never use. At some point I believed that eventually once I accumulated a critical mass of parts projects would spontaneously appear, but there's some law of the universe that says you always are missing at least one part.

For small common components (diode, resistor, LED) though I prefer the traditional wall-mounted array of trays for sorting by values. Also, my commonly used tools and supplies (soldering, cutting...) live in other wall mounted open top bins (like the stereotypical "mechanic's shop" kind that hook on at the rear).

I have a rare brand loyalty for the brand of box I use - only the "Really Useful" stacking boxes. Clear, robust, and the different sizes have lips to stack and tile on each other. Who knew that a simple storage box could have an ecosystem.

Why is it upsetting to see the same patterns repeated when you have something to say?

Once in the realm of signal integrity, it's true that the price goes straight into lab grade levels.

Even in my reputable cables, there are a couple with suspicious continuity issues. I wonder if this could find them.

You could probably build a data transfer tester using an FPGA and some signal processing.

Brilliant little device. I will be picking one up ASAP!. Didn't know that lying cables were a thing but I have a ton of charge only cables?!

I speculate USB B wasn't included because there are only really two types, 2.0 (regular size) and 3.0 (has an obvious extension on the connector). There also don't tend to be power-only A-B cables because they are usually found on printers, Arduino s, ... And not for charging devices.

Fun fact: A Xiaomi fast charge cable (with orange plugs) has an extra contact on the A end to support USB C PD out of a USB A charger.

Interesting... anyone know if they've released the rationale/data behind this? I could see a few reasons why power banks present a larger risk than phones/computers (battery capacity, quality control), but it seems like the 100Wh battery limit already covers one of these.

In a similar vein, China banned non-CCC certified (the equivalent to UL or CE) power banks on flights from 2025, which seems to be targeting the quality control side of the problem. Not just on paper - the security officers inspected every lithium battery I was carrying, even the one in my flashlight.

Willing to solder BGA, but not willing to use 0402 components while using the stencil anyways?

Nonetheless, impressive project!

I agree that the US voltage is safer (with the tradeoff of lower output powers available at your outlets). However, I suspect this is more than negated by the US plug design, which carries a much larger risk of shocks than almost all EU plug designs (Schuko, British/Type G, etc...)

- uninsulated metal pins make contact with supply while partially exposed - much smaller distance between metal pins and the edge of the plug

Can confirm. There are even growing numbers of high-quality games/projects on the platform (I explored it recently), including a fully interactive+realistic nuclear reactor and 1:1 DCS-like Airbus A320 simulator.

I suspect the popularity and ease of distribution/development on the platform makes it very attractive for developers with a dream.

Honestly as someone who mostly operates my computer instead of tinkering I don't care whether X or Wayland or something else, I just want something non-opinionated that works reliably. X doesn't support palm rejection so I can't use my stylus/touchscreen for note taking. Wayland doesn't pass through the pen properly (??) leading to glitches and full screen disabling the pen until I restart the wacom kernel module.

Apparently this bug has been fixed in Ubuntu 26.04 and it's to do with Mutter actually. We'll see when I upgrade.

> as good as a fast-food hamburger

But at a much higher price? The value is not really there IMO.

From their performance it seems like the intersection of (cares about animals | methane emissions) & doesn't mind health effects & less price sensitive & must eat hamburger-likes is too small.

Interesting point on cognitive dissonance though. I think it's possible to draw a rational tradeoff between acceptable amount of (externalised) cruelty and personal benefits of eating meat - no cognitive dissonance needed.

Same on Firefox desktop.

Curious - Any sources? Looking at publicly available details and copying them might be intellectually dishonest if it was a piece of coursework, but this isn't an academic research project. Taking features from something that's known to work is the fastest way to get to something working.

If there's actual smuggling of designs or trade secrets going on, I'd be more interested. But if it's just "the rocket looks the same on the outside", that's hardly "industrial espionage".

That's a valid opinion to hold. I think both machines are Pareto-optimal though. The ThinkPad will likely have a longer useful life because of its heavy build, extra I/O (each port gets less use), and upgradeable parts. The Neo clearly wins on power efficiency, battery life, resolution...

TBH, if I imagined I was the median casual user, I would also take the $20 marginal cost for the Neo. "Worse in almost every way" just depends on how you weight each individual parameter, which for me, is quite atypical.

I don't see why comparing prices between used and new options is unreasonable in this case. If I want a machine to do XYZ (without the stipulation that it be new), then an older model might well be better value. "In $CURRENT_YEAR, how can I get X processing power?"

Of course, old Macs should factor into that too. Also, it's a different story if I do want something brand new.

Doesn't necessarily have to be top down. It could be cultural, the quarter-by-quarter market economics incentivises "money today" (just look at all the disasters caused by poor maintenance) but cultural norms of long-term thinking could drive prioritisation of "security tomorrow". Also, a sense of personal duty and honor instead of accumulating money being the sole arbiter of social status.