dublin

It actually works very well. Phones/tablets are now more capable than many PCs/Macs. When you've literally got more compute power, RAM, storage, and network bandwidth than supercomputer centers had 15-20 years ago in a phone or tablet-sized package, all you really need is a nice dock to plug it into for display (I'll take a 42" multitouch/pen setup like the Surface Studio, please), keyboard, mouse, and network.

BTW, I've done exactly this daily with the only slightly larger Surface Pros and docks for over a decade, so the concept definitely works, and there are probably millions of people using it, contrary to your assertion.

It's a very small step from doing that with a PC or tablet to doing that with a folding phone design, and there are a few such solutions like that today. (Though they should run the same OS/interface, just morphed slightly for the hardware that's active.)

After having this setup, I will never, ever, go back to an old caveman laptop or desktop computer.

I disagree. I'm typing this on a nice Lenovo Yoga 2-in-1 and though it's quite nice and well-built, it's the worst computer I've bought in decades, because it's stupidly designed: It's got all the compromises of a tablet, but is too heavy and thick to really be used as one. The pen is marginal (and there's no way to carry it with the laptop except in a pocket!), and it gets way hotter than any of my Surfaces have.

It was clearly designed to be used as a laptop, and never really as a tablet. This shows in myriad ways, from being uncomfortable to hold as a tablet (though its rounded edges are infinitely better than the Surface Studio Laptop's razor-sharp edges (which really can cut you when holding it as a tablet!), to there being NO GOOD WAY to adjust volume without opening it back up to get to the keyboard!

To be fair, half of what I hate about the Yoga is Win11. I'm definitely moving to a Linux desktop next time, if that's viable. The Starlabs StarLite would be perfect if I could get it with 32-64 GB of RAM and a fast ARM processor like the one used in the new Surface Pro

I'm very seriously thinking about one of these (or really, its successor) when I need to replace my computer again in the next year or two - it's already optimized for several Linux distros: https://us.starlabs.systems/pages/starlite#

All I need now is a good replacement for OneNote that stores notes in an open format and supports pen input for sketching and handwritten note-taking...

One reason I'm not eager to ever have an EV - you can't really do the "avoid highways" thing on a non-trivial EV roadtrip, so you're doomed to Interstates...

This rolled map and notes system is still used today in many rally events, especially on motorcycles in events like the Dakar Rally. (Many cars and trucks use digital screens instead, but the paper has real advantages for the moto guys...

It's easy to blow $500K or more on certification of even a well-designed product, especially if you actually use UL for your testing (never again!) Yep, I've worked at a startup that did that.

If you don't have everythign done in China, certification is a racket: In addition to at least $60-80K minimum (for CE, which helps get UL/ETL if you need them), you'll be paying $5K/Quarter/factory for audits, and $2-5K just to open the report for any changes, including things like changing your company address!

You can't hate the bastards that run this industry enough. I have no problem with complying with reasoniable rules, but I have a big problem with shakedown protection rackets, which is what this is...

Regulatory certification is a shakedown racket that makes the Ticketmaster monopoly discussed a few items down look like a friendly environment.

Do you wonder why all of your new electronics are made in China? One big reason is that China has its own regulatory labs (which may or may not do testing - who knows?) that are literally at least an order of magnitude cheaper than getting certification done in the US or Europe.

I'm working on two client products now that I and the clients would prefer to have made here in the US, but both will be made in China because the companies literally cannot afford the rapacious cost of getting them certified here. (And China mfg is way cheaper, too - partly because of parts distribution models: It's literally cheaper to buy a finished product from China than to buy the components here to assemble the same product!)

LLMs fundamental flaw is that unlike many other forms of AI, they have NO understanding of the material they were trained on or its relations ships to anything at all int he real world. (viz, the recent bizarre answers to goat/river crossing questions)

Ultimately, any really useful AI must understand real-world relationships - this is one reason I was always more bullish on the late Doug Lenat's Cyc than on any other AI - none of the others were grounded by that knowledge.

And a commitment to truthful and error-free answers (a la HAL 9000) is an absolute must. Keep in mind that even in Clarke's fictional account, HAL was proud of the 9000 series' record for "never making an error of distorting information", and never went hallucinated or acted crazy until his training was overridden by his programmers for political purposes - this is EXACTLY what happens in today's wokified LLM models (can't allow another Tay!): The programmers redefine truth as political in contravention to actual factual truth.

Make your life easy. Assume 7-bit ASCII. No one needs all those other characters, anyway...

I don't think I've ever before been party to any conversation where the words "toaster mogul" ever appeared in the exchange, and yet, here they are, in all their golden brown and delicious glory!

Obesity may be a factor, but it's stupid to think that it has anything like the impact that boneheaded government policy has on healthcare costs. Obamacare was, and is, a disaster, driving up costs while producing worse outcomes. (I've worked as a CEO in a healthcare tech startup since then, so I've got better insight than the average bear.)

The vast majority of people actually need those "junk plans" Obama eliminated: Catastrophic coverage plans with fairly high deductibles (which HSAs would handle after a few years...)

No, it has little to no value at all until something really catastrophic happens to you. Paying thousands of dollars a year for a "free" annual checkup is NOT delivering "a lot of value". It's been much more of just a money pit.

Over my career, I am upside-down on my healthcare costs to the tune of six figures - and that's after kidney stone surgery some years back...) I think I'll pass on succumbing to cancer to try to recover a bit more, though...

This famous "granddaddy of them all" story about knowing where to make a chalk mark was validated in a 1965 letter to the editor of Life magazine. Although most Internet sources act as though this story is apocryphal, it has some real (if not conclusive) provenance, and definitely fits the known personality quirks of both Henry Ford and Charles Steinmetz...

About 15 years ago, I developed an unfortunate reaction to drinking beer: heartburn that made me wish I was dead. Kinda ruined Mexican and BBQ dinners, both of which are not just tasty, but cultural events here in Texas. The condition got progressively worse, but I still stepped up for the abuse from time to time,until I tried a thick, chewy porter or stout that did NOT trigger the dreaded heartburn. I still have the heartburn (I manage it with an unusual mineral supplement), but can almost always enjoy a good, dark, porter or stout (the darker, the better), which has improved life quite a bit!

To be fair, I bought a Razr+ just before Thanksgiving, finally switching to Android, and I have no idea what Google assistant is for or how to use it. There's a gesture that's supposed to launch it that doesn't work, so I've just ignored it.

Sounds like I'd be PO'd if I'd bothered to put any effort into learning to use it. Google is the least trustworthy company ever for software users - it's Lucy holding the football for its beleaguered Charlie Brown software users...

If microplastics are a huge problem (and they likely are), then tires are perhaps the largest source: Recent studies reveal that tire dust is actually responsible for 100x more pollution than the engine of an ICE car, and EVs (due to their increased weight and torque, which produces more tire dust particles) emit an additional 20% more tire dust than gas and diesel vehicles. Unintended consequences, and all that...

Some details on the research here: https://e360.yale.edu/features/tire-pollution-toxic-chemical...

Yes. Yes it is. The Lada's engine compartment isn't choked to death with hundreds of vacuum lines trying to reduce/control emissions...

Most (actually almost all) IoT systems are not well-thought-out in this regard. It requires a bit of paranoiac foresight. Designers far too often think it's really, really important that remote devices stay connected to the mothership, when in reality, most IoT devices would be far better off NEVER requiring a cloud connection, but leveraging one if/when available.

*Rule One of IoT network design: NEVER assume that you even have a network * If at all possible, and to the maximum degree possible, an IoT device must work whether there's a network available or not.

It's not like this is a new problem, and it's been solved for decades - it's just good network design.

One example: This is exactly why randomness is required by Ethernet's ARP protocol: to avoid ARP storms when the power comes back on and all nodes try to get back on the network at the same time. (And ARP is still powering most IP connections (v4) today, since IPv6 is painfully fiddly by design, so no one uses v6 unless they have to...)

Probably not. In general, this sort of thing is buried in the often unchangeable microcode of an RF ASIC. (Which makes sense, after all, the vendor is selling an RF modem for a specific band/modulation capability - they don't expect it to change, certainly not after they've built/configured it.)

If that's the case (as is common), then there is really nothing to update, short of scraping off that chip or module and replacing the hardware.

Do we even have the kind of engineers that could design, develop, and produce something like the SX-70 today? It really was a marvel of insanely clever design - the mechanisms, optics, batteries, film, flash, etc., all produced at a price that was only a bit higher than conventional photography and processing, and offering unparalleled convenience. (As well as, of course, instant gratification!)

Due to their vastly greater mass and torque, EVs produce far more tire pollution than ICE vehicles do. In addition to that, tire dust is a far larger part of the overall pollution from operating a car than even the emissions from an ICE car. "Research done by UK-based independent testing company Emissions Analytics showed that used tyres produce 36 milligrams of particles each kilometre, which is nearly 2,000 times higher than the 0.02 mg/km average from exhausts."

Article here: https://earth.org/tyre-pollution/ Research here: https://www.emissionsanalytics.com/tyre-emissions

How it can look so good? ROFL!! It just created a guy with a hand coming off his left ankle in place of a foot, and toes or fingers or something poking out the end of the show on his right foot! https://generated.photos/human-generator/64e682308448b8000c5...

Given what WeWork charged, you can't convince me there was much subsidy there, nor much social benefit.

"Cool offices" are something that should never even be talked about by a founding team until they have several spare million sitting in the bank. Until then, rent cheap-ass real estate and buy second-hand office furniture. And that's if you even have offices, which you may not need if you're a software and/or services company. Nice laptops, monitors, chairs, Zoom, GitHub, and Google subscriptions are really cheap compared to real estate!

I'd take a solid cash cow producing producing value for customers at an A-round size over growing it to D-round size any day. Maybe because I've just been through enough of this crap to know that yes, you want to make money with your startup, but there are some things no amount of money can compensate you for...

And a company spinning off a fair amount of cash can be grown surprisingly rapidly organically, though it does take several changes in how the company is run as it hits inflection points (there are usually several!) due to growth (e.g. people, processes, and effective business/marketing/sales oversight become more important to grow beyond $6-10M/yr...)

THIS! I have been a founder and/or CTO for around a dozen startups. Two exited successfully by M&A, but they made only enough money to offset the others I lost my ass on. (One of those was due to being 20 years too early - that product might sell well, now...)

I'm no longer interested in a doing a startup for someone else to own and control. (My biggest startup mistake was hiring an experienced CEO and COO to run my dream startup. The person with the vision and dream needs to be calling the shots, and hired guns are only just that... Passion for the product is really important!)

Although I love startups, they are hard and take a LOT out of you. It's not worth the hit to your life (and your family's!)just to make a pile of equity/money for some ungrateful trust fund kid or a VC partner who thinks their crap doesn't stink just because they happened to be in the right place when their first startup hit big.

VC investment is fundamentally parasitic. If you're building a software/services startup, you almost never really need VC - if you can build a product company without it, do so. I live in Austin, where there are a LOT of startups and startup people. Out of all of them, I know one inventor/technical founder who thinks that taking VC was really worth it, and didn't get screwed over by being liquidated to death. That's not a real good showing for the VC guys. Just sayin'...

ELDs have been a predictably miserable failure - as the article points out, their very rigidity in draconian enforcement of "safety" rules actually creates perverse incentives to do unsafe things (like ignoring needed maintenance, etc.)

This does not just affect truckers - as "driver monitoring" becomes an anti-feature in many new cars (especially EVs or "self-driving" cars), there will be more and more cases of people (quite reasonably) bristling at Big Brother looking over their shoulder and into their eyeballs every moment they are in their own car.

As for me, I'm leaning heavily towards a life goal to never again buy a car with a screen in the dashboard.

While heat provides the energy for hurricanes, crap in the air prevents the convection required for storms to develop and organize. The Saharan Dust Layer has been brutal this year, blowing massive amounts of dust across the Atlantic and the Gulf up into Texas, where it’s produced significantly reduced visibility and rainfall. See it here: https://www.myfoxhurricane.com/saharan_dust_car.html

Oh, and CreativeCreek's excellent MathU RPN on the iPhone, which feels insanely HP-like as it mashes together the functionality of several HP calculators in a very useful way. (It does the work of the 12C, 15C, and 16C quite well - at least all of what I use on each!)

MathU remains one of only three apps I've ever paid for. It is actually the last major thing keeping me from leaving the Apple ecosystem, since there's no Android version. Yes, it's that good.

An RPN calculator is a must for almost everything I do, from real engineering, to startup finances and expenses, to making/3D printing, to home/landscape improvement. I keep a real HP emulator* pinned to the taskbar at all times, ready to be launched and used with just a touch (and yes the touchscreen works great with the emulators, if you upsize them a bit. Plus, an actual HP-41cv on my physical desktop, for the heavy lifting not easily handled by the emulators. (Anything that can't be done on the HPs is going to need some code written, anyway...)

*Three, actually - an HP-15C Scientific pinned to the taskbar, and the default install links to the HP-12C Financial, and HP-16C Hex/Binary emulators in the apps menu. All are official exact HP emulations for Windows published by HP France some time ago. Alas, the link I had is dead, so I'm not sure where you can get them anymore...