hakfoo

There's a good chance that most humanoid robots are not going to look particularly hunan.

You might have different proportions due to different weight distribution or use cases (maybe the legs are made less flexible if the workspace has fewer obstables, for example.

Maybe "bipedal" is a better descriptor, since wheels are a proven way to go faster than Usain Bolt, but walking-style strides are new.

The hard part is knowing where to draw the line between relatively stable infrastructure items that don't benefit from duplication, and flexible items that are likely to benefit from specialization and competition.

X11 made the right choice in putting graphics drivers in the "stable infrastructure" stuff and display toolkits and window managers in the "specialize and compete" section.

I'm sort of pleased about that we're finally trying to replicate this division with the River ecosystem, building a standard compositor that we can plug in different actual window management logic into it, but that makes River itself a huge single point of failure-- if it has a bum release or fails to keep up with trends and extensions, it takes down a lot of the ecosystem, but perhaps not enough to be a five-alarm fire the way Xorg or XF86 back in the day would have been.

I've always figured the dream would be to be able to advertise a low price without ever having to deliver it.

Some particularly skeevy car dealers were skewered many years ago for saying "Advertised price is less tax, title, and additional $2,000".

But they CAN get away with saying "The $8.99 burger is $11.99 unless you: - possess one of a range of sanctioned devices - have access to data services - are able to create and manage an account - are willing to opt in to whatever tracking/marketing gimmickry - can claim the "deal" in advance

Each of those steps is a funnel that opts out at least some potential customers from the deal. The 12-year-old who doesn't own a phone can't get the deal. The 85-year-old who can't operate Android can't. The person making impulse purchases and not pre-researching their meal selection misses the offer.

I feel like there's a argument for a precedent akin to "no purchase necessary to enter" for sweepstakes-- no additional purchase, software install, or commitment should be required to claim any advertised offer.

A big part of the numbers game is on variants though. There's what, eight or ten total RP2040/2350/2354 parts to choose from? So all the volume is split between those.

Conversely, there are a lot more variations within other MCU lineups. Just looking at the WCH CH32v30x datasheet-- a single relatively low-popularity range from a single vendor, the datasheet shows 9 basic models with five different physical form factors, and there are theoretically different SKUs for different temperature ranges, etc.

More so than the em-dash, I'm disappointed about "It's not X, it's Y" becoming a slop barometer

I'm a fan of that phrasing because it used to have real punch if you delivered it with the right timing.

"It's Not A Fashion Statement, It's A Death Wish" comes to mind.

I think it presses a few buttons we probably recognize (if subconsciously) and find distasteful.

The verbosity makes me think of two things in particular:

- The classic essay written by someone who has 125 words worth of actual content but a 1500 word minimum. Those three paragraphs could be bullet points and convey the meaning just as well. The screen-filling chart of every test case you ran that came back green manages to be less actionable than a direct "one test out of 54 failed." I fully expect to see Claude tell us that "Support Ticket 8257 is a Land Of Contrasts" at some point.

- The sitcom trope of the person caught in a lie who figures if they can keep adding more and more detail he'll be believed and can escape the awkward conversation. Stop. Just stop. You're proposing a fix on a CODEBASE THE CUSTOMER DOES NOT EVEN USE. Cue laugh track, cut to commercial.

I feel like the Raspberry Pi products are inherently a special case.

They're probably produced in far greater numbers than most off-the-shelf STM32 or CH32V chips. You've got a huge ready market in hobbyist/educational products as well as the commercial products that have used it as a convenient choice.

There's that whole non-profit/educational heritage around them that likely selects for a different set of defaults and features than, say, a MCU designed specifically to be the controller for a SATA SSD or a $19 Roku clone.

They also have a small product range, as compared to the broad product matrix a lot of the more "commercial brand" MCUs come in. I know even the CH32v30x chips come in several variations multiplied by several package options (which vary enough to impact the features you can realistically use on them).

What's weird is that they did an open-source release of GWBASIC, but it seemed to be in a worse state than the DOS 1/2/4 releases. I don't think there's a turnkey distribution out there outside of digging up your old DOS 4.01 floppies.

I guess you could line-for-line duplicate functionality, but that's just like running the binary in an emulator with extra steps.

Part of the value of a migration would be the opportunity to to unwind some of the details that are contradictory, mis- or non-documented, or wrong-but-unfixable.

If you go far back enough "x86-64" was the original unbranded name. I wrote to AMD back at the time and they sent me a 5-volume set of programmer's reference manuals labelled x86-64, dated 2002.

There's a many, many post thread here https://forum.vcfed.org/index.php?threads/isa-usb-board.7697... where a lot of the discussion took place, both my efforts and some other devs working on a DOS-based driver.

https://gitlab.com/hakfoo1/ch37x-bios is the actual code.

Post 394 shows a picture of the card I used, which at the time was sold in like 500 AliExpress storefronts for about USD25. The magic word is "CH375" or "CH376" (two chips, overlapping functionality, different enough to be annoying to support in software)

As mentioned in the thread, it tends to fit a weird niche.

For 8086/8088 machines, the other main option is XT-IDE cards, which are like $40+ and they're sort of finicky with some drives.

For a 286+, usually installing a standard IDE drive (or a more modern CF->IDE or SD->IDE adapter) is the easy mode with wide software support.

I did a lot of work on a custom option ROM for the ISA USB card type you mention. It exposes an INT 13h interface, so systems that access discs through the BIOS will work (DOS, probably CP/M-86 or ELKS, Minix might require you to specify BIOS disc access). More sophisticated operating systems that directly poke the IDE registers are not going to find what they're looking for.

Discounted stamps do exist.

Stamp collectors end up stuck with sheets and sheets of unpopular designs, and since the hobby (like many hobbies) has imploded, the dealers will pay less than face value for it; they in turn will sell it for a smaller discount for people who are willing to futz with wallpapering their envelope in 3-cent stamps and Fat Elvis.

It's possible that the demands on the model are growing faster than it gets efficient though. A lot of the improvement in output quality/metrics come from more churning and passes.

You could argue that a RTX5090 needs less power than a 1996 3Dfx Voodoo 1 to render GLQuake at 320x200/60fps, but it's rarely being used for that.

It seems like the FCC is a convenient source of rubber stamps for the administration.

Property values going up is only appealing if you own property.

For renters, it means they're going to try to increase rents.

For everyone, it presents a pressure on favourite local businesses-- higher costs, and an influx of well-bankrolled outside competitors.

What's interesting is that there's really nothing about a Win95 or Motif style theme that doesn't scale well.

If you pair it with modern antialiased/high-DPI typography, it still looks clean and legible.

Some later busier looks -- MacOS X Aqua or NextStep, for example, have a lot of complexity (shadows, reflections, more complex widget designs) which needs to be manually remastered for updates for higher DPI or changes in overall dimensions. But classic sharp bevels can be pretty much scaled up and down infinitely and remain crisp and on-brand.

Maybe that's the thing: the "brand" they're on-brand with is the system's brand. The widgets don't blend into any specific website or company branding diagram, because they were designed to fit with the Windows style guide and goal for software to look and act consistently from one program to another.

The Bank of England was issuing currency as late as the 1950s that wouldn't look out of place in the 1750s.

It's interesting that they didn't rely more on state-of-the-art design and printing process technology, to make a poor-quality fake more difficult to pass off.

Personally, if you want to go the XT-IDE route, I'd consider getting a SD-IDE adapter to pair with it, like $10 from your preferred fountain of Rubbish From China.

Some CF cards don't work well with XT-IDE cards, since they often depend on some specific 8-bit modes that are not guaranteed to work, but SD adapters generally support it. SD cards these days are also more available and probably cheaper, considering you won't even need 2Gb for many retro machines.

Another option is an "ISA USB" card using a CH375 or CH376 chip. This requires software support (a DOS driver or an add-on BIOS ROM) but you can plug in a cheap flash drive and format/partition it like a hard disc.

3-D Secure has been a fiasco IMO.

I can recall when we first tried 3DS in the US and it went over like a lead balloon. Let's jump out of the middle of checkout and go to a page which looks like they're trying to phish your bank account to continue, and by the way, you can just skip it. So customers did, and then merchants followed, except in countries that effectively required it because they cared about fraud.

One of the major selling points of 3DS2 was basically "we can guesstimate fraud with magic black-box logic behind the scenes so most of the time the customer is not disrupted."

But it's still lipstick on a pig because there are plenty of outs where you don't strictly need 3DS even in "countries that required it", and it's still window dressing around the idea that we're giving merchants an unscoped credential and hoping desperately it doesn't get misused or stolen elsewhere.

When we finally decide we don't want to get lapped by India and Brazil in payment tech anymore, I hope the camel-designed-by-committee it spawns is a push-only paradigm. If I want to buy something, let Newegg render a HTML microformat that browsers can detect and turn into a big clicky link to my bank's website/app with a pre-configured outbound transaction. Just as easy for the customer as a stored card, with less risk of abuse/compromise.

It's disappointing that we still have terrible "press 9 buttons at the same time while reciting from the Necronomicon and plugging in and out the device" recovery stories.

Put the firmware and config on a ** uSD card, or set up some sort of UF2 recovery mode. Then no matter how badly you bollix it up, the answer is "plug it into your computer, download the big prominent "factory image", and drag it onto the device.

If done right, you could even do stuff like "clone the SD card so you can deploy identically-configured units for every branch of your chain business."

The keyboard enthusiasts got to "personalized hardware" pretty early, so there might be some lessons there.

There's a whole continuum from "Buy an off the shelf unit" to "here's a barebones case you can slide ready made switches and caps into" to "mix and match custom PCBs and cases" to designing your own PCBs and/or cases. There are pretty clear pipelines and even some levels of tooling for "draw up the layout you want and get a bunch of files you can send to production houses"

Takeaway 1: A lot of this is grounded in economic realities. I did the full bespoke route (custom PCB, custom 3-D printed case) and figured it probably cost me about $500 all inclusive to get what I wanted, and that's honestly a lot of money for a keyboard.

AI won't solve any of the economic problems. They can't fix "the minimum PCB order is N units, so now you have a drawer full of spares you paid for". They can't make the expensive part you needed cheaper, especially if you're an individual buying quantity of 1/5/10 instead of an OEM buying reels and containers-full. They can't change the fact that a case for a large widget will be expensive to mill/3-D print/mould/etc.

Takeaway 2: Customers may have surprisingly limited imagination for bespoke gear. There are galleries (and even coffee-table books) full of exotic keyboards. But Micro Center is full of $50 interchangeable "tenkeyless with RGB lighting" boards; throwing on a random set of "custom" keycaps, and that's enough for a large part of the audience.

Will these customers want or benefit from more tools, or will it just give them rope to hang themselves on and give them an excuse to bail out of the purchase entirely? Even if you can provide them a gallery of vetted turnkey choices, there might be more choice paralysis than actual benefit.

Takeaway 3: Hardware is forever (relative to software). You have a lot of small firms and group-buy products that disappeared and now the owners can't get an exact replacement or repairs. Conversely, Unicomp can gut and rebuild a 1986 Model M with new innards in large part because they've been selling the same basic design since a 386DX/16 cost as much as a Toyota Tercel.

If your AI spawns a galaxy of 1-of-1 bespoke products, who services and supports them? That seems like it's only going to appeal to the enthusiast-hacker type who can keep them alive themselves, who is least likely to need AI help designing them. Design for disposability isn't a great look for anything but incredibly low-cost, limited-usecase items.

I always hoped we could make "cinematic universe" for really enormous refactorings.

I'm not sure if a bigger population would really justify more jet manufacturers.

Outside of general aviation (hobbyists/business jets), the potential buyers for jet aircraft are going to trend towards natural oligopoly.

Military craft, there's basically one buyer per country, at most a handful of different decision makers behind the same basic chequebook.

Civilian craft, does the number of airlines scale with population? There are a finite number of viable routes, airport slots, and market segments, so would it actually support a hundred new airlines, or would we just end up with a Big Southwest buying 1,000 737s instead of 100?

Even if you had more airlines, would they want to diversify their fleets? Running the same few types of planes, especially if they're the same types of planes as their competitors, unlocks efficiencies. How much would it cost a random American or European airline to retrain their pilots to fly the Comac C919, and how much would they spend extra on adaptations (stocking new spares, retraining maintenance staff, retooling processes for different floorplans)? I also suspect there's a very strong CYA/risk aversion mindset that would make it very hard to sell a new player into the market.

Regional flag carriers have political excuses to support a buy-local policy at some cost, but that still only justifies a handful of manufacturers per economic hegemon.

I think we can even skip the "that may be targeted by the US government" clause.

The whole "hosted AI" business feels like like a huge violation of corporate norms on confidentiality. Businesses that would have your head for printing out a source file to reference and annotate are encouraging developers to feed in huge amounts of proprietary code and data, and incorporate changes suggested from an outside party with minimal vetting. Evidently whatever privacy policies they've been throwing at enterprise users are plated with mithril.

At some point, one of the big services is going to get popped, and it won't just be a data breach. There's too much opportunity to quietly use the system as a malware distribution hub. Every vibe-coded dashboard suddenly starts depending on some weird left-pad fork that, 12 dependencies deep, is running a keylogger or Dogecoin miner. Your payment processor suddenly starts accepting the Konami code to approve a transaction.

I think, to a degree, ergonomics are a complete package and sound can be part of it.

I tend to err on the side of loud-click switches (Alps/Matias, buckling spring, Gateron Melodic or Kailh Box switches lately) in part because I beat a series of late-1990s dome keyboards to death because I needed some sound to feel like a key was registering.

A family member has a light linear board basically because he wanted a Pride-exploded-on-his-desktop lightshow and it's very awkward for me to use.

If you use a machine with an ISA slot, you can get a card with a chip called CH375 or CH376, which deploys a USB flash drive like a normal hard disc with either a loadable driver or option BIOS ROM. You can just pull out the entire drive and mount it on a normal Windows or Linux box.

I think the below-mentioned Pocket 376 might have one soldered-on already.

> Outside of coding, almost every business case for AI doesn’t need above human intelligence, it doesn’t even need human intelligence, or half a human intelligence, a business can extract a lot of value from a machine that has a fraction of a human’s intelligence.

What the business world actually needed isn't intelligence, it's VBA with a bit of polish on it.

Yeah, people want tools to distill reports, and puff nonsense into bigger nonsense, but to a remarkable degree, this doesn't require an LLM. In fact, the alternatives might be preferrable by offering more consistency/repeatability and efficiency (I am so sick of watching a LLM babble for 5 minutes on something a regex would do in 5 seconds).

The genius of the LLM industry is that it avoids "programming anxiety" by hiding it behind a friendly-ish UI and not calling it programming. It's another in the string of innovations like "hide the file system" and "removing user programmability" so we can sell it back to you.

There's also another side of it: there's a legitimate case for places where we don't need high quality creativity.

We have a world of clip art and stock photos. A lot of this is not best effort-- people grab what's in the catalog, and the catalog is itself often either mediocre or overused to the point where it's a blatant signal of low-effort. If you want a smiling washing machine to put on a flyer for the building's laundry room, or a generic photo of St. Basil's for an article about Russia, nobody really complains about that.

AI could fill a similar niche. We know it's crap, but it's good enough crap. Except it's absurdly expensive crap when the externalities are actually priced in.

For some of us, we found digital "third spaces". In a way, when we're arguing on HN, or the kids on Discord, are using it largely as a community centre on their screen.

It clearly shouldn't be the only option-- it's not going to service all types of interests and audiences. I attend the meetings of the local numsimatics club-- they get a room in one of the city offices when it's closed for the day, and do presentations and discussions. The demographics are weird, it's like under-15s and over-60s with very little in the middle, and I'm not sure there's the technical capability or the preference to do it over Zoom. (Trying to remember what they did during the pandemic, I think they just closed down for a year or so)