nsb1

Unfortunately there's another angle here which is that the little fish are competing for supply with higher priced, higher volume products like cars, where a 10x increase in one component can be amortized over a much higher total cost and passed on to the customer. Nobody is going to notice an extra couple hundred bucks on the price of a car, but they'll definitely notice when it's on something that itself only costs a couple hundred bucks.

Big consumers are able to outbid even companies like DigiKey because they can afford to spread the cost around. TI had one of its best quarters ever over the last 12 months, but just try to buy TI parts anywhere - they're being priced through the roof. A $0.30 TI regulator was going for $30.00 on the secondary markets. I feel for any small company trying to build hardware right now.

This. Thailand is another option. They have a booming medical tourism business.

Pretty sure the gearing and/or flywheel spinning required to actually reasonably charge a device like this would make using it as a gaming input mostly useless. If you've tried any of those hand crank devices, they take quite a bit of force to get going.

When your supplier decommits on your order, new order lead times are > 52 weeks and the open market price is 2 orders of magnitude higher than buying new, this starts to make some sense. Either you find a way to make product to sell, or you don't sell any product. It's ugly out there right now.

Nice tool - my muscle memory steers me toward bvi though.

Or, on the flip side, how much do you lose by deploying an 'oops', resulting in customers having a bad experience and posting "This thing sux!" on social media?

I can sympathize with the costs in both time and money to maintain a staging environment, but you're going to pay for those bugs somehow - either in staging or in customer satisfaction.

There is! And it's even featured in this article!

True, though this is still one of the most annoying things in online recipes:

"Add one small onion"

Oookay...how big is that? How much of a difference in flavor will it be if I add more or less? What if I barely like onion? If I add more, will it cook enough to not change the outcome significantly?

It does take experience to guess whether it will matter or not, so if you're getting started it's nice to be given a clue (like weights).

Also, adaptation assumes that you're going to be trying the recipe again to get it right for the next time. Some people may do that, but there are so many great recipes out there that a lot of people (myself among them) will just go find some other recipe if one doesn't turn out well.

For liquids maybe, but for dry ingredients not so much. Weights are better if you want consistent outcomes.

Totally agree, but if you're a pro and there's extra detail in the recipe, you can ignore it or tailor it to your needs. If you're just getting started or it's an unfamiliar recipe and you don't have any details, you're left hanging. It costs nothing to add in the details to help people along, so why not?

I don't know that I'd go so far as to call it a toy, but I do think that this device is more likely to be used in education or prototyping than anything else - which is still great! Just having a platform that will autoconfigure the array of devices that he's demonstrated is amazing. Being able to snap on two cameras and a TPU and have everything 'just work' so you can focus on your vision processing software is incredible.

I'm betting that it will be cost-prohibitive to have this device as a permanent fixture for any one application outside outside of the sorts of things an rPi4 already does (Home Assistant server, etc). I don't think anyone is going to use it to control an LED with a slider, but for prototyping that sort of thing it has endless possibilities.

Hats off to Anil for the huge amount of work he put into this project.

I don't have a problem with the price - I have a problem with being sure what I'd be getting for that money. If it was guaranteed to live up to the claims that are being made then it's in the ballpark of a good laptop, which I have no problem dropping all sorts of money on. This device has several potential problems though, that can render it completely unusable rather than a laptop that mostly works fine except for a nit or two: - If it's too heavy/uncomfortable, you can't use it for long enough to warrant switching your compute medium to VR - If the battery doesn't last long enough, then you're tethered to a wall outlet. - If the display has distortion or artifacts, the eyestrain may render it unusable over time.

Some of which can be addressed by being able to try before you buy, and the rest will come out in the product reviews....but right now there are no product reviews, and signing up for a preorder at this price is taking a lot on faith.

I wish this team all the success in the world, but I'll probably wait for V2.

Agreed - Teams has a truly terrible messaging interface. Organization is nearly nonexistent, and the UI is awful.

On the other hand, I find Teams video conferencing to be pretty good for video meetings. Once you get to a certain number of people, Zoom starts to do better interface-wise, but for a useful number of participants Teams has been relatively friction-free for me.

Like this? https://www.tapwithus.com/

Just so long as he doesn't teach too many others - this sort of thing doesn't scale well.

Damn, driftwood.com is taken

Is it just me or are there only two different mazes?

Be careful though - this is the path I took, and it still comes with trade-offs. I started out as a developer and made the transition to management, where I now oversee a mid-size engineering department (~100 people). I never get to even look at code any more - there's just no time. Off hours I get to do what I want of course, but there are real life things competing for my time there. Unless you're single with no kids and no house to maintain, there will always be a list of stuff that needs to get done, and then you have to choose again. When I actually get a couple hours to myself to do some project coding, it's glorious, but it doesn't happen very often.

One piece of advice I can give is that if you do decide to go down the management path, own that decision and understand what it means. I spent a number of years trying to keep a foot in the code, and it was exhausting because I never had the blocks of time necessary to produce good output, and as a result, both my code and my management duties suffered. Learning to let go was very difficult, at least for me, but when I did, it was better for me and everyone I was managing. My job was supposed to be about making sure other people could do theirs, and as soon as I understood that, I was able to focus my attention properly.

Because https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26709159

..which is unfortunate.

Wow...TIL...

Still around - Last FB post was March 14 looks like...

https://www.lolo-sc.com/

I love the idea, but this has Tragedy of the Commons written all over it IMHO. It won't take very many bad actors before it's ruined for everyone.

That said, it's not stopping me from participating.

Trouble is - I don't know what sort of consequences Amazon would find 'substantial' at this point. All the FAANGs have enough cash to shrug off billions of dollars in fines if they have to.

....like...down by the river??

;)

Relevant Malcolm in the Middle "Hal Replaces a Lightbulb" video. Sometimes I feel like this is my life.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbSehcT19u0

Video seems missing/broken for me.

YouTube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IujQzSQtaTU&ab_channel=Scien...

I would love to know the answer to this for all the same reasons. Is there some actual special sauce or is the world of 'audiophile DACs' just the new 'Monster Cable' FUD?

These two things are not mutually exclusive. The decision to allow operating without a battery is a mainboard design decision and has very little to do with the protection circuitry on the battery pack. In a device like this, the decision to require the battery as the primary current source is usually due to the high current draw for activities like initial searching for a cell tower. Lithium batteries can source this current easily, but if you want to run without the battery, your charger needs to be able to source that max current as well. Sizing the charger to handle this brief load translates directly to additional product cost, so it is often not done that way.

The protection circuitry on the battery pack is designed to protect the cell from charging and discharging situations that may damage the battery. You definitely want those protections in there.

>How is this different than any other kind of media like TV, magazines, newspapers, etc.? All of them are trying to make their product engaging so that you consume more of their media and more of their ads. Just because those services also charge a subscription fee, doesn't change the dynamics of what they're trying to do. Social media has maybe just been more successful in doing so, partially because

I think this trivializes the problem. The issue isn't that these things have existed for ages and are simply getting better, the problem is that we have gone from mass-marketing designed to appeal to a broad audience to personalized marketing designed to appeal to just you. With that in place, the more data that gets collected about you, the more precise the message delivery can be. The more sophisticated the algorithms that input all that data get, the more susceptible you'll be to their messaging because they are designed to capitalize on human psychological weaknesses.

Me too. This is my desktop calculator of choice.