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Maybe you could be happy with that, or perhaps I could be as well, but you and I aren't ChiTu. And ChiTu is free to do whatever they want (including doing nothing at all).

And that matters because statements like "just buy an open Chinese printer" are non-starters. The machines themselves have the soul of ChiTu inside of them and openness isn't really their jam.

So while the PC software that produces the layer images can be replaced, the printer's brains stays the same.

(This is very different compared to the world of conventional world of FDM printers, wherein: It's just some sensors, motors, heaters, and sensors; a screen, if present, is optional. A person can replace the brainbox of a traditional FDM Cartesian rig with open, off-the-shelf parts and be printing something in an afternoon, and there's a whole industry providing parts to support this kind of thing.

ChiTu isn't that way.)

For awhile, I picked up yet-another Pi Zero W every time I went into Microcenter for $5.

It was a wonderful time to live nearby.

I've been on Amazon's "get free stuff" list for a few years. I review stuff honestly.

If the product is trash, I review it as such.

If it's good, it gets some notes about the good stuff and the parts that make it less-than-great.

If it's great (and I'm rather particular so most things fall short of "great"), then it's still gone over in detail.

If my opinion changes over time, either positively or negatively, then: I update the review.

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This is in-keeping with the program's terms of service, and nothing about those terms compels me to behave other-than-honestly. I'm not expecting to get kicked out of it anytime soon regardless of how many 1-star reviews I post.

Same on my 14-year-old Honda van. The sane way to replace the HID bulbs (or the ballast or the ignitor, because HID things) is to remove the headlight housings, and the first step of doing that is removing the front bumper cover. It's not completely awful, but it's not exactly awesome either.

The less-sane way to replace just-the-bulb is from the top. It seems like it should be faster, and it sure does look easier, but it's a blind one-handed process with little fiddly bits to manipulate. There's not enough room to add a reasonably-stout glove to that hand, and there wouldn't be enough dexterity and tactile sense if there were. Consequently, there will be blood. I'm told that it's a lot more practical to swap a bulb in-situ with the halogen housings (as those don't have as much depth to them as the ones for HID), but my Honda is not so-endowed.

Part of this is because, AFAICT, the headlight assemblies are structural. They tie into several other assemblies and help hold the front of the vehicle together.

(A pedestrian Buick or Chevrolet from ~20 years ago is very different: To remove a headlight assembly, just lift up on a couple of heavy nylon straps and the whole shebang basically just falls out. It takes seconds. Reinstallation is very nearly as quick.)

That's a computer, wherein: More is better.

But here we have LLMs, wherein: It depends. The smaller models can in fact outperform the bigger ones, and get some stuff done cheaper, better, and faster.

If the question is "Which one is best?" then the answer is "It depends on what the fuck you're doing."

(If that answer is found to be unfulfilling, then let it serve as an indication that a person may be better-served by improving their questions.)

The customer is always right in matters of taste.

I'd prefer no pictures over obviously-false pictures that don't resemble the food on this planet.

Even in a strange place and where I don't understand the language, I have Google Lens.

Does whole experience of having dinner at restaurant involve more than dropping some plates of food on the table and a finale of "Fuck you, pay me"?

If does, then: The menu is an important part of the experience. It's the first part of the experience that involves the food itself, and it leaves an impression just as every other aspect does.

It can! :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhpF10H9G-M

How does one more-properly articulate "it depends"?

Cheap MCU dev kits in general, for me?

A somewhat-elaborate fan speed controller for a wonderful old pro audio power amp that also needed a good bit of other rehab

A window fan controller, for summer use, that only turns on the fan when it's cooler outside than it is inside -- so it only cools the indoors, seeks never to heat it

A sensor for automating the color temperature of my indoor lighting based on outdoor conditions

A macro pad that ultimately works kind of like a Streamdeck, but without the built-in display features (that was a download-and-print project)

Other random stuff, like an ESPHome widget that talked to a window aircon via infrared commands (mostly just a download-and-run project)

They're just cheap little programmable low[ish]-power computers on a board, with some flash storage and RAM, and a fair bit of low-level IO. Often with wireless network connectivity as a built-in. They do stuff. :)

If the code is tight-enough, they can do a remarkable amount of that stuff -- in terms of raw compute, they present something near-ish to the Pentium era of personal computing for a few dollars.

For me, they make sense for simple projects. When something like a disused laptop or a Raspberry Pi-like device [and the accoutrements, like a whole-ass operating system] seems like overkill, then: It's probably overkill.

With a dev board, I can breadboard a circuit and maybe even leave it that way forever, or get a custom PCB drawn up with KiCad and made inexpensively by JLC PCB or Osh Park or whatever, or just solder wires and parts to the dev board like a caveman.

All methods work, and the cost of screwing it up is usually very low.

After that, the thing gets powered up with one of the featureless USB wall warts that we all have accumulated too many of and it just sits there and does its job.

(And honestly, these Pi Pico and random ESP32 dev boards are also overkill for what I do with them. Most of what I've done could be accomplished with an MCU chip that costs pennies instead of dollars, but my quantities are low-enough that I just don't care much about a few dollars for occasional one-off projects.)

My cat's brain sure does seem to be stimulated by birdwatching on a screen. He tries to kill them, then walks behind the screen and has a WTF moment, and returns to the front to try to kill them again.

It's very entertaining for me, but I don't do it to him very often lest he become miswired.

Google Chromecast remote is bad, too.

The curvature on the back of those is such that it's harder to rotate into a position so the thumb can hit the right button than a flat surface would be.

It also means that resting it on the arm of a recliner produces about the same result as just dropping it into the void to begin with: It's going to wind up there either way.

Yeah. You get it. Heroin is bad.

We all know something about what it does, and that it is bad. Regular folks are often unaware at all that Heroin was once a product and trademark of Bayer, or that Bayer was the first to mass-produce the substance.

But we all know what is meant when someone mentions heroin. We know what is meant when someone talks about the iPad at the checkout counter at a restaurant, or says to get a Band-Aid from the cabinet or a box of Kleenex from the pantry. Beyond a certain age, at least, there's no issue with understanding what is being conveyed when a person Xeroxes a document.

We can understand these nouns even in the face of Clover payment terminals, Equate bandages, Puffs facial tissues, and Brother copiers.

We know (if we're paying attention at all) what a Flock camera is. It doesn't really matter that if it actually says Axiom on the box, instead; "Flock" doesn't serve to substantially diminish the understanding of what is being referred to.

In terms of spreading helpful information, "flock camera" is nice and easy. It communicates what needs to be communicated in a way that can be understood.

Besides, we don't have a good, concise, specific term for items like this. If we used the generic term, Automatic License Plate Reader (or ALPR), then that conversation would just make a normie's eyes glaze over and they'd stop listening.

Yep. And to be justifiably curt: It's fucking bullshit.

At best, it's deliberately manipulative. At worst, it's a pack of lies.

The median bullshit quotient here is: Festering.

What I'm trying to convey is this:

We may end up getting rid of Flock the company (ha, as if), but we'll always have [what people call] Flock cameras.

I'm not worried about it. It's just a word.

Regular folks often refer to any larger-than-phone, smaller-than-laptop device they see with a screen as an iPad, even if it's a hardwired Clover payment terminal running Android. The description is wrong, but it's easier to accept it than to correct it. I'm over it.

Regular folks can go ahead and call any nefariously-networked camera a Flock camera. This description is also wrong, but I'm over it as well.

We survived fine as a species when IBM's automatic machines replaced the ledger clerks of yore. That wasn't even such a long time ago.

We'll survive this transition as well.

That's a nice certification program. I'm glad that it exists and that there's a list of products that comply with it. I've saved it for later perusal.

But it reaches a wee bit further than I actually care about for something like a television:

> All the product software must be free software. The product software includes all software that the seller includes in the product, provides with the product, recommends for use in conjunction with the product, and steers users towards installation in the product.

I don't feel apologetic at all when I say that open-source just isn't very important to me at all when selecting a television. I do not care whether it is open or closed. I just don't want it to spy on me.

Being open does make it more inspectable for spyware, for sure, but as a realistic concept: I'm not going to be inspecting it myself, anyway. A third-party inspection or audit would be fine for me, and that kind of thing can happen without the source being available to me, myself.

The required open-source push seems kind of egalitarian.

I don't need the source code for wireless devices to understand that they've passed FCC certification testing. I don't need the schematics and code for my AV receiver to understand that the UL logo on the back of it means that it has been tested to show that it won't burn my house down or give me an electric shock.

I don't want to be a product certification testing lab when I grow up.

I'd rather bet that YouTube wants the greatest number of people watching as many videos with as many ads as possible, and that they don't give a fuck how the content was produced as long as it acquires and retains eyeballs.

I'd like to present a newspaper insert from Circuit City in 1997 that advertised the televisions they offered: https://web.archive.org/web/20261025051358/https://i.ebayimg...

Front page at https://web.archive.org/web/20261025052016/https://i.ebayimg...

A 35-inch Sony TV was $1.4k, or ~$2.9k today.

25-inch GE sets were $219, or ~$458 today.

> No previous tech shifts are comparable.

That's why the tall bank buildings that dot ~every small town (and plenty of big ones) in the US are full of bankers tending to paper ledgers, and with a secretary in front of every office. We still get milk delivered every day, as well as a block of river ice from last winter every 2 or 3 days (or more often if it's been particularly hot). We dig our ditches by hand, with hand-made shovels and pickaxes. The material for the clothes on our backs was woven on manual looms, from cotton that was harvested by hand, and carded by hand, and spun into thread by hand. We wear them in homes made with iron nails that were cut by hand, from ores that were mined by hand and smelted the only way we know how: With charcoal, in clay furnaces that were made with hands and that are stoked by hand.

I mean: I can be very happy just plugging my laptop into the TV and using mplayer from the command line. That works great for me.

But sometimes, other people (often referred to as "family" and/or "friends") come by and hang out. A TV-centric interface driven by a simple remote is more familiar and easier for them to understand.

(And frankly, I don't want anyone but me futzing around with my laptop at all, ever.)

Not as a median, they didn't.

Perfect.

That matches exactly how I've used every television I've owned for 20-ish years: I don't have the outside antenna I'd need for ATSC reception here so a tuner is useless, and I don't ever wish to hear the slightest utterance from a television speaker so speakers are useless, and I don't need it to have multiple inputs (but the digital signage displays usually seem to have a few, anyway, just as PC monitors do).

> I have a logitech mouse that allows you to unclick the scroll wheel

Yeah, I've had one for few years now. It was always annoying to accidentally unlock the scroll wheel...

> so you can scroll at tremendous speed (the scroll wheel has a bearing)

...but I never once gave the unlocked scroll wheel a whimsical flick until I read this part.

I learned a thing! It works great. Thanks!

This point of this whole concept is about getting better about dealing with variable production. It seeks to better-fit flexible demands against production variations, and thereby smooth things out.

(...which is actually really good for all of us even if we're not active participants in the game, as far as I can tell.)

Anyway: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/335175027_Investiga...

Attenuation of 95 GHz seems likely to be in the realm of 30-40dB, which is also in the realm of letting less than 1% through.

So you're suggesting what, exactly? That further testing is necessary?

Please be constructive instead of dismissive.

> Higher frequencies need smaller holes to attenuate as effectively.

So let's make the holes smaller. We want to permit nanometer-wave light to pass while blocking centimeter-wave RF. I'm not seeing a particularly difficult engineering challenge here. :)

> You'd likely be better off with aluminum foil than the door.

Did you think this through at all? Running away and hiding while wearing opaque aluminum foil blinders is kind of a unilateral non-starter.

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Anyway, we also have this: Window film. Let's look at an example.

3M Thinsulate Climate Control 75 is a self-adhesive film that blocks greater than 99% of RF from 100MHz to 4.5GHz[1], which I might suggest is pretty good for protecting the ol' eyeballs from a brief encounter with the blindness machine.

The combination of it and a single pane of window glass provides 74% visible light transmission[2]. I further suggest that this allows plenty of light with which to safely move around.

[1]: https://multimedia.3m.com/mws/media/1704860O/electromagnetic...

[2]: https://multimedia.3m.com/mws/media/1435912O/product-bulleti...