Comment by earthboundkid | Hacker News Reader

Comment by earthboundkid | Hacker News Reader

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An example that illustrates the point:

I went to a restaurant tonight. Because of COVID-19, we were seated outside. Instead of being given a menu, we were told to scan a laminated QR code on the table. That loaded a website with the menu.

From one point of view, this is a huge waste of compute. The phone camera is scanning for QR code whenever it’s open, which is a waste. We’re calling up cell towers to do megabytes worth of downloading to get a website, when the text of the menu is at most a couple of dozen items.

On the other hand, the restaurant knew we’d have phones and didn’t want to either sanitize laminated menus or print and toss plain paper menus. You could imagine a system in the 80s where you’d use a CueCat style scanner to get a simple barcode for a text menu… but nothing was ever as widespread then as smartphones are now. The sheer ubiquity of computing makes it easy to solve a novel problem with overwhelming resources.

Do you think artificially constraining compute resources would bring great software into being?

For example, Pico-8 gaming engine: https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php

and TIC-80 computer: https://tic80.com/

These are way too limited, but I could imagine something a little more powerful - 1024x768 pixel buffer, 64 MB ram and 100 MB space. All apps natively running on this (or even emulation) would instantly load and the latency would be unreal.

Anyone interested in building something like this in physical form? Have access to ME/EE expertise and supply chain that's second to none, contact info in the profile.

Adding to your point, even with the artificial limitations of pico-8, massive hits have been born in it, such as Celeste: https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=2145

Imagine MSAccess Webbased Online, with GUI + Report + Query Designer + Free backend database + scripting and repl.

That's the basic offering of Microsoft's Power Platform, except for the repl part. Scripting is done graphically through Flow, the backend database is CDS, and reporting is through PowerBI.

As a developer, I think the whole thing is so convoluted and asinine it should curl up and die in a fire. It will spawn an entirely new area of bespoke, non-maintainable yet critical business tooling.

Great software at great (big) prices. I mean if minecraft would have been published in the 90s it would prob cost 80$ which is 160$ in todays money (making up numbers here) instead of 10$. It is harder and more expensive to make software in constraint environments.

Why? Original 1994 System Shock was released at $34.99. Internally it was pretty much Minecraft https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sr3_6gb92Kw ;-)

Maybe country specific. Here any game was 80 (but probably i remember wrongly)

If a restaurant can't be bothered to clean their menus between guests can they be bothered to clean the dishes, glassware and prepare food without issue? It seems like a small thing but I'd expect that to happen anyway.

On the plus side, they chose the environmentally friendly option, the alternative would have been disposable paper menus.

They likely already have commercial dishwashers. Maybe there’s a machine that can do high-temperature cleaning of laminated menus with minimal labor, but I doubt it’s cheap.

It's more of a faff to clean laminated menus (disinfectant spray, cloth, manual, have to clean each indvidually) than to clean dishes (just stick them in the dishwasher and turn it on).

Hmph.

ESP-CAMs combine a 2-megapixel OV2640 with an ESP32 clocked at 240MHz that has a Wi-Fi b/g/n + Bluetooth 4.2 baseband integrated into the chip.

Finished/working flashable boards run for about $6 apiece on Aliexpress.

I don't know the innards, but I don't think qr decode is that intensive. I seem to recall you can give popular open source decoders frame-at-a-time from a phone camera and it isn't really a bottleneck.

It's not that hard all things considered, but from a 90s PoV, it's a lot of work: you have to identify possible QR areas, deskew them, try the QR algorithm, see if it decodes to something, and then show a pop up on screen.

Compare that to the CueCat, which was made in 2000 and much more finicky about scanning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CueCat

Yeah but... People write libraries in garbage collected byte code languages, I have seen zxing (java) run on phones from 10 years ago much less powerful than today, and it can still get a decent framerate processing the camera without any special tricks.

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