Once upon a time, on USENET, someone had a .sig that predicted one day computers would be cheap enough they'd come in cereal boxes and we'd throw them away.
That day appears to have arrived.
That day appears to have arrived.
For one, 10 years is a perfectly good used car for somebody, and for two with large EV battery packs we’d expect some lithium recycling effort
Disposable vapes don’t have either of those going for them, batteries go straight in the trash after one charge cycle
Either way, it seems pretty unfair to assume that EV packs will be 100% recycled, while vape packs will be 0% recycled. One could imagine a sort of "core charge" for disposable vapes. Bring the vape back for recycling when you get a new one and get $2 off. This could even be done by law like California CRV for cans and bottles.
I'll show myself out!
It's wasteful, I don't particularly approve of it, I expect to see a lot of jurisdiction ban disposable vapes, but nor do I think it's particularly egregious or meaningfully impacting on the commodity price of lithium carbonate.
https://hackaday.com/2022/05/05/2022-hackaday-prize-disposab...
I don't understand this. Instead of plugging it into a charger, they'd rather go to the store to buy another, or more likely order online and wait for it to be delivered?
maybe you live somewhere without convenience stores
The materials for one EV battery can make ~30 e-bikes, and currently EVs are too expensive for most people.
The way to fix that and the way that industry is fixing it is to make batteries more efficient (higher-density, new anodes/cathodes) in parallel with making a bunch more of them (and mining more lithium).
If we succeed in making a $25k EV, the batteries used in those vapes will be _even cheaper_.
I don’t think it’s desirable and I find the waste appalling, but I do think that disposable batteries can only be expected to grow without intervention.
A typical disposable vape contains about five cents worth of lithium.
https://www.irena.org/-/media/Files/IRENA/Agency/Technical-P...
Make of that what you want, but disposable electronics to administer nicotine seem to be a major waste.
One 18650 can get you several hours of runtime for a pi zero. The battery can cost more than the zero. The cheaper one cell UPS boards are about $2 (plus shipping).
An advantage of single cell UPSes is that you don't have to worry about balancing, which is a bit of a pain with scavenged cells.
Selling consumer devices with Li-Ion batteries that are designed to not be rechargeable, should be banned altogether.
Except when your watch battery dies, you only dispose of the battery, not together with the watch, as is the case with those single-use vapes.
The problem with lithium batteries is that they can catch on fire, but that's a problem only when charged (or charging). A fully discharged battery shouldn't do much.
No we're not. Disposable batteries should not be a thing anywhere, especially not in products where they cannot easily be removed by design. Alkaline batteries may not combust when damaged, but their internal juice leaking out is damn corrosive.
> A fully discharged battery shouldn't do much.
Even that is enough to light trash compactor trucks or the heaps on waste collection plants to fire. This shit is becoming a massive problem for the trash hauler and processing industry. One in Australia blames 35 (!) fires a day in the country... no surprise if 1.8 million of them are sold a week [1]. This is frankly insane, and the rise in trash fires directly corresponds with disposable vapes.
Additionally, we need every bit of lithium we can get for electric vehicles and other stuff. Not for throwaway devices.
[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-12-02/qld-lithium-ion-batte...
If true, then the hedonism and pleasure seeking (the homeostatic pleasure trap is a monkey trap) found within the big, global industrial complex is meant for a small set of secret hackers to take advantage of by collecting disposed "vape" or smoking pleasure devices for powering some cool nerd contraptions.
Don't be afraid to get your hands dirty when you pick up trash. Because capitalism produces treasure when it excretes its waste products.
You just have to be outside the capitalist world-system to do this cool trick.
Just spitballing here, but considering that at typical intersections, automobile traffic outnumbers cyclist traffic by at least 100:1, isn't it more likely that those vapes were throw out the window of a car when someone got frustrated they clogged or something? (I'm not a vaper, but I've heard of clogged vapes being a common occurrence).
https://groups.google.com/g/comp.arch/c/Y4C_Zjkb9VM/m/scDk_0...
> Killer micros of today are a lot like flourescent lights -- cheap to operate, prevalent, and expensive to turn off. To see a machine standing idle, when you were raised as a child to "use cycles efficiently" is a gut-wrenching experience. Just remember Alan Kay's prediction: In the future, computers will come in cereal boxes and we will throw them away.
March 20, 1990. I haven't found a source for Alan Kay's prediction.
"In the future, you're going to get computers as prizes in breakfast cereals. You'll throw them out because your house will be littered with them. -- Robert Lucky"
i think typically the thing that distinguished these from microcontrollers like the 8031, 8051, 8748, 8751, pic1650, etc., is that the microcontrollers had program memory built into them, either rom, eprom, or, starting in the 90s, flash. so they didn't need to be booted, they didn't need program ram, and in fact for a lot of applications they didn't need any external ram at all
If the leader got a bus error they would generate an interrupt on the follower to stop it before it executed the bus erroring instruction.
The leader and follower would then switch roles, and the new leader could deal with the situation that had caused the bus error on the former leader.
* MCUs usually have program memory builtin. But then there chips like RP2040 or ESP32 which while considered MCUs are used with external Flash memory chips for storing the firmware. * MCUs usually have builtin RAM. But there are also some capable of directly using external RAM. * Then there are things like apple M1 chips, with a lot of stuff builtin you still don't call them MCU. * A bunch of ARM application processors/SOCs/Microprocessors might have enough resources builtin that they could be used as more or less standalone microcontrollers, without external RAM or flash memory. * some early microprocessors used external MMUs and it took some time until the processors settled on architecture that's closer to how we have things now * early personal computer processors were in a weird category in terms of price and processing power, in certain time period it wasn't impossible that similar microprocessor chip was used both for as main computer CPU and also for peripheral devices.
The microprocessor name in my opinion at this point is slightly outdated. It's not like anyone beside hobbyists is making non micro processors out individual relays, transistors or logic chips.
actually i think non-micro (multi-integrated-circuit) processors are becoming popular again. the 'microprocessor' moniker wasn't coined to distinguish processors built out of discrete transistors from processors built out of integrated circuits; that was the 'second-generation computer' vs. 'third-generation computer' distinction back in the 01960s. what made a microprocessor 'micro' was that it was a chip instead of a circuit board
Though by my definition of requiring reprogrammability and Turing completeness I am purposefully excluding many things that have historically been considered computers, like the many mechanical computers of the 19th and 20th century. From that standpoint I can see how some people might count ASICs as computers, even if I don't think that fits modern usage.
https://www.wch-ic.com/products/CH32V003.html
The PIC12 has 25 bytes! of sram. The CH32V003 has 2k.
https://www.aliexpress.us/w/wholesale-CH32V003.html?spm=a2g0...
About that... https://www.pcmag.com/news/you-can-run-doom-on-a-chip-from-a...
Another friend will give me a 180 gigabyte RAM device next week, cause it would go to the container otherwise...
I never ended up buying one, because it'd consume way more power than made sense, and they're kinda shitty for gaming/workstation use due to low single-core performance and NUMA issues.
Does anyone remember this?
My example was all the above except the chip was centerfold in the middle of the magazine. Not on the cover...
I'm surprised this happened more than once however.
Hacking the Esquire e-ink cover
https://www.popsci.com/diy/article/2008-09/hacking-esquire-e...
Apparently the group that did this advertisement was: https://www.americhip.com/ourwork/?product=product-magazine-...
And they have a whole slew of magazine inserts that they've done. I'm convinced now that I saw one of these magazine inserts, but not the one on the Chevy. Thanks for helping me track it down! I'm really close...
EDIT: I found it!! https://www.americhip.com/ourwork/microsoft-wi-fi-hotspot.ht...
It was this advertisement, I remember the cover. Sorry I wasn't very specific earlier, but I didn't realize how many "throwaway computers inside of magazines" that there were. I guess I assumed this was a one-off event with Microsoft's 365 WiFi cloud (now that I remember the chip, lol).