geerlingguy

Consider that entire product lines for random widgets you see in every day life in the dozens or hundreds have Pis inside now. A lot of "smart" things are just the thing plus a Compute Module.

There are smart parking garage lights, smart inspection cameras, smart golf ball dispensers... all these things have enough margin they can absorb a 100-300% component increase, though I'm sure they don't like it.

16GB was $120 at launch. Even at that price it was a stretch and really only useful in some niches. The 4 or 8 GB models were always the best value. Now those are a bit too much, for what you get.

I still think there are good applications for the <4 GB Pi 5s, but for a lot of projects I just stick with a Pi 4 or CM4 now.

Yeah, for those with a Micro Center, the Pi pricing is in line with MSRPs. A lot of people buy from vendors on Amazon or eBay, which do not have to stick to MSRPs, and they use those prices as "gospel". Sadly, for some people, those prices are the best they can find for a shipped product in their location, so I don't blame them.

Bingo.

"We had to do extra work to make this safe because it's so advanced and dangerous..." how many times can they trot out that line before it loses its effect entirely?

I just found out newer desktop Macs now have a setting as of 26.5 that allows power on after power restore even without an unsafe shutdown. I'll have to test this.

Cutting a live transmission line is incredibly foolish, for many reasons, but I'm guessing the station has a modern(ish) solid state transmitter, which has great foldback protection.

I've seen (and personally tested) AM transmitters dead shorting, and within less than a second (probably less than 100ms, but I haven't measured precisely) it will fold back on a dead short to like 1% of its operating power, lower if it still detects a short.

This is to protect the (even more expensive) transmitter from lightning strikes or other weird eventualities (like the line leaking pressurized nitrogen, used to prevent shorts from moisture mainly).

But replacing that 3" transmission line is not cheap or fast. Usually the runs are planned and designed, and every elbow / connection has losses that are accounted for.

If you only have 1s to hit Del for BIOS it can be a problem, especially if you're powering the IP KVM off of the computer being controlled.

But otherwise, I've tested BIOS access on every one of these and it works on the PCs I've tested. Mounting ISO's can be tricky sometimes but mostly "just works" now.

There are tons of devices used that have no built-in BMC (like the Thinkpads in the original comment in this thread), yet still need reliable remote control in certain cases (e.g. a remote lab, or multiple-unit headless testing).

It would be a bit odd if a place was deploying new Dell servers and slapping IP KVMs on top of them.

Indeed, I will add a note in my blog post. They should've called it V2 or something.

Same here; trying to get OpenBMC flashed onto older motherboards can be a rabbit-hole. I generally throw an IP KVM on top if I really need remote control and can't settle on just SSH and a remote power cycle if that fails.

The annoying thing with Macs is they don't have the ability to 'Power on after clean shutdown and power cycle'. They can power on after a power fail, but that's not the same thing.

I want to be able to have power toggle on my Mac remotely, but without soldering in a jumper on the power button, AFAIK there's no way to do it :(

There are a few, like this add-on for PiKVM[1], a fully integrated version from Geekworm[2], and an as-yet unreleased 4-port IP KVM switcher from GL-iNet[3].

[1] https://technotim.com/posts/pikvm-at-scale/

[2] https://geekworm.com/products/pikvm-x680

[3] https://www.gl-inet.com/products/gl-rm4pe/

I think if you can afford it, the PiKVM is still the gold standard... and also one of the best engineered devices, with the most flexibility. It costs a lot because it's worth it.

They also have a nice (if messy) solution for multiple device management with an external box (TechnoTim had some good coverage on his channel/website[1]).

Most other Pi-based KVMs use PiKVM's software anyway, and I'm not sure if any directly support PiKVM upstream (they should, IMO).

The other class is the JetKVM and its derivatives (many forked JetKVM's snappier Go software), and that's another reason I've stuck with JetKVM itself. It seems to have a nice community around it for mounts in almost any situation, and hacks to get weird things working correctly with it. They're also going to have a PoE + full-size HDMI version soon, I think, with microSD for expanded ISO storage.

[1] https://technotim.com/posts/pikvm-at-scale/

On some the latency is within 45-60ms (that's the best I've tested, under pretty strict LAN conditions), but average is more like 100-200ms. Not good enough for gaming, but fine for things like watching video, if you really want to do that.

Most employ heavy compression by default, and it looks a little more pronounced with motion. A few have 'high quality' mode, but especially on the Pi-based KVMs this eats up more CPU, so I don't use that.

It's on the whole best for use cases where you just need to log into remote servers and check on things, or reinstall/re-image something. I don't think I'd like using any of these for a constant remote session for daily work. I do use Screen Sharing on macOS for that sometimes, and it works great in its low-latency mode. None of the KVMs I've tested are quite to that level.

Always a fun adventure when you buy an old server motherboard to see what state of disarray the BMC is in. Or if you have to patch the license on older boards just to get into it. Usually I just ignore the BMC on any hardware more than 5 years old.

You mean a standard TCXO, but not rubidium—those start in the low thousands new, or $300+ used.

They even made them a little bigger, and they still overheated...

All because they had to have the top line specs for video, pushing the little SoC to the limit while recording. The heat makes battery life worse, too.

If it's still based on the chip in the DGX Spark, idle power draw remains a problem to be solved. My Spark pulls down 40W when doing nothing under Ubuntu.

MacBook Air 11" form factor with 12" retina display (with thinner bezels) and M1 or A19 would be peak portability for me.

Shorter PCB traces because of insane timing requirements for DDR5, GDDR7, and beyond; GPUs put the memory chips as close as possible surrounding the CPU die to reduce the latency and prevent timing/signaling issues.

But even there, the fastest AI accelerator GPUs are putting memory on die, and using chiplet designs, to get the memory closer and closer to the cores.

It seems like they had two issues (both hardware) related to display quality: one is they couldn't have a custom display made to their specs, so they had to pick something off the shelf to meet requirements. Two is they used a 30 pin display connector (see https://community.frame.work/t/does-fl12-have-a-40-pin-edp-c...), so certain resolutions and refresh rates probably can't work.

The individual creator can turn that off in settings — however, it was enabled automatically for everyone, and creators have to know to turn it off...

Unfortunately this is true; and if you're not careful with your time, a lot can be wasted by people who realize "I can email so-and-so instead of putting in 5 minutes to finding the issue myself".

They're usually pretty courteous in their interaction, which makes it all the more difficult to be "rude", in my case, by adding an exponential falloff in response times - after I realize what's happening, I tend to take a little longer for each reply so they figure out it's faster to just do the research on their own most times.

The crypto craze was a microcosm of this. The difference is there are a few good and immediate applications for improved LLMs; with crypto it was a lot quicker to burn through the hype phase, since much less of substance was made.

That, and the cryptocurrencies, NFTs, and immutable contracts weren't blowing sunshine up your hindparts.

My comment was on the Anthropic co-founder's speech, not Pope Leo's encyclical.

> And what has grown is far more subtle, odd, and beautiful than science fiction prepared us for. They are not the cold, calculating robots we were promised. They are made from us, from our words—and, as the Holy Father observes, they remain in important ways mysterious even to those of us who train them

I love how he's framing AI as some new and fascinating form of consciousness... when in fact it is a cold, calculating technology devoid of any empathy or care.

There's an important distinction between the 'substance' and the 'accidents' (outward characteristics), that matters a lot in Catholic theology.

Some deeper discussion around Aquinas' philosophy on the difference: https://iep.utm.edu/thomas-aquinas-metaphysics/#H4

But I'd say any Catholic who believes in the Eucharist would admit, yeah, it's a bit of an odd thing, especially by today's standards, to consume the blood of a sacrificed animal.

Similar to the much smaller scale Wi-Wi setup that was on HN a few days ago (which came after WR): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48209055

"Magic"

I bought an iPod again this year, and started buying MP3s instead of streaming songs.

It's so nice to sit in a chair, close my eyes, and listen to a soundtrack or an old album.

I'm getting old.