jetpacktuxedo

> A clarification: these are interviews with people who assemble custom keyboards, I was expecting chats with the people who actually design and produce custom keyboards (like yuktsi, Rama, Wilba, ZealPC, etc...)

At least one of them is with a board designer, the V4N4G0N one with Evan (formerly of TheVan Keyboards)

No, you can't pay your ISP to get "faster internet", only to get more bandwidth between your wall and whatever backhaul provider owns the physical fiber lines. There is no way to make the internet "faster" other than reducing the number of hops you have to make to get to the destination, or by increasing the speed of packets on the networks, which should already be roughly speed of light. Therefore if they are proposing "fast lanes" it isn't about speeding you up, but rather about slowing everyone else down.

Net Neutrality doesn't prevent ISPs from selling more bandwidth to netflix, it only prevents ISPs from treating the traffic differently due to the identity of either the sender or the receiver. This means that Comcast can't slow your traffic down just because you are sending data to and receiving data from netflix instead of using Hulu (which they partially own).

Them competing to be the safest means that none of them are as safe as they could be working together, though.

If every company has their own secret suite of test cases then different companies can specialize in different aspects of safety, and different AIs will be tuned to watch for different conditions.

Imagine if instead of that they all worked together to define a rigorous test suite. Then they would all be striving to excel against all of the tests that the best of them could come up with. Wouldn't that result in more rigorous testing than any individual company would do? Especially if the results of all of the tests were public?

To go another step further, imagine an open carAI platform that had the aforementioned test suite and a full simulation platform for testing changes, with different car manufacturers represented on a committee that oversees the carAI platform. Separate the smarts from the base car a bit and have some sort of abstraction layer between the smart bits and the car bits. As long as the abstraction layer is configured properly then different AIs would be interchangeable/upgradeable on the same base hardware. All car companies (and tech companies, and interested individuals) could collaborate on building the best, most efficient, safest car AI possible. People on older hardware would get all the same safety improvements as people on newer hardware (though hardware improvements would obviously improve things like sensor quality and quantity and the like), there wouldn't be fragmentation between ai ecosystems with poorer people trapped on older releases with lower safety standards while the rich get the latests and greatest and safest cars, etc.

Obviously competition is better than nothing, but is it really better than an open, collaborative alternative?

I mean it isn't like any of these makers are sharing their tax returns or anything, but for example eat_the_food is the designer and manufacturer behind "Nightcaps" [0]. He ran an event called "Poisoned summer" where he had 80 days of "micro batch" sales, where each sale was for somewhere between one and fifteen or so caps, priced between $60-80 each. Most days the sale was only open for about one minute, and in that minute he would have hundreds of entries to randomly draw "winners" from, and then the winners would get to buy the keycaps. I'm pretty sure he hit six figures in sales on those 80 days of sales alone, and those were not his only sales throughout the year. He isn't even making keycaps full-time yet, he still has a day job.

Several other members of the mechanical keyboard community (especially in the artisan keycap subsection of the community) have managed to turn their keyboard hobby into a full-time job and make a pretty decent living out of it.

[0] https://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=79513.0

Probably not particularly well as the Myo band only detects a handful of super basic gestures, and unless they have changed their stance in the past year or two they refuse to expose the raw data to developers. This makes it impossible to distinguish more than their predefined gestures.

I get this in dense areas now. I will still get "in a half mile turn left on X street", but when it actually gives me "turn left" I will instead get "take the next left" or "take the second left" if there are multiple streets close together on the left.

>you can dial a phone from Hangouts, but not back

I use google voice and hangouts. I can both send and receive voice calls using my google voice number via hangouts. I can also send and receive sms message using my google voice number via hangouts. Both of these have been true for at least 4 years, maybe 5. They started trying to phase sms out of hangouts a few years back, but never removed it for google voice users.

Out of curiosity, did you see it in 3D? Most of my friends that saw it in 3D were complaining about how bad the renderd Leia and Tarkin were, but very few of my friends who saw it in 2D had any complaints about it.

>I get it completely. It's nowhere near as done up as say, Seattle or Boston. It's because it has an industrial past.

Seattle also has an industrial past, and more importantly, a lot of it is still industrial. If you pop open google maps and zoom in on Seattle's waterfront, essentially everything south of Yesler Way is shipping and other industrial uses. Additionally basically everything south of the stadiums is pretty industrial, even further inland.

From looking at Toronto, it looks like the Port Lands area you are talking about is pretty similar to the Sodo area in Seattle I was talking about, while your Harbourfront Centre and Bathurst Quay are more like what people usually consider the Seattle waterfront, with lots of parks and some restaurants, near what I can only assume is your downtown area?

The biggest difference that I see is that you guys appear to have a _lot_ of parking lots, and your rail lines and a big expressway appear to run right between your downtown and the waterfront.

Not sure about low latency (especially since this article seems to have failed to test that at all...), but for low-profile cherry-style switches you could look into the new low-profile Kailh switches, which are sort of based on the old Cherry ML switches. The only manufactured board you can buy with these right now is the Havit HV-KB390L[1], as far as I know.

If you are really tied to the cherry mx style you could check out the kailh and cherry "speed" switches, which have slightly shorter travel distance and a higher actuation point.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Mechanical-Keyboard-Extra-Thin-Switch...

False. You can bend the leaf of a cherry MX switch into all sorts of wild shapes to move the tactile event up and down the press, but the actuation will stay in largely the same place. If you browse the force curves from the link I posted above, you can see that some switches (cherry MX Brown, for example) actuate well after the tactile event.

The tactile event on a Cherry MX Brown is ~1mm into the travel distance, and the actual actuation is ~2mm in. Kaihua Box Orange switches (still an MX-style switch) is an even better example of that. Kaihua Speed Bronze has the actuation point inside of the tactile bump instead of after the bump. I can't find any examples of switches that actuate _before_ the tactile bump (mostly because why would anyone design that?), but tactility and actuation are not inherently tied together in cherry MX switches, either.

They are both handled by a two-part leaf, which you can sort of see in some of the pictures on Deskthority[1]. There are two legs on the slider that have a surface to them that determines the tactility (or lack thereof in the case of linear switches) that slide linearly up and down the top leaf, which flexes it until it makes contact with the bottom leaf. That contact causes the actuation. All of the tactility is determined bu the shape of the slider legs.

[1] https://deskthority.net/wiki/Cherry_MX#Construction

For long enough key travel times that could actually show a negative latency, which might be super weird.

As mentioned in my other comment, that is a symptom of ghosting, not of being limited to the standard 6-key rollover set by the usb spec.

ghosting can also cause issues with holding multiple keys at once and is more likely what they are referring to. Details here: https://www.microsoft.com/appliedsciences/antighostingexplai...

>In tacticale switches the bump and the making of the contact are mechanically connected.

Nope! This is rarely (if ever?) the case. In alps switches, for example, there are two totally separate leafs, one of which handles the tactile feeling and the other of which is responsible for the actual actuation. If you browse through Haata's Plotly[1] you can see that many switches actuate well after the tactile bump. Though they are often pretty closely related in terms of their depth in the keypress, they are wholly unrelated from one another mechanically.

[1] https://plot.ly/~haata

> but you wouldn't need to replace them any more frequently than other headphones

Except that the batteries will eventually stop holding a charge. This is not a problem with wired headphones. I can plug a 40 year old pair of headphones my Dad got in college into my phone and they work the same now as they did then. You can't do that with wireless headphones.

I drove from Indiana to Seattle two years ago while on Tmobile. I really only had issues in the mountains, in National Parks (yellowstone really, the badlands were fine for the most part, and had full LTE at Mt. Rushmore), and chunks of South Dakota.

Out of curiosity, does your phone support Band 12? Because they have been really pushing that rollout which roughly triples their range and building penetration, so I wonder if that could account for our different experiences.

Unless you have an add on that isn't compatible, like the one that ubuntu for some reason bundles with the browser out of the box.

I use google assistant for controlling smart lights sometimes with "ok google, turn on/off the lights". At one point I tried "Ok google, turn off the lights in ten minutes" and it just searched it. That seems super simple and like something it shouldn't have had any trouble with, but here we are :/

You're not wrong. I use smart lock and fingerprint on my 5x. I actually would prefer it to require fingerprint when near my watch with password fallback, and require fingerprint+password when away from my watch, but that isn't currently a possible configuration as far as I can tell.

You can check out the other databases he has tested here: http://jepsen.io/analyses

That being said, none of the big players in sql are there, so you can't size it up against postgres or mysql.

The A line is APUs, so CPU + GPU on chip. I wouldn't call those mobile chips, though. They drain waaayyyy too much power for that. The tegra line is arm + nvidia gpu on the same SOC, which has way lower power draw (and is already used in some tablets and a chromebook or two).

Not that I agree with your parent comment that bing still uses google results on the backend, they did at least used to: https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/microsofts-bing-uses...

Separated halves is the easiest of your requirements. That is a pretty well solved problem in the keyboard community (see ergodox, etc.).

Having the halves communicate wirelessly is a bigger challenge, but still potentially solvable. The easiest solution would be to have each half register as a separate board. Then because it is wireless you have the issues of batteries and charging and stuff.

The curve might also be tough, especially when combined with the wireless part. The easiest solution would be to have a plate cut, heat it up to soften it slightly and then bend it into the curve that you want. There would probably be a lot of trial and error involved in that though, and it may be faster (though a lot more expensive) to design the final 3D version of it in a cad program and have it milled as one big block.

Standard cherry-style keys will be much easier to source than scissor keys.

This geekhack thread might give you some ideas: https://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=70221.0