peteforde

I'm not saying that you've clearly never built and shipped a hardware device as a small team in North America; maybe you have, and maybe that's what you do all day.

However, I have noticed that the only people who look at a product like Chompi and think "overpriced" are people who have never built and shipped a hardware device. Perhaps you'll be the one to prove me wrong.

I'm not saying that Chompi wasn't expensive, or that you couldn't get a mass-produced device like a Roland SP-404 for less on Reverb. I am saying that that is not a fair comparison, however.

I understand that there's always a hesitation to invest in what looks like an expensive and large tool, but if there's one thing that I could go back in time and force myself to get years sooner, it's a stereo microscope.

It's the single largest difference between frustrated and feeling like a ninja. You will, quite simply, never regret it.

I recommend this one: https://www.strangeparts.com/a-boy-and-his-microscope-a-love...

There are lots of pedals these days that are designed as performance instruments in their own right. Check out the Erica Synths Nightverb; it's all chonky knobs and it doesn't even have stomp switches. You'd never put it on your floor.

Storm Summoner takes a pedal with lots of parameters [that would normally be set-and-go] and gives it that missing live performance UX. Singers in particular could use the sensors to modulate their voices.

What excites me is the flag-based system described in the review video at 11:45. You can set up stuff to happen (launch an LFO?) in response to other things that happen, like a value crossing a threshold. That takes it out of the realm of a dumb controller, and we already have enough dumb controllers.

Austria: Federal Environment Agency / approved dual system. P €810 + W €1,110 = €1,920/yr. Battery: +€1,110.

Belgium: IVC/CIE; Fost Plus for household packaging / Valipac for commercial packaging. P €585 + W €585 = €1,170/yr. Battery: +€585.

Bulgaria: Executive Environment Agency / Ecopack or another approved system. P €375 + W €990 = €1,365/yr. Battery: +€1,195.

Croatia: FZOEU / RPPO. P €780 + W €1,315 = €2,095/yr. Battery: +€1,315.

Cyprus: Green Dot Cyprus or applicable national system. P €375 + W €910 = €1,285/yr. Battery: +€910.

Czechia: Ministry of Environment / EKO-KOM. P €385 + W €1,110 = €1,495/yr. Battery: +€910.

Denmark: Danish Producer Responsibility / approved PRO. P €1,110 + W €925 = €2,035/yr. Battery: +€730.

Estonia: Pakendiregister / approved PRO. P €385 + W €775 = €1,160/yr. Battery: +€775.

Finland: Producer Responsibility Register / Rinki. P €810 + W €925 = €1,735/yr. Battery: +€925.

France: ADEME/SYDEREP; normally Citeo or Leko. P €585 + W €985 = €1,570/yr. Battery: +€790.

Germany: LUCID/ZSVR plus a dual-system contract; WEEE: Stiftung EAR. P €360 + W €1,185 = €1,545/yr. Battery: +€705. Germany illustrates why the service price and actual environmental fee should not be confused: LUCID registration itself is free and one current small-volume packaging example is only about €39–€41/year if handled directly.

Greece: EOAN/EMPA / HERRCO. P €790 + W €985 = €1,775/yr. Battery: +€910.

Hungary: national registration / MOHU. P €1,120 + W €1,185 = €2,305/yr. Battery: +€985.

Ireland: EPA / Repak as applicable. P €585 + W €1,170 = €1,755/yr. Battery: +€1,170.

Italy: CONAI and relevant consortium. P €805 + W €1,305 = €2,110/yr. Battery: nominally +€1,305, although this provider offers a WEEE+battery bundle.

Latvia: State Environmental Service / approved recovery system. P €1,290 + W €1,365 = €2,655/yr. Battery: +€1,375.

Lithuania: GPAIS / approved PRO. P €780 + W €1,365 = €2,145/yr. Battery: +€1,375.

Luxembourg: Valorlux. P €375 + W €1,485 = €1,860/yr. Battery: +€1,500.

Malta: ERA / GreenPak or Green MT. P €780 + W €675 = €1,455/yr. Battery: +€675.

Netherlands: Verpact; electronics commonly through Stichting OPEN/Wecycle. P €385 + W €385 = €770/yr. Battery: +€385.

Poland — Packaging/WEEE registration through BDO and appropriate recovery organisation. P €910 + W €1,110 = €2,020/yr. Battery: +€985.

Portugal: APA/SILiamb / Sociedade Ponto Verde or another scheme. P €1,195 + W €1,390 = €2,585/yr. Battery: +€1,390.

Romania: AFM / approved OIREP. P €880 + W €1,195 = €2,075/yr. Battery: +€1,195.

Slovakia: Ministry/ISOH / ENVI-PAK, NATUR-PACK or equivalent. P €750 + W €1,120 = €1,870/yr. Battery: +€1,125.

Slovenia: ARSO / approved PRO. P €1,485 + W €1,615 = €3,100/yr. Battery: +€1,630.

Spain: MITECO / Ecoembes. P €790 + W €985 = €1,775/yr. Battery: +€985. This provider also quotes €595 one-time for obtaining the Spanish NIF where required, plus official/apostille costs.

Sweden: Naturvårdsverket / NPA. P €810 + W €1,110 = €1,920/yr. Battery: +€505.

Using the published list of concierge prices above, covering all 27 EU countries for a batteryless electronic product would cost approximately:

Packaging service: €20,290/year WEEE service: €29,260/year Combined: €49,550/year

Adding battery compliance using the same provider's à-la-carte figures adds approximately €27,445/year.

What is the opposite of something putting a spring in your step?

I'm not part of the Musk fan club either, you can count on that.

However, I've been using Cursor since it came out. I have a massive amount of institutional knowledge locked into their platform, and vastly prefer it to the other options available even if the switching costs were zero.

Going through what would amount to significant effort/time/cost to switch to a different coding tool as a sort of performative political rebuke is just not how I would recommend anyone protest DOGE.

I don't know because I honestly don't know or really understand how/why anyone needs what you're describing.

I am not saying that you're wrong, just very aware that we appear to use LLMs in radically different ways.

Only the most substantial requests run for ten minutes or more, and I would spend an hour or more writing the prompt for that action.

I am always the bottleneck for how quickly Cursor can do what I want, with the level of outcome that I get.

I would genuinely love to be a fly on the wall while you do what you do, because it just doesn't currently make sense to me.

A few months ago folks were understandably annoyed when Microsoft dropped their heavily subsidized per-request pricing model because it was figuratively burning cash.

Well, I'm here to tell you that whatever is going on behind the scenes at Cursor with this Space-X acquisition in the works, the Auto setting is clearly routing all prompts through "Cursor Grok 4.6 High" right now.

This is a degree of subsidy that makes the Microsoft thing look quaint.

I reduced my $200/month subscription to the $20/month level and have proceeded to do what I would have paid about $1500 to do with Opus 4.7 or thereabouts, which is how Grok 4.6 High feels like it compares. I don't have anything remotely like hard evidence to back this estimate up beyond what I'm watching it do and I still somehow have ~10% of my monthly Auto capacity left on my account. It's completely nuts.

Can't say much more because I have more backlog to run before someone comes to their senses.

This is peak HN. It's a criminal shame that nobody else is seeing it.

I feel like you're getting hung up in semantics such that your essay doesn't say the obvious: coding is "easy" relative to confidently knowing how and what to do next at every stage.

The comparison does not imply that coding is an easy thing to do, just that it's easier than being really, really good at the bigger picture.

What Carmack did wasn't hard because writing C is hard.

Let's say you're in the market for an $1800 frequency analyzer such as https://siglentna.com/spectrum-analyzers/ssa3000x-plus/

Well, if you want to use your new tool to analyze some frequencies, you need to start buying activation codes to unlock core functionality.

There are at least five different things your machine can do which need to be unlocked for USD$380-650.

https://siglentna.com/product/emi-activation-license-ssa3000...

Don't worry, though: each unit comes with 128 hours of free preview for these premium features. If the analyzer is powered on, the timer is running. Leave it on when you head home for the day? Whoopsie!

This offends me on so many levels.

That's why we're here. Even the lame posts on here have survived vastly more scrutiny by smart people than >99% of what is published online.

Maybe I'm an outlier, but I find that my main reason for discontinuing Ground News/Nebula/whatever is that I subscribe aspirationally and never actually make time to consume the content. One year I got my partner and I subscriptions to Masterclass and at the end of the year neither one of us had watched a single video.

Basically, I don't know anyone who is ever bored. Who the hell has time to click on and read random posts? The entire value of HN is that other smart people surface the top 1% of 1% of stuff I'd probably find interesting.

The notion of reading Substack posts just because I'm a subscriber seems like fantasy.

Everyone's experience will be different, but I will say that I have not received significant network effects traffic on Substack nor have I ever been tempted to click on suggested posts to others' content.

In short, I think that for the vast majority of casual posters, the aspirational upsides of joining a network are going to fall flat. Like with most aggregators, the popular things tend to be promoted more.

So, for me at least, if I'm going to get very low traffic, I'd prefer to get that very low traffic on my own website. It might be a pyrrhic victory but I sleep just a little better knowing that as one of the 1% that actually creates stuff, I did what little I could.

I've been talking to them since before my first comment to you, and they are unable to sell even a single unit to a verified engineering team.

They told me that if I am willing to commit to at least 300 of the 4GB/32GB eMMC + BT/Wifi then they could produce them for me on demand.

I told them that it was insane to expect anyone to commit to developing a product around a platform that they would have to buy USD$30k worth of to see if it could (for example) support a particular display panel configuration using eDP.

Having this kind of chicken-and-egg problem is a quick way to doom a SoC, which is super frustrating because I definitely want to use it.

Thanks for reminding me that that exists! I'll have to give it a try, as it seems to have matured significantly since I last checked.

That said, outside of casual experimentation, I have almost zero need for an LLM to lay out my circuits for me. It's not just that I do have the deep knowledge, but there's so much more to board layout than routing. What parts I've worked with, what I have in inventory and on my PnP.

I also just really love laying out boards, and I'm in no hurry to give that up.

That said, I've found ChatGPT to be extraordinarily useful for part comparisons, getting second opinions on approaches, figuring out resistor divider values, troubleshooting drivers, and so much more it's difficult to enumerate.

Every variant comes up as not available.

This is the listing, right?

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005007516847708.html

I have serious beef with ChatGPT's text-based circuit schematic drawing abilities. Even though the model itself appears to be fully coherent about the big and little picture aspects of whatever's "on bench" I have wasted too much time trying to parse its attempts to draw circuits. I consider them actively harmful in their current form. I quietly hope that one of the LLMs will start actually generating netcode that can be pasted into KiCAD, or even rendering circuit snippets inside of the chat stream properly.

I've seen KiCAD running in the browser, so it's not like this isn't completely doable. It's just a question of resource allocation.

This is really cool. I would love to switch from using the SoM I'm currently using to the Radxa CM3 but I cannot find even a single unit actually available for purchase on any of the "international" distributor options.

Can you speak to how you're sourcing these, and from where? (And would you sell me one?)

Right... except I'm asking so that I can apply his techniques to my PCB, which you know nothing about.

Very happy to hear about your success!

I'm curious to hear more about your anti-counterfeit strategies beyond just enabling encryption. I'm curious if you feel like anti-counterfeit and open source firmware are mutually exclusive. I made the choice to embrace an open firmware approach on my project while keeping the hardware closed, while knowing that if someone tries hard enough they can completely reverse engineer if they put their mind to it. Desoldering caps and x-raying PCB layers etc.

I'm also very curious to hear more about your adventure in injection molding. What starting resources do you recommend, how much did it cost? Would you do it the same way today, or have the recent innovations in 3D printing forms for injection molding present superior paths?

Finally, I'd love to hear about your certification process. What certs did you get, how much did it cost, what were the gotchas?

Again: getting a call is enough to knock someone out of deep concentration.

Anyhow, in addition to not hating LLMs, I would add "try not to use dramatic, hyperbolic devices in casual writing, it makes you sound ridiculous" to my advice.

That's really interesting about German law. I didn't know that, so I appreciate learning.

I suspect that if we were having this debate over dinner, we would agree on far more than we disagree on. I think we're speaking past each other because we're operating with slightly different notions of what mentoring implies.

From my perspective, I think that there's an obvious and reasonable expectation that you make best efforts to be a good team player. That means doing your part to participate in planning, knowledge transfer, group morale and of course making yourself available to work through tough problems with people regardless of their skill level.

What I think is far more dubious is the relatively recent slippery slope towards the notion that someone should reasonably be expected that career progress dovetails with some sort of natural law that says you are not being a good human if you aren't willing-to-excited to spend 70% of your productive time in a semi-permanent state of continuous partial attention because the people around you demand priority access to your time and attention, above any of your personal priorities or job responsibilities, often without compensation beyond a rote "thanks".

If you can't ship inside of a deadline because your ephemeral "mentoring" took implicit priority over your actual job, then something is very wrong with people's expectations of how key talent's time should be allocated.

I wish I was there with you to witness the look on your face as you slowly begin to realize that something as simple as a call can and often will absolutely pull you out of the flow state.

Someone sneezing nearby can pull you out of the flow state.

The idea that the onus is on the person who you're trying to distract to distract themselves to tell you not to distract them is just so broken if you think about it even just a little bit.

I'll defer to John Green, here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80SCl6n0TEo

It is a skill that you can develop.

$0.02: the way to read more books is with a really good pair of earbuds.

The Libby app (with Audible to fill in the blanks) makes it incredibly easy to train up your listening speed dramatically, making it possible to finish several books per week for free, while doing your morning rituals, commuting, washing the dishes.

The thing you have to absorb is that reading more does not come at the cost of doing other things, unless those other things are podcasts or recorded music.

You just have to be somewhat assertive about realizing that if you shave for 3-4 minutes, that's 1% of a novel at 2.5x speed. All of those interstitial moments in your day add up, fast.

It seems as though you want things both ways.

The notion that an experienced person should automatically consider mentorship to be part of their job is not backed by any code or contract that I'm aware of. It's just increasingly been pushed on people who haven't pushed back enough to keep a new generation from feeling as though they are entitled to it.

You can sample as large a pool of senior devs as you want; I suspect that if you can find 1-in-10 who have specific wording and structure in their employment contracts about the percentage of their time that they should expect to allocate to mentorship, you'll be beating my own estimations. No, what you're doing is attempting to codify a very polite form of exploitation. Yes, those people are usually among the most well-compensated, but it doesn't change the fact that they have their own job to do and a finite time in which to do it.

Please note that I am not suggesting anyone on a team could somehow work in a vacuum. Also, even the most experienced person frequently needs to ask for help, guidance and clarification. Being experienced is pretty much the opposite of knowing everything and is much closer to a measure of how much you have forgotten.

Nor am I implying that senior people have any business being rude or dismissive towards team members who legitimately have good reasons to interrupt someone's flow state. Timely clarification is important to a project regardless of who is doing what.

What I am saying is that if you run a company you might legitimately be horrified to learn that your most critical team members are spending 70% of their productive time mentoring, especially if that remaining 30% of their time is so fragmented that it never resembles a true flow state. You need those people to Build The Thing.

If you don't get that, then you're not living in the same reality I am.

Context switches are not free.

Dozens of "quick questions" over the course of a day will drag down your productivity to about one third or worse.

I know that for me, it takes about 45 minutes of focus to enter a flow state, when I'm at my most productive. If I can never enter the zone, then I'm not really doing the thing that made me such a valuable player in the first place, am I?

Alternative take: the assumption that senior engineers get pressured into agreeing to mentor without it formally being an acknowledged part of their job - that is, that a significant percentage of their time is supposed to be allocated to making themselves available to juniors - is fundamentally a problem.

There is so much stigma associated with being an senior engineer that simply wants to spend 95% of their day working on the problems that they were hired to solve. The worst part is that the vast majority of people in this situation are not compensated for this time, and they are expected to keep up with their actual assigned responsibilities.

This state of affairs is a relatively new thing. The idea that you would join a company with the expectation that the most important people to the success of a project should drop what they are doing to context shift to someone else's problem several dozen times a day is not something that would have been remotely normal twenty years ago.

I am not saying that mentoring is bad or that asking for help is bad, just that there's been a change and the unspoken vibe is that if you're not happy to work at ~30% capacity because you need to mentor people, you're some kind of antisocial jerk.

If a company wants seniors to mentor, pay them to mentor. It's very simple.

You're projecting several layers of bias onto this scenario.

The more busy you are, the more valuable your time... the more expensive context switching is. When you are known as the person with the answers, your day is at least partially structured around getting people to leave you tf alone so that you can actually concentrate on getting your own work done.

There's a really toxic expectation that people who are senior should stop what they are doing XX times per day to help other people figure out their issues. Usually there's zero consideration given to how much each one of these interruptions takes away from them. Resentment builds cumulatively.

Before LLMs, this conversation usually went like this:

"What should I do?"

"What do you think you should do?"

"X"

"Do X"

There's only so many times that can play out before you really want everyone to just fro.

Anyhow, you should try hard not to "hate and despise" LLMs. Life is too short to invent paranoid reasons not to use the best tools available. That's another instinct you learn as an experienced dev.