wombat_trouble

I'm not sure what you're saying... there is a clear benefit to perfboard and protoboards: they let you prototype instantly, without waiting for PCBs to be manufactured. An earlier critique of that approach was that some parts are no longer available as through-hole. I'm pointing out that there is a simple workaround that still lets you prototype quickly. Generic breakout boards are around $1 a piece and you don't need them custom-tailored to a project.

Arduino never made sense as far as technical specs go. You could always buy more capable and compatible AVR microcontrollers for one tenth the price. In the past decade, the disparity has gotten more dramatic as 8-bit chips have gotten even cheaper and even more capable.

Arduino owed its success solely to building a healthy maker ecosystem of folks who simply defaulted to it as a platform, published tutorials, and promoted it through word-of-mouth. That's probably still there. Raspberry Pi had the same thing going on for it, by the way.

Marketing / community building trumps technical merit in almost everything, and embedded computing is not an exception. I'm not lamenting this, it's just a fact of life.

I'd wager that 99% of Arduino enthusiasts (and a good percentage of industrial hw engineers...) do not have a habit of using power save modes on bare metal.

You can use surface-mount-to-DIP breakout boards. They add a buck or two per part, but that's generally OK for prototyping.

Best in what sense? This is automating outrage. While it's framed as a helpful tool for tweet authors, it's clearly a ruse. Come on, it even comes with an "expose tweet" button, so that you can cancel others without the inconvenience of copying and pasting a link...

Every other home in the US isn't up to code. The code changes over time and governs all kinds of mundane things that you as a homeowner don't pay attention to (and shouldn't be forced to). Not being compliant doesn't make a home illegal to live in.

This is different. Many municipalities specifically require all dwellings to have basic utilities (water, sewer, electricity, garbage service), even if you're not using them. Not having that will get you in trouble pretty quickly.

Unincorporated areas are usually fair game.

I mean, it's a reasonable career choice.

Practical downsides: considerably lower pay right now compared to a job at FAANG, although certainly nothing to sneeze at. A profession regulated far more than necessary, similarly to many other blue collar fields - for example in California, you need 8,000 hours of apprenticeship to get a license. You are also technically required to deal with municipal bureaucracies and get sign-offs on almost every single thing you do, although most electricians follow these rules rather liberally, and there's a ton of unpermitted work in every older house.

You're less vulnerable to AI, but you sure are vulnerable to downturns in construction.

You serve at the pleasure of your clients. You're gonna be getting emergency calls at weird hours and you're gonna be spending a lot of time in your car.

It's physical labor - you're gonna be spending some time in crawl spaces or other uncomfortable positions, it's rough on your hands, etc.

We're already harvesting less than we can or should, essentially for political reasons. faster-growing varieties on the loose seem like a way to make the PNW even more flammable.

> “I am not a bot/intelligence services construct/foreign troll masquerading as an citizen etc.”. Is a pretty valuable service for the network.

It is valuable to Facebook to maintain a healthy pltform. But is it really worth $15 a month to you to broadcast this to others?

Unless the culture of the platform shifts to a point where non-verified accounts are considered second-class, the only reason to pay this is basically as a status symbol. In which case, I think the tiered approach makes more sense. And maybe "Facebook Gold" for people who want to pay even more for a badge....

Twitter had their checkmarks established as an artificially constrained status symbol you couldn't buy with money... and then, under Musk, they altered the terms of the deal by saying you have to pay, but you get tangible perks in terms of platform features, visibility of your content, etc. Unless Facebook wants to do that, I can't see people paying this much on their own...

If Getty wins this one, you win as a photographer. If they lose, you lose. They might be a shitty company, but in this instance, your interests align...

Oh come on. I'm excited about new technologies and I think that image generation can be a net positive for the society, but can we not do that? First, we had people confidently asserting that stuff of this sort absolutely can't happen. Now, we're moving the goalposts to "well, not a legitimate criticism because it doesn't happen often".

The point is that basically all Stable Diffusion / DALL-E / MidJourney output is some shade of this; the only new data is that contrary to prior assertions, in some cases, it goes all the way to a verbatim copy.

I think there are some defensible stances one can take. One is to reject the idea of intellectual property. Another is to advocate for some specific legal or technical bar that the models would have to pass for it to qualify as "not stealing". Yet another is to argue it's a morally-agnostic technology like VHS or a photocopier, and the burden of using it in a socially acceptable way rests with the user.

I see invented texture and layering here: https://yager.io/comp/mi.jpeg

"Real" cameras do a lot of postprocessing too, but it's generally oriented at producing faithful results. They might remove unambiguous and correctable issues such as vignetting or lens distortion, but they don't cross the line of inventing new details to make the photo look good.

Computational photography techniques on smartphones, on the other hand, were always designed around squishy "user perception" goals to make photos look impressive, details be damned.

For all the hate Microsoft regularly gets, they are pretty amazing about that: I have ancient software that still runs fine on Windows 11 through layers upon layers of compatibility libraries baked into the OS.

I'm sure it's costing them dearly, but there's plenty of niche and industrial hardware like this that lasts much longer than a generation of operating systems, and there's no alternative. Linux pays lip service to compatibility, but ABIs change constantly and it's easy to get stuck in dependency hell. MacOS X is... MacOS X.

> It makes me wonder why Aliexpress doesn't have more warehouses in the US

My guess would be liability. A lot of what's sold on Aliexpress is... questionable. Fakes, products that are patently unsafe or don't meet US regulations, fraudulent specs, etc.

What's happening right now is basically a bit of a laundering operation where small "front" businesses in the US, often registered to residential addresses, import small chunks of the inventory, collect markup, and resell it domestically on Amazon, eBay, Etsy, walmart.com marketplace, or whatnot.

And if their USB chargers keep catching fire or a big brand gets uppity about trademark infringement, the retailer disappears, and a new one pops up. Amazon gets some flak in the media every now and then, but they are several steps removed from the phenomenon.

If you had a Chinese megacorp with a large US footprint, they would likely soon find themselves in hot water with all kinds of regulatory agencies. Partly because there would be a single party with gobs of money to go after, and partly because of anti-China sentiments.

This is a popular take, but I found relatively little difference in how my bank handles CC and debit card fraud. In both cases, they credited the disputed amount to me right away.

Not that it buys you much; there's plenty of small / specialty merchants who might offer you a discount for paying with cash or check, but they treat credit and debit the same.

It doesn't work that way. An LLC is governed by an operating agreement, and that agreement can specify what actions needs approval from whom. You can have an LLC that is owned by one person and managed by another, and yet another party collects proceeds... sky's the limit, if it's not otherwise illegal, it's fair game.

What would that accomplish? Most LLCs are created (incorporated) by a lawyer who then cedes control to the intended owners. Even if you had a requirement for a US person, you'd just have figureheads collecting some nominal salary. Plenty of low-income folks would be eager to get an extra $500 a month for doing nothing.

For what it's worth, the formation of an LLC is a state affair, and every state has its own rules around requirements, reporting, transparency, etc. Most states keep the paperwork public; some states don't, but these are not the states where housing shortages are all that profound.

There definitely is a tendency for hobby photographers to amass gear to the point where it gets in the way of taking photos (and then ditch most of it when they get older and wiser).

That said, yeah - the article is half good advice, half snobbery. There is some merit to learning the technique using a stable toolkit, but you don't need to spend $6,000 on a "status symbol" camera and you certainly don't need to only shoot black-and-white.

There is this rather cute "intent laundering" ecosystem surrounding this work. Starting with Common Crawl, which uses the "we're not collecting anything, we're just a list of URLs" excuse to reject removal requests. And then feeding into nonprofits that effectively develop the technology for buyers such as Microsoft while being able to escape scrutiny because they're just small, charitable academic research shops...

Anecdotally, I know a good number of people "in the trades" and in tech, and the incidence of serious health issues around the age of 40-50 appears much higher in the tech group.

I think it's different for "unskilled" labor, such as working in a warehouse, but it's not like being a plumber or an electrician is that hard on your body.