Banksy is an establishment-approved protestor, they promote him regularly [1]. His artwork is regularly on display in galleries [2]. They could easily seize the works to pay for costs, but don't. His name is supposedly Robin Gunningham from Bristol [3], they could take him to court. The whole thing is ridiculous.
Designing/generating those assets is an incredible amount of work, it's the value-add on top of an engine that a game studio spends most of their budget on. Game reimplementations like this one get their own asset-sets sometimes, but it's rare and usually happens long after the game is working
Antenna design is a dark art, I like simple hacks like this.
> The two parts of the antenna are intentionally designed to create an omnidirectional radiation pattern without a pronounced directionality.
I worked on a project a while back to try to utilize this to detect the arrival direction of WiFi signals approximately based on received strength. Do this for enough base stations and you have a very crude positioning system.
As an individual this is mostly true unless you're touching broadcasting proper. As a business this is absolutely not true and noncompliance is a ticking time bomb that will bankrupt you.
As someone in Southern California who uses HAM, this is both true and not true. There's an older gentleman who has already spent time in jail for sitting on frequencies without a license repeatedly. After he got out, he jumped right back on it. He's got tens of thousands if not more in unpaid fines, but as far as I'm aware they cant get blood from a stone.
Another anecdote, dozen or more years ago a friend had a fault cable modem that was spitting out radio traffic I assume on some important frequencies in a dense area. They got a knock on the door from an FCC team who were tracking the interference down.
2.4GHz is already incredibly crowded and prone to interference (in urban environments). I remember once picking up emissions on a Bluetooth headset from a leaky microwave oven.
You can replace an inefficient (turns power into heat) antenna with a more efficient antenna which will then radiate more.
And some frequencies are regulated by effective radiated power, where they basically care about the strength of the signal in the strongest location, so a more directional antenna could push you over the limit.
I'm doing something similar, using the directionality of the antenna to turn an ESP32 into a high RPM gyroscope for use in a combat robot. Standard gyro chips top out well under 1000 RPM, and are much more expensive than an ESP32 board, plus the ESP can serve as the radio control link and brain of the bot at the same time.
cool idea. care to share more? my thought would be continuously measuring antenna impedance over time, and looking for a peak in this signal's spectrum near the rotation frequency. could also try with a photodiode (+ optional light source, or use ambient light) (this would be similar to an optical computer mouse), which i guess could be more directional, and thus give a stronger signal
Combat robots are more like RC cars than autonomous robots, the driver stays in control of the bot over a radio link. I use ESP-NOW, and get about 6000 packets per second from the transmitter to the ESP32 in the box, and each comes with radio link stats, signal strength and Channel State Information. Using autocorrelation on the signal strength gives you the rotation period, and using that you can establish a Phase Locked Loop to remove the drift of integrating rotation speed to get absolute rotation angle.
That exchange is quite a good prediction all things considered.
> Note that "minor" implementation issues like die space, routing, and gate delays, especially of 128-bit adders & shifters are non-trivial, so people aren't going to rush out and build 128-bitters for fun, just as people matched timing dates of their 64-bitters to their expected markets.
I think we're stuck with 64 bit for quite a while. The circuit size jump from 64 bit to 128 bit is significant. There's no fixed scalar or apples to apples comparison (that I'm aware of). Just for adders though, 2 bits requires 2 full adders, 4 bits requires 4 adders, 8 requires 8, etc.
Another way to look at this is that 16 bit gives addressable memory up to 65k, and quite a few programs had to deal with paging in architectures like the 8086/8088. 32 bits gave us up to 4GB addressable memory, and not it's now not uncommon that a program such as a web browser exceeds this. 64 bits would give us up to 18 exabytes of addressable memory. I'm not aware of any common programs breaking into the terabyte category (even in most research), let alone petabyte and then exabyte.
Even iterating over that many numbers becomes a large computational task. Just a quick test program:
// gcc -O3 count.c -o count
#include <stdint.h>
int main(){
uint64_t z = 0;
for(uint64_t i = 0; i < UINT64_MAX; i++) z += i;
return (int)(z % 2);
}
Using uint32_t and UINT32_MAX, it returns almost instantly. For uint64_t and UINT64_MAX you will be waiting a long time. 128 bit values? Even longer. Maybe many many cores could break that memory up, but then it makes sense to have a 64 bit system with some kind of ability to occasionally change page.
> I'm not aware of any common programs breaking into the terabyte category (even in most research)
Wouldn't that be the commercial LLMs? ChatGPT, Claude etc are estimated to be in the 2-10 TB range, and a large portion of the population of developed countries are using those apps commonly. Not on their own systems, but if we're in the 1995 academic perspective, multiuser systems are assumed.
I imagine the strongest reason we won't need 128-bit memory addressing is because horizontal scaling is easier. If OpenAI had needed a single addressing plane to cover all their users, 128-bit might be required. Similar to how the internet hobbles along fine with 32-bit addressing by just adding a layer of indirection to the internet with NAT.
I guess the other example of 128-bit addressing is ZFS. What are the biggest ZFS file systems? And who has more data? S3? Once you get bigger than 64-bit you want to scale out horizontally anyway and not just put it all into one flat addressable plane.
> Wouldn't that be the commercial LLMs? ChatGPT, Claude etc are estimated to be in the 2-10 TB range, and a large portion of the population of developed countries are using those apps commonly. Not on their own systems, but if we're in the 1995 academic perspective, multiuser systems are assumed.
I think each part is generally treated like an individual large program - which makes sense because otherwise you have large parts of the model sitting there doing nothing. You want all of your silicon running hot, RAM sitting doing nothing for a period of time is a waste.
> If OpenAI had needed a single addressing plane to cover all their users, 128-bit might be required. Similar to how the internet hobbles along fine with 32-bit addressing by just adding a layer of indirection to the internet with NAT.
I think even then, 128 bit memory for OpenAI et al would be more of a headache than it is worth. Economically it's not worth building the 128 bit systems. The fact that servers and consumer CPUs have a lot of re-use within their designs reduces the costs for everybody. Sony for example stopped producing their 128 bit CPU [1], where it was mostly about pushing more data between CPUs and VPUs. Now we have specifications like PCIe where you can just adjust your pipe width to increase throughput.
> I guess the other example of 128-bit addressing is ZFS. What are the biggest ZFS file systems? And who has more data? S3? Once you get bigger than 64-bit you want to scale out horizontally anyway and not just put it all into one flat addressable plane.
Yeah exactly. The other thing to consider is that it doesn't matter how many bits wide you can go, the bottleneck is the smallest width. With ZFS, at some point you likely need to send it over a network, and I think fibre is up to 64 bits via parallel transceivers. If that points outwards, it'll probably be single bit by the time it gets to you.
Dunno, a 128bit integer add is essentially 2x as expensive as a 64 bit one, a multiply is 4x. We've already had SSE in the early 2000s that could do computations like this in a single cycle (tho on multiple 32 bit numbers, not 128-bit ones).
I think on x86, we're still limited to 48 bits of address space on 64 bit systems, not sure if this has changed, but even 64 bits is so vast (16exabytes) , that you'd need a supercomputer with a single address space to fill it, but at least the latter is practically realizable.
I am compelled to point out how much "For uint64_t and UINT64_MAX you will be waiting a long time" really undersells it.
If we assume that the uint32_t version runs in one second, the u64 version will take 136 years.
In reality, on the machine in my lap, u32 takes 0.6s, so we can expect the u64 version to take at least 81 years!
Statistically, "you" will not be waiting a long time, because you will die first.
"128 bit values? Even longer."
Yes, 2^64 times longer than u64, and 2^96 times longer than for u32! 2^96 just about 80e27. Age of the universe is ~13.8 billion (13.8e9) years, or ~435e15 seconds.
If we consider a more moderate 96-bit size, and I started at the very beginning of the universe, I will only have been able to run that program just over 25 times by now. That's all.
If you're in the UK, just use the MSF radio signal to sync your clock [1].
> The end result exactly matched my expectations—the best criterion for success that I can think of. With an LLM providing the heavy code lifting and the CAD work, I think I spent more time waiting on supplies to arrive than on anything else—something attributable to my lack of planning and the ease of next-day delivery.
I think the author robbed themselves of a deeper understanding.
I don't think you want to store your source code in a place where they ban projects based on politics [1]:
> Allowing these projects is not a neutral stance; the effects to the environment are severe. The "DarkFi" (seemingly some crypto designed for criminals, citing an FBI director) project for example uses a "PoW blockchain" (per their readme). PoW (Proof-Of-Work) projects waste an astonishing amount of computational energy, with Bitcoin alone using more energy than the entire countries of Argentina or the Netherlands. This energy is almost always from fossil fuels, which directly contributes to greenhouse gas emissions and undermining any global efforts to fight climate change.
> This is not a neutral space, Codeberg is political. If you disagree with someone, be constructive and don't call them merely political and think that's a reason for the discussion to stop.
Cryptocurrency is bad, but LLMs are fine? What next? Maybe you can't store your simulation source there because it is deemed to resource intensive for the expected results? When did source code itself become dangerous?
I'd rather companies actually care (or even just care about seeming to care) about ethics, rather than only caring what makes the line go up the fastest, yes.
A company that treats ethics as optional, or that thinks "it's a business" excuses every imaginable sin, is one that will happily screw you and me over too.
Also, in the long term, making climate change worse is a catastrophically bad decision for absolutely everybody. Companies just have to look past the ends of their own noses to see the immediate, quick payout of not giving a fuck about it is like accepting payment to dig their own graves.
Also, this is probably, in part, about all the cryto scams everywhere. Companies don't like legal trouble.
Anyway, anybody who's sane backs up their source code. If a company burns you, and it's not a monopoly, you leave it. It's not a problem.
That money had to have come from somewhere, whether it was taxpayers or individuals. What if I donated? Is it cool to just roll over and allow political groups to hijack a previously neutral service?
Also there are other projects hosted there, and network effects involved.
Probably if you become a member you'll have more ability to discuss with the other members and the board and the operators, yes.
Clearly they are setting limits on a case-by-case basis where needed. If something like GNOME was on Codeberg, they'd happily raise the storage quota for them. So they can also exempt you from the AI code rule if you have a really good reason, which you don't.
They have noted somewhere (it's linked in this thread) that most vibe-coders act like they're big and valuable software projects (like GNOME), and use commensurate resources, even though they aren't. This is what they want to block. If you were actually GNOME and you were vibe-coding, they'd probably let you.
This step perfectly aligns with the political direction Codeberg had from the very start.
Who are you to now come in and demand they change to fit your political stance?
I don't understand the complaint. This is the most participatory governance model of any of your options for this service category. If that's not enough for you, you really should just host your own.
Then it's moved in a direction you don't like and you can withdraw? What happens when someone you don't like, that you donated money to, changes stance?
Codeberg? Did they? I know large corporations do it because they fear commercial retaliation, but Codeberg is a registered German charity by German citizens living in Germany and has absolutely no reason to give a flying fuck what the US president thinks. Which is incredibly based.
Can't every company do that at any time though? How is being on the other side of an ethical line different or more risky from being on the other side of a spreadsheet-driven line. One day you're in a green cell and it's all good, the next you're in a red cell and on the other side of what they care about (just green cells).
The decision to stop hosting such projects on codeberg will change nothing, it will just make it clear that its not a serious competitor.
Its like how the EU kneecaps everything related to energy because of the climate while literally the best case scenarios for the EU lawa is to be 0.1 colder, because the EU isn't the bigger emitter.
It just doesn't matter.
The biggest problems with energy policy in the EU haven't been about climate. If they were they wouldn't have been shutting down nuclear to burn Russian gas, nor would they have been suffering the high prices when that Russian gas got less available.
Moreover, the EU is a large market. If they e.g. switch to electric cars, it's not just them switching to electric cars, it's all the carmakers who want to continue selling into that market, who in turn design electric rather than ICE cars that they sell everywhere and increase the economies of scale for battery production which makes them more economical everywhere.
I didn't say it violated the first ammendment. I said it violated the principle of free speech. It's the same principle that justifies your ability to post in this discussion here, right now, despite the fact that you don't believe in it yourself.
Maybe we should campaign to ban all left-wing aligned projects from all major git hosting services. No big deal right? After all they can just go somewhere else. No, clearly this is not reasonable. But I say this to demonstrate that your ability operate in society at large depends on the same principle of free speech that you do not extend to others.
Hey. It isn’t the same principle. We have guidelines here, too. For instance: “ Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.” “Avoid generic tangents.” Etc.
> It's the same principle that justifies your ability to post in this discussion here, right now, despite the fact that you don't believe in it yourself.
HN has rules. I can be banned if I violate them.
It seems this very site does not uphold the free speech principle all that much.
> Maybe we should campaign to ban all left-wing aligned projects from all major git hosting services.
Sure, if it suits them. Fine by me. I believe in freedom of association.
There are some limitations for certain public services to avoid discrimination and segregation, but apart for that, I don't care.
In fact, I host my own Gitea instance for my private projects.
> But I say this to demonstrate that your ability operate in society at large depends on the same principle of free speech that you do not extend to others.
It absolutely does not. Speech was not completely free in any country I lived in, and society worked out fine.
There is a degree of freedom within the democratic framework of those countries, but there are absolutely rules limiting speech. And it is fine, societies are all about compromises.
> with Bitcoin alone using more energy than the entire countries of Argentina or the Netherlands
Btw this particular comparison can be traced back to a single Guardian article from 2021/2022 or so
It's a very weird comparison imho cause what they did (in the original article) was sort all the countries by energy usage, and notice that Bitcoin lies between Argentina and Netherlands. I thought a better comparison would be to consider that air condition uses 20x the amount of electricity globally compared to what Bitcoin uses. You can find a whole lot of other comparisons here: https://ccaf.io/cbnsi/cbeci/ghg/comparisons (the airco comparison is about halfway on the page).
Now I'm not trying to argue that bitcoin doesn't waste a lot of energy, it totally does. It's still a lot of energy and proof-of-work does seem really wasteful. Fortunately not all crypto currencies use proof-of-work.
It's just ... it's a stupid comparison. it doesn't really make anything any clearer to the reader by knowing that the global energy usage of Bitcoin ranges between NL and Argentina.
Anyway, it's not wrong. it's just .. yeah it's a lot? I guess? a country is a lot? Is it just households or also the country's industry? Anyway.
My main point, however, is that quoting a ~4 year old piece of not-so-great journalism shows exactly how much original thought these people gave to the subject. They're basically repeating a line that hardly made sense 4 years ago.
Edit: BTW I want to add, they're giving away a service for free and therefore it's their good right to decide who gets it and who doesn't. And it's my good right to think those reasons are stupid.
> Now I'm not trying to argue that bitcoin doesn't waste a lot of energy, it totally does.
Bitcoin doesn't waste energy, it uses energy to encode and secure the blockchain. The federal reserve (corrupt as it is) does not waste energy to print dollar bills, it is just part of the process of creation.
That's not correct. The complaint isn't about data processing energy, it's about the energy purposely wasted in the "how much energy can I waste today" e-dick contest that gives you the right to print new bitcoins. Of course everyone is wasting as much energy as they can.
It isn't "as much as they can", it's as much as is profitable. Which currently means that if you're paying more than about $0.08/kWh for electricity, it isn't profitable and there is no financial incentive to do it.
Of course, this means that people with access to cheap electricity still have the incentive to do it, but now who are they? Well, the places with the cheapest electricity fall into two categories. First, the ones like Iraq that heavily subsidize the cost of electricity, but those countries tend to ban cryptocurrency mining because their intention isn't to subsidize it and that's otherwise what they would be doing.
Second, the places with a large amount of hydro or renewable generation, which then have cheap electricity whenever the intermittent sources have high output. So for example, the country that does the most Bitcoin mining by a fair margin is the US, and the top US state for it is Texas, which despite its reputation actually uses significantly more renewable generation than both the US and world average.
Moreover, cryptocurrency mining instantaneously becomes unprofitable when the price of electricity increases, so when those places with a lot of renewable generation see a period of low output and increase the price because they have to switch on fossil fuel peaker plants instead, the Bitcoin miners immediately shut down because paying the higher prices would be losing money. But loads that disappear quickly in response to higher prices like that are exactly what you need to increase the amount of renewable generation in the grid. You have 1GW of Bitcoin miners and 1GW of ordinary consumers and you can use 2GW of solar generation without needing to backstop it with anything because when solar output is at 50% the price goes up some and the Bitcoin miners drop out until the clouds clear.
With the result that mining tends to happen using excess renewable generation and funds and supports the increase in renewables as a percentage of the grid.
You know what's a real waste of energy?
The federal reserve increasing the money supply by 50% in the last half decade and inflated away the savings of hundreds of millions of people that spent tens of thousands of hours of their lives earning that money through blood, sweat and tears.
Who is keeping significant savings as cash in a mattress? Anyone holding investment assets sees nominal asset prices increase along with inflation.
The thing that really screws them is that the government calls the nominal but not real asset price increase a capital gain and wants to collect tax on it.
The core argument they are making is one of resources, I can find myself seeing their point. Another abuse of the service would be to convert videos into ASCII text and check them into git, for example.
The issue with the crypto argument is that it is purely political, it is not affecting the service at all. You may think that you agree because it happens to align with your political sentiment, but it's entirely possible they come for your projects next.
Yes if you compare a proof of stake blockchains (most of them) and the banking industry, crypto has a far smaller environmental footprint.
Ethereum (since PoS) was designed to allow anybody to run a validator or even a full node out of modest hardware. The result is that the entire network probably has a smaller footprint than a single small/medium size bank.
While I can't confirm comparisons to a "small/medium size bank" specifically (cause I have no idea how), I can perhaps clarify a bit
Ethereum moved to proof-of-stake in 2022, and it was initially expected to use only 1% of the energy it used when it was proof-of-work.
Turned out they were under-estimating the savings. According to studies by the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance and the Crypto Carbon Ratings Institute, Ethereum's 2022 switch to Proof-of-Stake reduced its global network energy consumption by over 99.98% overnight.
As far as I understand, this was made possible because the Ethereum protocol was set up to be made extensible like this (even though big changes like these are hard), while Bitcoin on the other hand, is stuck on proof-of-work forever, since its protocol does not allow for changing it.
There isn't really a technical difference that made PoS viable for Ethereum but not Bitcoin; it's a hard fork in either case. The differences are more cultural -
- For better or worse, Ethereum has more centralized leadership (mainly the EF) which helps coordinate upgrades. Hard forks happen pretty regularly, and don't typically risk fracturing the community, unless the changes are particularly controversial (see Ethereum Classic).
- PoS wasn't that controversial, since it was planned from the beginning (see the difficulty bomb). Some users still resisted the switch - see the EthereumPoW fork - but for the most part the community was on board.
- The Bitcoin community OTOH values ossification. It rarely accepts proposed hard forks as "still Bitcoin"; that has only happened a few times in its history. The community's response to most proposed hard forks is "interesting, but that's not Bitcoin, call it something else."
- The Bitcoin community is also more ideologically and economically invested in PoW, so a proposed PoS fork would be extremely controversial, and would fracture the community (at best, if it gained any traction at all).
The centralization and PoS makes Ethereum unsafe. What's the point of moving from a currency that a government can unilaterally control to a currency that the Ethereum board/stakers can unilaterally control?
The point of PoW is that it resists monopolization unlike PoS.
The centralized leadership has no hard power though; the community normally goes along with changes they propose because they're normally sensible. If they go rogue, people will stop following their proposals.
In Vitalik's words: "If someone puts a gun to my head and tells me to write a hard-fork patch, I will definitely write it. If I publish a patch to delete a bunch of accounts, how many people here would download and install the update and switch to that chain? I see relatively few raised hands. This is called decentralization"
PoW is trivial to control in its' today form. When the network hash power is dominated by three players, you know every address you need to pay a visit.
Validators are low requirements, in the RPI ballpark and and a lot if them are combined on a single host.
Then you also need some full nodes to access the data or submit transactions. So you can consider them part of the core infrastructure and those have higher requirements in terms of bandwidth and speed/capacity of storage but also CPU. But still a mini PC is fine.
Let's say a bank have 10k employees, you already might need more computer power just with their "laptops".
Now Ethereum is a global network competing with all the network of banks all around the world.
So you can do a quick calculation its footprint is magnitude lower.
Are we going to pretend that hosting open sourse software for free is an apolitical thing?
Neutrality itself is very political. You may prefer it, and that is fine; sometimes I prefer it as well.
But within the confined of the law, it should be a non-issue that a free service is not neutral.
To be frank, I think that the majority of people screeching about Codeberg here are totally fine with "right to refuse service" when it comes to businesses (as if that was not political at all).
Not the biggest fan of crypto myself, but allowing LLMs and "AI" stuff with open arms while condemning PoW crypto is hilarious. They should just say they don't like crypto at that point, because LLMs and datacenters for them are causing way more harm. Even if their qualms are fraud and abuse, I have some bad news for them about what people are using LLMs for lol
Companies chasing profitmaxxing (to use a fashionable pattern) are just as political, do you complain about those too? Anyway, the answer is the same here: If you don't like it, just don't use them.
I'd say Microsoft is pretty political. But you're welcome to continue using Github. No one's asking you to host your FOSS projects (for free) on Codeberg.
A million scammers forked around and found out - and to ban that is politics?
At least you went straight to whataboutisms - instead of introspection. "Why cant we have the sweets, the others are getting-" instead of "Why did we built something that allows the worst of human nature to run rampant- and how could we do better"..
Just ordered myself the LilyGo T5 E-Paper S3 Pro [1]. The other good options on the hardware tab are sold out [2]. I quite like the idea of having GPS capability, and maybe I can experiment with LoRa gateways. I originally missed out on the M5 Paper and have been looking for an entry since.
My plan is to not use this firmware and use MicroPython instead (based on a high-level OS I already developed that is extremely low battery consumption). I carry around with me an A6 notebook with TODOs for each day - just the other day I temporarily lost it and realized that I actually need to have a backup for this stuff synced with a private VPS.
> I did not expect much, and because the bottlenecks were the HDD and CPU I did not feel any noticeable performance improvement. Still, it occurred to me that it might be fun to take the netbook completely apart and start replacing its hardware piece by piece.
I would look at swapping out the HDD for something solid state - lighter, less power, higher performance for random R/W.
Then it's just a case of lightening the load of the CPU as much as possible, strip out everything that is not needed.
I've run modern Firefox on much lighter devices. One of my netbooks is the same spec as this, and I do browsing + coding on it easily.
> We considered this but decided not to for several reasons:
> You'd probably lose the charger before the battery runs out!
> Adding charge circuitry and including a charger would make the product larger and more expensive.
> You send it back to us to recycle.
I don't think this is true. The charging circuit could have been in the charger itself. To provide access to the battery, one of the terminals could be behind a transistor enabled by the micro. The charger could then send a signal to the ring to unlock the battery terminal. Then all you needed to do was expose two/three pads externally.
Yeah, that's really not great at all! From their website:
> Wait, it's single use?
Yes. We know this sounds a bit odd, but in this particular circumstance we believe it's the best solution to the given set of constraints
I don't want to be too harsh, since it seems like the pebble team are working hard at producing some exciting tech. But intentionally making a single use device is phenomenally irresponsible in today's climate.
I know they say they'll recycle them, but it'd be naive to expect anything other than a tonne of these becoming e-waste.
I was initially put off by the lack of recharging too, but I've changed my mind a bit.
I think the amount of ewaste is pretty small. My uneducated guess is that it's probably about the same as a musical birthday card. And unlike a singing card that probably gets used a dozen times and thrown away, the Index can be used >10,000 times before it's time to recycle it (assuming it lives up to the specs)
For comparison, check out the rechargable Stream ring. It's bulkier, costs >2x as much (before including subscription... The sub alone costs more than buying an index every 2 years), and needs to be recharged every night. It's sort of in line with Pebbles advantage over other smart watches- doesn't need to sleep on a charger every night
The ring can record for 12-15 hours before it's empty. I'd guess it's incredibly rare that people throw away their phone before reaching 15h * 20 = 12.5 days of active screen time.
- Human impact on the environment, which e-waste is a big part of, is causing damage to wildlife, and serious climate change.
- There's huge awareness of and push back against bad hardware practices (often around non-replacable batteries) so they must have at least considered this.
I can't tell if you're being serious, but if so, this is a bit silly. It feels like saying Covid 19 was no big thing because the Black Death of the 1300s was much worse.
But even more so than that, your own wikipedia article seems to fly in the face of your point:
> Estimated annual temperatures in 1540 were by far the highest between 1500 and 2000, while estimated precipitation was by far the lowest registered until 2025
The weather events we're seeing now are even more extreme that those of 1540, but the impact hasn't been as severe because our food and water supply chains are more resilient.
HOT WEATHER. Many a man has mopped his brow during the summer months of 1884, declaring it was the hottest weather the world ever knew, which, of course, would not be true for the extreme heat in the records of the past, which has not been approached during the late summer.
In 627, the heat was so great in France and Germany, says the London Standard, that all springs dried up, water became so scarce that many people died of thirst.
In 879, work in the field had to be given up; agricultural laborers persisting in their work were struck down in a few minutes—so powerful was the sun.
In 993, the sun's rays were so fierce that vegetation burned up as under the action of fire.
In 1000, rivers ran dry; under the protracted heat, the fish were left dry in heaps and putrefied in a few hours. Men and animals venturing in the sun in the summer of 1022 fell down dying.
In 1132, not only did the rivers dry up, but the ground cracked and became baked to the hardness of stone. The Rhine in Alsace nearly dried up. Italy was visited with terrific heat in 1139; vegetation and plants were burned up. During the battle of Bela in 1200, there were more victims made by the sun than by weapons; men fell down sunstruck in regular rows. The sun of 1277 was also severe; there was an absolute dearth of forage.
In 1303 and 1304, the Rhine, Loire, and Seine ran dry. In 1615, the heat throughout Europe became excessive; Scotland suffered particularly. In 1625, men and beasts died in scores. Meat could be cooked by merely exposing it to the sun. Not a soul dared to venture out between noon and 4 PM. In 1718, many shops had to be closed; the theatres were never opened for several months. Not a drop of water fell during six months.
In 1753, the thermometer rose to one hundred and eighteen degrees. In 1779, the heat at Bologna was so great that a large number of people died. In July 1793, the heat became intolerable; vegetables were burned up and fruit dried upon the trees. The furniture and woodwork in dwelling houses cracked and split up; meat became bad in an hour.
In Paris, in 1846, the thermometer marked one hundred and twenty-five degrees in the sun. The summers of 1859, 1860, 1869, 1870, 1874, etc., although excessively hot, were not attended by any disaster.
Exposed terminals would need a lot more than a single transistor. It would need ESD protection and it would change the outer case from being a complete sealed over mold into something that had to seal against two exposed terminals. That’s a big change.
They would also need to ship a separate charger device to go with it, which approaches the complexity of the simple ring product.
These are solvable problems, but it would increase the cost, decrease their margins, or both.
For a niche, low volume product with an unknown market demand I think making the simplest possible version of the product is a good idea to start, but at $99 it’s getting into the range where buyers don’t want to think of it as a disposable item.
The bigger problem is that the 2 year battery life depends on the device being used for only short notes like “Add milk to the grocery list”. The people who expect to use this for taking notes or thinking out loud could exhaust the battery in a couple months.
> Exposed terminals would need a lot more than a single transistor. It would need ESD protection and it would change the outer case from being a complete sealed over mold into something that had to seal against two exposed terminals. That’s a big change.
This is a solved problem though. Wireless earbuds can do it. We're probably just talking about a TVS diode.
> For a niche, low volume product with an unknown market demand I think making the simplest possible version of the product is a good idea to start, but at $99 it’s getting into the range where buyers don’t want to think of it as a disposable item.
> The bigger problem is that the 2 year battery life depends on the device being used for only short notes like “Add milk to the grocery list”. The people who expect to use this for taking notes or thinking out loud could exhaust the battery in a couple months.
$75 for a use once device that could last as little as a few months under normal usage, or $100 for something that could operate for 5+ years. Knowing whether there is a market is always difficult, but if you do crack a market you typically only get one chance to get people onboard.
> This is a solved problem though. Wireless earbuds can do it
They’re all solved problems!
That doesn’t change the fact that every additional complication adds cost, complexity, failure points, more warranty returns, and time to market.
Saying it’s just a transistor and a TVS ignores the hard parts like sealing the enclosure and building an entire second device to charge it.
Solvable, but less so for a low volume product with unproven demand. You have to be building a lot of a product to offset the costs of developing it.
> $75 for a use once device that could last as little as a few months under normal usage, or $100 for something that could operate for 5+ years.
The retail price of this device is $99. The $75 is only for the promotional preorder period.
It’s already a $100 product. Adding charging ports and a separate charger is going to be even more expensive unless they start shipping 100,000s of these to build at scale.
Not only that, the charger thing also implies charging it weekly if not more often. I got a pebble watch because I can wear it for 2 weeks without charging. Would hate to have to charge a ring.
I don't think I've ever heard anyone complain about that, and I know a good amount of people who use Garmin watches. My own forerunner is still going strong after 5 (I think) years of use, with multiple runs a week for most of that time.
I've had my Fenix 5 Plus swapped once during warranty because of this. And the replacement's contacts started to corrode again when I sold the watch. It might not happen to all models, but some are very prone to it.
They make little ~rubber caps to cover the charging port when you're not using it. That, and make sure it's dry when you charge it to rule out galvanic nonsense.
I know someone whose garmin watch refused to charge after a few years, not sure if it was caused by sweat. Mine is starting to get wonky after a few years. I keep worrying I'll plug in some time and it will stop. anec-data is not that reliable of course.
> Roughly 12 to 15 hours of recording. On average, I use it 10-20 times per day to record 3-6 second thoughts. That's up to 2 years of usage.
2 years is optimistic I think. 3-6 second thoughts is not much, most ideas I'm having past TODOs are >15 seconds. Plus this would definitely depend also on how regularly you sync to the app.
Bare in mind, these devices have not yet been used in the wild on people outside of the product creator. Maybe one of the use cases is to note down monologues, or to easily record conversations with clients for later review.
1 month battery life is also highly usable, but there at least should be a way to charge it.
Seeing the index in action next to an oura I appreciate how much smaller/thinner the index is (or at least how much less it seems to “spread” my fingers apart with of a width of 6.5mm vs 8mm).
It’s effectively a regular ring with a button on it that’s smaller than a typical 1ct engagement ring. The oura by contrast (even the 4) is a chonker compared to “regular” wedding bands. I’ve tried in the past but personally a very thick ring is a non-starter for me. Might just be a personal sensitivity thing. Clearly the oura sells.
From a V1/MVP/founder lens I am sensitive to the value in shipping a product that just works rather than doubling the complexity with a bms, custom charger, wrap around flex pcb, and associated engineering effort to mitigate ignition hazards. Especially when there’s platform risk in seeing if this thing even gets used. There’s no platform risk on the watch side which has comes miles from my first pebble/Alerta that was one day charge and blackberry phone compatible only.
As for the ewaste argument? If the market demands a rechargeable product then that’s the right move. But from a weight perspective? This feels performative. Even pessimistically three-four 5g device that are 0% recyclable will generate less ewaste than a 200g phone with 55% recovery and a 5% recapture rate of obsolete devices thats turn over every 3.5 years. It’s like 10x less and probably in the ballpark of what a hypothetical “rechargeable” index would look like.
A piezo button would be neat, might be able to generate enough electricity for each use without having to rely on a battery at all. Not sure about the form factor here though.
Or even a thin-film amorphous silicon solar panel + capacitor.
Assuming most of the weight of that ring is the battery, it appears to be storing around 0.5Wh, so two years of operation should amount to approximately 30uW of power.
It should be possible to squeeze this much from a 0.5mm2 amorphous cell in direct sunlight. Considering the ring is 6.6mm wide at the widest point, they could get orders of magnitude more power even in poor lighting conditions, by just wrapping a thin-film solar panel around the ring.
Not sure that would work. Charging is not 100% efficient, and if I remember correctly most batteries need to reach a minimum current to start actual charging. When you're talking micro or pico amps, it barely registers as a signal in most cases.
I’m also baffled that they didn’t do this. If I am buying something that becomes so precious to my workflow then I don’t want a hardware subscription. I also want peace of mind that the company will not be gone, or the product discontinued in a few years.
I dunno. If you need to record your thoughts often enough that you're wearing a smart-ring to do it, then it seems like you're going to burn through the 12 hours of recording time pretty quick.
IIRC EU markets now mandate the USB-C charger for devices (which is not a bad thing, too many throwaway custom chargers....). Adding the port, the USB-C PD circuitry may take up too much room. I think this approach would require some kind of custom charging cradle (probably usb-c connected..). Is having a custom usb-c adapter to charge a device allowed under the rules?
I think the "dock" itself could be USB C easily, it would probably also significantly reduce the cost of the dock.
> Adding the port, the USB-C PD circuitry may take up too much room.
You don't need PD circuitry for this. 5V 500mA over USB2 is more than enough. But the actual port and battery charging circuit is a bit ridiculous at this size.
I'm not sure precisely what the EU rules are, but the requirement should really depend on the dimensions/power of the device.
Robots suck, the future is cheap human Labour
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:(