HN user

bArray

7,339 karma

Why jump in one pond when you can dip your foot in many?

Posts10
Comments2,234
View on HN

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.

[1] https://lilygo.cc/products/t5-e-paper-s3-pro

[2] https://freeink.org/#hardware

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.

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.

How long does the battery last?

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.

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 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.

Was just checking out the Index 01 [1]:

Why can't it be recharged?

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.

[1] https://repebble.com/index

I think this was somewhat predictable. The USB cable from the hub is too long, and it's not thick enough. USB3 can also kick off a decent amount of heat, it's not a good sign when the case is in plastic.

If you're looking for a good USB3 hub, look for one with a short thick USB cable, metal chassis. If it has HDMI it's a good since because you're unlikely to pump that via USB2.

I've updated the magic weights, and I too can get the result I want:

    WEIGHTS = {
      'w_xg': 0.09,
      'w_goals': -0.07,
      'w_star': 0.018,
      'w_value': 0.18,
      'w_rank': 0.4,
      'w_def': -0.12,
      'xga_share': 0.85,
      'w_gk': 0.0042
    }

    $ python3 worldcup_model.py --sims 100000

    2026 FIFA World Cup -- championship probabilities (100,000 simulations, from Round of 32)

     1. England                 11.7% *
     2. France                  10.0% *
     3. Spain                    9.3% *
     4. Argentina                8.4%
     5. Germany                  8.1%
It's coming home!

I've done a decent amount of traveling - honestly the most important thing has always just been to have stuff that works. Charging things has rarely been an issue. A few extra cables in the luggage is not a big deal.

Terrence's issue here is that he is over complicating things:

- Toothbrush - Just take a non-battery toothbrush, it's perfectly fine and will not break down or need charging.

- Tracker - I'm doubtful you will get it back in most countries. Always keep the essentials such as phone, wallet and passport on your physical person where possible.

- Bug Bite Zapper - Do as the locals do, they too don't want to be swamped with insects.

The only metric that really matters is 'profit per amount invested'. This is very difficult to quickly evaluate, and therefore we resolve to use simplified metrics such as cost per unit tokens.

The point at which the metrics become meaningless is when others become aware of them, and begin to optimise for them. Lines per code is is not a bad insight for development activity, only when the developers are not aware of the metric. Price per 1M tokens became meaningless when LLM providers started to optimise for it. It seems to be that Sonnet 5 is optimised to score well on AA intelligence whilst seemingly having a lower price per 1M tokens.

I think generally we are in an AI bubble, and it will at some point pop. The numbers simply don't make sense. I would gamble heavily on local cost per task to survive the LLM winter. Given that hardware is pretty much a fixed overhead, you probably want to optimise for task per kW - that's where I'm betting.

OpenPrinter 16 days ago

I agree with the rest but Pi Zero W is a specific machine with 512 MB RAM:

I thought they came in different variants - my meat-based LLM must have hallucinated it.

It's also the one everyone can buy online for $19, not Pi Zero 2 W (always out of stock)

I get the impression that they don't actively manufacture Pi Zero W anymore and it's all old stock. Rapid for example say they have an availability of 761 (at time of writing) [1], but are those all within Rapid's control, or what is reported at Raspberry Pi's remaining stock? If you sell 1k printer units, can you put a Pi Zero W in all of them?

Compute modules are probably a bit more reliable and there is some capability with other modules, specifically the DDR2 form factor ones [2] (which is my favorite form factor). For example, ClockWork sold their own compatible compute modules [3].

[1] https://www.rapidonline.com/raspberry-pi-sc0020-zero-w-singl...

[2] https://www.rapidonline.com/raspberry-pi-compute-module-cm3-...

[3] https://www.clockworkpi.com/shop

OpenPrinter 16 days ago

They are largely sold out, especially at quantity. Not something I would currently be looking to base a product on.

OpenPrinter 17 days ago

With Openprinter, you are free to choose between standard sheets or a roll of versatile paper.

A few other comments have concentrated on the printer head and ink cartridge, but the roll vs sheets interests me. Manipulating sheets of paper is actually quite a difficult problem to solve - and there is only a demonstration of paper placement. Loading page after page is actually really not easy at all. There is no example of it printing.

I see they got a nomination for a design award [1], which in my personal experience has been a negative signal for successful projects. On the same page they mention that they also mention that they don't even know how much this will cost yet:

We know this is your most frequently asked question! Final pricing depends on a moving puzzle of production volumes, BoM costs, industrialization expenses, regulatory certifications, and final engineering developments.

On the crowd funding page it mentions for parts [2]:

Main board: Raspberry Pi Zero W

Cartridge board: STM32 MCU

Not a specific MCU variant, and the specifics of the Pi variant (i.e. RAM) are not mentioned. I would expect these parts would be locked in by now. I have a feeling that this is not quite as ready as made out - I think there is still R&D going on.

[1] https://www.crowdsupply.com/open-tools/open-printer/updates/...

[2] https://www.crowdsupply.com/open-tools/open-printer

I'm not sure why you were downvoted, your point is well made.

Too many people seem to believe that the AI bubble popping means something like "the total volume of the activity will precipitously drop and whole centers will be abandoned forever".

I think that many of them will fail. We have several data centers being built nearby to me, where the UK has some of the highest energy prices. I don't know how AI companies can make it make economic sense, let alone any normally operating company (like a Cloud service provider).

I don't believe that. I was an adult when the dot-com bubble popped. What happened then was that a lot of unsound businesses went under, and the healthier players (like Amazon) expanded into the resulting void. Ultimately, the relentless march of digital technology didn't even slow down back then, although the inflow of risk capital definitely did. But the existing resources were mostly taken over by someone else.

I think the difference between this and the dot-com crash is enormous. Every part of our economy is now entangled in this. A significant part of the US's GDP is based on the idea that Nvidia can keep expanding their market cap past several Western nations. Your pension likely has large buy-ins on the AI hype. Everybody at every level is very exposed to this.

If/when the current bubble bursts, it will be similar. All that infrastructure will be resold and re-rented to healthier players. By now, machine learning has reached a level of usability/maturity which is genuinely useful and the economy at large won't abandon it any more than it abandoned e-mail or WWW back then.

I have my doubts that anybody will be liquid enough to buy what remains at reasonable prices. And the impact of that is obvious, why buy RAM from Micron when LLM Corp are selling it for 50% of retail value?

Isn't it the family's job to set the limits?

When children are very young, parents can set strict boundaries. But as kids move into their teens, parents also have an obligation to loosen them. Teenagers need spaces where they can act independently, make decisions, and talk to others — where they can learn to navigate the world without a parent looking over their shoulder.

You are still responsible. If you allow your child more freedoms, you are still responsible if something bad happens. Your choice to loosen your parenting shouldn't become everybody else's problem. Some parents for example allow children to try a small quantity of alcohol - if your child is suddenly found drunk, they shouldn't ban alcohol for sale everywhere.

I would go the other way, if it's found as a parent that your child is drinking, smoking, etc, then this carries punishments for the parents. I think it should also be punished if they are found accessing online services targeted at adults.

The digital version is the same idea, with cryptography. An authorized issuer verifies your age once and issues a signed credential:

Sounds great, but there is a clear agenda for digital IDs that 'they' are trying to shoehorn in with this "protect the kids" thing. They tried rolling it out digital IDs in the UK in 2006 [1].

As I said the other day, what really makes me suspicious is that most Western countries suddenly have the same idea at the same time. This isn't just some random politician wanting to protect children, this is an international concerted joint effort to roll out a form of mass censorship.

So instead of fighting a system that is built to preserve privacy, we should be fighting to put the right checks in place — the ones that guarantee the implementation actually honors it.

The objective is the system itself. Once there is a control in place to stop you accessing these services/systems, changing the exact unlocking procedure is trivial and can be done gradually. We'll all just be frogs in slowly boiling pots.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UK_Digital_ID

I only shutdown when absolutely necessary, i.e. the system becomes unstable and crashes. Otherwise all of my machines have 100% uptime. This is for a few reasons:

1. Some tools take time to get setup in the way that they were originally setup. I mentally want everything to remain where I left it. I'm usually working on 5+ projects at a time, it's already enough mental tax to have to context switch, let alone to have to go find all the resources I need to be productive again.

2. I'm forced to use Ubuntu, and it is constantly updating stuff and making it crash. Every time I reboot it's a gamble as to whether something I previously used works again properly. Maybe 1 in 100 boots, the entire system doesn't come back properly.

While most people blame massive demand from AI companies, Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra says price pressure from certain customers over the past few years has also significantly contributed to the shortage.

This is some next level gaslighting. AI companies significantly increased the demand and have deeper pockets than most consumers. He who bids most gets the product.

Mehrotra also said the memory shortage could last into 2027 and beyond because fabrication plants take years to build, and the next generation of memory is even more complex to manufacture. Micron is now investing up to $200 billion in manufacturing and R&D, including new memory fabs in Boise, Idaho, and Syracuse, New York.

When the AI bubble pops, and supply significantly outpaces demand, we'll then see them close tonnes of fabs.

With just 32 MiB of embedded pSRAM memory and 16 MiB of flash, and 128 KiB ROM storage, the specs may sound meagre – although in the current AI climate, generous – but this is an embedded device not a full-blown PC hiding in an aroma diffuser1.

It somewhat reminds me of the PineCube, which had 128MB DDR3. Once the Linux tax was paid it was basically unusable.

Factory shipped firmware is open-source and provides Wyoming Satellite, compatible with assistence platforms such as Home Assistant.

They are at least supposed to be able to show it working with some factory software [1]. I would have just liked to have seen some edge compute capability.

[1] https://pine64.org/documentation/PineVoice/

I think page 4 is a little disingenuous, I'm pretty sure you could pick lots of windows and show the mag 7 deviating negatively, but then later trends positive. I believe this whole thing will pop, but I'm not quite convinced it is just yet.

Page 8 for Oracle's free cash flow trending negative is really quite impactful. The Bloomberg AI bubble diagram [1] shows how this could really blow up. If Oracle falls they could take the whole market with them. We're just waiting on the mag 7 or any closely linked companies to fail to raise investment.

Page 16 really outlines how insane these evaluations are. I think most countries see it, hence aggressive selloffs of US bonds [2]. But everybody is just too insanely heavily exposed to it all now, it's going to wipe out everything. It's going to be a very awful time when heavily debt strapped countries can't issue debt anymore.

I think what we're going to see is some insane moves to keep these companies afloat longer in some desperate attempt to delay the pop, which will just make a bigger bubble. I could see Nvidia for example issuing bonds in excess of $100bn soon if the market has appetite for it [3].

[1] https://archive.is/0bYLS

[2] https://sg.finance.yahoo.com/news/china-japan-uae-india-sell...

[3] https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/nvidia-raises-over-21-5bn-...

Our environment contains harms. Vehicles are several tonnes traveling 60+ mph, they make guns look safe. The calculation is a risk-reward one.

The question we have to ask ourselves is whether these "protect the children" laws are worth the internet freedoms they are about to erode. I would argue not.

1. It is not the state's responsibility to raise your children. They should ensure that safety is available, they should have some ability to deal with clear cases of abuse - but otherwise you're on your own. Anybody who thinks they want a nanny state just has to imagine the worst possible government abusing this power.

2. On the basis of providing safety, it would be enough for example for mobile phone OSes to provide parent restrictions (as they currently do). Kids can't afford to buy phones, so it's the parents in almost all cases giving them unfiltered access. If you really really want to ensure that all children have filtered access on phones, just spot check kid's phones and confiscate them if they do not have the locks enabled.

It seems insane to me that so many parents believe they have zero responsibility for their children's access to the internet, despite being the source of that access. I'm sorry, parents need to step up.

Thank you for sharing. 1.5TB of streamed data at 12 seconds per token on a high end consumer laptop is a pretty high requirement - I can only imagine how much that cost to train. I don't know how running this model could be cost effective for anybody.

Not sure, but the code is quite dense and lacking in comments. `nanoeuler` & `nanoeuler_check` is itself the binary checked straight into git with the `.log` file? All of the commit messages are "Add files via upload" and happened in quick succession.

I suspect this is LLM generated, which is cool, but shouldn't then have the claim "forward and backward passes are written and verified by hand" unless it is true.

Regarding the data, old texts from Gutenberg probably lowers the performance - especially as many texts are on purpose whimsical. Shakespeare for example made up words to be theatrical. You have a mix of different old English styles in the corpus - it's a terrible way to learn modern English. I had some success using .ZIM data archives from Kiwix as a source, you should get a more stable output using that data.