Viewing profile — hoopladler

What's the reason why they can't make bigger chips? More costly?

I think there have been a number of studies showing that poverty does directly make people unhappy, though - or at the very least, happiness is definitely correlated with wealth. B…

I think it was always a bit like this. You can read what people thought about advertising in the 60's, and they had the same kind of paranoid fantasies we have today, although less…

Thanks for the post! I guess there are a few things that might make these projects less of an unmitigated disaster than your analysis suggests: 1. Musk is clearly working off the c…

I'm actually kind of embarassed by how innacurate my post was, but I can't edit it with corrections.

No, I'm just confused. I used lambda when I meant ternary operator.

Turing reportedly believed that programming would require “a great number of mathematicians of ability”. I think if you want to find a trend in computing, it's the same as the prog…

Wow - that is beautiful. You're almost certainly right about good metal-milling CNC machines never being cheap. I think the only possibility to make such a thing economical would b…

I don't think you're wrong. I do think that a pick-and-place machine is probably more compatible with the hobbyist world than home CNC - given that CNC inherrently requires robust …

I guess I figure you don't have to be good at something for it to be worthwhile. As a human, no matter how steady your hand or sharp your eye, you're always going to be inferior in…

Isn't this literally the point of computers? A processor is something that does amazingly stupid stuff 1.3 million times a second. If you do even very simple things rapidly enough,…

That man is honestly the most entertaining and informative tv-show I've ever watched.

Well, you can actually do stuff a 3d printer does by other means. It just typically requires more skills, and often more equipment. I think your analogy falls down because an autom…

I've got pretty bad essential tremor (and bad eyeseight), so I was also wondering, what's a good way to keep the chips in place on the board? I was thinking of using a tiny dab of …

A replacable battery doesn't cost 150$. It's just one screw. The reason why headphones are much cheaper than hearing aids is mainly economies of scale. I think the main reason why …

How does this compare to doing it with a normal soldering iron? I just ordered a bunch of surface-mount components - just because they were so much cheaper, but I haven't really go…

I don't disagree, but I think that's more because it's hard to make a shitty headphone jack, whereas it's easy to make a shitty bluetooth headphone set. If somebody actually sat do…

Cables and switches always break first. It's the same in power tools - any component that you have a 200-pound gorrilla mucking around with every day will eventually break. You can…

As a hobbyist, I'd like one. You could do projects using hundreds or thousands of devices that are -at the moment- out of reach not for reasons of price, but rather because it woul…

The point about surveilance is it doesn't effect anyone, until it does - and then everybody gets arrested in the night. We're just a couple of decades out of the twentieth century …

I think electronics could work in the US. Lead times are very important. It takes a very long time for a component to arrive from Shenzen. If you have a domestic electronics indust…

Sure - but I think it's understated how important that stuff is. If you go into a psychiatrists office looking like a mess, you're absolutely, by the book, going to be more likely …

I'm not the biggest fan of Keynes, myself. I'm assuming that's what you're referencing - since of course, the rest of the industrialized world also enjoyed unprecedented prosperity…

>Trashing the planet for future generation is certainly reprehensible and not particularly clever, but it isn't narcissism in the official psychological sense. (DSM edits aside.) I…