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There's a ridiculous amount of tech in a disposable vape

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Re: There's a ridiculous amount of tech in a disposable vape

#281

Post by jwr »

pkolaczk wrote: post #217
pjmlp wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is why when folks nowadays say "you cannot use XYZ for embedded", given what most embedded systems look like, and what many of us used to code on 8 and 16 bit home computers, I can only assert they have no idea how powerful modern embedded systems have become. Now that it is a pity that when people talk about saving the planet everyone keeps rushing to dispoable electronics, what serves me to go by bycicle to w…

> Which is why when folks nowadays say "you cannot use XYZ for embedded", given what most embedded systems look like, and what many of us used to code on 8 and 16 bit home computers, I can only assert they have no idea how powerful modern embedded systems have become. Yet, I still need to wait about 1 second (!) after each key press when buying a parking ticket and the machine wants me to enter my license plate numbe…

That's programmer incompetence. Unfortunately pervasive, especially with devices like parking meters, EV chargers, and similar, where the feedback loop (angry customer) is long (angry customers resulting in revenue decrease) or non-existent.

Re: There's a ridiculous amount of tech in a disposable vape

#282

Post by lostlogin »

tuetuopay wrote: post #218
lostlogin wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fault lies with vape manufacturers. It’s big tobacco. They are soulless ghouls.

Surprisingly, Big Tobacco does not really likes vapes because it's not them, and eats in their profit margin. If any, they lobby against vapes and specifically disposable vapes.

That hasn’t been true here in New Zealand. Although the nuance around what counts as a vape may be where this is happening.

Re: There's a ridiculous amount of tech in a disposable vape

#283

Post by smokel »

pkolaczk wrote: post #217
pjmlp wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is why when folks nowadays say "you cannot use XYZ for embedded", given what most embedded systems look like, and what many of us used to code on 8 and 16 bit home computers, I can only assert they have no idea how powerful modern embedded systems have become. Now that it is a pity that when people talk about saving the planet everyone keeps rushing to dispoable electronics, what serves me to go by bycicle to w…

> Which is why when folks nowadays say "you cannot use XYZ for embedded", given what most embedded systems look like, and what many of us used to code on 8 and 16 bit home computers, I can only assert they have no idea how powerful modern embedded systems have become. Yet, I still need to wait about 1 second (!) after each key press when buying a parking ticket and the machine wants me to enter my license plate numbe…

One of the more inspired design choices of the parking ticket devices in my area is the inclusion of a key repeat feature.

If you keep your finger on the touchscreen for just long enough, it helpfully repeats the keystroke while you're entering a license plate.

Given the inevitable hardware issues, this means that what should be a single tap frequently becomes a burst of identical characters.

The programmers who worked on this probably would've liked to be game developers instead.

Re: There's a ridiculous amount of tech in a disposable vape

#285

Post by ErroneousBosh »

eru wrote: post #231
pjmlp wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What can you expect, when people assume as normal shipping the browser alongside the "native" application, and scripting languages using an interpreter are used in production code? Maybe that ticket machine was coded in MicroPython. /s

Interpreters don't have to be slow. Forth is usually interpreted and pretty fast. And, of course, we have very fast Javascript engines these days. Python speed is being worked on, but it's pretty slow, true.

It's not really "interpreted", in the way that for example BASIC or Java is.

It's a list of jumps to functions.

Re: There's a ridiculous amount of tech in a disposable vape

#286

Post by setopt »

adrianN wrote: post #158
rob74 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For my part, I hate anything explicitly labeled "disposable". As the author writes, you're supposed to recycle it, but how many people will do that if it has "disposable" written on it? Even worse, if it was truly disposable they could use a non-rechargeable battery, but because they have to keep up the pretense of it being reusable, they have to include a rechargeable battery with more dodgy chemistry that probably…

To make matters worse, recycling is a scam (with a small handful of exceptions).

Depends, it’s hard to make a blanket statement like that. Recycled steel and aluminum for example is absolutely not a scam. But for plastics, I agree that waste incineration is mostly a better solution than recycling (which produces low-quality plastics with some risk of unhealthy contaminants in the few cases that it’s not actually a scam).

Re: There's a ridiculous amount of tech in a disposable vape

#287

Post by bojan »

pjmlp wrote: post #213
smashed wrote: post #3

Many countries have deposits for single use bottles/cans but an electronic device with a lipo battery is seen as perfectly fine to throw away. These things should have 100 times the deposit amount of a can of soda with mandatory requirements for retailers to take the 'empties' back.

Most countries don't do enough at all. For example Germany, while the country is famous for the whole splitting the garbage, I am still waiting after 20 years to see the kitchen oil recycling recipients as we have in Portugal. As for electronics, I would say no one has anything in place, and human nature is as such that hardly anyone will drive to the next recycling center to deliver a single device that broke down,…

> As for electronics, I would say no one has anything in place

In Dutch Mediamarkt, the same company as Saturn in Germany I believe, they have bins for electric devices.

Re: There's a ridiculous amount of tech in a disposable vape

#288

Post by pjmlp »

anthk wrote: post #242
pjmlp wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What can you expect, when people assume as normal shipping the browser alongside the "native" application, and scripting languages using an interpreter are used in production code? Maybe that ticket machine was coded in MicroPython. /s

- TCL/Tk slowish under P3 times, decent enough under P4 with SSE2. AMSN wasn't that bad back in the day, and with 8.6 the occasional UI locks went away. - Visual Basic. Yes, it was interpreter, and you used to like it. GUI ran fast, good for small games and management software. The rest... oh, they tried to create a C64 emulator under VB, it ran many times slower than one created in C. Nowadays, with a P4 with SSE2 a…

I worked on a startup that was mostly powered by Tcl, the amount of rewriting in C that we had to do between 1999 and 2003, when I left the company among all those dotcom busts, made me no longer pick any language without at least a JIT, for production code.

The founders went on creating OutSystems, with the same concepts but built on top of .NET, they are one of the most successful Portuguese companies to this day, and one of the few VB like development environments for the Web.

Re: There's a ridiculous amount of tech in a disposable vape

#289

Post by qmr »

repeekad wrote: post #199
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Everybody makes fun of paper straws. Yeah, because they suck . Uh, pun not intended. Paper straws get somewhat soggy and feel bad in your mouth. They are inferior to the plastic straws they purport to replace, so people resist them as much as they can. If you want to actually make a difference with an environmental effort, you need to make something superior . Nobody makes fun of LED light bulbs because (up front c…

Most paper straws use PFAS, meaning we’re actively composting PFAS in a fantasy effort to feel good about our waste without actually giving anything up https://fortune.com/well/2023/08/24/paper-straws-harmful-for...

Thanks just the dystopian news I needed today.

What a stupid joke.

Re: There's a ridiculous amount of tech in a disposable vape

#290

Post by pjmlp »

bojan wrote: post #287
pjmlp wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most countries don't do enough at all. For example Germany, while the country is famous for the whole splitting the garbage, I am still waiting after 20 years to see the kitchen oil recycling recipients as we have in Portugal. As for electronics, I would say no one has anything in place, and human nature is as such that hardly anyone will drive to the next recycling center to deliver a single device that broke down,…

> As for electronics, I would say no one has anything in place In Dutch Mediamarkt, the same company as Saturn in Germany I believe, they have bins for electric devices.

For used toner/ink cartridges yes, for electric devices in theory yes, in practice not everywhere.

However that doesn't change the disposable garbage thing, I bet most of them land in some African landfill instead of being properly recycled.

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