The vape is 503
The HackerNews hug of death
Hosting a website on a disposable vape
321–330 of 493 posts
Re: Hosting a website on a disposable vape
#322Earlier quoted context omitted.
And not even that hard to find: "alibaba MSM8916 LTE" on Google and lo and behold: https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/TIANJIE-Qualcomm-MSM8... $5.92 each for 500-2999 orders. What a time to be alive.
How much work is it to rip one of these open and reprogram?
probably 2 screws at most or some glue/snaps, then put a jtag brush over the contacts, do some sort of unit test and you have a unit. Could take a few hours with a motorized screwdriver and a simple specialized CLI program for programming/testing
Re: Hosting a website on a disposable vape
#323Talking of cheap and powerful devices one can also look at Chinese UZ801 4G LTE (Qualcomm MSM8916) dongles. They cost like only $4-5 and pack quite impressive HW: 4GB eMMC, 512MB RAM, actual 4G modem sometimes with 2 sim switching support. Since it's actually old Android SOC there is even GPU and GPS in there. And a lot of work was already done on supporting them: https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Zhihe_series_LTE_d…
Do any of the modem bands work in America? If so... what carrier?
I've heard T-mobile works well with Chinese phones
Re: Hosting a website on a disposable vape
#324Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are reusable vapes and reputable stores carry only those, but they are generally many times more expensive than disposable vapes, which are favored by smugglers (profit margins) and underage users (price point and potential seizing by parent/teacher/police). Disposable vapes put young people in contact with career criminals and organized crime, who will be only too happy to oblige even if the customer has no mo…
My reusable vape cost like 15$. It's basically the same components as a disposable vape, except I can refill a pod and switch the pod if I burn the wick.
Well, lucky you, I guess? Here they are considered tobacco products and taxed as heavily as cigarettes. I think the cheapest models are around $50.
That amount buys 10-200 disposable vapes from China, depending on how much you order at once and whether you care about the quality. Meanwhile, street resale prices are about $20 per vape. Smuggler’s heaven.
The smugglers / bulk sellers do sell to school kids, who then resell to their friends and even online (telegram most probably). Seen so many teenagers walk over as a random car pulls up to exchange vapes for cash. Even seen a big time dealer arriving at a teenager’s house party in a new, expensive car with a trunk full of vapes, accompanied by muscle, talking about how many of each flavor the customer is going to buy.
Maybe things are better on the other side of the big puddle, even if it means the same things are sold quasi-legally.
Re: Hosting a website on a disposable vape
#325Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not about sponsorships and integrity, it's about preventing the pipeline "Person reads article -> Sees this brand of vape has micocontrollers -> Buys this brand of vape". (If I understood the author correctly, y'know, not to speak for them)
Ok, but what's bad about this?
Possibly greater e-waste than there would otherwise have been.
Re: Hosting a website on a disposable vape
#326Earlier quoted context omitted.
Where do you get them for $5? Cheapest I can find is around £8 (11 USD), and it’s not clear if they have this chip.
Yeah you won't find them for $5 unless you buy in bulk on Alibaba Aliexpress has this as the best selling one though the chipset is not confirmed https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005006924641101.html Well I take my gamble, wait 2 weeks and see what I'll get
Just fyi, the device at that link is currently showing $9.62 for a single unit, once logged in and the one-time-only "Welcome deals" are eliminated. But AliExpress pricing can vary hour by hour based on seller, inventory, algorithm, RNG.
Re: Hosting a website on a disposable vape
#327Re-using this sort of device is super cool. I can imagine a post-apocalyptic scenario where a city is run on a hodgepodge of random computing devices like this. I will say, though, disposable vapes with microcontrollers inside (and even full games and screens from recent reporting) are an egregious source of e-waste. Many layers of stupid are present here.
I do wonder if there would be a workable law where companies are permanently responsible for what they produce, they must always accept back and responsibly recycle/break down to resources what they put out there, and do away with the shifting of responsibility of waste to society? Seems like a terrible engineering challenge but the right thing to do.
That would create a lot of work for corporate lawyers to create shell companies, merge/push-responsibility-onto/unmerge transactions, selling of "waste cleanup credits" by companies who then quickly go bankrupt (after the founders take all the $$ out of the company), etc...
Re: Hosting a website on a disposable vape
#328Earlier quoted context omitted.
You throw away your smoke detector? Just replace the battery. My guy is out here pulling off the whole thing and tossing it in the trash.
Modern smoke detectors, at least here in the US, have a 10-year sealed non-replaceable battery.
Interesting. We bought a bunch (5 pack, 6 pack?) from Costco IIRC about 3-5 years ago, and they all take 2 AA batteries, which is great because we've doubled down on Eneloop batteries for everything possible..
Re: Hosting a website on a disposable vape
#329Re-using this sort of device is super cool. I can imagine a post-apocalyptic scenario where a city is run on a hodgepodge of random computing devices like this. I will say, though, disposable vapes with microcontrollers inside (and even full games and screens from recent reporting) are an egregious source of e-waste. Many layers of stupid are present here.
Are they an egregious form of Ewaste really? (Serious question). Because there’s so much reusable hardware in so many of the other things we throw out (phones, cars, laptops, etc) but we don’t make reasonable efforts to limit that. I’d love if the vape hardware was standardized to a degree for cool reuse projects like this. Donate a bunch of used vapes as hardware platforms for school projects? Like arduinos…but not.
Re: Hosting a website on a disposable vape
#330Earlier quoted context omitted.
>The fact that selling such a thing is profitable means that we lack regulations somewhere. It's the exact opposite. Tobacco is so heavily regulated and taxed that these become profitable. If cigarettes were 3-4$ a pack (which they would be without sin taxes and regulatory overhead), the vape market would come down as well and there's no way these could be profitable. As it is, they retail around $20 and contain the…
Cigarettes could sell at 3-4$ a pack only because some regulation are in place that enforce the total separation of manufacturing and selling those packs from paying the cost for the societal damages wrt. health, pollution, littering... There are many possible ways to slice the economical cake.
I'm not sure what your point is here.
1) They don't sell for $3-4 a pack, yet your post seems to imply that the system has failed for cigarettes.
2) For externalities beyond the input cost of a product, the default [natural] condition is for those costs not to be included - one needn't enforce anything. Rather, it requires that someone with power put their thumb on the scale to enforce the inclusion of those costs during a sale[1].