There's a ridiculous amount of tech in a disposable vape • Hacker News Board

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

#571

Post by kowbell » Wed, Jan 14, 2026, 5:28 PM UTC

kleene_op wrote: post #317

Our whole current civilization could be construed as advanced alien tech servicing a humongous tribe of moronic apes. The fact that one fifth of the internet is dedicated to porn just speaks for itself. Just thinking about all the tech involved, from the capturing of footage using highly sophisticated camera, to the transmission over kilometers of fiber optics, to the stokage into redundant and consistent databases b…

Let's not forget that with both porn AND all the other "junk food" on social media that we waste away on: there are very smart people getting paid a lot of money to make/keep you hooked on them.

IMO this is as much a "we are hopelessly dumb monkeys who just want to satisfy ourselves" as as it is "there's clever monkeys who know and exploit our monkey weaknesses so they can make more money."

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

#572

Post by afpx » Wed, Jan 14, 2026, 5:32 PM UTC

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…

Sorry to rant, but this kind of stuff is the only thing that triggers me. It's gotten so bad that my family makes me put a dollar in a 'complain jar' everytime I talk about how poor quality software has become.

Just one recent example: few months ago, I replaced a Bosch dishwasher with the latest version of the same model. Now, when I press the start button to initiate the cycle, it takes over 3 seconds for it to register! Like, what is going on in that 3 seconds?

How was it possible that even 'kind of good' developers like me were able todo much more with much less back in the 90s? My boss would be like, "Here's this new hardware thingy and the manual. Now figure out how to do the impossible by Monday." Was it because we had bigger teams, more focus, fewer dependencies?

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

#573

Post by pbhjpbhj » Wed, Jan 14, 2026, 5:33 PM UTC

spacebanana7 wrote: post #386

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that a genuine question, or are you parodying an ignorant point of view? The World has limited resources, we don't have a spare. Do you need it spelling out more clearly?

That sounds like an almost Malthusian viewpoint. The world has effectively infinite resources, getting more is usually just a matter of figuring out better extraction techniques or using better energy.

>effectively infinite resources

Sure, like effectively infinite atmospheric carbon sink, effectively infinite Helium, effectively infinite fresh water, effectively infinite trees ... we've treated these things as true, because the World is big and population of humans wasn't so big we've got away with that for a time, now those presumptions are coming to bite us, hard.

Yes, we can work our way out of some holes, maybe all of them. But we have to make things sustainable first, then spend those resources. We're not wizards, deus ex machina only reliably happens in movies.

A little Malthusian.

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

#574

Post by mrguyorama » Wed, Jan 14, 2026, 5:33 PM UTC

ryandrake wrote: post #523

tialaramex wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no pressure to make a good product because nobody making this decision has to use the machine. Everywhere I've worked purchase decisions are made by somebody with no direct contact to the actual usage, maybe if you're lucky they at least asked the people who need the product what the requirements are, otherwise it's just whatever they (who don't use this product) thought would be good. "Key presses are 15x sl…

While this is a decision-making problem, it is also an engineering incompetence problem. No matter what pointy haired boss is yelling about "priorities" ultimately software developers are the ones writing the code, and are responsible for how awful it is. When it comes to priorities about what to write and what to focus on, the buck stops at management and leadership. When it comes to the actual quality of the softwa…

> When it comes to the actual quality of the software written, the buck stops at the developer. Blame can be shared.

No. The quality is not prioritized by management. A dev that fails to ship a feature because they were trying to improve "quality" gets fired.

We have no labor power because morons spent the good times insisting that we don't need a professional organization to solve the obvious collective action problem.

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

#575

Post by ssl-3 » Wed, Jan 14, 2026, 5:35 PM UTC

lazide wrote: post #544

ssl-3 wrote: post #531

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Debouncing would be smart, sure. But sometimes, these sorts of embedded machines are weirder than that. At Kroger-brand gas stations near me, I get to interact with the buttons on gas pumps to select options and enter a loyalty ID. Those buttons have visible feedback on a screen, and also audible feedback consisting of a loud beep. And there's always delays between button press and feedback. Some combination of debou…

They are running it on a Java VM in a container - on a 386? Over WiFi?

Perhaps.

Or perhaps the original programmers skipped the class on concurrency 25 years ago, and nobody has subsequently bothered to pay anyone to update that part of the software.

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

#576

Post by mrguyorama » Wed, Jan 14, 2026, 5:38 PM UTC

contravariant wrote: post #306

pkolaczk wrote: post #217

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. 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…

Give it some slack, it's probably doing its best to inexplicably run windows.

Disagree. Windows for embedded runs extremely well, though can take a minute to boot.

My underpowered cash register that hadn't been updated in a decade could run POS on top of Windows 7 Embedded POSReady buttery smooth.

Occasionally they would start performing poorly, and it was always a network issue.

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

#577

Post by chamomeal » Wed, Jan 14, 2026, 5:39 PM UTC

kleene_op wrote: post #317

Our whole current civilization could be construed as advanced alien tech servicing a humongous tribe of moronic apes. The fact that one fifth of the internet is dedicated to porn just speaks for itself. Just thinking about all the tech involved, from the capturing of footage using highly sophisticated camera, to the transmission over kilometers of fiber optics, to the stokage into redundant and consistent databases b…

I feel like our whacky world is only made possible by fossil fuels. Like why is it profitable to

- build these vapes and sell them for a few dollars? - tear down an entire house, rebuild a new one from scratch, and sell it? - ship things all the way across the entire freakin ocean instead of manufacturing them locally? - mine cryptocurrency?

To me the answer is always fossil fuels. We stumbled on an energy source so dense (at first, seemingly) infinite that it just wildly increased the amount of energy we can use. For most of human history our greatest constraint was energy, then that constraint was just blown the fuck off.

I feel like our whole society is riding a high of cheap energy. We attribute so much progress to things like science and democracy and great thinkers and revolutionaries. But how much of it was really just fossil fuels and nitrogen fixing??

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

#578

Post by ASalazarMX » Wed, Jan 14, 2026, 5:42 PM UTC

ryandrake wrote: post #523

tialaramex wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no pressure to make a good product because nobody making this decision has to use the machine. Everywhere I've worked purchase decisions are made by somebody with no direct contact to the actual usage, maybe if you're lucky they at least asked the people who need the product what the requirements are, otherwise it's just whatever they (who don't use this product) thought would be good. "Key presses are 15x sl…

While this is a decision-making problem, it is also an engineering incompetence problem. No matter what pointy haired boss is yelling about "priorities" ultimately software developers are the ones writing the code, and are responsible for how awful it is. When it comes to priorities about what to write and what to focus on, the buck stops at management and leadership. When it comes to the actual quality of the softwa…

Precisely this. We love to put our colleagues as competent victims of the system, but a competent engineer is unlikely to build an embeeded UI with high latency at their first try. It's a combination of cheap, underqualified labour and careless management.

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

#579

Post by mordechai9000 » Wed, Jan 14, 2026, 5:49 PM UTC

afpx wrote: post #572

pkolaczk wrote: post #217

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. 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…

Sorry to rant, but this kind of stuff is the only thing that triggers me. It's gotten so bad that my family makes me put a dollar in a 'complain jar' everytime I talk about how poor quality software has become. Just one recent example: few months ago, I replaced a Bosch dishwasher with the latest version of the same model. Now, when I press the start button to initiate the cycle, it takes over 3 seconds for it to reg…

I think we've been trained to accept bad software at this point, and a lot of people don't know anything different.

I suspect that a lot of it is caused by shoving Android onto underpowered devices because it is cheap and seems like an easy button. But I don't know for sure, that's just an impression. I have no numbers.

Could there be an opportunity here, for a specialized kiosk OS or something like that?

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

#580

Post by Etheryte » Wed, Jan 14, 2026, 5:49 PM UTC

gosub100 wrote: post #437

icameron wrote: post #8

Running a web server off a disposable vape: https://bogdanthegeek.github.io/blog/projects/vapeserver/

Soon: "Quake on a vape pen"

I mean, naturally there's Doom on a vape [0], so as far as I'm concerned, that box is already ticked. Someone should give a good name to the law that every hardware device with a screen has a Doom port.

[0] https://github.com/atc1441/Vape_DOOM_ScreenShare