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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

#581

Post by mrguyorama »

sofixa wrote: post #459
quickthrowman wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cooling for a card access system? A card access system requires zero cooling, it’s a DC power supply or AC transformer and a microcontroller that fits in a small unvented metal enclosure. It requires no management other than activating and deactivating badges. There is no reason to have any of the lock and unlock functionality tied to the cloud, it’s just shitty engineering by a company who wants to extract rent from…

The server running that system needs cooling, yes. You can't just shove it in a closet with zero thought and expect it to not overheat/shut down/catch fire, unless you live in the Arctic.

>You can't just shove it in a closet with zero thought and expect it to not overheat/shut down/catch fire

Actually in almost all products meant for real companies doing real work, this is an explicit design requirement.

Every cash register runs off of a computer that sits in a tiny metal oven with no cooling and is expected to run 24/7 without fail.

The difference between a tech gadget and a real world, real purpose appliance.

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

#582

Post by cons0le »

loeg wrote: post #551
cons0le wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weed disposables are a whole rabbit hole by themselves. You want to buy a disposable? Ok, here, $20 and you're done. But if you want to make the oil at home? Ok, $2000 for lights, timers, nutrients, seeds, and a grow tent. Plus another ~$10,000 for a basic short path distillation setup. And honestly to make anything close to what you get in the disposables, you'll need to hire an expert with experience. And you need…

Your home grow prices are high (even setting aside that you can just buy flower instead of the disposable vape). The right range is hundreds of dollars. And I'm sure making good oil costs somewhat more, but you can make crappy dab sludge (wax?) with some scissors, $10 of isopropyl alcohol, and a baking dish ("QWISO"), and that sludge can be loaded in some kinds of reusable vape.

Im talking about making full melt distillate. Crappy dab sludge can't go in a cart. It requires actual distillation to make what they put in the carts. QWISO is a joke.

I promise you, if it was easy, you would see more people making carts. I tried C02, water wash, sifting, heat press, everything you can think of. Its nowhere near the same. And that's just for the bare minimum distillate. We're not even talking about live resin or anything fancy.

You basically need a small factory to get close to the quality of the carts.

And my home grow prices are low. You cant just grow 2 or 4 plants if you want even a small steady supply of full melt wax. Like, 20 plants minimum is more close. And they have to be good. Living soil, aeroponic, whatever you want.

And that's if you can get actually good yield. I've seen people get such bad yield that they turn 1 pound of flower into less than 3 grams of wax. That's why you need an expert. Even putting together a successful distillation operation is no joke. Besides chemistry knowledge, you need lots of "industrial equipment" knowledge. We're not talking about using a heat press or a curling iron to make "dabs". We're talking about making the real shit.

To be honest 10k is in the range of the cheapest alibaba eqipment. Most commercial outfits, even smaller ones, use much more expensive equipment.

This is why people prefer to just buy it from the store for $20.

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

#583

Post by QuercusMax »

ssl-3 wrote: post #575
lazide wrote: post #544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

One time I decided to test whether these grocery story loyalty card XX cents off per gallon transactions were properly isolated, when my wife and I were both filling up vehicles at the same gas station at the same time. We both got the $0.50 discount per gallon with no problem. I'm sure there are lots of creative ways you can exploit the poor design of these things.

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

#584

Post by roadside_picnic »

tombert wrote: post #121
GeertB wrote: post #72

For these devices the microcontroller needs to be super cheap. Microcontrollers like the Puya PY32 Series (e.g., PY32C642, PY32F002/F030) can cost in the $0.02 - $0.05 range for the kind of many-million volumes applicable for disposable vapes. These are 32-bit ARM Cortex M0 MCUs, running at a 24 MHz clock or similar, some with 24 KB of ROM and maybe 3 KB of RAM! To put into context: this is 3x the ROM/RAM of the ZX81…

What a world we live in; we have gotten to a point where computers are so small and cheap that they can literally be “disposable”. It’s beautiful, I love it.

> It’s beautiful

Especially since both the waste created in the process of making the device and the e-waste created with it's disposal are somebody else's problem!

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

#585

Post by tialaramex »

freetinker wrote: post #558
ryandrake wrote: post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

To paraphrase Upton Sinclair: “It is difficult to get a man to prioritize something when his salary depends upon his not prioritizing it.”

Certainly one of the benefits of my "Fuck Off Fund" is that for a good many years now it has enabled me to be unburdened by concerns about whether I might get fired for saying what I think to management.

I'm at much lower risk than the imagined target of the "Fuck Off Fund" concept for things like inappropriate sexual contact or coercive control, but I find it really does lift a weight off you to know that actually I don't have to figure out whether I can say Fuck Off. The answer to that is always "Yes" which leaves only the question of whether I should say that. Sometimes I do.

And you know, on zero occasions so far have I been fired as a consequence of telling management to fuck off. But also, I had to think hard about that because, thanks to the fund, I had never worried about it. I've been fired (well, given garden leave, same thing) but I have no reason to think it's connected to telling anybody to fuck off.

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

#586

Post by estimator7292 »

GeertB wrote: post #72

For these devices the microcontroller needs to be super cheap. Microcontrollers like the Puya PY32 Series (e.g., PY32C642, PY32F002/F030) can cost in the $0.02 - $0.05 range for the kind of many-million volumes applicable for disposable vapes. These are 32-bit ARM Cortex M0 MCUs, running at a 24 MHz clock or similar, some with 24 KB of ROM and maybe 3 KB of RAM! To put into context: this is 3x the ROM/RAM of the ZX81…

For the even cheaper e-cigarettes many vendors are producing dedicaded ASICS integrating heater control, pressure sensing, battery management, for as close to free as it gets. It's astonishing.

It's all integrated on a tiny PCB mounted to the back of the microphone.

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

#587

Post by roadside_picnic »

rjh29 wrote: post #164
adrianN wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Varies widely across country and the type of thing you're recycling. People are so extreme with recycling, it's either "recycle everything!" or "it's a scam, just chuck it all in the garbage"

> "it's a scam, just chuck it all in the garbage"

This sentiment is the case because very often that's where recycling ultimately ends, we just pay someone to move it far away from us so we don't have to see it when it happens.

Until 2018, when they finally stopped accepting it, one of the US largest exports to China was cardboard boxes sent over for "recycling". We burned tons of bunker fuel shipping back the boxes Chinese goods arrived in. The net environmental impact would likely have been less had we just kept the boxes at home.

It's strange to me how often people prefer a widely acknowledged lie than to simply admit the truth.

I always recycle though because the recycle bin in my city is larger than my trash bin, and I don't have enough room in my trash bin sometimes.

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

#588

Post by estimator7292 »

jjice wrote: post #498
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,…

Not sure about electronics as a whole, but I was able to recycle (or at least dispose of properly) an inflated old Dell laptop battery at either a Best Buy or a Home Depot (I'd assume it was the former, but they were next to each other so I don't recall). This is in the US.

Home Depot accepts old batteries. Though it's kind of terrifying because they accept batteries in any condition as long as you put them in individual plastic bags.

And then there's a huge bin of damaged LiPos just chilling by the front door. I'm astonished we don't hear about fires in these bins.

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

#589

Post by ryandrake »

mrguyorama wrote: post #574
ryandrake wrote: post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 probl…

The idea that workers are not responsible for their own competence or the quality of their work output is such a bizarre take that you really only see on HN. Just because nobody is forcing you to write quality code, doesn't mean you shouldn't. Nobody is forcing you to bathe or brush your teeth, either, so why do we do it?

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

#590

Post by tzs »

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.

The world only has effectively infinite resources if growth slows down, because exponentials get out of hand surprisingly quickly.

For example at 1% energy growth per year it would only take around 9-10k years before to reach an annual consumption equal to all the energy in the Milky Way galaxy. By "all the energy" I don't just mean consuming all the solar energy from all the stars, and using all the fissionable material in reactors, and fusing everything that can fuse, and burning all the burnable stuff. No, I mean also using all the gravitational potential energy in the galaxy, and somehow turning everything that has mass into energy according to E=mc^2.

From there at 1% annual growth it is only another 2-3k years to using all the energy in the whole observable universe annually.

Population at 1% growth also gets out of hand surprisingly quickly. If we don't get FTL travel then in about 12k years we run out space. That's because in 12k years with no FTL we can only expand into a spherical region of space 12k lightyears in radius. At 1% annual growth from the current population in 12k years the volume of humans would be more than fits in the sphere--and that's assuming we can pack humans so there is no wasted space.

We actually have population growth under 1% now, down to around 0.85%, but that only gets us another 2-3k years.

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