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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

#611

Post by robotnikman »

tstrimple wrote: post #522
bigfishrunning wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apparently there is a charging circuit, because the battery will run out long before the fluid does

This is the brand I usually use. https://www.off-stamp.com It has a separate magnetically attached battery / charging unit. I have to charge 5-6 times per "tank" that's attached. The battery side also has a mini-led display showing animations and battery / juice left so it's actually communicating with the tank side. A kit with battery and tank runs me about $25, but the tank alone is about $20. So they add $5 to cov…

I always felt those Off-Stamps were at least a bit better than other disposables since the battery portion was at least reusable.

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

#612

Post by triceratops »

pixl97 wrote: post #601
triceratops wrote: post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand the moaning and bellyaching about straws. Are people that bad at drinking from cups? If you aren't a toddler or bed-ridden patient in a hospital (EDIT: or anyone else with physical conditions that necessitate a straw) you should be able to drink without a straw.

>Are people that bad at drinking from cups? You ever had the ice in the bottom of the cup turn into a large chunk then hit you in the face?

No

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

#613

Post by pyrolistical »

irishcoffee wrote: post #549
teiferer wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So maybe if you make the cost high enough (which is currently just externalized) then they might start disappearing by not being produced in the first place by lack of demand. People don't buy this because it's crap. They buy it because it's cheap.

> People don't buy this because it's crap. They buy it because it's cheap. This is an interesting thread to pull on. Why is it so inexpensive for the east to make plastic garbage and sell it to the world?

1. Plastic is cheap

2. Importers of cheap plastic crap are not on the hook of the eventual disposal. So the cost isn’t seen by the consumer at point of purchase but instead indirectly seen in increased taxes for garbage disposal

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

#614

Post by miki123211 »

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…

This is only partially true.

If developers prioritize customer experience instead of velocity and cost in situations where that isn't warranted, the company they work for can no longer sell products as cheaply as their competitors do. This decreases their market share and their revenue, which means they'll employ fewer developers in the future.

This is almost an evolutionary process, many (but not all) markets choose for developers which don't care about such things.

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

#615

Post by Fargren »

adrianN wrote: post #536
Fargren wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would be properly recycling electronics, if not extracting the metals? should the worthless based board to be melted and used for bottles?

Not burning all the ICs and all the other components that still work perfectly fine would be a good start imo.

That would fall under Reuse rather than Recycle. Reduce, Reuse and Recycle are in the order of best to worst. Recycling is the last ditch effort to not completely waste something. It's always going to feel like a half measure, because it is.

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

#616

Post by azornathogron »

M95D wrote: post #414
azornathogron wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Already been done.

Link?

Looks like I was probably wrong about this. There are a lot of "doom running on a vape" videos on YouTube - very easy to find, that's what search is for - but the best primary source I could find quickly actually has doom running separately and the vape just being used as a display.

Search for something like "doom on Puya PY32"

https://hackaday.com/2025/09/20/when-low-sram-keeps-the-doom...

https://github.com/atc1441/Vape_DOOM_ScreenShare

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

#617

Post by steve_adams_86 »

kowbell wrote: post #571
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."

This is an issue I've perceived with technology for a while now. Even a lowly ape like myself can gain disproportionate rewards from using computer technology in ways that many people around me can't. I could use it in constructive or exploitative fashions if I chose to, at scales I could never imagine without it. That has never sat well with me because I know there are people smarter than I am with a lot more resources than I have. And they also have no scruples, so exploitation is in their tool box.

I imagine these same types of people with similar tendencies would be regulated and mitigated by their peers more in the past. Say something like 200 years ago, you might be intelligent and cunning enough to gain power in a community, but it would never mean what it can mean today. The scaling factors are literally beyond comprehension. The accumulation of power, the modes of deception or concealment, sheer scale, all of it... It's too much for people to really track anymore, and it can continue largely unfettered in so many cases.

All that is to say yes, I think a tremendous number of people are being unwittingly exploited. The attention land-grab is arguably the most obvious battle field, but there are certainly others.

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

#618

Post by hippo22 »

Earw0rm wrote: post #175
hippo22 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main thing about plastic is that it’s made from oil, and oil already exists in the ground. Putting it back into the ground is basically neutral minus the pollution involved in manufacturing.

Right, but there's ground and there's ground. Geological strata vs shallow landfill sitting above aquifers and subject to near-term erosion. Disposing of this stuff in deep mines seems like it'd be fine, unfortunately we haven't yet, at a society/economy level, found the discipline to do so. Presumably after a few mya of heat and pressure it'll be indistinguishable from other petrochemicals (which aren't particularly…

I don't think disposing of stuff deep in mines would be a good idea as it would be easy to contaminate the ground water. Modern landfills are generally well engineered and don't contaminate the surroundings too badly.

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

#619

Post by labcomputer »

JoelMcCracken wrote: post #447
amelius wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A server on Mars?

Na each key press goes to a separate lambda invocation that gets submitted to a Kafka queue, and what happens after that is a mystery to all involved. We can make crazy latency ourselves just fine, no space transmission necessary

No, not a mystery, in fact.

Each keypress is appended to an 80 line prompt (key name along with timestamp of keypress and current text shown on the screen) and fed to a frontier LLM. Some of the office staff banged on the keypad for a few hours to generate training data to fine-tune the LLM on the task of denouncing key presses.

Thanks to some optimizations with Triton and running multi-GPU instances, latency is down to just a few seconds per digit entered.

You see, we needed to hit our genAI onboarding KPIs this quarter…

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

#620

Post by akersten »

roflmaostc wrote: post #375
st_goliath wrote: post #335

A lovely video from a Shenzhen factory, mass producing disposable vapes, in case someone's interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WohEiRvn2Dg+ Most likely a promotional from the looks of it. I myself stumbled over it a about a year ago, when someone posted it on an IRC channel.

lol, at 0:15 someone is literally testing the vapes with their mouth. I hope they don't do that all day long Later at 6:45 they show more people testing them

They are, there's a video on YouTube you can find where they interview someone with that job and they test 10,000 a day. Then they mention that they go home and vape some more
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