Earlier quoted context omitted.
The idea that people are smoking arm chips makes me laugh.
Not smoking, vaping - better for your health but not RISC free.
it's literal vaporware
There's a ridiculous amount of tech in a disposable vape
631–640 of 673 posts
Re: There's a ridiculous amount of tech in a disposable vape
#632Currently working on a method to recycle / repurpose the li-ion cells obtained from the disposable vapes, trying to scale up the recycling effort by releasing products to fund the manpower required to breakdown and sort the vape components . Getting close to releasing the first 100 demo models of the product for stress testing in the wild. Currently based in the greater Seattle area and here is a link to my site if a…
Came to this thread to shout you guys out! I was super impressed by your presentation at Open Sauce 2025.
Re: There's a ridiculous amount of tech in a disposable vape
#633Earlier quoted context omitted.
As European that is not spread everywhere, while you can get some money back in Germany and Greece, there is none to be had in Portugal. In Germany, it is such a big issue with people not having other source of income, that there is a culture where and how to leave the bottles around so that they are easier to collect.
I kinda prefer cultures where benefits and pensions are enough so that people don't have to dig into trashcans for Pfand.
It is getting hard across many countries.
Re: There's a ridiculous amount of tech in a disposable vape
#634Earlier 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…
> As the author writes, you're supposed to recycle it, but how many people will do that if it has "disposable" written on it? You need to offer an incentive (ie: discount on new vape if you recycle) and then, from my experience, most people will recycle.
And you also need to refrain from breaking this scheme entirely, by introducing silly restrictions like only exchanging for in-store vouchers instead of cash, or demanding same-store receipt for original purchase (or equivalent) - like it happened in some places (e.g. my country, Poland) to glass and aluminum recycling.
Such restrictions seem to purposefully target poor people, and I have rather strong ethical objections to them (something about making a problem invisible and hoping it'll go away - or starve out), but the effect goes beyond that. Getting $20 back on a $200 product would be a different story, but here, it's more like $2 on $20, or $0.2 on $2; most people aren't going to bother with that (and understandably so: it's not worth the logistics overhead). So at best, all this does is redirect money stream from poor people to recycling companies. More typically, it just makes people recycle less.
Re: There's a ridiculous amount of tech in a disposable vape
#635Earlier quoted context omitted.
> How close are we to smart dust I wonder? How small can we make wireless communications? There's two limiting factors for 'smart dust': power (batteries are the majority weight and volume of this vape), and antennae (minimum size determined by wavelength of carrier wave). I believe you can fit an NFC module in a 5x5mm package, but that does externalize the power supply.
We are going to have to rethink power for smart dust. Like consider that no creature out there is powered by batteries. From the biggest land animal to the smallest microbe it’s all chemistry. Maybe the smart dust will have to eat microbes and stuff to stay active. As for communication, we can’t go shoving antennas in them as then they’d be larger than dust. And you can’t use the optical part of the spectrum because…
> From the biggest land animal to the smallest microbe it’s all chemistry.
Batteries are chemistry. ATP is a chemical battery.
The difference between living things and our machines is primarily in manufacturing methods: we do things in bulk, because we reach from the top with crude, meter-scale tools; nature glues things up from lots of tiny biomolecular nanomachines, and each of those tiny machines has to carry its own power source!
Still, it's highly likely that any form of "smart dust" will resemble living cells as much as, or even more so, it will resemble miniature devices we build today, simply because that's the kind of chemistry that's efficient at smaller scales.
Re: There's a ridiculous amount of tech in a disposable vape
#636Earlier 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…
Not just that, nobody chooses their parking spot based on the UI of the machine. Banks and phone manufacturers now care about UI, because some of them started to do so, and people started switching to them en masse. US carriers were bleeding subscribers left and right when the iPhone was only available on AT&T, which was the first time people started switching plans to get a specific phone instead of the other way ar…
> Paying more for programmers or parking machine processors would be a waste of money.
The rise of parking apps on mobile adds an interesting angle to this.
No doubt, many of us favour apps because the UX is so much better. Not quite sure if that affects the bottom line short-term, but long-term I’m sure it will.
Re: There's a ridiculous amount of tech in a disposable vape
#637Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't this a bit like "paper" cups for coffee / water? We switched to these at work a few years ago, and it's an all-round horrible experience. I swear every other one leaks right away, and those that don't can only be refilled once or twice before they do. So you end up going through like 10 of those a day. I also don't know how "eco-friendly" they actually are, since there's a picture of a dead turtle on them under…
My company told everyone to bring their own mug, which they were expected to wash from time to time. Then they give mugs for "thanks for working here" awards once in a while so they can be sure everyone has one. Soap and a sink are provided near the coffee makers. Paper cups are still provided, but it is intended visitors not people who work in the building.
But do people actually use them? That's the theory where I work, too, but most people just use paper cups.
Re: There's a ridiculous amount of tech in a disposable vape
#638Earlier 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…
Not just that, nobody chooses their parking spot based on the UI of the machine. Banks and phone manufacturers now care about UI, because some of them started to do so, and people started switching to them en masse. US carriers were bleeding subscribers left and right when the iPhone was only available on AT&T, which was the first time people started switching plans to get a specific phone instead of the other way ar…
Interesting story; I went to park at a downtown lot in my local city (Vancouver BC) and the machine had an unusual UI. So I skipped the machine and scanned the QR code for the app. By the time I had taken the elevator up to the lobby of the building I had the app.
But then the usability on the app was so bad, that I actually could not figure out how to buy parking. The instructions were clear, but the latency on the app was unusable. The Internet connection was fine. It was the app. So I skipped the whole thing, went to dinner, and was happy when I found my car without a ticket.
"Unable to buy a ticket" would have been an interesting day in court.
Re: There's a ridiculous amount of tech in a disposable vape
#639Earlier 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…
Not just that, nobody chooses their parking spot based on the UI of the machine. Banks and phone manufacturers now care about UI, because some of them started to do so, and people started switching to them en masse. US carriers were bleeding subscribers left and right when the iPhone was only available on AT&T, which was the first time people started switching plans to get a specific phone instead of the other way ar…
[dead]
Re: There's a ridiculous amount of tech in a disposable vape
#640Earlier quoted context omitted.
The vape ban in Australia is utterly stupid though. All vapes are banned, not just disposables, and guess what's easier to discretely sell to kids from a newsagency. Doesn't seem to have stopped kids getting their vapes yet I need to import my cannabis vape via the black market.
They're not all banned, you just need a prescription to get one which realistically should've been implemented day 0. Eventually it'll prove very impactful with the youth, it'll reduce the number of users and make it more cost prohibitive to be so prolific as it is right now.
Yeah I don't think my doctor is going to give me a cannabis vape prescription, though admittedly I haven't asked.
I don't see how making vapes prescription only changes the situation with children, which is that all tobacco products are illegal to sell or provide to a person under 18. Cracking down on the sale of tobacco to children does not require tobacco products to be made prescription only, these are orthogonal issues. All this does is drive profit towards shonky pill doctors who advertise on facebook that one cheap over the phone appointment is all you need to "feel great again" and other euphemisms, and will give you any pill you ask for regardless of the medical suitability.