This seems like a fun, slightly expensive craft project but not a serious bicycle. Or maybe the problem is that it's a little _too_ serious of a bicycle.
$400 for just some tubes, glue, and dropouts, plus another $800-$2500 for the other parts needed to turn the frame into an actual bicycle, plus however much you value several days of labor, and then from their FAQ...
> How long will a bamboo bike frame last? It’s difficult to say. If you care for your bike as you would for a musical instrument...
Care for your bike like a musical instrument?! They can't be serious. That instrument had better be a steel triangle.
> Are Bamboo Bicycles strong enough? Absolutely! Over the hundreds of bamboo bikes built, they have travelled thousands of miles
Is that 10 miles each? That's not very reassuring.
> If you crash, won’t you get splinters? Likely, yes
I don't know how well the bamboo frame performs, but I'm not sure your critiques really demonstrate that it's "not a serious bicycle".
> $400 for just some tubes, glue, and dropouts, plus another $800-$2500 for the other parts needed to turn the frame into an actual bicycle, plus however much you value several days of labor
$400 is extremely cheap for a bike frame, not to mention a custom one. And the "labor" is a selling point -- this a niche product is for customers who _want_ to build their own frame. The DIY assembly isn't a cost-saving measure like with furniture.
The $800-$2500 is just a catch-all range for the rest of the components. It's doesn't have anything to do with their specific frame.
> Care for your bike like a musical instrument?! They can't be serious. That instrument had better be a steel triangle.
I'm not sure what your issue is with their statement. Regular maintenance is important, and will extend the life of the components. That's true for all bikes. People that spend time & money on a quality bike are willing to maintain them.
> Is that 10 miles each? That's not very reassuring.
I agree with you that their statement doesn't give any indication of the durability of the frame. They should have quoted some kind of actual statistics, either real world or from factory testing.
> I'm not sure what your issue is with their statement. Regular maintenance is important, and will extend the life of the components. That's true for all bikes. People that spend time & money on a quality bike are willing to maintain them.
I keep my musical instruments in padded hard cases, in climate-controlled rooms away from direct sunlight. That kind of treatment is not remotely practical for a bicycle if you're actually using it as a means of transport.
> If you fly with a bike then you’ll want a hard, padded case for it, like one of these[1].
Sure, but flying is very much an occasional thing; you have to semi-disassemble a bike to put it in a case like that, and generally reckon on having to do a shakedown ride after you've unpacked it (at least I do). Putting it in a box every time would not be practical.
> I also keep my best bike (I, er, have several) in the house. i.e. a temperature controlled room.
That's not unknown but not exactly normal; you must admit having several bikes is pretty extreme in itself. If you're not on the ground floor then knocking the bike against a wall or doorframe on the way in or out is almost inevitable, whereas I certainly wouldn't want to do the same to a musical instrument. I suspect the majority of people who are using a bike as day-to-day transport would keep that bike in, at best, an unheated garage.
The bike I use for commuting is a Brompton. Folding it up to put in its padded bag takes less than 30 seconds and I do that every time I put it away in my hall. I don't own a flight case for it but they exist and don't require disassembly to use.
I'm not saying that everyone does this, just that treating a bike like a musical instrument isn't that far fetched an idea.
> you must admit having several bikes is pretty extreme in itself.
I'm in a bike club. I know so many people with more than one bike it's not even a joke any more. N+1 and all that.
And you'd what, stash a second box at the office? Always have a support car? Only do circular rides from home?
I'm sure there are some people whose lifestyle lets them treat a bicycle like a musical instrument. I really don't think most people could do it, not while riding with any real frequency. I count myself lucky that my office has underground bicycle parking (and we're still talking wheel-bender racks next to the A/C exhaust vents). I stand by the statement that a bicycle that needs to be looked after that carefully isn't, by the usual standards of such things, a practical bicycle.
Of course I don't keep a second box at the office. Likewise I know very few people that keep a piano in a flight case when they're not transporting it.
I actually do have bikes that I only take on circular rides because of their value and I baby the hell out of them but that's a false dichotomy.
They are not saying you have to treat these bikes as fragile musical instruments. They're just saying that if you do it will incur less wear and tear.
A carbon fibre bike frame is probably more fragile than a steel one. That limits the number of use cases for carbon but doesn't mean it's not a practical material for different usecases.
As a further example, I have a TT race bike. I keep mine hanging up in the garage an only take it out to races or for circular training rides.
I have a friend that commutes on his TT bike as a form of training. Mine will last longer than his.
It's on the low end, but certainly not "extreme". A nice steel frame like Surly or Soma is $500-600. "Extremely cheap" would be something like Huffy that is under $200 for the complete bike.
You're probably right. I don't know what would be a sane instrument to compare to bicycle care though. Is it possible to play music with a giant rock? It's weird seeing this kind of language about a classic utilitarian device that has stood the test of time exactly because it requires very little care or maintenance.
More related to what you're looking for though, I could see an improvised percussion instrument such as this group [0] play would probably fit the bill.
> It's weird seeing this kind of language about a classic utilitarian device that has stood the test of time exactly because it requires very little care or maintenance.
> This seems like a fun, slightly expensive craft project but not a serious bicycle.
Bamboo bikes can be extremely serious bikes.
Calfree (perhaps the best know custom carbon fibre bike manufacture) also builds a bamboo frame[0]
There's no reason why this shouldn't be roughly comparable, if somewhat heavier. The tubes (mostly) just transmit forces to the joints, which are carbon wrapped.
> $400 for just some tubes, glue, and dropouts,
By comparison, the Calfree bamboo frameset is $2795[1].
I wasn't quite sure if you meant Calfee till I saw your links.
I'm glad you put them in there... I've seen bamboo bikes around SB and Scruz for about 25 years. So I'm not surprised Calfee decided to do one.
I do think it's worth pointing out that the Calfee is built by experienced carbon-fiber layup specialists who do this everyday... they use titanium components and almost certainly impregnate the bamboo to offer the 10yr warranty. And total weight 6-7lbs (frame only) is pretty damn light! So 3k for a reliable one of a kind competition bike vs 0.5k for a kit you build yourself and ride carefully for less than a year. You better enjoy building it.
This may lead to a huge side debate, but for a lot of mechanics, the frame is actually the boring part of a bicycle build. Sure it's the centerpiece. Sure does it plane? But there's already a plethora of other issues one needs to address when assembling a bike that building your own frame seems like a misprioritisation of time for novices.
For example: will all the components of the drivetrain you pieced together actually shift well? Are the cranks going to clear the chainstays? Is the headset too tight? Do the brakes bite at the right moment when one pulls the lever? Why do the brakes squeal? Are the wheels properly tensioned and trued?
These details may not matter the first 30 minutes of riding a new bike. But 3 months from now, whether a bike has issues or not depends on attention to these details.
Most local bike co-ops have enough 80s Japanese frames that are still compatible with easily accessible parts that I don't see a strong proposition for building a bamboo frame other than a design gimmick. Steel frames are generally lighter, won't fail catastrophically, and are arguably more elegant.
But to answer your question, if you'd like to build a bicycle frame, I'd look into a class from any of the following:
I’d rather see numbers on that. My cheapo MTB is sure as hell not light. Depending on how much I have to pay for the materials, bamboo one might be lighter and provide higher quality of ride at the same price point (not counting work).
If I need to pay $1000 for such a bike, I’d say it’s a very generous interpretation of “generally lighter”. As in, 90% of bicycles I encounter on the street on a given day are probably not that.
Just realized where I remember you username from. You gave me a ton of food for thought in a bicycle maintenance thread not that long ago[0]. Thanks, being a newbie up until then I didn’t even know which terms to search for!
I've built up all but one of my bikes from parts, but have never attempted to build a frame. I look for 80s steel frames in decent condition and the right size.
My impression is that frame building is a highly intensive hobby and a labor of love. The frames become practically heirlooms. Some of the bikes are just stunning. There's a fair amount of specialized equipment involved, and brazing / welding are arts unto themselves.
Perhaps (just my guess) a bamboo bike is less intensive since it's basically glued together, to over-simplify. This might make it a much more accessible project.
One of the best places to save money on a bike is to learn to do your own maintenance.
A used frame that is mechanically compatible with new (or at least newer) components, and do most of the assembly yourself, at least for the things that only require specialty wrenches instead of something more complex, like a press. If you can strip an older, better bike to the frame, you can clean it up, patch the chips, and put it back together shiny.
If you can't do all of that, then the assembly costs could be higher than a reasonable frame.
The book "Bike, Scooter, and Chopper Projects for the Evil Genius" by Brad Graham is a pretty fun read around projects for and with bike frames. Loads of pictures too, if you're just interested in the sort of things you could do.
Edit: Fished the book out for the ISBN, 978-0071545266.
In case you plan to move this from hackathon experiment to real product, to me the second letter in the logo splash (first image in the readme) looks like an "l" instead of the "r" that it's supposed to be. So I first read it as "BlightPath" which is probably not desired.
Postgraduate student depression and suicidality is at horrifying proportions. The universities don't care. No one cares. Academia is super fucked and super fucked up, and it just keeps marching onward with blindfold on and fingers in ears, yelling "LA LA LA LA" as loud as possible.
Academic positions are basically gone. Whatever didn't vanish completely after the 2009 recession is definitely gone now. Universities continue to purge full professorship as a possibility and continue to shovel more work for less pay onto adjuncts and graduate students making less than minimum wage. And then they put on a big smile for the kids and say "One day you will be a college professor. Look how nice it is. You should join us." A huge lie. A huge malicious pyramid scheme of a scam. Every program churns out PhDs by the dozens every year. Which academic positions are they going to fill? Which of their advisors are retiring? There aren't any positions. Nobody is retiring.
And if you think that _science_ is bad, try a non-science field. There's lots of machines being built out there in the world. There's not a lot of people these days giving enough shits to pay historians.
I can't think of any other area where it's the _norm_ to need a support group to not quit or kill yourself because a fortress of gold has gaslit you into a deathmarch toward a tiny-fraction-of-a-percent chance of success.
On a personal level, I feel empathy for you and your struggling peers. You should not hate your life that severely, no matter what your line of work is. And it's not right to be lied to by people who should be looking for out for you.
But to be honest - as someone who was born and raised working class and has a perspective colored by that - I can't for the life of me understand why you do this to yourself. Why don't you quit and learn a skill that's actually in demand? Is it just sunk-cost fallacy? Or do you feel that hard work and some degree of intelligence entitles you to a career that's meaningful, respectable, ethical, and well-paid - regardless of it's value and demand as determined by the rest of the world?
It's hard to say, but either your position is more valuable than you're getting paid for - which means you all need to unionize, or it's not actually that valuable and you need to quit. Or maybe it's worth exactly what you're getting paid, because so many others will line up right behind you, and take those terrible odds because they like the environment / self-pride / respectability they get from working in academia.
To play the devil's advocate: We really, truly, desperately need academics. The human race would be very much worse off if there weren't a significant number of people spending their lives on purely intellectual pursuits in the name of curiosity instead of quarterly profits.
The problem is not the role of academics in the world, that's clearly very important.
The problem is the current economic situation of Universities and their relationship to post-docs. It's more akin to a pyramid scheme or a ponzi scheme than a valid career. The music hasn't quite stopped, but it's already fading, and the people that are paying attention are starting to cry foul.
I luckily escaped this death march, but I still keep up with Physics research, and I've noticed that the political structure of modern academia has caused fundamental research to stagnate. Risk is no longer rewarded. The tall poppy is the first to be cut. Small, incremental improvements are rewarded, big theoretical leaps are never approved for funding.
High energy particle physics in particular has completely stalled since the 1970s! Similarly, we still don't quite understand how high-temperature superconductors work. Fusion research has burnt a lot more money than helium. The efforts to marry GR and QM have produced a lot of papers, but no results.
Take a casual stroll through ArXiV, and you'll discover that 99% of the stuff that is published is a total waste of time. It's "diploma mill", "publish or perish" garbage. This means that sifting through the endless torrent of worthless papers for the occasional insightful one would be a full time job all by itself. This alone is sufficient to stall progress!
Scientists are no longer standing on each others' shoulders, they are now trampling each other in a mad scramble for funding and tenure.
I don't deny that the world needs people who can be dedicated to intellectual pursuits - but the stagnation you've described might be further proof that academia itself is the reason the job isn't getting done. There are hundreds of well-regarded universities in the world, many with massive private endowments - if just one of those universities could prove that they are capable of advancing valuable knowledge without falling into that publishing trap - why wouldn't they? All of these institutions claim to have education and knowledge discovery as missions, but all they seem to do is build up barriers in the name of elitism.
The world needs innovators, discoverers, creatives, and engineers - but why is a university structure required for someone to be acknowledged as such? The market's needs certainly can't drive every valuable intellectual discovery - but I don't think they preclude them. Government agencies (NASA, EPA) are also capable of doing research and publishing.
To be clear, I do think academia does serve a valuable role and is a good thing in general. I just think that it's grown too broad in scope - probably because of the massive availability of government grants and competition for those grants.
I did after several years. I, luckily, was in CS and landed on my feet. My partner and many friends did not quit. They, unluckily, were not in CS. So I have the displeasure of seeing it from both ends of the degree and many angles.
> Is it just sunk-cost fallacy?
Some but not all. You have to realize that the entire world is gaslighting kids every day into thinking that the hole-in-one once-in-a-lifetime shot is normal and common. But it isn't. It isn't normal. What's normal is failing to make it after giving 7 years of your life for less than minimum wage because there are 1000 applicants for every hyper-specialized position and almost all of them have more experience than freshly-defended-and-posted you, even if you're coming out of Harvard or Yale. But most people at the bottom never see this until it's too late, because nobody at the top talks about this ever. Worse, people at the top constantly lie about it or dismiss how bad everything is because _they_ made it and don't see what's so bad from where they are. They're all stuck in pre-2009 mindsets before available job postings completely fell off a cliff and never recovered.
To pervert a common expression, psychological warfare is a hell of a drug.
> which means you all need to unionize
This does happen, but, I don't know where you live, culture in the US is extremely hostile to unionization. Hell, the NLRB only decided that graduate students qualified as employees and were thus _allowed_ to unionize in 2016 after more than a decade of saying otherwise.
I'm glad to hear you did get out and did well for yourself. Thanks for explaining it from your perspective. As much as you were personally influenced by the people surrounding you - it was probably the exact same dynamic, but opposite (the people around me taught me was that academia was a debt-trap or a luxury for elites who didn't want to be demeaned by real jobs) and that is likely the source of my bewilderment and even low-grade bias against the field as a whole. I can see how if you are someone who respects academics, and listened to respected academics (who necessarily experienced success) - how that would lead you down a totally different path. Seems similar to what I hear about people who try to get into acting in Hollywood - they always listen to the people who make it.
Feel you about unionizing though. I'm in the southern US, and we don't see a lot success here. Still, I'm an IWW member, and my local hospital just successfully unionized a few months back - so it's something I do truly believe is worth continuing to fight for.
Thanks. It's hard to express how literally almost everyone who enters a PhD program is coming right out of undergrad and is still in many ways a child. There are no good decisions because making good decisions depends on having good insight and information and guidance, and the only people who can give good insight to the next set of children are either in therapy or quit, but the only people who get asked for guidance are the small fraction who made it.
And the entire system depends on funneling more children into the meat grinder so they have the most perverse incentive to just keep lying about everything. Graduate students are used and abused for a huge amount of lecturing, guiding, and grading so that schools don't have to pay for professors, so that they can have more millionaire administrators and football coaches and replace the flowers in the quad every week and other weirdly expensive stupid shit instead of providing basic healthcare or a decent wage for their lecturers. And then people are surprised to hear that the same schools that have grad students doing a ton of the work for peanuts don't have professor positions available at the end.
You raise a lot of good points, but I'd just like to comment on the "I can't for the life of me understand why you do this to yourself" part. I'm a postdoc in astronomy, and my situation is pretty good all things considered. But I think for many people their work becomes their identity, perhaps starting as early as childhood, and leaving is an enormous identity crisis. Going from being "the kid who has always loved space" to working on ad-tech or finance might as well be the same as changing your name, moving to France, and just hitting reset on your life. The "sunk cost" goes much further than just career skills.
The situation is actually very similar to what I've read from folks in game-dev. Almost one-to-one. And like you suggest, these sorts of situations probably all have their root in the supply/demand of labor imbalance from people choosing the career out of passion and being willing to sacrifice on many fronts for the opportunity to do it.
I can relate. I just read this at 3am while trying to stop wondering what to do with my life. I had the childhood dream of being a professor, and after a short stint in industry, when someone gave me the chance to do a PhD I took it. Life got in the way and got my PhD at 36 years old. Nobody guided me, and did not optimize my publication schedule, so it is impossible to land a job in academia. Now I am postdoc 39, non hirable bc I'm old and my cv compares badly to anyone elses. No clue how to provide for my family.
Last month we helped clean the room of a colleague after he "passed away" after 10 years of post doc.
Another colleague got a job at 36 as a bare programmer after a very successful PhD where he wrote books and was invited to conferences. At 40 he rage quit this job after a bout of frustration and we haven't heard from him since.
Luckily they didn't have kids.
Wouldn't I have kids I would definitely follow their path.
I can understand it too - I finished my PhD with 34. In the end, I could have seen it coming: my supervisor had 0 interest in supervising, so it took a huge mental strain on me.
I've also had immense luck - I've been a computer nerd for a very long time and I was programming a lot in my field (neuroscience). So all it took was a word from one guy I knew at a big software company and I was hired. I also have to say, that a PhD, or better said, a Dr. in my country still means something, especially if you have customer contact.
But I've seen things... bright people in their 40s who have to drop out in their 40s to be hired as a labor assistent at pharma. Associate professors who would run out of money and that's the end of the career. Doing a PhD was easily the dumbest and most risky decision of my life and I was extremely lucky to get away with only some mental scars. The only positive things I can think is the friendship with other PhD students (because you went through hell together!) and the confidence in my abitity to process and dissect huge piles of information. In the end, the latter is sole reason companies are willing to give you a shot. Dont undervalue it and sell it accordingly. If you have a PhD you most likely are very persistant and very capable of self-learning.
I'm curious, what advice would you give to a person that is in that position you were when the opportunity of PhD was given? (and have a childhood dream of being a professor)
I met one person at my Master's degree lab who went on to PhD, he said his childhood dream was to be a professor (and his father was a professor). I also have a father that is a professor (and have been very curious about PhD - although that window is getting narrower as I'm getting closer to 30:s) but he have multiple times told me that "it's not worth it", "it's a waste of time, the opportunity cost lost is too high", yet in my field I often see job post that requires a PhD, so I get mixed signals.
Doing a PhD is definitely not the same thing as becoming an academic. If anything, the PhD is a direct career boost: it's a recognised, high-level qualification that is known the world over (and, incidentally, if you go outside the US, you can probably get it done an awful lot quicker...). If you love the subject -- and you have to love the subject -- do it. It's like being paid to play.
Going from PhD to Prof though, is a difficult, unlikely path of awkward postings: for every 100 PhDs expect ~1 successful academic. Oh, and once you are a professor, expect a salary....less than that you'd get in a starting job straight out of your PhD.
Thank you for the reply :) I'll add it to my note of "pros/cons & advice to take in to account before important decision" that I've started to log after my repeated mistakes..!
> I'm curious, what advice would you give to a person that is in that position you were when the opportunity of PhD was given? (and have a childhood dream of being a professor)
Bluntly, if your goal is to become a professor, don't. With 99.99% certainty, you will not become a professor and the opportunity cost is extremely high.
Almost nobody with a PhD who dreams of being a professor ever actually gets to be. Most quit or only ever become adjuncts, and, in the US at least, adjuncts earn less than minimum wage and get zero respect from anyone. Most likely you will be abused by institution after institution who will keep telling you how important your dream is while stringing you along and paying you next to nothing. Or you will quit. Or you will have a mental breakdown.
If you can see yourself being happy doing literally anything else, do literally anything else. If you can't see yourself being happy doing literally anything else, spend some more time thinking about it.
If you're independently wealthy and don't really need to succeed at the goal to live a happy life of luxury, then definitely go for it.
>Another colleague got a job at 36 as a bare programmer after a very successful PhD where he wrote books and was invited to conferences.
I can relate, as this basically describes me - though I've been lucky enough to find bare programing jobs that I quite like doing.
One of the toughest things about leaving academia is discovering that (i) no-one who doesn't have a PhD has any clue what a PhD is and (ii) everyone who has a PhD has a healthy disregard for the intellectual capacities of their fellow doctors.
>I can't think of any other area where it's the _norm_ to need a support group to not quit or kill yourself because a fortress of gold has gaslit you into a deathmarch toward a tiny-fraction-of-a-percent chance of success.
I can think of plenty: Musics, Arts, Game development, (in some area) startups, "No college-degree nor drive & mid 30:s as cashier hoping for the middle-class life" people.
Academia is just like arts/musics: You only see the final result, and often from the top people; You won't see the struggling low/middle in their fields, largely being ignored in both their result & struggle.
I can easily agree with part of what you are saying, but the fatalistic exaggerated tone of your claims makes it rather hard to start a constructive discussion and definitely does not prompt people to discuss how things can improve.
> definitely does not prompt people to discuss how things can improve
One problem is there is plenty of discussion and no action to address the problems of the parent comment.
It's difficult to understand what action is possible, since the people holding the power to change the system are highly motivated to keep it as it is. But of course, we can discuss this all day.
In a tournament increasing funding will increase the number of winners but suffering will increase further if the greater number of winners leads to more entrants. Academia is a tournament. Most people who get a Ph.D. are aiming at a professorship and they’re not going to get it. They’re not going to get it after sourcing six years of their life, perhaps twelve or fourteen single mindedly chasing that goal. If you increase funding for a brief period there will be more spots but competition will re-emerge quickly. Things aren’t going to improve. The only people with the power to change anything are those who won under the current system. They have no motivation to change it so they won’t.
If you're a hobby scientist who happens to have money and goes off in an attempted to create something that would truly advance our technological understanding of the world/generally make the world a better place with whatever you're making - you'll probably be arrested by the FBI long before you ever get to succeed.
This is a bad thing. If science is to be seen as simply a hobby by the coming generations, the world as we know it is truly doomed to complete stagnation.
> I can't think of any other area where it's the _norm_ to need a support group to not quit or kill yourself because a fortress of gold has gaslit you into a deathmarch toward a tiny-fraction-of-a-percent chance of success.
> is it not more effective altruism for those like Bezos and Scott to keep their wealth compounding as effectively as possible, and then donate it much later on, perhaps in a few decades?
You can donate stock. Or, if desired, the charity can convert your cash back into stock. Or you can transfer the stock into a trust that the charity controls.
That's true, but a charity doesn't (usually) actually use the stock - they would sell it to spend it when they needed the money, and I think (perhaps I'm not correct here since I don't have data) they generally sell equities instantly post-donation, with the main purpose of donating stock instead of cash being for personal tax purposes.
Many charities keep their resources in investment structures. These are often called endowments.
> a charity doesn't (usually) actually use the stock - they would sell it to spend it when they needed the money
It sounds like that means that withholding the money in order to make it grow better wouldn't actually help them then because then they wouldn't be able to spend it when needed.
> If Apple makes a 12" MacBook with a M1, it would be awesome.
I wish Apple would make everything" MacBooks with M1. I hate that I have to wait another year or whatever for a 15/16" screen and will have to pay a measurable weight penalty to get it when nothing stops them from making a 15" ultralight model now that they don't need fans for stunning performance.
But most people don't need or even care about those things. Making the MB or Air body bigger (not thicker) and just increasing screen, battery, and heatsink size proportionally while keeping it fanless would knock everything else out today for like 99% of people.
But I really don't understand the meaning/value of most of the shown descriptions. (I see that the creator is not from an English-speaking country, which may explain also why the grammar is clumsy and none of the final sentences end in punctuation and some of the final sentences aren't sentences.)
> "pprint(): You ask a wizard to transform a heavy encyclopedia to a creature that will look lovely. He changes it into a sheep"
Why a creature? Why a sheep? What qualities do sheep have that encyclopedias don't? Is pprint wooly? Does it bleat?
> "tuple(): A creature and a ghost. One of numerous tuples you can create with this function"
Why a creature? Why a ghost? What does it even mean to call tuple a creature and a ghost? And this is self referential in a completely opaque way. If I don't yet understand "tuple", how am I to understand "tuple"?
> "set(): You threw all unique items into a chest you have found. Soon it became cluttered and unordered."
Describing a set as "cluttered" (as opposed to granting immediate membership evaluation) and saying that you only put unique items in (as opposed to the set removing duplicates for you) IMO completely obscures the entire definition and purpose of sets.
Maybe the game's instructions would clarify a lot, but looking just at the cards themselves as a person who has been programming in and also teaching Python for 15 years now, my primary reaction to "STJ: Python will help you learn to program" is "I don't think so. I actually think this might hurt."
You are overthinking it. You don't design fantasy cards with art to make sure all the technical details are right. You design them for fun and to make sure that the intuitive ideas and recall of all the python std functionalities remain at the tip of the tongue.
They cost 50$. The least they should do is teach me a certain amount of Python. Calling a tuple a "creature and a ghost" doesn't tell me what a tuple is.
Why not "drill recall" by actually using the language, for example doing advent of code puzzles? This is a lot of money just to have simple functions printed on playing cards.
You may be under thinking it. You still want to capture the essence of the function / keyword in order to build the intuitive understanding and make linkages that help the reader remember.
Ex: One good thing about the tuple example is that it sort of highlights that we can have mixed types. The bad thing is that it doesn't do much else..
Well the first use case on the website is for someone who is 'looking to become a programmer', so it doesn't sound like the goal is simply for someone to recall their own knowledge of the standard python language.
Actually I was talking with several coding educators and they all agree it is great help to learn how to code. Many of them actually buy decks for their students.
But I agree the page description can be better at explaining the value.
Also you are right there were some language issues that are now solved because the deck was double checked and corrected by english native proofread and educator.
I think it’s much easier to be a high paid technologist than it is to be a high paying model. Both are difficult, no doubt, but there are vastly, if not infinitely many more models who are barely scraping by earning almost nothing.
I knew of one “talent” agency that was trying to get early on the Instagram model phase who had employed no fewer than 100 absolutely stunning girls who each were barely averaging a couple thousand followers. At least as a no name at FAANG I would have a cushy salary.
what would they have to do in addition? Maybe: have good business skills, networking skills, be independent, be in the right position to spot the right opportunities at the right time?
You’d be surprised how much work goes into operating with that many subscribers. Top funnel, attrition, constant harassment, stolen content, fan requests, just to name some obvious ones.
> I have a pair of Audio Technica A700s, about $150 new that are now 12 years old; I'm on my 3rd set of earpads.
So you buy a new set of earpads on those every 4 years. But we can also compare with the same-market-segment-as-AirPod-Max (wireless+ANC+mic) Bose QC35, where many people have to replace their earpads _every_ _year_⁰ at $35 a pair (or $20 for third party ones that might last longer but definitely feel worse). So the question I think will be how long the pads last on these. Do you have to replace them every year like with the Bose ones or only every 4 years?
⁰ - QC35 ear pad extreme comfort but lack of durability is basically a meme among owners now.
$400 for just some tubes, glue, and dropouts, plus another $800-$2500 for the other parts needed to turn the frame into an actual bicycle, plus however much you value several days of labor, and then from their FAQ...
> How long will a bamboo bike frame last? It’s difficult to say. If you care for your bike as you would for a musical instrument...
Care for your bike like a musical instrument?! They can't be serious. That instrument had better be a steel triangle.
> Are Bamboo Bicycles strong enough? Absolutely! Over the hundreds of bamboo bikes built, they have travelled thousands of miles
Is that 10 miles each? That's not very reassuring.
> If you crash, won’t you get splinters? Likely, yes
Oh fun.