Yeah LiveJournal (my username there is lightfixer) really came close to replicating how we actually social. Deciding who is able to see what I posted on an individual level was great. Could create groups etc.
Dreamweaver or some other real WYSISYG web page editor that could maybe deal with very basic JavaScript.
I just wanna make a mostly static site with links in and out of my domain. Maybe a light bit of interactivity for things like search that autocompletes.
I still have my 2013 11.6” i7 and once I replace the battery and hinges (threw it across bed while open too many times) it’ll be good for another 10 years.
The original “MacBook” 12” retina could have been wonderful aside from the extremely poor performance, keyboard, and single USB, and battery life. Most of which Apple Silicon/lack of Jony Ive would fix.
I don’t know why, but for me about 1kg feels negligible for a laptop I carry constantly, where 1.5kg feels heavy.
You get used to a certain weight and then a larger weight feels much larger. I remember having a 12-pound cat and thinking it was very comfortable to hold her (in my lap, not walking around). Then I had a 9-pound baby and held her a lot, and suddenly a 12-pound cat felt very heavy.
(The cat lost a bunch of weight and died, and that 9-pound baby is 50-something pounds now.)
My last company _refused_ to buy me an air (what I use personally) and instead insisted on sending me their "standard" specced out 16" MBP and I _hate_ it. Flying with that thing to the offsite felt like I was smuggling a cinderblock through security.
Absolutely the same problem here. The 16" is portable, but it is not a laptop made for travel. It's to big and to heavy. You can't use it on a plane, you can't even really use it as a laptop, it needs to be supported by a table.
Traveling with that thing in my backpack is a nightmare.
> The original “MacBook” 12” retina could have been wonderful aside from the extremely poor performance, keyboard, and single USB, and battery life
“Other than that, how was the play Mrs. Lincoln”
> I still have my 2013 11.6” i7 and once I replace the battery and hinges (threw it across bed while open too many times) it’ll be good for another 10 years.
I doubt you would feel the same way if you had a M series MacBook Air.
While I don't have a 2013 Mac anymore, I do have both an M3 MacBook Pro, and a Ryzen 5 Lenovo for development work with different clients and I really don't find the Mac that much faster in day to day usage.
Sure in benchmarks it gets bigger numbers, but in normal usage it's negligible. That's probably more due to MacOS getting less efficient than anything else though.
It’s not about raw speed. If you want raw speed, you will be better off getting an x86 desktop or laptop. Except of course where the unified memory/GPU comes into play where an M1 Mac will win.
The benefit of the Mx Macs are the combination of speed, quietness, battery life and lack of heat.
> The benefit of the Mx Macs are the combination of speed
Which I've stated is generally not that obvious to me. My compiling, and running of tests isn't massively different between machines.
> quietness... and lack of heat.
I can't think of a laptop I've had except the 2019 MacBook Pros that were so noisy and unnecessarily hot. It is a marked improvement over that, but that was a particularly low point in laptops.
> battery life
I'm sure it's really important for some folks to get more than 8 hours battery, and there's always someone here talking up their productive 15 hours flights, but I honestly don't get that much advantage from it, or have met someone who has. Definitely not enough to warrant more than £200 over the Thinkpad.
Unnecessarily hot? All x86 laptops are some combination of unnecessarily hot, underpowered or loud because of fan noise. It’s just the nature of x86 and a trade off you have to make
And you have never met anyone that thinks battery life is a big deal for a portable battery powered device?
They're very similar, but handling both together my old 2016 12" is just slightly smaller and lighter in a way that is really appealing compared to my 2020 13" M1 Air. It's 350g lighter, which makes more of a difference than I would have guessed when throwing it in a bag.
(Oops saw other comment linked, but I’ll leave this comment in case summary is helpful)
Check out the SO100 arm, being supported by Huggingface and others. Only 4 axis, but cheap AF (<$250/arm) and using ML to make it more capable than 4 axis would seem. Also using identical arms for mirror teleportation/training.
4 is still though fundamentally limited: you need a minimum six DOF to position all three translational and rotational freedoms. The human arm has 7, and I think a case can be made the smart software would reduce the problems from having only exactly as many as required. ... but not eliminate: the extra degree of freedom lets you "get out of your own way" when moving objects that are not zero size trough multiple positions :)
Perhaps 4 is enough for any specific application, but then again perhaps 3 is or 2. :P
I've never programmed a robot arm, but I've spent a fair amount of time using a seven axis faro arm (a coordinate measuring device, sort of the opposite of a robot arm) and it certainly takes some practice to avoid "cant move there from here without reorienting everything", it's easy to take for granted what our brains do automatically for us. :)
The point is that you can achieve a lot without being able to access every position and the human arm having a lot of degrees of freedom doesn't necessarily mean it's more capable than a different arm with fewer.
Sure but why not, say, an XYZ or XYZT gantry instead?
There are a lot of downsides in 'arms' -- stacking all the axis hurts their speed, stiffnes, accuracy, increase complexity (e.g. in pathing, limiting speed, restricting to safe areas), limited reach.
I've always thought of them primarily as beneficial for flexibility at considerable cost, but if it's not 6dof then the flexibility isn't so great, then why not some other geometry?
in simpler term: an object has position and rotation, and we're in 3D, so we need minimum 6 linearly independent parameters to be able to both point at a direction and be at a location at the same time.
Drone and helicopters has 4, and they are able to control max 4 of 6 parameters. Usually 3 positional + 1 rotational, and the rotatinal axis go first.
It uses cheap hobby servos which is, to put it mildly, not the same as steppers. You will never get 0.2mm precision with them. They will were out quickly and even quicker under load.
BTW, looks like it doesn't have closed loop control. "0.2mm repetability" (should be repeAtability) is only 'under certain conditions', no load.
You'd be surprised what you can do with servos modified with encoders, setup with an industrial grade cascading control loop. First demo video below demonstrates threading a mechanical pencil lead in and out through the writing tip. Second video demonstrates a 187gram weight at the end of a 470mm long rod. Third video shows that the modification is now a quick fitting of some 3D printed parts to the servo motor axle and servo housing.
It has closed loop control, these [0] are a bit more proper serial servos with digital absolute magnetic encoders. Each one can be sent positional, velocity and even acceleration targets. I doubt anyone is looking for 0.2mm precision for $300 total. Or even 1mm precision.
The PAROL6 BOM doesn't provide any cost estimate, but it looks quite a bit more expensive.
I really never understood why hobby servos are so shitty. Their protocol uses only a very narrow range of PWM values and not the full 0-100% scale and that alone completely wrecks their precision beyond what their motors can achieve.
Also they do measure position to achieve their feedback, might as well just output that on a 4th wire.
It's because the default "analog output" PWM mode of a microcontroller will only give a rough approximation of the signal that the servo actually requires. For a servo, the duty cycle is (almost) irrelevant, the 0-100% scale has no meaning here. What matters is the actual length of the control pulses in milliseconds - the gaps between them can be arbitrarily long within a certain range.
If you think about it, it actually makes a tiny bit of sense. First, it is failsafe: Breaking the control line or shorting it to ground will not move the servo to 0%, shorting it to signal level will not move it to 100% - it just doesn't move at all and stops applying force. Any sentient being within the movement range will definitely prefer it that way instead of random movements. Second, it can actually be pretty precise: The driver circuit can be completely analog, it doesn't have to be limited by arbitrary digital quantization steps. All it needs to do is check if the current encoder value is above or below the target and apply power to the motor accordingly.
They've been around for a really long time. I suspect that back in the analog radio days of yore, the control pulses transmitted by your Futaba were recieved as a pulse train - 6 channel radio, six pulses and a big enough gap between frames to reset the index. At the RX all you have to do is feed those pulses through to successive servos one after the other, which is easy and cheap to do with basic logic ICs.
So when you use hobby servos for robots, you're taking a low precision actuator meant to make a flap or throttle or other control surface go relatively up, down, in, or out, that was designed in like, the 70s, and asking it to do modern robotics stuff
My guess would be they use variable resistors for encoders. I haven't done servos for a while, but the industrial stuff all used optical encoders with Gray code patterns.
There are bit more expensive servos with proper encoding. The thing is hobby airplanes don't need high precision as pilot controls looking at the whole plane movement. Now that hobby is killed by regulations. Robotics is coming..
Also Meshtastic.org is a cheap (various <$50 options) open source LoRa based hardware bridge (or standalone device) that can be used with an app over bluetooth (or WiFi web interface).
It supports strong encryption layer and over 1 km/mile per “hop” in most circumstances.
Designed originally for off grid, it’s very flexible and pretty polished.
Abstracts your phone into a UI. Has a whole ecosystem behind it. I’ve been using it for festivals and tracking my vehicles (high theft area) for years.
Very handy should infra not be available. Should be great for protests also :)
I spend a lot of time in the RF space and Meshtastic is by far the most mature system out there for instant ad-hoc secure digital communications.
However...
The first rule of emergency communications is that if you can conceive of the need in the future, you need to practice using it now. Getting people to download the meshtastic app or figuring out a weird setting is a lot easier when you have working uncensored internet.
This would depend on your phone being able to permanently disable its radio, right? I don't know if I would trust my phone well enough for that, I would be worried even in airplane mode about it making some small beacon checks.
There are a few devices floating around with a hardware switch built in. If you use a Pixel, grapheme OS is probably pretty trustworthy so you at least no there's nothing nefarious down to the OS level.
But yeah, in general if you take a phone just assume it's tracking you or at least making it possible for those with access to know you where there.
Do you have any information about the privacy achievable by Meshtastic?
From a quick glance it looks like it‘s using static NodeIDs derived from the Bluetooth MAC address in the always unencrypted Packet Header.
So not only can you sniff these messages from far away at greatly simplified complexity when comparing to cellular communication, but also tie it to the hardware that you carry with you.
Mesh networks sure have its uses, but I‘d be wary of their offered privacy in the presence of adversaries you could be facing at protests!
For the next few years it's fine. Functionally the feds just don't have the infrastructure to care about Meshtastic. In a decade maybe that'll change but two decades in the best they can do against drones is receive the ID DJI manufactured ones voluntarily broadcast and lookup the owner if they registered it correctly.
They're far dumber than most people give them credit, unless you off a rich guy they just don't have the resources to even think about penetrating anything but cell networks.
The encryption is pretty good, they're not likely to break it any time soon. The device MACs are whatever, unless you go to protests then go wandering around an urban area with the same radios for an extended period of time they're not going to do shit about it. They would have to geolocate from the RF emission and that's difficult to do to an accuracy necessary to uniquely identify you. Further, LoRa is still a bit of a pain to work with outside of using vendor chips which don't have non-cooperative DF capability so we're in the realm of expensive custom solutions from an RF shop which is far more money than the feds are willing to spend to dragnet a couple people.
how have you been able to use it at festivals? I tried it once and maybe the default settings are terrible but no communication could be achieved. There were dozens of other nodes that it found in a tight space and I think the entire network was saturated with pings/messages that I couldn't get mine to work. Are there settings to change that get around network saturation issues?
If you just want to talk to a few friends, don't bother with the default public mesh config, setup your own with encryption enabled.
Don't use longfast, use a higher speed setting if possible. Longfast will go 10km+ in optimal conditions and in a city environment, won't go any further than medfast.
Don't use the default radio channel, pick another one.
MAKE SURE ALL SYSTEMS ARE CONFIGURED IDENTICALLY - meshtastic is picky about all the radio settings being the same for bits to go through. It cannot figure out that the sender is using a faster/slower bitrate than you are so you will just get nothing. Do not attempt to use them until you've verified that all systems reliably send and receive messages in an uncontested environment. It's very easy to misconfigure meshtastic but once you do, fixing it in the field is going to be very difficult.
That's interesting! Training a stable diffusion model seems relatively easy! [1] (implementing a stable diffusion model from scratch or even understanding how it works seems like the difficult part :-).
Post the 9/11 PATRIOT act (etc) led to dilution of America’s ideals in various ways, IMHO. I felt like we were in the middle of it. I wanted to call attention to how ridiculous it was - since the attention ended up on me and my friend. Zebbler was in the USA on political asylum at the time and it was made clear he’d be kicked out if we made any more noise after this.
When Family Guy s21e11 (2023) parodies Sleepless in Seattle (1993), they make a point of mocking the fact that a kid left his backpack behind at the Empire State building, as if an unattended bag in a public area is an unthinkable idea.
The show is usually pretty self-aware when it comes to jokes about terrorism and post-911 hysteria, so it was surprising to see this one played straight.
It reminded me of the meme that went around in 2007 - "If it isn't an American flag, it's probably a bomb".
I worked at Disneyland in September 2001 and we received instructions at some point warning us the FBI considered us to be the 4th most likely location in the United States to be targeted and telling us to report unattended bags as possible bombs.
Left me wondering do they have any idea how many people every day set down a bag and forget about it at Disneyland? If we really cordoned and reported all of these, the Anaheim PD and local FBI would never again do anything else.
I am at least very proud of our improv dealing with the press at least! Especially as I don’t think either of us slept particularly well the night before in holding cells.
