Oh geez. I had some USB OTG prototypes of a device like this in 2019 over a Pi zero but nobody cared so I abandoned it. I even used mine in the field. Worked over LTE.
So disappointing. Ewasted it during Covid. And now... Looks like it's a hot field.
I've fantasized about fax phone banks for artists to send things out periodically.
The idea of a machine unexpectedly popping out a sheet of paper has gone from "this is all spam" to delightful again.
Physical items in a physical space whereby you call a place and not a person.
We've digitally moved from spaces to individuals and I think that's the main critique of the modern web: somehow networked ourselves but abandoned the networking of ourselves.
You could even do it all digitally somehow and just hook it up to a modern network printer. Whitelisted senders get printed while unrecognized ones enter a digital backlog.
The real desire is to explore the psuedo anonymous nature of the early web in a way that is robust to abuse.
I think the key point that would make this delightful is the whitelist. Lord knows the moment its opened up it'll be spammed with the worst things bored teenagers can find.
On the one hand, I don't understand: a reliable EV costing only a few months of the median US income would be world-changing. On the other hand, I do: high-margin EVs like the Cybertruck are an easier way for car companies to make money in the next quarter. Why would you ever sell a vehicle that the people building it could afford, when the margins are so low?
The wealthy are buying larger more expensive vehicles. The poorer are either holding onto their existing cars (the average age of an American car went up from 11 years to 12 years or so) or buying the used larger ones from the wealthy.
> If they sold well in the US, they would bring in more of them. But they don't.
The auto industry would rather use its limited assembly line capacity for the highest margin products, which are large luxury internal combustion vehicles.
We have long been in the era of lean manufacturing, where assets like factories are hyper-optimized for returns to capital, not for making products to serve all needs or desires. Why lower your gross margins by investing in more factory capacity to make affordable cars? You'd rather put your capital into the Mag-7 to get a higher rate of return.
It also makes sense because with growing inequality in the US, the well-off (or the financially irresponsible) are the only people who buy new cars anyways, so the manufacturers make cars for them.
This is also a big part of the reason they make EVs (which are disproportionately higher end or luxury): because they know that EV buyers are likely to be more well off. The environmental benefits are secondary, and the auto industry has never cared much about lowering TCO or energy costs (those things benefit the EV driver, not the car manufacturer).
People talking about lean manufacturing never seem to mention the outsourced risk involved. That ‘wasted’ inventory that you have laying around is actually insurance against supply chain shocks. And outsourcing manufacturing of critical components creates uncontrolled existential risks for your business.
> saying bad things about our lord and savior lean manufacturing.
I'm not saying it's good or bad, it just is, and car companies don't exist to make affordable new products for everyone. "Obese" manufacturing won't result in more affordable cars either, not while housing, education and healthcare continue to eat away at Americans' stagnant income growth.
If affordable transportation is the goal, we probably need to get past personal car ownership.
This is the argument everyone was making for small trucks until Ford brought in the Maverick and demand was so high they couldn't keep them on lots. When they bring is right sized vehicles thay don't suck, we but them.
In the 1970s Detroit thought the Honda Civic was a joke as well. How could it ever compete against the Pontiac Astre or the Buick Skyhawk they thought...
It couldn't compete. Those cars were shit, just like the Chevettes they were competing against. It was all shit. All of it. The imports were typically slightly more expensive to boot.
They sold well because you could get a Civic or whatever with a nice radio and they had a bunch of them on the lot in automatic and all the other things buyers cared about beyond just A to B because for the Japanese automakers shit was serious business and so they built their shit with some give-a-fucks included whereas to the Americans shit was a sideshow and they phoned it in and it was like pulling teeth to get a well optioned domestic that wasn't hobbled by the lack of some key feature or ergonomics issue.
None of these were cars people wanted to be driving. The market for big nice fuel hogs shrunk and the market for compacts rose in it's place and the Japanese were very well positioned to put their ass in that seat when the music stopped.
That's not the point. It was that the market hypothesis of supply simply responding to demand doesn't actually hold.
People sell things based on their perception of future consumer sentiments, calculated margins, defensible moats, lots of things.
If someone wanted a compact sedan but the only thing for sale was SUVs, they aren't going to be like "I refuse! Bus pass for me" no. They will just bite the bullet and purchase the SUV.
Then the analysis will say "well people are buying the SUV! It looks very popular we should make more of them! I told you sedans were a bad idea!"
The supply and demand economics 101 ways of thinking are for fools and simpletons. It's why the iPhone wasn't a BlackBerry knockoff
Kind of. For a number of complex reasons SUVs are cheaper than sedans. I know with more stuff you think that would be more cost but things are complicated.
I mean look at Hyundai's ev line up. I drive a kona because it's the cheapest. The next most expensive car is the 5 and then their most expensive (up until recently) was also their smallest! The 6.
It's like twice the price and at the end of the day I just wanted to drive electric so I got the cheaper one.
But if the ioniq 2 had a US release I'd be on top of that real quick
Ok, this comment obviously touched a nerve, but as a non-USian I don't quite understand why. You can pick up a new Kia Forte for $20k. I was about to suggest the even smaller Kia Soul, but it was discontinued because, drum roll, it didn't sell well enough.
huh I guess abstractions can lead to a break in consensus. You sound as confident as I feel on the matter but we're at different places.
Maybe that's all that "good design" is ... surely there's other systems and architectures where we can confidently reach the same conclusion independently.
For instance, here, I thought we have a well-done separation of concerns that is a bit exotic and people refuse to understand it.
However, as I explored how I disagreed with you, I realized that there's obviously messy concepts that I map differently than you do. So in truth we have an ambiguous design! I'll have to think about this some more.
Maybe usability issues arise not from tools that are "difficult" to use but tools that don't afford a clear mental model on their fit and purpose.
That's right, MVC is a very simplified model that's actually quite useless in practice. The reality, is as you have reflected, is messy with cross-cutting concerns, and it's often the case that it's not easy or obvious where the lines are drawn.
there's design principles behind css js and html and people don't bother to learn them and instead want to shoehorn what they know into these languages. Take the time and actually learn the elegance of these underlying languages and use them properly.
I don't know why people continue to refuse to do this.
The biblical antichrist/world government thing has been linked to so many things. People were against the UN in the 1940/50s because they thought it was part of the apocalypse and anti-christ.
I quoth Common Sense 1952-04-01:
"The United Nations, which had its birth in the San Francisco conference—set up by a group of which Alger Hiss was secretary, is no doubt a forerunner of the coming “one world” dictatorship by “one man”—the anti-Christ The UN has ruled out Christ entirely and its headquarters are a convenient spy nest for the Reds."
This is just the same fanatical brainmelt that imagines wild conspiracies in every generation. Before the UN it was The League of Nations (Which the US didn't join) and before that "catholic imperialism".
Just because Theil has money doesn't mean we should take him seriously. The same nonsense just gets re-contextualized for every generation.
"Jesus' second-coming in your lifetime!" I mean true believers don't want to think they're going to miss out I guess...
The concept of the Antichrist and the cryptic symbolism in the Book of Revelations seem to be true cognitohazards. The Mark of the Beast has been attributed to everything from social security numbers to license plates to RFID chips. Republicans said Obama was the Antichrist because of his charisma. When I was younger, and a churchgoer, I was taught that the locusts in the Book of Revelations were really Apache helicopters, and this was evidence of the Bible's prophetic truth.
And chances are the whole thing was a coded rant about Nero Caesar meant to be read within a specific cultural context that no longer exists. But I guess that isn't as satisfying as numerology and cryptograms and Satanic supervillains and the promise that the future can be known if only you're clever enough.
There have been many attempts to create a one-world tyranny: Nero's empire, the Inquisition, Hitler's reich, Stalin's communism and so on. All of those tyrants were antichrist wannabes: they wanted to live and rule forever. However none of them understood that they were too small for the role, and that they didn't have the means to keep the entire planet under control, even if they conquered it once. Many of the dictators today want the role too, and they all believe it's almost within their reach: all it takes is to create AI first, use it to strengthen their body with technology so others cannot slay them, remove competitors and rule forever. This idea is certainly in the air, and once this idea captures the mind of some powerful man, we get another antichrist wannabe. Whether it will come true is another question. Hitler had elaborate plans too, but his empire fell apart in a few years.
VibeVoice (according to the repo description) is currently unavailable due to "misuse". But my impression was that it required a significant (>8GB) amount of VRAM? Or that it wasn't suitable for on-device for devices with low specs.
According to this issue[0] the 1.5B model needs 6GB of VRAM. Meanwhile it looks like NeuTTS is designed to be able to run on CPU, which is nice for older/lower-spec hardware.
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