@SirEDCaLot@lemmy.today

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• You don’t even need separate controls. Just have the compressor and temperature controlled by a simple microcontroller which gets commands from the touch screen. Thus if the touch screen crashes the microcontroller keeps the food cold.

  That of course requires adding a microcontroller rather than just putting a couple of relays attached to the touch screen…

  on Owners mourn spoiled food after firmware update bricks Samsung smart fridges in c/technology@lemmy.world · 14h ago

• Yes of course, but if the spacing is too much then stuff like this starts to happen.

  agreed

  If the knockoff is $200 and the same-spec legitimate Pi with warranty is $200, the knockoff won’t be around for long.

  Supply and demand aren’t a black and white thing, it’s a sliding scalre.

  More likely the knockoff will be $180 and comes with a knockoff warranty- we make it for $40 incl. parts and labor and sell it for $180, so if it breaks we’ll just send you a new one and we’re still ahead financially.

  What if the knockoff isn’t $180 but is $80? Under that condition who would buy the $200 one? If the thing sucks you could literally buy a spare and still be ahead.

  on Raspberry Pi is intentionally blocking RAM capacity upgrades in c/technology@lemmy.world · 16h ago

• In concept nothing. But do you also recognize a legitimate business model of selling multiple products at different price points, spaced out more than the different cost of production?

  And speaking hypothetically with some stupid numbers is it your argument that they should be able to purchase the $20 product, add $10 of parts, and either use it or sell it as the $200 product?

  on Raspberry Pi is intentionally blocking RAM capacity upgrades in c/technology@lemmy.world · 2d ago

• This makes sense. Hear me out.

  1. A CM5 is a device designed to be embedded into other devices. I believe most of their sales come from just that- companies that make other things, and build a CM5 into them rather than design their own control board.

  2. As you go up through the model tiers, the price increases faster than the added price of memory. IE, if the 2gb one is $20, and the difference between a 2gb memory chip and an 8gb memory chip is $10, the 8gb unit isn’t $30 it’s $60. You pay RPi a premium for the high end products.

  3. Desoldering RAM off a production PCB is something no hobbyist is going to bother with. BUT, a company buying 10,000 of these to build into their product MIGHT find it cost effective to setup a production line to do so. And they could probably resell the 2gb chips.

  Point being- while I don’t like this, and I don’t like the ideas it represents, I also understand why they are doing it. It’s not about us, the hobbyists. It’s about the manufacturers that build compute modules into their products.

  on Raspberry Pi is intentionally blocking RAM capacity upgrades in c/technology@lemmy.world · 2d ago

• There’s probably a generic, dedicated chipset or board that does just this available for OEM purchase that they just wire into whatever they’re building.

  Yup. It’s called an Espressif ESP8266, and it’s spawned a bunch of variants including the more powerful ESP32. It’s a little microcontroller on a circuit board with an antenna on the board, cost about $1-$2 in quantity, out of the box it speaks WiFi and most variants now have Bluetooth also. It’s got enough intelligence on board to run a simple IoT gadget, and if you want more it’ll act as the communication module for your larger system board. And since it’s got all the RF approvals (FCC, CE, etc) already done, it means you can add RF communication to your product without expensive RF certification.
  In fact, use an external low voltage power supply (which comes with its own certification), and pretty much the only regulatory testing you need to do is to prove it won’t spontaneously catch fire.

  Anyway there’s over a dozen variants of ESP-family chips and boards with various capabilities. Here’s an example. Or that same example mounted on a breakout development board. See the pinout here- this little module is a proverbial tub of Legos with TONS of capability to unlock.

  Then throw in some cloud platforms like Tuya that will handle most of the cloudiness so all the developer needs to do is write an app and sell products.

  on Smart devices can testify against you: How home robot data is being used in court in c/technology@lemmy.world · 3d ago

• They work fucking fantastic, until they don’t.

  on The Wirule in c/onehundredninetysix@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 12 Sep 2026

• If you have more than 3 brain cells to rub together maybe. But that requires recognition of the knowledge chain challenge -> experience -> learning -> knowledge. Hell even the last two (learning -> knowledge) seems beyond a lot of people.

  Personally I blame our educational system. It does a shit job of teaching people to learn. It does a great job of teaching people that learning isn’t fun and should be avoided.
  Combine that with ‘stranger danger’ and helicopter parenting keeping kids indoors and keeping them from unstructured unsupervised activities that lead to organic learning through experience, and you get 18yo’s graduating high school with virtually all of their learning being in school settings and virtually none of it fun. So they do it when necessary or when they don’t realize they’re doing it, and otherwise avoid it. It’s really sad.

  I got lucky or maybe I just had really good parents. But somewhere along the line I figured out that learning could be a ton of fun if it’s on a subject you’re interested in and if the instruction matches your learning style. So I taught myself all kinds of shit, usually by diving face first into projects I had no idea how to finish and by the time I was done I was good at it.
  Like in the early days of VoIP- ‘I’m bored so let’s download some sketchy open source bullshit and route all my phone calls through a random free provider in Washington State. Oh it only runs on Linux? Guess I gotta figure out how to make Linux work then.’ Add a bunch of evenings and weekends of fucking around and without realizing it I’ve now got a marketable skill. And that ‘sketchy open source bullshit’ became Asterisk, one of the most common open source PBX systems around today.

  Thing is- if Claude had been around, and I used it, I’d just have said ‘Claude, I need to install CentOS linux, download the latest snapshot of Asterisk out of SVN, compile it, and set up an IP PBX. Write me a script’.
  It’d think for 30 seconds and then give me the entire answer. And I’d learn fucking nothing other than how to copy and paste from Claude.

  It’s like all the companies that are firing their junior engineers in favor of AI… they are shooting themselves in the foot. Where you do think senior engineers come from? Do you think they hatch from eggs, fully trained and experienced and ready for a technical leadership position? No you moron they start as interns or junior engineers and they gain knowledge through experience. Get rid of the junior engineers and wait a generation or two and there will be no senior engineers to direct Claude.

  on The Wirule in c/onehundredninetysix@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 12 Sep 2026

• Depends on the situation. Not every place to live is walkable, or should be.

  Past a certain level of population density- ABSOLUTELY. EVERYTHING should be designed with walkability in mind.

  Below that though, cars can often make more sense. If you live in a suburb, there’s too much distance to walk usually, and too few people on any given route to justify regular mass transit.

  Personally I’m a real big fan of ‘third mode’ transportation- bikes, scooters, powered skateboards, hoverboards, segways, etc. Things that go faster than walking, slower than cars, and (crucially) take up almost no pavement space. Get enough people on those and things can get better fast.

  on The Wirule in c/onehundredninetysix@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 12 Sep 2026

• I’ve had this exact conversation in real life.

  I do IT work. Someone who was a heavy AI user asked me ‘how was I integrating AI into my workflow’ as if it was a foregone conclusion that I AM integrating AI. I told him I wasn’t, that AI may be useful for finding answers to some things or photoshopping funny pictures but most of what I do is intellectual, specific to certain situations and requirements, which AI generally doesn’t understand. That I can’t risk AI making actual changes to my environments, so if I let AI write a plan and then I proof it myself and then do it, it’s easier just to do the work myself. So that leaves the only thing AI could do for me is writing, and I’m good at writing, so I overall have little or no use for AI.

  Dude looked at me like I was an alien. Like he legitimately could not understand why an intelligent person would voluntarily reject AI. Like I said I rejected cars and I ride a horse to work. Does not compute. Here’s this supposedly smart person who knows more about tech than the next 2-3 people in the office combined, and this person is completely rejecting the holy grail.

  on The Wirule in c/onehundredninetysix@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 11 Sep 2026

• Honestly she should sue for malicious prosecution. She was driving the vehicle legally with insurance, she proved that to the officer by showing her paperwork, and then, knowing that she had insurance and the complaint was baseless, the officer wrote the ticket anyway.

  This should be an open and shut case.

  on Flock Camera Tells Cop New Car Didn’t Have Insurance When It Did, Cop Writes Ticket Anyway in c/technology@lemmy.world · 11 Sep 2026

• This exactly.

  Manifest V2 is not just a plugin, it touches a LOT of the code. Keeping it in the codebase will become increasingly difficult for any 3rd party.
  But this isn’t just about Manifest V2. It’s about the very concept of choice- if Google decides you don’t get something, then nobody gets it. Call it open source if you want, if all rely on Chromium then edge, vivaldi, opera, brave, etc are just reskinned Chrome with extra shit.

  It’s sad that Firefox and Webkit are really the only other choices. I wish there was more. Sadly these days it’s all about fast javascript and that’s not a super easy thing to build.

  For lack of better choices, I agree that Firefox and its variants are what we should be pushing these days.

  on Chrome again exempts Google from user site data settings in c/technology@lemmy.world · 8 Sep 2026

• Shocking, but not surprising.

  The more I think about this, the more I think it’s a really big problem how much Web surfing runs on Chromium. While standards are far more prevalent now than in the days of Internet Explorer’s de facto monopoly, the end result is similar- just as MS had control of the Internet through IE, Google gets a lot of control through Chromium.

  The recent removal of Manifest V2 is a perfect example. A change literally nobody wanted forced upon the whole world. And while others like MS may be keeping the Mv2 code around, that won’t be tenable forever.

  The problem isn’t Mv2 or uBlock or anything else. The problem is control. That one company has the ability to disable something millions of users want, across multiple browsers, because they say so.

  And thus the more I think about it, the more I conclude it’s important to get as much browsing OFF Chromium as possible.

  on Chrome again exempts Google from user site data settings in c/technology@lemmy.world · 7 Sep 2026

• Disney didn’t use Steamboat Willie for a while, they didn’t lose it…

  on New Twitter launches, says Musk's X gave up the name in c/technology@lemmy.world · 27 Aug 2026

• I’m not claiming Twitter is great.

  But this is obviously going to fail, always was obviously going to fail. It’s a PR stunt, nothing more.

  Twitter will sue them, they’ll settle for giving up the name and some token fine, and hopefully they’re on the map. Or, their hail mary long shot will pay off and they’ll get to call themselves twitter in which case holy shit they’re golden. That’s the strategy.

  It’s stupid- they’ll lose in court and I doubt whatever they offer is more compelling than what’s already out there.

  on New Twitter launches, says Musk's X gave up the name in c/technology@lemmy.world · 27 Aug 2026

• In general I agree- the concept of red tape, environmental evaluations, etc is a good thing.

  But we all know what the road to Hell is paved with.

  Key is to find a middle ground- that lets a fab be built in an environmentally friendly way but also rapidly.

  on Chinese memory can now match the speed and latency configs of the RAM in our gaming PCs in c/technology@lemmy.world · 22 Aug 2026

• Is this a surprise?

  Semiconductor production is a national priority for China.

  on Chinese memory can now match the speed and latency configs of the RAM in our gaming PCs in c/technology@lemmy.world · 21 Aug 2026

• This 100%.

  HBM has massive profit margins. It’s also hard as hell to make, as it involves multiple stacked wafers. This vid is a good catchup on that and the rest of this situation.

  China will HAPPILY flood the non-HBM DRAM market with memory ‘only’ 2x as expensive as last year. And every PC maker, automaker, gadget maker, etc will happily buy it because as Valve famously put it, “They give us a price every month or something, and they say ‘you can buy that many’ and it’s yes or no, and if we say no then they never talk to us again.” Source interview. If China says ‘we have consistent price, we have consistent supply, we can meet your needs’ and the quality is decent then it doesn’t matter if it’s slower or DDR4 or whatever people will love them for it.

  And play that ahead.
  The big 3 are focused on HBM and most of their capacity is already sold through 2027
  If China can scale up production of standard DDR4/5 and sell it reliably at 200% of normal price (aka, below current market rates) then there’s less incentive to build fabs. So they will let China have the consumer market with their blessings. And thus China will have made themselves essential in yet another product supply chain.

  on Chinese memory can now match the speed and latency configs of the RAM in our gaming PCs in c/technology@lemmy.world · 21 Aug 2026

• This was easy to predict.

  Chinese government is not stupid. They have a strategy (more so than USA does). Years ago that was to dominate global manufacturing and supply chains. They were successful. Now the goal is to reach parity with Western chipmakers and/or get ahead. It’s happening.

  The AI boom was like a golden gift to them. Semiconductor prices are through the roof. So if they can produce almost anything at all in quantity it will sell for inflated prices.

  While the tech companies of the world jerk each other off with AI, China is building DRAM capacity. CXMT is the first and will not be the last. They will scale quickly. If they have the process perfected they will build a fab in the time it takes USA to conduct the environmental review for the consideration of allowing a permit application to build a fab. They will not build one fab they will build 5 or 10. I’m proud to be American and I love my country but I compare USA to China on the ability to execute large projects like this and China will win every time. We have too much red tape, too many lawsuits and insurance and moving parts. China executes faster and more decisively.

  So give it a year or two and China will have a fleet of pretty good fabs. They will sell memory for way less than what the others do. And then just as China made themselves indispensable for manufacturing, they will make themselves indispensable for DRAM.

  on Chinese memory can now match the speed and latency configs of the RAM in our gaming PCs in c/technology@lemmy.world · 21 Aug 2026

• Never underestimate me how out of touch business management can be.

  There’s a saying- corporate consultants are people who charge millions to tell you what your employees and customers have been trying to tell you for free.

  on Young people increasingly don't trust AI - or the billionaires that keep telling us we should all love AI, survey finds in c/technology@lemmy.world · 17 Aug 2026

• I was able to disable but not uninstall it…

  on Force installed app in c/privacy@lemmy.ml · 17 Aug 2026