dyselon

I often try to do this, but it's rarely cheaper, and occasionally much worse. I recently bought a beach tent directly from the manufacturer, and when it showed up, it had a big Amazon sticker on it, and didn't actually have the product inside; it was clearly something Amazon had returned to them. Meanwhile, they haven't responded to e-mails and there's no way to return it, so, uh, I just got scammed.

I keep doing it anyway, but it's certainly not because it's a better or cheaper experience.

Sure, it's just a poor analogy. YouTube doesn't show up at your door unprompted as junk mail does. You go there intentionally for the purpose of watching a video. You can pay for that video with your time or your money. No one is being "paid off" in that scenario.

Heaven forbid someone pay for an online service they use and enjoy.

We finally gave up our Prius after 12 years, and we never changed the brakes once. The brakes were just peeking into the yellow on its last service upgrade. I was really impressed with how well the "normal" hybrid could take advantage of regenerative breaking, honestly.

I really like the DE0-CV in particular for having the 7 segment displays and accessible buttons and switches. When I was first getting started in FPGA stuff, I spent a lot of time just getting basic circuits to work, and you need some physical IO to get any feedback that your stuff works. It gives you a lot of things to learn on before you start worrying about VGA output or whatever (but does have a lot of interesting stuff on board for when you do want to mess around with that stuff!)

There's a ton of of dev boards out there, but I would say to be sure to get something with hardware buttons and LEDs, as it really helps with some of the Hello World level of things, and many of the cheapest options won't have those.

I started messing with FPGAs with the DE0-Nano, but eventually got so frustrated with the tiny buttons that I upgraded to a DE0-CV, which I really enjoyed my time with. It has some 7 segment LEDs, physical switches, and buttons, and it also has a VGA port, PS/2 port, and Micro SD card slot, so you can build a pretty snazzy little PC if you want to.

Not the gp, but I used Duolingo quite a bit, and recently learned Spanish to an upper intermediate level. In my opinion, Duolingo is just as weak with pure reading as with spoken language. You'll learn some vocabulary and be introduced to ideas, and that's valuable, but not enough. Just like spoken, to learn to read, you have to read a bunch of stuff you can understand. I jumped straight from Duolingo to children and young adult books, and it was a difficult transition with lots of intensive looking-up-every-other-word study, but, I mean, you do that long enough, and eventually you're just reading.

Accessing the cart was as fast as accessing RAM, and you didn't have much RAM to go around, so I imagine there just wasn't much advantage to it.

Op's point is that the lower nominal voltage is the culprit in the battery's lower energy density. If you and I each have a 1 kg battery that stores 1 amp hour, but yours puts out 3.7v and mine puts out 2.5, then your battery is storing more total energy than mine. We can both manipulate that output voltage (via boost converter, or more commonly just using multiple batteries in serial) to get whatever we need, but given the same load, my battery's just going to drain faster than yours.

Can I ask what the feature set looked like? I always kind of wanted to do this with the Skullgirls AI, but never had the time while we were developing it. As a developer, I obviously had full access to the game state, but I'm still not really sure what the best way to represent that state to a neural network is.

Is there a good reference for potential upgrades to old, obsolete-ish parts? I definitely understand that many of the old logic ICs, transistors, and op-amps have been displaced by better parts, but I don't always know how to identify them short of a parametric search on digikey and hoping there's not some sharp corner I missed. I'd find a lot of value in a page that had some recommendations for "Are you using <OLD PART> for <PURPOSE>? Consider <NEW PART>!"

The DE0-CV is a bit more expensive, but I think it's probably better than the Nano for the FPGA 101 type experiments. It's got more on the way of switches and LEDs, and the buttons are a lot easier to get to. I have both, and I had a lot more fun with low level learning activities with the CV than the Nano. Moving past that, I also enjoyed messing with the VGA and SD card peripherals more than the ADC and accelerometer, and also found those easier to add on after the fact.

SNES is a 12 bit shift register, as well.