hoopladler

What's the reason why they can't make bigger chips? More costly?

I think there have been a number of studies showing that poverty does directly make people unhappy, though - or at the very least, happiness is definitely correlated with wealth. Being poor is extremely stressful. Being stressed is not necessarily going to make you unhappy, but it's certainly likely to.

I think it was always a bit like this. You can read what people thought about advertising in the 60's, and they had the same kind of paranoid fantasies we have today, although less focused on tech, more on psychology. In reality, advertising psychology then was much as it is now - basically quackery, with a side of 'thought leadership' by guys that really should have stuck to squash.

That said, I think the reason why machine-driven advertising is so much better than its predecessors is simply that the predecessors were really awful. They used to do market research by installing double-sided mirrors in department stores then taking notes on what people looked at. It was absurd. Now, there's actually an even-odds chance that a targeted advert will meet somebody that might be vaguely interested - and that's absolutely orders of magnitude better than a billboard.

And also, to be honest, this whole complaint about cost-performance indices is a bit absurd - since as far as I can gather, they were basically oneiromancy before Google and Facebook came along.

Thanks for the post!

I guess there are a few things that might make these projects less of an unmitigated disaster than your analysis suggests:

1. Musk is clearly working off the common delusion that 'getting in at the ground floor' is a good idea. In reality, innovators and groundbreakers typically go bankrupt. Investors who buy the bankrupt company are the ones who typically profit off the expensive research and development, without the associated risks.

2. If you consider similar examples, for instance, the English railway system - early investors losing money is by no means a bad thing. Even if 'getting in early' is bad business strategy, it's good for society in general if moonshots get funded, even if they never turn out to be profitable.

3. These projects, while obviously unsound and based on false premisses, will typically produce useful technology, knowledge, or techniques - that can later be taken up by governments (as in the case of railways) or private investors.

So I mean, sure, these projects are stupid and will end in stupidity. But they're also a better (from a human perspective) use of investor capital than pretty much everything else it could be spent on - more Walmarts, Amazon surveillance devices, or oil exploration - even if those things are certainly safer bets in terms of profits.

I'm actually kind of embarassed by how innacurate my post was, but I can't edit it with corrections.

No, I'm just confused. I used lambda when I meant ternary operator.

Turing reportedly believed that programming would require “a great number of mathematicians of ability”.

I think if you want to find a trend in computing, it's the same as the progression in other industries. Tooling replaces raw ability, technique replaces skill, and jobs requiring skills are slowly replaced by jobs that don't require skills.

Consider Go, for instance. There's no doubt that the opinionated, overly-controlling compiler, absolute minimalism, and conventional structure of the language is designed so that a mediocre programmer can produce passable code. A good programmer doesn't really need gofmt, or a compiler that tells them off for not properly commenting their code. Good programmers don't tend to abuse generics or lambdas or all the other things Go doesn't have.

So what it does, compared to C++, or even Java, is allows you to employ less experienced, less skilled programmers, and equally, to expect them to actually be productive, and not to produce morasses of unreadable gibberish.

Don't get me wrong - I like Go. But if C was the only language in town, there's no doubt you'd need more programmers, they'd have to be better trained, and their job security and compensation would be better.

Wow - that is beautiful.

You're almost certainly right about good metal-milling CNC machines never being cheap. I think the only possibility to make such a thing economical would be by re-purposing car parts (I think if you could work out a way to use common car parts and clever software, you could step around the fact that things manufactured to high tolerances out of steel are expensive - since car parts are both cheap, and well-made).

That said, the thing that really excites me about CNC is just how much it opens up a whole load of projects that I haven't had the tooling or the mechanical skill to take on. I'm a bad carpenter, so when I make things out of wood, I tend to have to allow massive tolerances in everything I do. Even a CNC that could only cut softwood would be really useful for me.

I've actually been ummming and ahhing about buying one of ali-express - where did you get your engraver from?

I don't think you're wrong.

I do think that a pick-and-place machine is probably more compatible with the hobbyist world than home CNC - given that CNC inherrently requires robust construction, and robust, accurate components are inherrently expensive. I mean - this machine looks more or less like a 3d printer with some reels, and a scanner. Once 3D printing becomes a cheap technology, things that require accurate repetitive movement become cheaper too.

I wouldn't be entirely surprised if stuff like small robotic arms become available to the hobbyist in the next 50 years or so, simply because being able to do arbitrary tasks with a high degree of accuracy is incredibly useful.

At the point where CNC, not as in cutting, but as in general computer-controlled movement, is an ordinary part of the workshop, I wouldn't be surprised if things like this ended up in hobbbyist spaces.

I guess I figure you don't have to be good at something for it to be worthwhile. As a human, no matter how steady your hand or sharp your eye, you're always going to be inferior in manufacturing basically anything than our new robotic overlords.

The main thing I like about electronics is it makes me feel at home in a world of technology that's kinda crazy alien at least half of the time. Being able to interact with it in a proactive way makes it something I can get a grip on, even if, when we're frank, my soldering is shit.

Isn't this literally the point of computers? A processor is something that does amazingly stupid stuff 1.3 million times a second.

If you do even very simple things rapidly enough, you can get amazing results.

That man is honestly the most entertaining and informative tv-show I've ever watched.

Well, you can actually do stuff a 3d printer does by other means. It just typically requires more skills, and often more equipment.

I think your analogy falls down because an automatic bottlecapper does the same thing as you'd normally do by hand.

The difference for me is that a pick-and-place machine is an enabler. It would enable hobbyists to take on large-scale, distributed electronics projects - for which, right now, assembly time is normally the bottleneck.

If all hobbyists were solely interested in producing consumer-style devices, like bad versions of phones, or home-automation systems, then a pick-and-place machine wouldn't be a good idea for anyone. But there are actually lots of hobbyists that do stuff like data logging, where assembly time is a major problem.

I've got pretty bad essential tremor (and bad eyeseight), so I was also wondering, what's a good way to keep the chips in place on the board? I was thinking of using a tiny dab of superglue.

A replacable battery doesn't cost 150$. It's just one screw. The reason why headphones are much cheaper than hearing aids is mainly economies of scale.

I think the main reason why headphones often suck are cultural, not mechanical. If you make stuff in capitalism, it being cheap is always a great selling point, even if it craps out after a couple of weeks of use. So you get the whole market crowded with useless junk, and well-made stuff gets crowded out. Stuff that, from a technological perspective, is outdated, works better than new stuff because of this culture. It doesn't mean that the new technology isn't better. It just means that, with an attitude like ours, we could make crud using any technology.