wombat_trouble

I'm not sure what you're saying... there is a clear benefit to perfboard and protoboards: they let you prototype instantly, without waiting for PCBs to be manufactured. An earlier critique of that approach was that some parts are no longer available as through-hole. I'm pointing out that there is a simple workaround that still lets you prototype quickly. Generic breakout boards are around $1 a piece and you don't need them custom-tailored to a project.

Arduino never made sense as far as technical specs go. You could always buy more capable and compatible AVR microcontrollers for one tenth the price. In the past decade, the disparity has gotten more dramatic as 8-bit chips have gotten even cheaper and even more capable.

Arduino owed its success solely to building a healthy maker ecosystem of folks who simply defaulted to it as a platform, published tutorials, and promoted it through word-of-mouth. That's probably still there. Raspberry Pi had the same thing going on for it, by the way.

Marketing / community building trumps technical merit in almost everything, and embedded computing is not an exception. I'm not lamenting this, it's just a fact of life.

I'd wager that 99% of Arduino enthusiasts (and a good percentage of industrial hw engineers...) do not have a habit of using power save modes on bare metal.

You can use surface-mount-to-DIP breakout boards. They add a buck or two per part, but that's generally OK for prototyping.

Best in what sense? This is automating outrage. While it's framed as a helpful tool for tweet authors, it's clearly a ruse. Come on, it even comes with an "expose tweet" button, so that you can cancel others without the inconvenience of copying and pasting a link...

Every other home in the US isn't up to code. The code changes over time and governs all kinds of mundane things that you as a homeowner don't pay attention to (and shouldn't be forced to). Not being compliant doesn't make a home illegal to live in.

This is different. Many municipalities specifically require all dwellings to have basic utilities (water, sewer, electricity, garbage service), even if you're not using them. Not having that will get you in trouble pretty quickly.

Unincorporated areas are usually fair game.

I mean, it's a reasonable career choice.

Practical downsides: considerably lower pay right now compared to a job at FAANG, although certainly nothing to sneeze at. A profession regulated far more than necessary, similarly to many other blue collar fields - for example in California, you need 8,000 hours of apprenticeship to get a license. You are also technically required to deal with municipal bureaucracies and get sign-offs on almost every single thing you do, although most electricians follow these rules rather liberally, and there's a ton of unpermitted work in every older house.

You're less vulnerable to AI, but you sure are vulnerable to downturns in construction.

You serve at the pleasure of your clients. You're gonna be getting emergency calls at weird hours and you're gonna be spending a lot of time in your car.

It's physical labor - you're gonna be spending some time in crawl spaces or other uncomfortable positions, it's rough on your hands, etc.

We're already harvesting less than we can or should, essentially for political reasons. faster-growing varieties on the loose seem like a way to make the PNW even more flammable.

> “I am not a bot/intelligence services construct/foreign troll masquerading as an citizen etc.”. Is a pretty valuable service for the network.

It is valuable to Facebook to maintain a healthy pltform. But is it really worth $15 a month to you to broadcast this to others?

Unless the culture of the platform shifts to a point where non-verified accounts are considered second-class, the only reason to pay this is basically as a status symbol. In which case, I think the tiered approach makes more sense. And maybe "Facebook Gold" for people who want to pay even more for a badge....

Twitter had their checkmarks established as an artificially constrained status symbol you couldn't buy with money... and then, under Musk, they altered the terms of the deal by saying you have to pay, but you get tangible perks in terms of platform features, visibility of your content, etc. Unless Facebook wants to do that, I can't see people paying this much on their own...

If Getty wins this one, you win as a photographer. If they lose, you lose. They might be a shitty company, but in this instance, your interests align...

Oh come on. I'm excited about new technologies and I think that image generation can be a net positive for the society, but can we not do that? First, we had people confidently asserting that stuff of this sort absolutely can't happen. Now, we're moving the goalposts to "well, not a legitimate criticism because it doesn't happen often".

The point is that basically all Stable Diffusion / DALL-E / MidJourney output is some shade of this; the only new data is that contrary to prior assertions, in some cases, it goes all the way to a verbatim copy.

I think there are some defensible stances one can take. One is to reject the idea of intellectual property. Another is to advocate for some specific legal or technical bar that the models would have to pass for it to qualify as "not stealing". Yet another is to argue it's a morally-agnostic technology like VHS or a photocopier, and the burden of using it in a socially acceptable way rests with the user.

"Real" cameras do a lot of postprocessing too, but it's generally oriented at producing faithful results. They might remove unambiguous and correctable issues such as vignetting or lens distortion, but they don't cross the line of inventing new details to make the photo look good.

Computational photography techniques on smartphones, on the other hand, were always designed around squishy "user perception" goals to make photos look impressive, details be damned.