SirEDCaLot

There’s a second lesson here- if you teach people to their individual ability rather than to the average ability of a class or grade level, you get some amazing results. Every other kid in the class was playing ‘at grade level’. This kid wasn’t so he got a lot of extra instruction. But what if every other kid got the same level of extra instruction? They didn’t, because they performed at grade level and thus were determined to be satisfactory. But I argue that if you give every other kid in the class the same focus as OP’s friend, you’d find a lot of people going much farther than they would otherwise. This is one of the horrible things of our education system- kids aren’t pushed to meet their potential, they’re pushed to meet grade level.

This is absolutely a thing. I remember reading a story about this, this was years ago, but this guy worked for the air force of some nation in heavy conflict. One of the most used weapons in this war was an anti-radiation missile, it would loiter for some time until it detected an emissions target then lock on and destroy it. Whenever they needed to use radar, they would hotwire a bunch of microwave ovens to work with the door open, then plug them in with like six extension cords plugged together. The missiles would lock right onto those microwave ovens and blow them up. He was joking about how the enemy would boast they destroyed 15 aircraft that week on the ground, when his force only had 10 aircraft to begin with.

Absolutely 100%. Click login, accept passkey signature, logged in. This is the way to go

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?

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.

Their cost is higher than the official one, but they can still undercut the official one and make money. That’s why it works. Personally I’m not aware of anyone actually selling these, so this may be a made up issue. Or it might be a case where they were sold on aliexpress or something.

That’s the whole point of the House-Senate split- that the more populous urban areas get more representation in the House, but proportionately less in the Senate. That said- gerrymandering has fucked that up hardcore. The solution though is to stop gerrymandering, not to give urban areas universal control over the Presidency. If you make the Presidency a popular vote only, then candidates will campaign in every major city and won’t give a fuck what rural areas want.

This makes sense. Hear me out. 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. 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. 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.

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.

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…

A better analogy Counting the votes- pepperoni wins. There’s a lot of vegetarians but they don’t make up an absolute majority so their needs are ignored. Counting the votes at each table- cheese wins, because even the two huge tables want pepperoni, many of the smaller tables are mostly vegetarians who don’t eat pepperoni. This is why the electoral college is still relevant- to ensure that urban voters don’t bowl over suburban or rural voters who deserve to have a say in government too. Dividing each table into groups then adding them together- that’s a scam by a pepperoni fan because they will ensure every group has 5 known pepperoni lovers and 2 others.

Okay you hit on a much bigger issue- swing states. IMHO the fact that ‘swing states’ are a thing is a problem that we should fix. Why isn’t EVERY state a ‘swing state’? Why is the voting outcome of certain states essentially prewritten? THAT is a problem. EVERY state should be in play. Some of that blame rests with lazy voters who will blindly vote red or blue without consideration of the actual candidates. A bigger blame though rests much deeper in our electoral system. It’s not the electoral college that takes blame, it’s first-past-the-post voting (IE simple majority). FPTP voting heavily rewards coalitions who rally behind a single candidate. So for example if fiscal conservatives, social conservatives, and libertarians all say ‘let’s elect the Republican’ while liberals (for example, hypothetical) split up into the Democrats and the Greens, the Republican will win EVERY time. This is a problem because it means more often than not you’re not voting FOR someone, you’re voting AGAINST someone. Recent DNC nominees have been a perfect example. Look at Kamala- she was polling at 2% before she got nominated, but she still got a huge % of the vote simply because she wasn’t Trump. DNC could have put forth a keg of stale beer as their candidate and it’d have gotten 30% of the popular vote because those people were voting AGAINST Trump, not FOR the DNC. And THAT’s a problem, because it’s forcing people to vote for someone they don’t actually support. The solution is dump FPTP and switch to something like Instant Runoff Voting. In most suggested flavors of IRV, you don’t have a primary- you have a large ballot with everyone who gained enough signatures to be on the ballot. Ideally there’d be 8-10 candidates. You then vote for as many or as few as you like in order of priority. Thus you can vote FOR the guy you actually want, without losing your vote AGAINST the guy you don’t want. To count the votes, all the #1 votes are added up and you see if a candiate got 50%. If none did, you find whoever voted for the least popular candidate, tear off all their #1 votes and reallocate their ballots based on the #2 votes. Again you look for 50%. Repeat as many times as necessary until you have a winner.

Cheese wins because we don’t ignore small tables, as a simple majority system would do. I think small tables deserve to have a voice for their needs, even if there are fewer of them. It’s not right to ignore an entire group of tables simply because fewer people sit at them. If it’s possible to ensure such majority of pepperoni lovers in every single group, then pepperoni lovers have an overall majority. They don’t need scams to win. In fact - you’d need scams to prevent them from winning. Not necessarily. Let’s say you have 100 people. 60 want cheese, 40 want pepperoni. You need to split this 100 people into 6 tables, each table will vote and submit their overall request. Whichever kind of pizza most of the tables request gets ordered. You assign seating as follows: Table 1- 10 pepperoni, 6 cheese Table 2- 10 pepperoni, 7 cheese Table 3- 10 pepperoni, 6 cheese Table 4- 10 pepperoni, 7 cheese Table 5- 17 cheese, no pepperoni Table 6- 17 cheese, no pepperoni There we go. I’ve just ‘fairly, evenly’ divided 100 people into 6 tables of 16-17 people each. And thus with my ‘simple and unimportant’ job of assigning table seating, I’ve guaranteed that pepperoni will be ordered even though a majority of the people want cheese. Tables 1-4 will vote and pepperoni will win, tables 5-6 will unanimously agree on cheese, and when we ask the tables what they want 4 out of 6 tables will vote pepperoni. And thus the minority wins because the table seating was a scam. If the tables were assigned randomly, or if a computer grouped the tables by similar interest, age, etc, we’d get something more like a fair vote.

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.

This is hilarious. I bet Muse got paid. If I were in the band I’d say absolutely sell the thing- the Muse AI thing is going to crash and burn anyway so might as well get paid especially if they’re too dumb to realize MuseAI would be a better handle anyway.

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.