Yeah, I’ve been able to use desktop Linux without many issues in a corporate environment. The main issue was the web version of office being incomplete. If corporate IT teams embraced it, I bet most companies could be free of Windows without too much issue.
The bigger problem seems to be the cloud services - teams, OneDrive, sharepoint and all the account management stuff.
> The push toward LED seems to be primarily for emission target related reasons
Is this true? I’ve got LEDs in my house because they cost vastly less to run, and because I rarely have to replace the bulbs.
Some cheap LEDs do flicker (at 50 or 60 Hz). But that’s fairly easily solved. I don’t think I’ve noticed the flicker since some cheap bulbs I bought in 2014 or so.
Well… (Sorry, let me put my tinfoil hat on.) Yeah, well that noticed part is what is worrisome to me. I do worry that there is some effect on our brains even though we might not perceive the flicker.
As an analogy, I got into those supposedly audiophile "Class D" (or "Class T") amplifiers over a decade ago. Every day I turned on the music in my office and coded with the T-amp playing. I would have told you at the time that, indeed, it sounded amazing.
Some time later I built a tube amplifier (The Darling [2], in case anyone cares—I've since built perhaps a dozen more).
When I brought it into the office and swapped it out for the T-amp, the change was sublime but immediately noticeable. I hate to fall back on audiophile terminology but it's the best I have for the experience: I was suddenly aware of "listening fatigue" that had been a component of the T-amp. I hadn't even known it had been fatiguing until I heard the tube amp in its place for days on end.
With the loss of color fidelity and the flickering issue, I'm embarrassed to say that incandescent is starting to look good to me again.
I might, as an experiment, replace only those lights that we turn on in the evening when we are relaxing, reading.
If the LED has good DC conversion it should not flicker at all, the flow across the diode would be constant. Just buy good LEDs, incandescent light has many drawbacks.
This is a really interesting comparison, but a flawed analogy. (I’m absolutely not challenging your preference for tube amps.)
LEDs clearly do not produce anything like the spectral energy of blackbody radiation (sunlight, incandescence bulbs), and many do flicker (although that’s a byproduct of individual designs, not the technology itself). This is easy to confirm with simple sensors. So it’s completely uncontroversial to say they don’t replicate “natural” light.
Pretty much all tube amp designs produce an output that is modified from the input signal. This is what makes them sound different and to plenty of personal opinions more enjoyable to listen to music on. But they are more like the “LED” side of the lighting example - they produce an output that is different from the “natural” aka original audio material.
I have not found that LED bulbs last noticably longer than incandescents. I'm still replacing bulbs, and though I don't keep records it feels about the same.
LEDs are just terrible in every way except electrical consumption.
If you buy cheap off-brands on Amazon that's what happens. The cheap ones have poor thermal management around the LED drivers, and the heat dissipated will eventually burn the drivers out, much sooner than is reasonable.
Hooray shitty capitalist incentives.
The non-cheap LED bulbs I've bought have all lasted years and years. I do have some cheap ones that are starting to fail, after just a year or so. (Problem with those is that it was really hard to find the correct bulb size and connector type, so my options were limited.)
Good LEDs in the right circumstances will last almost forever - unfortunately many LEDs on the shelf are trash. They often have small print about not using them in enclosed fixtures or sconces since their thermal management is atrocious and they will self-immolate if not in open air.
It does seem an easy win for govts to easily conform.
I buy the ones that are suitable for dimmable switches (even tho I don't have dimmers) because there is discernible flicker with most other LED bulbs if you for eg wave your arm through the air or made a saccade. There is a certification (i think) for LED bulbs that are closer to
sunlight in their emission spectrum
LED bulbs, even though cheaper in the long term, used to habe high enough shelf prices enough that most houdeholds wouldn’t have switched without a government push. Incandescents are literally banned now for most uses, while the economies of scale have helped drive LED prices down.
It costs less to run because less energy is used; I'm pretty sure incandescent bulbs aren't emitting anything by themself!
"The push" is from the government, perhaps consumer demand is "the pull".
Almost all the energy consumed by appliances in your home gets ultimately converted into heat. For example, the picture on your TV is made from emitted light rays that are absorbed by various solid objects in your home and heats them up. Same for the sounds from your speakers. Your washing machine spins water and clothes around, which makes both the water+clothes and the body of the washing machine to heat up due to friction.
A counter example is a water pump, which converts electricity into gravitational potential energy of the water as it flows upwards.
Not sure about the point of your comment. Ok, doing work generates heat. But if the primary goal is to generate light, not heat, then incandescent bulbs are terrible at their job.
which is not that bad if you want to warm your room a bit. The heat is not wasted, but added to the room. We use 250 watts to warm under the coffee tables. These are infrared-coated incandescent bulbs
>Is this true? I’ve got LEDs in my house because they cost vastly less to run, and because I rarely have to replace the bulbs.
At least in EU is true. Citing from Wikipedia: "The 2005 Ecodesign directive covered energy-using products (EuP), which use, generate, transfer or measure energy, including consumer goods such as boilers, water heaters, computers, televisions, and industrial products such as transformers. The implementing measures focus on those products which have a high potential for reducing greenhouse gas emissions at low cost, through reduced energy demand."
I’ve seen a few submissions recently that look great - convincing landing page, complex app, modern design - but are almost unusable due to JavaScript bugs. I’m guessing it’s the power of AI.
This is more than just a bad side project - it's borderline malicious.
How confident is the OP that every single one of these 60 calculators work all the time, with all edge cases? Because if someone is on your website using your calculator, they are putting trust in you. If it's wrong, it could have downstream impacts on them. I hope every single one has a comprehensive set of tests with good edge cases. But realistically will they?
I'm actually pretty pro-AI development. But if you're going to use AI to help develop a website, at least focus on quality rather than quantity. AI makes quantity easy, but quality is still hard.
As an aside, the website doesn't even work for me. My clicks don't don anything.
> How confident is the OP that every single one of these 60 calculators work all the time, with all edge cases?
The compound interest calculator, which is their 'favorite page', already shows an incorrect value in the graph. So my faith in the other calculators isn't great. I also kinda doubt OP's story of them using that page all the time, since it took me about 20 seconds to find this issue.
I built one of the top 3 results on Google when you search “compound interest calculator” and a dozen other similarly popular calculator pages.
The value isn’t the interface, it’s the trust that its calculations are accurate. I can’t tell you how many meetings I had with accountants and finance people to validate all the calculations.
Yes of course. These are calculators - they are meant to reliably calculate things.
I think the difference is that building 60 interactive calculators manually would force you to do a lot of manual testing. If someone built up that many interactive calculators I would imagine a lot of attention has gone on each one. Why would they spend so much time on something and not test it?
I've been thinking a bit about vibe coding with trust-critical apps. My solution has been hand-code and test the parts where bugs would mislead users, and vibe code the rest. In my case that's been hand-coding backend calculation logic and vibe coding the UI and server (this is also the part I am least expert in). In practice this does wind up including a lot of little judgment calls at the interfaces.
In the end, my feeling is there needs to be transparency in how bulletproof-tested a product is. IMO even a calculator that might be wrong can be useful if it's the most convenient option and the user knows the risks (though to be clear, that is not the philosophy I am employing in my personal project).
Are a large part of the people living in a city the kind of semi-transitory-but-also-there-for-years people you describe?
I'd wager that's a small proportion of almost every city. Most cities will have tourists who are visiting for a few days or weeks, and long term residents who have a permanent address there. The percentage of people living full time in hotels or airbnbs must be tiny. Perhaps in high cost of living cities there's more "hidden homeless" living on couches, but even then it's not going to be "a large part" of a city.
I don't have sources but for cities like Amsterdam I wouldn't be surprised if 5% of the population isn't registered with the municipality for various reasons. But have been living there for years. Plenty of people I know would sublet empty rooms of their social housing apartment, which is highly illegal but for some people the only way to find a place to stay. But you obviously can't register because then the person subletting would be kicked out.
Using a Raspberry Pi (or anything running Linux) is a completely different experience from bare metal. I wouldn't recommend it for learning fundamentals.
If you want to understand how interacting with peripherals and hardware works, an RP2040 is a good option - it has great documentation and sensible peripherals. Or STM32s have huge numbers of examples in the wild.
Ultimately the biggest difference - the thing you need to learn the most - is peripheral setup. Things like setting up the clock, setting up an I2C or SPI bus, reading and writing bytes from a UART etc. This stuff happens on every computer all the way up to a Raspberry Pi, but the bigger and more powerful the MCU the more it tends to be abstracted away by libraries and middleware.
If you want to truly learn this stuff you have to get low down, strip away all the abstractions and get very familiar with the 1000+ page user manual. Doing that on the simplest microcontroller possible is a benefit, because you're not overwhelmed by complex peripherals and too-many-settings.
I'd also recommend starting with C, rather than trying to mess around with Rust. Rust (and embassy) are great for building apps with very few runtime bugs, but debugging stuff in the Rust async world is a headache, and you've got an abstraction layer sitting between you and the chip.
It's actually really powerful to realise that a peripheral is just 10 memory addresses, and to make it work you just need to define a C struct and point it to the start address. Suddenly you're talking to the peripheral and can configure it. None of that is obvious with layers of middleware and abstractions.
My dad has developed an unhealthy addiction to buying used agricultural equipment and machine tools. He's been busy importing them to his rural farm. I have no idea how we'll clear that up once he's gone!
> In these countries, the price of the product is simply higher, to account for this
Maybe on the individual level, but the aggregate effect is that manufacturers are incentivised to save money by increasing reliability. Which is a good thing for everyone.
I mean, it's good for the people in America and other shorter-warranty countries, who get to free-ride on any enhanced reliability that this results in.
But honestly I've had Macs that still work 15 years after I bought them, and iPhones that work for easily 6 or 7. That's not because AU or EU require a somewhat longer warranty, I don't think.
> good for America and other shorter-warranty countries, who get to free-ride on any enhanced reliability that this results in.
The EU mandates that in the EU you can change your default navigation app from Apple Maps to Google Maps.
The US isn't getting to free-ride on that, that only works if you move to an EU country.
Why wouldn't apple do the same for US vs EU, if EU has a longer required warranty period, apple can bin processors so the US gets more likely to fail processors and the EU gets more stable chips.
It would be the sort of vindictive malicious compliance apple has been doing with everything else, so I wouldn't put it past them.
> But honestly I've had Macs that still work 15 years after I bought them [...].
2002 PowerBook user checking in. Not great for "modern" work, CPU gets really hot compiling "simple" stuff like git or libressl, but OSX 10.5 is a superior user experience to macOS 15. Still great for lightweight web browsing (disable JS!), some coding (Python 2.7.14!), classic games (StarCraft! from a *box*!).
Amazing. I have a 17 year old iMac that still works OK. I don't use it often, but I remember the first time I booted it with an SSD over FW800 and I was like damn, this is a brand new machine.
Imagine being in that "not very fun" zone continuously, day and night, for decades.
That's kind of what having kids is like. I love my kids and have great times with them, but there's also a lot of routine, endless cleaning and boredom.
People with kids probably wish they could have longer conversations. They'd happily talk about things other than kids. Sometimes that's possible - but it's very hard to predict when it will happen.
It's something I've observed since having kids - quite a lot of people I have adult relationships with simply have no interest in being near them. As a result, I just don't talk to them at all any more. It's a shame, but there's not really much I can do about it.
The bigger problem seems to be the cloud services - teams, OneDrive, sharepoint and all the account management stuff.
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