partial_accumen

Now, with the advanced automation in building these, combined with the increased difficulty of repair(fine-work soldering, firmware debuging and the like) it makes way more sense to just replace the whole thing.

The other valid component to your argument is the cost of labor now. It is more expensive to maintain a staff of people to perform repairs and manage the logistics of transporting units to service than it is to simply lose 100% of the wholesale value of the handful of items that fail within the warranty period. Labor, especially skilled labor, is really really expensive in the western world.

I think the author was referring to the makers of the device not understanding what theyre making, not so much the end user.

Just to make sure I’m following your thread of thought, are you referring to this part of the author’s opinion piece or something else in his text?

“This wouldn’t matter if it were just marketing hyperbole, but the misunderstanding has real consequences. Companies are making billion-dollar bets on technologies they don’t understand, while actual researchers struggle to separate legitimate progress from venture capital fever dreams. We’re drowning in noise generated by people who mistake familiarity with terminology for comprehension of the underlying principles.”

The author’s take is detached from reality, filled with hypocrisy and gatekeeping.

This isn’t nostalgia talking — it’s a recognition that we’ve traded reliability and understanding for the illusion of progress.

It absolutely is nostalgia talking. Yes your TI-99 fires up immediately when plugged in, and its old. However my Commodore 64 of the same era risk being fried because the 5v regulator doesn’t age well and when fails dumps higher voltage right into the RAM and CPU. Oh, and c64 machines were never built with overvoltage protection because of cost savings. So don’t confuse age with some idea of golden era reliability. RAM ICs were also regularly failed in those age of computers. This is why you had RAM testing programs and socketed ICs. When was the last time, Mr author, you had to replace a failed DIMM in your modern computer?

Today’s innovation cycle has become a kind of collective amnesia, where every few years we rediscover fundamental concepts, slap a new acronym on them, and pretend we’ve revolutionized computing. Edge computing? That’s just distributed processing with better marketing. Microservices? Welcome to the return of modular programming, now with 300% more YAML configuration files. Serverless? Congratulations, you’ve rediscovered time-sharing, except now you pay by the millisecond.

By that logic, even the TI-99 he’s loving on is just a fancier ENIAC or UNIVAC. All technology is built upon the era before it. If there was no technological or production cost improvement, we’d just use the old version. Yes, there is a regular shift in computing philosophy, but this is driving by new technologies and usually computing performance descending to be accessibly at commodity pricing. The Raspberry Pi wasn’t a revolutionary fast computer, but it changed the world because it was enough computing power and it was dirt cheap.

There’s something deeply humbling about opening a 40-year-old piece of electronics and finding components you can actually identify. Resistors, capacitors, integrated circuits with part numbers you can look up. Compare that to today’s black-box system-on-chip designs, where a single failure means the entire device becomes e-waste.

I agree, there is something appealing about it to you and me, but most people don’t care…and thats okay! To them its a tool to get something done. They are not in love with the tool, nor do they need to be. There were absolutely users of TI-99 and C64 computers in the 80s that didn’t give two shits about the shift register ICs or the UART that made the modem work, but they loved that they could get invoices from their loading dock sent electronically instead of a piece of paper carried (and lost!) through multiple hands.

Mr. author, no one is stopping you from using your TI-99 today, but in fact you didn’t use it to write your article either. Why is that? Because the TI-99 is a tiny fraction of the function and complexity of a modern computer. Creating something close to a modern computer from discrete components with “part numbers you can look up” would be massively expensive, incredibly slow, and comparatively consume massive amounts of electricity vs today’s modern computers.

This isn’t their fault — it’s a systemic problem. Our education and industry reward breadth over depth, familiarity over fluency. We’ve optimized for shipping features quickly rather than understanding systems thoroughly. The result is a kind of technical learned helplessness, where practitioners become dependent on abstractions they can’t peer beneath.

Ugh, this is frustrating. Do you think a surgeon understands how a CCD electronic camera works that is attached to their laparoscope? Is the surgeon un-educated that they aren’t fluent in circuit theory that allows the camera to display the guts of the patient they’re operating on? No, of course not. We want that surgeon to keep studying new surgical technics, not trying to use Ohm’s Law to calculate the current draw of the device he’s using. Mr author, you and I hobby at electronics (and vintage computing) but just because its an interest of ours, doesn’t mean it has to be of everyone.

What We Need Now: We need editors who know what a Bode plot is. We need technical writing that assumes intelligence rather than ignorance. We need educational systems that teach principles alongside tools, theory alongside practice.

Such gatekeeping! So unless you know the actual engineering principles behind a device you’re using, you shouldn’t be allowed to use it?

Most importantly, we need to stop mistaking novelty for innovation and complexity for progress.

Innovation isn’t just creating new features or functionality. In fact, most I’d argue is taking existing features or functions and delivering them for substantially less cost/effort.

As I’m reading this article, I am thinking about a farmer watching Mr. author eat a sandwich made with bread. Does the Mr author know when to till soil or plant seed? How about the amount of irrigation Durum wheat needs during the hot season? How about when to harvest? What moisture level should the resulting harvest have before being taking to market or put in long term storage? Yet there he sits, eating the sandwich blissfully unaware of all the steps and effort needed to just make the wheat that goes into the bread. The farmer sits and wonders if Mr author’s next article will be deriding the public on just eating bread and how we’ve forgotten how to grow wheat. Will Mr Author say we need fewer people ordering sandwiches and more people consulting US GIS maps for rainfall statistics and studying nitrogen fixing techniques for soil health? No, probably not.

The best engineering solutions are often elegantly simple. They work reliably, fail predictably, and can be understood by the people who use them.

Perhaps, but these simple solutions also can frequently only offer simple functionality. Additionally, “the best engineering solutions” are often some of the most expensive. You don’t always need the best, and if best is the only option, then that may mean going without, which is worst than a mediocre solution and what we frequently had in the past.

They don’t require constant updates or cloud connectivity or subscription services. They just work, year after year, doing exactly what they were designed to do.

The reason your TI-99 and my c64 don’t require constant updates is because they were born before the concept of cybersecurity existed. If you’re going to have internet connected devices they its a near requirement to receive updates for security.

If you don’t want internet connected devices, you can get those too, but they may be extremely expensive, so pony up the cash and put your money where your mouth is.

That TI-99/4A still boots because it was designed by people who understood every component, every circuit, every line of code.

It is a machine of extremely limited functionality with a comparably simple design and construction. Don’t think even a DEC PDP 11 mainframe sold in the same era was entirely known by a handful of people, and even that is a tiny fraction of functionality of today’s cheap commodity PCs.

It works because it was built to work, not to generate quarterly revenue or collect user data or enable some elaborate software-as-a-service business model.

Take off the rose colored glasses. It was made as a consumer electronics product with the least cost they thought they could get away with and have it still sell. Sales of it absolutely served quarterly revenue numbers even back in the 1980s.

We used to build things that lasted.

We don’t need most of these consumer electronics to last. Proof positive is the computer Mr. author is writing his article on is unlikely to be an Intel based 486 running at 33Mhz from the mid 90s (or a 68030 Mac). If it still works, why isn’t he using one? Could it be he wants the new features and functionality like the rest of us? Over-engineering is a thing, and it sounds like what the author is preaching.

Apologies if my post turned into a rant.

What are things that visitors can do you your nature reserve, regardless of amount or frequency, that don’t hurt/damage the reserve? As in, if 1,000,000,000 visitors showed up at your gate tomorrow and asked what they could do in your reserve that wouldn’t hurt/damage the reserve, what would you tell them?

Struggling taught me that if I don’t use my money right now it’ll be gone.

And I’m not saying that to contradict you. It’s funny how different people learn different lessons from the same experience. I grew up dirt poor. If I didn’t spend my money as a kid it might be called upon. And that’s the lesson I took for years.

This is something others had to explain to me as I didn’t experience this first hand.

If I didn’t spend my money as a kid it might be called upon.

In case others are reading this there’s a few extra points to gaining the understanding of this concept. An example of this may be:

You have come into $100 without it being allocated to anything. If you wait “too long” a bill/need will show up that will consume all of that $100 (and probably still leave you needing more). However, if you spend the $100 as soon as you get it, you can buy a nice pair of sneakers or a video game. The bill will still come, and you’ll still be in debt at the end, but you’ll have your sneakers/video game. So this mindset incentivizes spending immediately instead of saving. An additional angle on this is that you may not have the bill/need but someone in your life does, and if you have $100 and don’t volunteer it, or refuse to “lend” it when its discovered, there are large social consequences. So again, spending it immediately is incentivized, because there are no social consequences for not having the money to “lend”, only having the money and not “lending” it.

This is far more common that I had understood initially.

Is there a similar “tell” with how people pronounce Darwin?

Most of us do something like that when we first get money we earned ourselves, myself included. Depending on when you did actually stopped wasting money, this may have had a massively positive impact on your life. If you learned that lesson fairly early, it translated into you making wise spending choices as an older adult. You are successful today because you wasted that money back then and made changes afterward.

Mine would be not slacking in learning Chinese because I never though I would be a weeb.

I thought “weeb” slur was refering to one way into Japanese pop culture, not Chinese.

Now I need to re-learn tons of Kanji

Kanji would be one of the three Japanese writing systems. The written language symbols in Chinese would be Hanzi.

That said, its never too late to learn any language, and any work you did before still helps today as you have a basis for understanding to build on. Depending on how young you learned what you did, you could have some very helpful hard wiring in your brain for other languages than your native one.

I am asking because without reading the article it seems like the only interested people would be Indians.

You’re coming to a community called “World News” and complaining about getting stories of * checks notes * World News?

What exactly do you think World News is? I come to World News to read stories just like this that are happening on the other side of the world from me.

India is the most populous country in the world. It, along with a handful of others will likely rise in dominance in the next 100 years if nothing else because their population isn’t declining. Seeing this window on development in India is seeing a prequel to a future superpower. I find it fascinating to see how they choose to go about it.

Broderbund was an important staple of the Commodore 64 world.

!c64@lemmy.world

!retrogaming@lemmy.world

…would also probably appreciate this content.

Every year the government takes 1 hour away from every American with the implementation of Daylight savings time. They return the hours to each American in the fall. However, in between March (when the hours are taken) and November (when the hours are returned) over 2 million Americans die, and don’t get their hours returned to them, or their estates. This happens every. single. year.

What is the government doing with all of these stockpiled hours of dead Americans?

I will say more, the same exact team that spends time managing EKS clusters could manage self-managed clusters and have money to spare for additional hires.

Your suggestions is a large expansion of skillset needed for your alternative to the cloud solution. Your own experience in attempting to hire workers should point to the reason thats a bad idea. You’re going to need even higher skilled people, and they are going to ask for significantly more money.

All Holdo had to say was “yes, there’s a plan. Not telling you what because of operational secrecy”. Instead she expected Poe to blindly follow orders when he’d already shown he couldn’t do that.

Well, he did fine following orders in the first movie, and then they changed the entire character in the second movie but kept the same name. I have no idea why they did that.

The third is arriving in December.

A non-optical sensor based solution would require other sensors to calculate the relative position of the solar cooker oriented to Earth as well as calculate the elevation. Your solution is turnkey that you just slap down and it does everything needed without external input beyond solar radiance.

Also, a whole bunch of your approach has many other applications with only very minor tweaks. I like what you did.

No, but I have done and said stuff that gives me an intense feeling of embarrassment when I recall the event.

Wait, this isn’t a daily or near hourly occurrence? The longer you live you even have a longer list of these to recall intrusively when you’re doing completely unrelated things.

Fact:

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi to European diplomats: “China cannot afford a Russian defeat in Ukraine”.

Supposition:

The reason? Beijing reportedly fears that a vanquished Russia would allow the United States to shift its entire strategic focus onto China, a fear which is probably not unfounded given US President Trump’s openly anti-China rhetoric and policies.

I fully support Ukraine, but I don’t agree with their guess at a reason for the statement from Minister Wang Yi. I’m thinking that China needs to cement the legitimacy of invading sovereign territories with ethnically similar populations so that China can get political cover when it wants to invade Taiwan. If China is successful in getting the world to accept some or all of Ukraine being held by Russia, then there will be no grounds for the world to oppose the invasion and capture of Taiwan by China.

“trump is the highest scoring individual in a number of areas. As an example, trump is the national all-time leader in being impeached as President.”

There are troubles in Russo-Armenian relations, but there’s no details of Azerbaijan distancing themselves from Russia. If anyone knows more, please let me know.

There’s a good chunk of evidence of Azerbaijan distancing themselves from Russia. This doesn’t necessarily mean that Azerbaijan is equally embracing the West though. source

This is heartwarming news that two nations which have been such bitter enemies are looking to a long term peaceful coexistence. This can only benefit both nations and their citizens.