> it could also hack your home network, delete your family pictures folder, log into your bank account and wire all your money to shrimp charities.
It's interesting that Jason Calacanis is fully committed to OpenClaw. In a recent podcast he said that at a run rate around $100K a year per agent, if not more. They are providing each agent with a full set of tools, access to online paid LLM accounts, etc.
These are experiments you can only run if you can risk cash at those levels and see what happens. Watching it closely.
Interesting. I have worked in ITAR environments with serious security and have never experienced 30 minute lines at the door. In fact, I can't remember lines at all. Hard to understand what happened here.
Was it really a single turnstile for a building with over 10 floors? That's kind of silly, isn't it? Mass transit operations have this figured out. Most recently for me, taking the monorail in Las Vegas for the CES show. No problems for the most part. It would be interesting to know what this company actually installed.
I don't see how any of this wasn't already a problem. In the story, everyone shows up to the office at the same time, how did they use to work out the elevator issue? This story has a bunch of AI telltales so I doubt it's real anyway.
In the story, they implemented table (building) and row (floor) level permissions simultaneously. So you had to swipe into the building, then in the elevator to get the elevator to stop at your floor.
I guess I could see contention possibly happening as described if everybody arrived almost simultaneously and both swiping points had very high latency. But why not keep the door checkpoints armed and disable the elevator swipes? That makes me think it's a contrived example.
> The thing is, what are the parents to do beyond restricting things?
Well, I can't speak for parents (as in all parents). I can, however, tell you what we did.
When two of my kids were young we gave them iPods. The idea was to load a few fun educational applications (I had written and published around 10 at the time). Very soon they asked for Clash of Clans to play for a couple of hours on Saturdays. We said that was OK provided they stuck to that rule.
Fast forward to maybe a couple of months later. After repeated warnings that they were not sticking to the plan and promises to do so, I found them playing CoC under the blankets at 11 PM, when they were supposed to be sleeping and had school the next day.
I did not react and gave no indication of having witnessed that.
A couple of days later I asked each of them to their room and asked them to place their top ten favorite toys on the floor.
I then produced a pair of huge garbage bags and we put the toys in them, one bag for each of the kids.
I also asked for their iPods.
No anger, no scolding, just a conversation at a normal tone.
I asked them to grab the bags and follow me.
We went outside, I opened the garbage bin and told them to throw away their toys. It got emotional very quickly. I also gave them the iPods and told them to toss them into the bin.
After the crying subsided I explained that trust is one of the most delicate things in the world and that this was a consequence of them attempting to deceive us by secretly playing CoC when they knew the rules. This was followed by daily talks around the dinner table to explain just how harmful and addictive this stuff could be, how it made them behave and how important it was to honor promises.
Another week later I asked them to come into the garage with me and showed them that I had rescued their favorite toys from the garbage bin. The iPods were gone forever. And now there was a new rule: They could earn one toy per month by bringing top grades from school, helping around the house, keeping their rooms clean and organized and, in general, being well behaved.
That was followed by ten months of absolutely perfect kids learning about earning something they cherished every month. Of course, the behavior and dedication to their school work persisted well beyond having earned their last toy. Lots of talks, going out to do things and positive feedback of course.
They never got the iPods back. They never got social media accounts. They did not get smart phones until much older.
To this day, now well into university, they thank me for having taken away their iPods.
So, again, I don't know about parents in the aggregate, but I don't think being a good parent is difficult.
You are not there to be an all-enabling friend, you are there to guide a new human through life and into adulthood. You are there to teach them everything and, as I still tell them all the time, aim for them to be better than you.
My parents took the same approach and it helped, but I will anecdotally point out that kids have played video games under covers for a while, even when I was young, I remember getting in trouble for playing this spyro game n' watch clone from mcdonalds at night, or gameboy with one of those lamps that plugged into the serial port. When I become a parent, I think I'd feel understanding of something like this, but would likely still only give them access to hardware like cell-enabled apple watches or DSes. The issue I take with modern games like CoC is that they are psychologically engineered to be mentally harmful, and push you to spend real money on fake things. I've seen many peers who were engaged in CoC as kids get into online gambling and sports gambling recently, it doesn't sit right.
> The issue I take with modern games like CoC is that they are psychologically engineered to be mentally harmful
Precisely. I am not saying I am perfect as a parent or that this was the best possible approach to the situation we had. Nobody is and perfect parenting is an absolute myth.
I knew full well just how addictive gaming could be because I experienced it in my 20's. Needless to say that the "shock and awe" consequence to their deceit was not the result of a single data point. We had been seeing changes in behavior over time (six months or so). The objective was three fold: Take away the device that delivered the addictive behavior. Take away something of value to them. Make them earn it back with positive behavior.
The decision was not planned and the consequences were not communicated in advance. Few things in life are like that. Sometimes people discover the consequences of their actions (or understand them) when they are sprung on them because of something they did. Drunk driving being one possible (though not perfect) example of this.
In this case, it worked. Perhaps we got lucky. Not sure. I also did highlight that I cannot speak for all parents. I did the best I thought made sense at the time. Based on the outcome, many years later, I can say it worked.
To the critics on this thread: Your mileage may vary. Some of the comments sound juvenile, perhaps you'll understand if you ever become a parent and face similar circumstances. Then see what you think of someone who thinks they know better from behind a keyboard than you did in the moment and without having to be responsible for the outcomes (which is a multi-year commitment).
You probably figured, but I am likely the same age to your kids, I agree that the similar "shock and awe" nature with which my parents treated this stuff was warranted, and in fact I wish they went a little further, but even hiding the batteries to all devices and only allowing them out for a couple hours a day was progress. The problem I see coming my way is that the cultural monolith has degraded to the point where an online kid and offline kid can't coexist, it was already pretty strained when I was a high school student in the '10s, isolation isn't the answer, and in my own experience while one can tolerate being "weird", the lack of a shared culture is often dislocating. At this point I'm just hoping there's somewhere I could find with with like-minded parents
What you highlight here is a vexing modern problem. Today, my kids, between 20 and 27, actively socialize with friends through gaming. Seen in isolation gaming is a monumental waste of time. However, there's this social element that I think is pervasive today that cannot be ignored.
Dating myself, I fully experienced the negative side of gaming back around the time of games like Duke Nukem, etc. I worked nights for a few years. I'd get home at 2 AM fully awake from having driven home. I'd sit down and play for four hours, maybe more. No social element at all in those days. I quick when I started to have nightmares and realized it was because of the games. Decades later, with kids, there was no way I was going to let a ten year old destroy their brains with an addictive substance in the form of a game.
Going back to culture and socialization, I don't really know what the answer might be today, much less in the future. Maybe AI friends will be crucially important (I shudder to think this could be true). Some of it comes down to family structure and dynamics. Our cultural makeup means that we are very often in family-and-friends gathering with 20 to 50 people. That does help kids relate to humans more than keyboards, yet the danger is still there.
Maybe this is where schools might need to become far closer to community organizations than (sorry, I have to...) centers for indoctrination. I attended private school most of my young life. One of the interesting aspects of this is that the parents all knew each other and socialized. We would go to each others homes, throw parties, travel together, etc. This is very different from the (again, I'm sorry, I must...) typical US school-as-a-cattle-ranch approach where you have a high school with 4000 students. I know I am being very opinionated and maybe a bit elitist due to my young experience, it should be noted that this was in a third world country...so, when I say "private school" the reader should not imagine what that might mean in the US.
My point is that things are becoming very complex at a social level and we, as a society, need to make sure that kids grow up to be solid adults. Today there are so many opportunities for them get lost in screens that I truly don't know what social problems might come out of this mess. Games are but one part of it.
It's true, having gone to public school and seeing other public schools, you're basically either getting austerity curriculum forced on teachers served in a new deal skeleton with 50 coats of paint or you're at some cargo-cult charter school run like a private prison. I'm sure in a decade or so when I'm ready the answer will be more clear, especially as it seems we're in the middle of several paradigm shifts, but I appreciate your answers. I just hope by then we'll see an end to this pointless peacocking with extracurriculars and activities. I still remember the feeling of wanting to be treated more like an adult as a kid, to do adult things like own a cell phone or use power tools and being given facsimiles, if I could put my kids in a Montessori school maybe that'd be good but they feel like the kind of place that exposes are posted about on HN, maybe worth more research. As the role of college changes from one that makes taste to one that makes money, learning motivation and moderation will be the most important.
I can't tell whether "destroying all your favorite toys" was a clear expectation the kids already had as a possible outcome of their choices.
__________
1. Teach children about consequences... by using clear expectations, timely feedback, and proportional responses.
2. Teach children about consequences... by allowing wrongdoing to become a festering mess until it "justifies" some big punishment that comes as deliberate emotional trauma and surprise.
Separately from asking which one is more "effective" at conditioning an immediate behavior, each choice also affects how those kids are going to behave when they are in any position to set and enforce rules. Being a role-model is hard.
The issue with any parent's narrative, including yours, is that it's one-sided. We'd need the story told by the children-turned-adults to make any fair judgement. Some people are going to say what their family wants them to hear and only open up to professionals or a neutral third party.
> We'd need the story told by the children-turned-adults to make any fair judgement.
True enough. Of course, you are not going to get that in this case. All I can say is that those commenting here about potentially cataclysmic consequences are likely precisely the kind of people who will practice the kind of soft "friend class" parenting that can result in really troubled kids. If they even have kids at all, because some of the comments by others sound infantile.
The other narrative that is utterly false is that of role models in the negative sense. Almost all of you are one or two generations away from a culture and style of parenting where beating the kids was considered normal and even good parenting. An era where teachers beating kids in school was also normal and accepted. And yet, that has largely not survived the generational divide except in some segments of some cultures.
Raising kids and being a role model isn't a matter of single events or experiences, it is, like most other things in the human condition, a matter of building a relationship over time and understanding that life usually is a rollercoaster ride, not a straight-and-flat road.
Product management --and managers-- can be, shall we say, interesting.
I was recently involved with a company that wanted us to develop a product that would be disruptive enough to enter an established market, make waves and shock it.
We did just that. We ran a deep survey of all competing products, bought a bunch of them, studied absolutely everything about them, how they were used and their users. Armed with that information, we produced a set of specifications and user experience requirements that far exceeded anything in the market.
We got green-lit to deliver a set of prototypes to present at a trade show. We did that.
The prototypes were presented and they truly blew everyone away. Blogs, vlogs, users, everyone absolutely loved what we created and the sense was that this was a winning product.
And then came reality. Neither the product manager nor the CTO (and we could add the CEO and CFO to the list) had enough understanding and experience in the domain to take the prototypes to market. It would easily have required a year or two of learning before they could function in that domain.
What did they do? They dumbed down the product specification to force it into what they understood and what engineering building blocks they already had. Square peg solidly and violently pounded into a round hole.
The outcome? Oh, they built a product alright. They sure did. And it flopped, horribly flopped, as soon as it was introduced and made available. Nobody wanted it. It was not competitive. It offered nothing disruptive. It was a bad clone of everything already occupying space in that ecosystem. Game over.
The point is: Technology companies are not immune to human failings, ego, protectionism/turf guarding, bad decisions, bad management, etc.
When someone says something like "I am not sure that's a good idea for a startup. There's competition." My first though is: Never assume that competitors know what they are doing, are capable and always make the right decisions without making mistakes. You don't always need a better product, you need better execution.
Replace the C levels with AI. The C suite is am impediment to innovation and progress. They are the office politics mentioned in this entire thread. The person with the vision and the strategy is a random person out there that doesn't even work for your company. Hell, you could have done it.
> The point is: Technology companies are not immune to human failings, ego, protectionism/turf guarding, bad decisions, bad management, etc.
They only accidentally succeed in spite of those things. They have those things more than existing businesses precisely because having too much money masks the pressures that would force solid execution and results. When you have 80% profit margins, you can show up drunk.
The video was likely recovered from local flash memory on the camera itself. These kinds of devices are not uploading raw video to the cloud.
There are several reasons for that. The first is that you cannot rely on connectivity 100% of the time. Second, if you can have the camera run image processing and compression locally, you don't have to dedicate a massive amount of processing resources at the data center to run the processing. Imagine ten or a hundred million cameras. Where would you want the image processing to run? Right.
My guess is that they either went to Google to perhaps connect the camera to a sandboxed testing rig that could extract locally-stored video data or they removed the flash device, offloaded the raw data and then extracted video from that data. This last option could also have the advantage of having less compression (architecture dependent).
Decades ago I was personally involved in recovering and helping analyze surveillance video data for the prosecution in the OJ Simpson case. Back then, it was tape.
One of the techniques that was considered (I can't publicly state what was actually done) was to digitize raw data right off the read heads on the VCR's spinning drum. You could then process this data using advanced algorithms which could produce better results than the electronics in even the most expensive professional tape players of he era.
Once you step away from the limitations of a product --meaning, you are not engineering a product, you are mining for information-- all kinds of interesting and creative out-of-the-box opportunities present themselves.
> I truly do not understand the appeal of proto board.
I didn't understand your comment until I looked at the pictures in the article. To me "proto board" has always meant wire-wrapping. I lost count of how many of my designs back in the dark ages started as wire-wrapped protoboards. CPU cards, drive controllers, memory cards, motor drivers, keypads, I/O cards and myriad other projects.
In fact, I still have my OK Industries wire-wrapping gun[0]. I still have pins, sockets, boards, wire, etc. I probably reach for them once every couple of years these days. On those rare occasions when it's the middle of the night or a weekend and I have to wire-up a small board (nothing substantial). It's fast and works well for the right kind of project.
The problem with wire-wrap (and breadboards) is that, once clock frequencies (or frequencies in general in analog designs) rise the capacitive and inductive effects quickly conspire against you and make it impossible to build circuits that work. This is where the OP's approach can provide a bit of a bridge between a full PCB and wire-wrap/breadboard. I have done hand-wired (just like the article) boards with twisted pairs and carefully routed point-to-point connections. I never used magnet wire, just kynar or teflon wire-wrap wire.
[0] Mine is exactly like the one in figure 4 in this article. It works with spools of wire and auto-strips as you wire a board. It is very fast. Not sure why the article shows pre-stripped wire, the tool does the work for you auto-magically. I didn't read the article, maybe they are using a bit that does not strip (why?).
I've seen the opposite as well, and at a high level.
In this case it was an incompetent VP of Engineering who was seriously lacking domain knowledge when a new set of projects outside the norm came into the company. Instead of having a professional attitude, understanding his limitations and convening domain experts to help him and the team move forward, he actively opposed and derailed the project.
What's sad is that we, as external engineering consultants, were yelling at the top of our lungs trying to make management understand the serious liability this had revealed. They were absolutely blind to it until even a toddler could recognize the issue.
This cost the company millions of dollars as well as market reputation.
I think he is an Uber driver now, it's been a few years.
Nice concept, yet, this isn't realistic but for a few special cases.
In simple terms, if a company has a continuum of products of a certain category over time, the designs (hardware, software, manufacturing, testing, etc.) are typically evolutionary in nature.
This means that product B inherits from product A, C from B, etc. When product C goes to market, A and B might be EOL. Open sourcing anything related to product C means relinquishing their intellectual property.
Nobody in their right mind would do that unless a unique set of conditions are in place to have that make sense. In general terms, this does not happen.
> I have a SolidWorks Students License and it's the most frustrating piece of software I have ever used.
Yeah, you need to invest time to learn it. I do understand the frustration when learning something new. I get it. However, your sentiment on this isn't leading to the correct conclusion. A piano or or a guitar are frustrating instruments until you get past a certain level of mastery.
Engineering tools do carry with them a degree of complexity. There are reasons for this. Some are, of course, better than others. I started in the dark ages with AutoCAD, then, over time, learned used ACAD 3D, Inventor, Pro-E, Solidworks, Fusion 360, Onshape, Siemens NX and CAM tools like Camworks and Mastercam; all in professional commercial, industrial or aerospace (NX) settings. I would rank Solidworks way up there in usability and functionality.
Of course, this isn't to say that there are lots of things that could be improved in Solidworks (and all of the CAD/CAM programs I mentioned).
Sometimes online resources like YouTube can feel (and actually be) really disjointed. Get yourself a good book on Solidworks and go through it front to back. At some point it will click. From that point forward it will feel like an extension of your brain. This is no different from learning to play the piano. When I use Solidworks I don't think about the UI, I just work on my designs.
> I've been saying it for ages, but a decent easily available western equivalent to the ESP32 (meaning easy WiFi) needs to happen
- Texas Instruments SimpleLink CC32xx (CC3220 / CC3235)
- TI CC3235MODA module
- Renesas DA16200
- Microchip PIC32MZ-W1
- Microchip WFI32 module family
- Silicon Labs SiWx917 / SiWG917
- Silicon Labs SiWx917Y module
- Nordic Semiconductor nRF7001/7002 WiFi 6 IC
- Use with nRF52, nRF53 or nRF91 series SoCs
- STMicroelectronics STM32 with ST67W series pre-certified WiFi modules
These solutions are priced well for commercial and industrial solutions at scale.
If necessary one can use any cheap hobby solution for initial development and then port to an industrial-class SoC solution. We've done this a few times during pandemic era shortages; using the RP2040 to get through prototyping and development and then switching the design to an industrial-grade chip.
What's missing from these parts which makes people reach for ESP32 by default instead? (I don't have any experience with ESP32.)
The TI parts seem a bit expensive in small quantities, but the Microchip and SiliLabs parts are like $6-7 in single units from Digi-Key. Is it just that the dev kits are in the >$50 price range which puts people off compared to ESP32?
> The TI parts seem a bit expensive in small quantities, but the Microchip and SiliLabs parts are like $6-7 in single units from Digi-Key. Is it just that the dev kits are in the >$50 price range which puts people off compared to ESP32?
It helps to separate hobbyist use from professional product development.
The hobby market is driven by quick, cheap, and easy: low up-front cost, abundant tutorials, and inexpensive dev boards. In that context, ESP32 shines, and expensive dev kits can be a real psychological barrier.
For commercial, industrial, or professional products, however, small-quantity pricing is often irrelevant. Sample or single-unit prices rarely reflect real production costs. Without getting into specifics, it’s common for the ratio between sample pricing and volume pricing to be 10× or more.
A part that costs $20 in onesies can easily be a $2 part at scale. This doesn’t apply universally, but it does mean that judging a device’s suitability for mass production based on Digi-Key single-unit pricing is usually a mistake.
There are also system-level considerations beyond the MCU’s line item price. For example, the RP2040 could be very inexpensive (around $0.50 in modest volumes when we used it), but that ignores the required external flash, which adds cost, board space, and supply-chain complexity. More importantly for many products, it offers no meaningful code security (the external flash can simply be read out—which can be a non-starter in commercial designs).
Guaranteed long-term availability can be crucially important as well; with design support requirements in commercial/industrial settings often extending past ten year timelines.
Tooling and ecosystem maturity also matter. At the time, the RP2040 toolchain was notably hostile to Windows, and Raspberry Pi support reflected that attitude. In reality, most product development (EE, MCAD, manufacturing, test, PLM/ERP) is Windows-centric. Asking an organization to bolt a Linux-only toolchain onto an otherwise Windows-based workflow just to save a dollar on an MCU is rarely a winning argument.
So while cost absolutely matters, it’s often not the dominant factor in professional design. Security, tooling, vendor support, long-term availability, and integration into existing workflows frequently outweigh a few dollars of MCU price, particularly once production pricing enters the picture.
> What's missing from these parts which makes people reach for ESP32 by default instead?
I didn’t directly answer that question before.
Strictly speaking, nothing essential is missing from many of these other parts. In fact, in professional contexts they often have better documentation, support, longevity guarantees, or security features than ESP32.
One of the biggest differentiators is simply pricing strategy. Espressif has used aggressively low pricing (what many would reasonably call predatory pricing) to capture mindshare and market share. That playbook is hardly new; it’s been used successfully across industries for decades. Ultra-cheap silicon, combined with inexpensive dev boards, dramatically lowers the barrier to entry and makes ESP32 the default choice, especially for hobbyists and startups.
Price pressure also creates a feedback loop: more users means more tutorials, libraries, examples, and community support, which in turn makes the platform feel easier and safer to choose, even when alternatives might be technically superior.
For teams operating in cost-driven markets, this can become unavoidable. If your product lives or dies on BOM cost, reaching for the cheapest viable part may not be optional. I spent several years in that environment myself, and while it’s a valid constraint, it tends to push decisions toward short-term cost optimization rather than long-term engineering value.
So the answer isn’t that these parts lack features, it’s that ESP32 combines good-enough capabilities with exceptionally aggressive pricing and a massive ecosystem, which together make it the default choice in many contexts.
> These solutions are priced well for commercial and industrial solutions at scale.
Translation: they're expensive, and getting them working involves jumping through hoops more complex than simply getting boards off Amazon and launching VS Code. They aren't equivalent, and the sneering isn't helping.
It is failing to understand this that opens the door to DJI and Bambu, who unsurprisingly prioritize user experience and predictability, which is a major factor in why in open competition they keep wiping the floor with everyone.
> Translation: they're expensive, and getting them working involves jumping through hoops more complex than simply getting boards off Amazon and launching VS Code. They aren't equivalent, and the sneering isn't helping.
Who's sneering?
Complexity is a relative assessment. Bringing up 8, 16 and 32 bit MCUs/SoC's has never in history been easier. Decades ago we used to have to bring up our boards from nothing, sometimes even having to write our own RTOS, boot code, firmware update code, etc. Today? A high school kid could do it with most chips. Go check out the STM32 Cube ecosystem for a glimpse.
I do understand that this is still likely daunting for hobbyists. I am not talking about arduino-level hobby users. That is not my world at all. However, understand that the commercial/industrial market is orders of magnitude larger than the hobby markets, and the rules and requirements are different.
> It is failing to understand this that opens the door to DJI and Bambu, who unsurprisingly prioritize user experience and predictability, which is a major factor in why in open competition they keep wiping the floor with everyone.
Are you responding to someone else's comment? This has nothing to do with what I was addressing. I am talking about chips, and, in particular, SoC (System on Chip) solutions for WiFi applications. These are components used by engineers to design products. You are talking about finished products. You might as well add blender and microwave oven manufacturers to that list.
You're missing the point: the line between hobbyist and prototype now doesn't exist - there is a continuum where devices are made in single digits, tens of units, and progressively scaled up. This isn't the 80s/90s where you make none or thousands. Even those Amazon made wall socket relay things are ESP based after all.
In this universe the old way of doing things makes no sense.
> Who's sneering?
Your comment was, and you still are like:
> However, understand that the commercial/industrial market is orders of magnitude larger than the hobby markets, and the rules and requirements are different.
In fact the hobby market now has _tougher_ requirements (particularly for software support, which Wifi necessitates) than the commercial and industrial one, and would not tolerate the level of random hacks/erratum that are spat out by the major chip providers.
> You're missing the point: the line between hobbyist and prototype now doesn't exist - there is a continuum where devices are made in single digits, tens of units, and progressively scaled up. This isn't the 80s/90s where you make none or thousands. Even those Amazon made wall socket relay things are ESP based after all.
Yeah, no. Sorry, you don't know what you are talking about.
I've gone from self-funded garage startup to millions of dollars in annual sales twice in my life (> $40MM annual with my current business, targeting 10x that within five years). And, yes, I've also had several truly memorable failures (including going bankrupt).
What you are saying might only align with reality at a trivial business level. Even today. Making ten or a hundred gizmos for Etsy with no concern given to the requirements of real comercial/industrial products? Sure. Anything else, no, you are wrong.
> In fact the hobby market now has _tougher_ requirements (particularly for software support, which Wifi necessitates) than the commercial and industrial one, and would not tolerate the level of random hacks/erratum that are spat out by the major chip providers.
Once again, sorry, you might want to stop, this statement shows just how little you know. There's nothing in hobby-world that even remotely compares to the requirements of commercial and industrial products.
Simple example: Nobody producing hobby products worries about setting someone's house on fire or making a device that interferes with pacemakers.
Please go ask ChatGPT what it costs to obtain UL, FCC, TUV, CE and other certifications for a non-trivial electronic or electromechanical product. Depending on many factors, the number is going to be between $25K and well over $100K.
So, if you are doing it legally and with all safety and other certifications, your cost basis starts at around $25K JUST FOR THE CERTIFICATIONS. If you manufacture 100 units, that would be $250 per unit in regulatory costs. So, how do you sell a hobby gizmo for $10 or $25? Simple, you ignore all of that and just sell it. And if it burns down someone's home, interferes with pacemakers or had other negative repercussions you ignore it, go out of business or whatever.
The millions of Chinese products on Amazon in this category are "fire and forget" products. The manufacturers could not care less what happens or what harm they may cause. There are plenty of stories of cheap USB charge adapters that have caused fires, etc. Certifications obtained in China for these products are mostly fake and cannot be relied upon at all (I have seen some truly horrific things).
BTW, there's nothing wrong with not knowing. We don't know everything, nobody does. What is ill-advised is to behave as though we did know.
One way to look at it is that the hobby market is the domain of a range of people spanning a range from kids to adult tinkerers and enthusiasts. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that. I was a kid designing and building computers (from bare IC's) before I went to university. The commercial, industrial, medical and aerospace markets are the domain of professionals. There's a vast knowledge, capability, responsibility and requirements gap between those two worlds. One does not negate the other and it isn't sneering to say that hobby products rarely measure up to products designed for other markets.
> Yeah, no. Sorry, you don't know what you are talking about.
"OK". This is why your snark is so easily detectable, you're the one that doesn't see how things have moved on.
> Once again, sorry, you might want to stop, this statement shows just how little you know. There's nothing in hobby-world that even remotely compares to the requirements of commercial and industrial products.
> Simple example: Nobody producing hobby products worries about setting someone's house on fire or making a device that interferes with pacemakers.
Yeah, they do. What do you think the 3D printer community worries about? It's a rapidly moving heating element shooting hot plastic, an inherent health and fire hazard if it goes wrong. If the likes of Bambu got this wrong you would absolutely know about it.
If drone control software crashes what happens? It falls out of the sky on to people.
And here you are coping that 3D printers or drones are easy products to develop in consumer friendly form.
I've worked on tablets and cellphones prototypes (things shipping in tens of millions per model variant) we had burn people in testing because of bugs caused by the usual supposedly reputable manufacturers. You can tell by some of the devices that actually shipped that big corp enthusiasm for risk taking can easily exceed what smaller scale producers will accept, and that to the right people it presents no obstacle to certification.
The Chinese have overtaken the west at actually being good at consumer electronics development, and the denial about this from people is frightening.
If I argue with my wife about medical matters (she is an MD) her response might look or sound snarky to some. In reality, she would be correct in telling me how and why I would be wrong.
You really need to stop, because you are digging a deeper hole with every word. You just said that 3D printers and drone are easy consumer products to develop. You truly do not understand what it takes to develop these products. The vast majority of them are still incredibly unsafe. There's a minority that have greatly enhanced safety. It should not be surprising that the safe systems (with a couple of exceptions) cost tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars and address commercial/industrial markets, not hobby. The amount of engineering and testing these systems require is nothing less than massive.
Context: I've been designing, building and flying all kinds of RC planes, gliders, helicopters and multicopters for four decades. I have been designing, building and using 3D printers for over two decades. Our latest 3D printer for internal use is equipped with Teknic Clearpath motors with fully machined structure and parts made on our Haas CNC Vertical Machining Centers.
Again, please, chill, nobody is insulting the hobby world (which you seem to be offended by). These are different worlds. That's how it has been from the start of time. And that's OK.
Here, I'll help you stop. Let's agree to disagree. You are absolutely right and I am wrong.
> You really need to stop, because you are digging a deeper hole with every word. You just said that 3D printers and drone are easy consumer products to develop.
Basically you can't actually read then and are just imagining things to argue with while slinging insults.
I said the exact opposite of what you are claiming - you're the one dismissing the entire hobbyist field, while attempting to deflect otherwise.
I simply started this comment thread to say that there's a substantial, massive, actually, difference between hobby and commercial/industrial products and here you are blowing it up into a fucking ridiculous moronic argument trying to say this isn't true.
It's interesting that Jason Calacanis is fully committed to OpenClaw. In a recent podcast he said that at a run rate around $100K a year per agent, if not more. They are providing each agent with a full set of tools, access to online paid LLM accounts, etc.
These are experiments you can only run if you can risk cash at those levels and see what happens. Watching it closely.
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