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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • On that subject, does anybody hate the term “Sprint” as much as I do?

    “Sprints” are extremely quick events that last tens of seconds and are done at most once a day, but more often (in competition) a few times a month, or a few times in a day every few months.

    You don’t sprint for a full week every week. That’s a marathon, maybe an ultra-marathon.




  • One difference is that Flipper have a track record of actually building and shipping a successful product.

    I’ve followed a lot of similar projects on kickstarter, etc. and a lot of them fail before finally shipping something. There are so many hard parts: international shipping, customs clearance, supply chains, lead times, legal compliance, etc.

    I hope that Mecha Comet works out, it looks really cool. But, I’m definitely not going to pre-order.

    As for how it’s different, it looks like they’re intended for different uses. The Comet looks like it’s intended to be a handheld device you can use for gaming and maybe on-the-go stuff like texting, email, maybe watching media, etc. It has a 40-pin breakout board but you have to remove the keyboard to use it.

    The Flipper One looks more like a portable debugging server. Despite its small size it has 2 ethernet ports and a full size HDMI port. It seems like if you’re holding it in your hand and looking at its tiny screen for any length of time you’re probably not using it the way they expect.




  • First reason is that during covid they tried shifting all business over to these pickup services. Well…without direct control of the services, you’re kind of at the mercy of the workforce that can’t get jobs that have a boss. You are not their boss. They are their boss. You’re allowing them to do your work without any oversight on your behalf. So why would Joe the delivery driver, whos 4 hours late picking up this order, give a shit about quality control?

    It’s worse than that.

    You’re looking at it as if the app-based delivery service has low standards. The reality is even worse. They use all kinds of surveillance and data analysis techniques to figure out which of their drivers is the most desperate, and will keep working for the lowest possible fees. Then, they give the most work to those drivers because they are the most profitable. The drivers know they’re getting screwed, but they are doing app-based deliveries because they can’t find anything better.

    The apps are a middleman between the restaurant and the customer and they don’t just squeeze those two, they also squeeze their drivers.





  • There are so many issues to consider. Who makes the motor? Who makes the battery? Will you still be able to buy that battery in 5 years? Will it still work if the company that sold it goes out of business? You can get cheap Chinese e-bikes for 1/4 the cost of American-branded e-bikes. But, sometimes the American ones are just Chinese ones with a sticker slapped on that doubles the price.

    From what I’ve been able to figure out, motors made by Bafang and batteries made by Bafang or Samsung are thought to be ones that should still be around in a few years.

    Then there are all the other issues to consider: hub drive or mid-drive? Pedal assist or throttle? Rear derailleur, internally geared hub, or continuously variable transmission?

    I’ve been thinking of getting one and am ready to part with my money, but I can’t justify the price of some of the North-American / European labelled bikes, but don’t want to waste money on a Chinese one that might only work for a few weeks.


  • My experience is that games run just as well (if not better) in Linux. I’m also running Bazzite. The difference is that I think I had an nVidia driver issue once in about 10 years under Windows with this computer and hardware combo. It was such a rare occurrence that I assumed my card was dying, but it turns out that the next update fixed all the problems.

    Meanwhile, the time between hitting a driver bug in Linux is measured in months. For a long time I couldn’t play SNES games with an emulator because something about how it initialized the display (on systems with 2 monitors attached to the card) caused the driver to completely lock up.


  • I’ve run modern AAA games with no issues, but using an emulator to play an old SNES game caused the driver to lock up. Apparently it has something to do with running 2 different screens? It’s definitely not just using advanced features or games that push the envelope.

    When I was running Windows for games and Linux for other things, I think I had an nVidia driver problem once in something like 10 years. Once I switched to Linux completely (with the same hardware) the driver issues are frequent. This is using Bazzite so it’s a base system that has been assembled for all nVidia Bazzite users, not a quirk of my particular setup.

    It’s basically what you’d expect when 95% of nVidia GPU users (at least home users) are running Windows, and only 5% are on Linux. Windows gets a lot more QA effort, and Linux gets a lot more bugs.