I really hate the way they use the colour in the netting to try to make the fruit look better / fresher. Red netting for oranges to make them look more ripe, onions in brownish netting, limes in green netting, garlic in white netting.

I’d pay more for neutral / translucent netting that’s more honest. Or, maybe we can just get rid of the plastic entirely and use paper or something.

Suuuuure they are. No accounting gimmicks at all! Just suddenly profitable via magic right before they go public.

Sure, it might seem like a sprint compared to a Waterfall project where it’s a marathon, where there might be months between points where you check in with the plan and try to figure out if the software is ready to ship yet.

I still just object to the word “sprint”. Any job where you’re sprinting over and over, week after week, where that’s the main thing you’re doing, you’re doing something wrong.

What makes it so annoying to me is that a sprint implies putting in maximum effort for a short time. The pace of a sprint is unsustainable over more than a few seconds.

If you say you did “sprints” for over a year… no you didn’t. Either you sprinted for a little bit and then had to walk for a while because you’d used up all your energy. Or, you jogged at a sustainable pace for a year and just called it a sprint.

They make it up in volume.

(Volume being how loudly they shout about how it’s going to change the world and dupe more people into investing.)

Yeah, it worked.

What’s funnier is that typically the AI providers lose money on every query their customers make. So, this may have cost some company $500m to Anthropic, but it cost Anthropic a whole lot more than that.

Hmm, does the other direction work? @[email protected] wants to know. (That’s me).

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.

Especially when they’re called “standups” but everybody sits down because they typically last an hour or so.

Tag it how?

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.

I remember using it back when it was called “Audioscrobbler”. I think the “scrobbler” part stuck around somehow?

The demo would be a lot more impressive if the questions you were asking weren’t longer than the extremely simple SQL queries it generates.

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.

It’s good that they’re attacking them on the software side, but they should also go after them on the legal side.

It looks like you can buy a fully assembled ebike for the price of just an ebike conversion kit.

I think they’re even worse.

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.