It's interesting to see their intent to make an explicit drop-in replacement.
I'm surprised there aren't really high-quality drop-ins for most of the classic "name brand" commercial fonts at this point, built solely out of the commercial motivation. "We could contract out someone to build it for less than we're paying a commercial foundry to license it for N years, and then forever every designer is using BrandCo Sans instead of Futura/Univers/etc so we get the free brand recognition".
Bread and Circuses was the old answer to social unrest.
The new bet is on surveiliance and security tech, the more autonomous the better. The owner class no longer needs to provide bread and circuses when they can constantly monitor for any sign of dissent and deploy enforcers without empathy or morals.
Property rights might not end up as sacrosanct as they hope. There's a series of slow-motion emergencies unfolding, and emergencies are often a place where all rights-- not just property rights-- get curtailed. If they keep up the "Let them eat cake" act, it's going to make them an easy target for a gritty reboot of 1917.
More than that, these emergencies are the kind that collectively end entire civilizations. We've faced confluences like this before as a species and when it happens, nations fall and die. Not fast and violent, but slow and rotting.
Everyone has the same basic objective and measurement norm, so we can see how performance improves year over year, and how different manufacturers handle a specific known goal, even if it's not super-representative of real world use cases.
Billion-dollar supercomputers don't spend most of their time running LINPACK, and some probably perform better on specific tasks, but it doesn't make the Top 500 list any less of a thing.
There's a good chance that most humanoid robots are not going to look particularly hunan.
You might have different proportions due to different weight distribution or use cases (maybe the legs are made less flexible if the workspace has fewer obstables, for example.
Maybe "bipedal" is a better descriptor, since wheels are a proven way to go faster than Usain Bolt, but walking-style strides are new.
The hard part is knowing where to draw the line between relatively stable infrastructure items that don't benefit from duplication, and flexible items that are likely to benefit from specialization and competition.
X11 made the right choice in putting graphics drivers in the "stable infrastructure" stuff and display toolkits and window managers in the "specialize and compete" section.
I'm sort of pleased about that we're finally trying to replicate this division with the River ecosystem, building a standard compositor that we can plug in different actual window management logic into it, but that makes River itself a huge single point of failure-- if it has a bum release or fails to keep up with trends and extensions, it takes down a lot of the ecosystem, but perhaps not enough to be a five-alarm fire the way Xorg or XF86 back in the day would have been.
I've always figured the dream would be to be able to advertise a low price without ever having to deliver it.
Some particularly skeevy car dealers were skewered many years ago for saying "Advertised price is less tax, title, and additional $2,000".
But they CAN get away with saying "The $8.99 burger is $11.99 unless you:
- possess one of a range of sanctioned devices
- have access to data services
- are able to create and manage an account
- are willing to opt in to whatever tracking/marketing gimmickry
- can claim the "deal" in advance
Each of those steps is a funnel that opts out at least some potential customers from the deal. The 12-year-old who doesn't own a phone can't get the deal. The 85-year-old who can't operate Android can't. The person making impulse purchases and not pre-researching their meal selection misses the offer.
I feel like there's a argument for a precedent akin to "no purchase necessary to enter" for sweepstakes-- no additional purchase, software install, or commitment should be required to claim any advertised offer.
Agree. I see it also as, and maybe it's just the kinda wealthy area that I live in (though I'm myself a lifelong cheapskate)... I assume that the upper 50%, by income, of the people who walk into these places value their time too much to spend it dicking around to get the promos, so it's a convenient way to maximize the revenue from the people who don't mind wasting money.
I think it presses a few buttons we probably recognize (if subconsciously) and find distasteful.
The verbosity makes me think of two things in particular:
- The classic essay written by someone who has 125 words worth of actual content but a 1500 word minimum. Those three paragraphs could be bullet points and convey the meaning just as well. The screen-filling chart of every test case you ran that came back green manages to be less actionable than a direct "one test out of 54 failed." I fully expect to see Claude tell us that "Support Ticket 8257 is a Land Of Contrasts" at some point.
- The sitcom trope of the person caught in a lie who figures if they can keep adding more and more detail he'll be believed and can escape the awkward conversation. Stop. Just stop. You're proposing a fix on a CODEBASE THE CUSTOMER DOES NOT EVEN USE. Cue laugh track, cut to commercial.
I feel like the Raspberry Pi products are inherently a special case.
They're probably produced in far greater numbers than most off-the-shelf STM32 or CH32V chips. You've got a huge ready market in hobbyist/educational products as well as the commercial products that have used it as a convenient choice.
There's that whole non-profit/educational heritage around them that likely selects for a different set of defaults and features than, say, a MCU designed specifically to be the controller for a SATA SSD or a $19 Roku clone.
They also have a small product range, as compared to the broad product matrix a lot of the more "commercial brand" MCUs come in. I know even the CH32v30x chips come in several variations multiplied by several package options (which vary enough to impact the features you can realistically use on them).
> They're probably produced in far greater numbers than most off-the-shelf STM32 or CH32V chips.
I highly doubt it. The RP2xxx lacks the built-in functionality for use in, say, a car, and it isn't cheap and fully-integrated enough for dime-a-dozen gadget application. They are great for hobbyists due to their low barrier to entry, but there really isn't a niche they serve when it comes to mass-produced electronics.
> They are great for hobbyists due to their low barrier to entry, but there really isn't a niche they serve when it comes to mass-produced electronics.
This.
Just programming a microcontroller is generally a pain, but a pain that hardware manufacturers can deal with, because they have employees with experience, who can read the long datasheets, get proper programmers and run the manufacturers software packages to program everything.
For hobbyists, you're basically limited to arduinos, esp??/??, and rpi picos, only those are guaranteed to have a lot of software support, documentation, easy availability on aliexpress etc. for cheap, and can be made to actually do some stuff in an afternoon of tinkering.
(technically it's the same with proper RPis, where they're the only SBC board (not x86 baed) that you're guaranteed will have at least some software support after 5+ years).
> technically it's the same with proper RPis, where they're the only SBC board (not x86 baed) that you're guaranteed will have at least some software support after 5+ years
This isn't quite true, though it's true at the RPi's price point. For example, Toradex (disclosure: I work for Toradex) produces the colibri-imx6 system-on-module that can be turned into an SBC with a stock carrier board. It was introduced in 2014, continues to be supported today, and will continue to be supported until 2036. But that level of long-term support and maintenance costs money, and the pricing reflects that.
This is often a gilded cage. Think about it. On one hand Great, you dont have to redesign your SBC, that would take whole ~1-2 engineering man months (small simple SBC at not bureaucratic nightmare small to middle size company, obviously man hours go thru the window at big many cook orgs). On the other hand you keep shipping SLOW AS ASS SBC to your customers while Chinese competition keeps redesigning _every year_ and offers smoother UI experience with more features for less money.
The real thing manufactures do is ensure that the SBC is available as long as they want it. My company started an embedded controller 6 years ago, at that time we got a contract from manufactures that all the parts would be available for 12 years, thus ensuring we won't have to redo that controller for 3-4 more years (and we might just renew the contracts). As a hobbyist you don't have that guarantee (except the 3 you named) it happens all too often you buy something only to discover not enough other hobbyists have the same board to give it a critical mass of people to make it work. It can still work, but you will personally have to do all the work to make it keep running which few hobbyists have the time/energy for (and often the deep technical knowledge is lacking as well)
A big part of the numbers game is on variants though. There's what, eight or ten total RP2040/2350/2354 parts to choose from? So all the volume is split between those.
Conversely, there are a lot more variations within other MCU lineups. Just looking at the WCH CH32v30x datasheet-- a single relatively low-popularity range from a single vendor, the datasheet shows 9 basic models with five different physical form factors, and there are theoretically different SKUs for different temperature ranges, etc.
What's weird is that they did an open-source release of GWBASIC, but it seemed to be in a worse state than the DOS 1/2/4 releases. I don't think there's a turnkey distribution out there outside of digging up your old DOS 4.01 floppies.
There are some binary releases there from 2022, but I did not try those. The binary I built from source has worked very well.
Never tried to build the DOS source, but I really enjoyed playing with the toolchain they included with the MS-DOS 4 source code release. It's pretty much a complete, MIT-licensed (but binary only) Microsoft toolchain (msc, masm, make, link, etc) from ~1988. For some of my recent hobby projects I put that toolchain in my git repos, to have everything self-contained, with DOSBox as a virtual machine both for building and running, and no other dependencies. So I am happy Microsoft released the DOS code, even if I did not look much at the code itself.
I'm surprised there aren't really high-quality drop-ins for most of the classic "name brand" commercial fonts at this point, built solely out of the commercial motivation. "We could contract out someone to build it for less than we're paying a commercial foundry to license it for N years, and then forever every designer is using BrandCo Sans instead of Futura/Univers/etc so we get the free brand recognition".