I built a few identical fidget-spinner toy kits using either leaded and lead-free solder to decide which type I should keep buying from then on, the leaded stuff was admittedly a tiny bit easier to work with and usually left a slightly shinier (better looking) surface, but not to an adequate degree to justify any real risk (or even continual worry) of brain damage et cetera from voluntarily raising the lead level of my home. Your comment seems unbalanced, to me.
am well aware that leaded solder still has some niche applications, but the comment i replied to called lead-free a "clusterfuck" without any regard for the huge public health benefits.
i hope you agree it's good that e-waste isn't toxic.
E-waste is still toxic, now you have to ask yourself if increasing e-waste due to poorly-performing circuits and electromigration (look it up) is worth making some parts of it less toxic. I don't have the answer, but you don't either.
Those who care about the quality of the solder joint. You need to get a shiny surface, because anything else is a strong indicator that the solder has been contaminated/oxidized, and if it is such at the surface level, it may well be on the contact points aswell. Im not saying its a 100% garantuee, but if you look at failed solder joints, ESPECIALLY handmade ones, nearly all of them are the ones that were not coming out shiny. If its not shiny, its a fail
Are you planning to eat your laptop? If no, your risk is basically zero.
As for your hobbyist work, the flux used in lead-free solder is actually worse if you breathe it in:
It was widely believed that the move to lead-free soldering would create more environmentally-friendly conditions; however because of the higher temperatures required and extra flux used lead-free soldering smoke emissions actually contain more fine dust particles which are easier to breathe in. As Fig.1 shows, these penetrate further into the lungs than pollen or asbestos, reaching and blocking the alveoli.
i wonder if you really got leadfree when you can say that. a leaded tin like 60/40 is infinitely nicer to work with than leadfree ones, and I have tried MANY, cheap and expensive leadfree solders, none come even remotely close.
Sure, dont inhale the smoke, dont eat it, wash your hands after handling the solder, you'll be fine. Want to do more for your health? chances are that getting a little more exercise is a hugely more impactful thing to do (and no, I do not know how much you exercise, but many people today are way too sedentary, myself included)
He wasn't indulging in 'hobby talk'. He did a comparative assessment of solders using a (presumably cheap and simple) kit. The example just so happened to include a 'hobby'
You're taking the piss, and then bizarrely suggesting they should be kind to you.
A myth. Copper and aluminium won't heat on a consumer-grade kitchen induction stove, which only have a set of coils designed for ferrous metals, but restaurant kitchen professional IH stoves can use the different frequencies that heat non-ferrous metals, and a forge or melting furnace can indeed melt any metal, ferrous or not.
Why don't residential induction stoves have that capacity? Given the popularity of aluminum and copper cookware I'd think it would be pushed out. It's one thing people always bring up with induction ranges.
The electronics to drive the right frequency for efficiently heating ferrous metals (about 25KHz) are affordable. The electronics to drive the much higher (at least double?) frequencies for non-ferrous metals safely are not so affordable. It would add more to the cost than a new set of cookware. Cast iron is the king of cookware and works great on IH, anyway!
You can put a few mm thick piece of steel on top of the hob and then set your copper pan on that, as a workaround.
What is fenced off for Europeans? Admittedly I've been living outside of Europe for some time, but some of my self hosted stuff is still based there, and a lot of friends, and I haven't had or heard of a problem with being "kept out" of new products.
Personal anecdote, I think I've encountered a few news/radio stations being blocked (self censored), I think I can count the instances on one hand. I browse a lot.
Certain services are blocked like Bard, and Meta Threads, but that's more common with services, even for countries outside the EU.
I think the burden of proof lies on the one who makes a claim. So you should be providing list of services that are not available to europeans. And bonus points for not using "threads by instagram" in that list.
You literally made a claim in your very first reply: "Tech companies now seem to geo-fence their new products and keep European users out right from the start."
> You name the 10 most important tech products of the year so far.
Do name them, please. And then revisit that list and ask yourself: how many of them exist because of two things:
- unlimited investor money with no expectation of profitability
- blatant disregard of data privacy, user privacy, and/or other laws.
Great example is OpenAI. They said they welcomed regulation. The moment EU proposed level-headed sensible regulation [1] that among other things required documentation on how foundational models are trained and where they get their data, Altman screamed that they would pull out of EU.
There are tons of alternative single-board-computers available. The Orange Pi 5 is great for MUCH higher end performance but still under (usd)$100, and there are other options (Orange Pi 3? Banana Pi? Radxa RockPi?) that still match or beat the Raspberry Pi 4 performance for the same recommended retail price, but new stock is available for the sticker price.
Raspberry Pi OS is pretty much Debian with Broadcom drivers they haven't up-streamed yet. It runs on other SBCs, or there's Armbian, Arch for ARM, RebornOS, et cetera et cetera, all packaged for ARM uboot SBCs.
If you're just using it as a simple SBC, OrangePi may be a good option... but the hardware support with drivers and whatnot is, to my knowledge, far superior on Raspberry Pi's thanks largely to the Broadcom chipset (vs the Rockchip stuff). For many applications where it's used to do hardwarey things, it may not be a substitute.
If you're just using it to run Home Assistant, or some server application, then sure the OrangePi is probably better.
My Kirb. What is this negging "yeah if you're into basic stuff" tone? I'm a fan of the genre, I own quite a few SBCs with various chipset manufacturers, and I use them for all kinds of things, from AI-vision voice-trained mobile robots to "simple" Kodi/emu boxes, and I can guarantee that so long as you notice the specific sizes and pinouts - CSI is CSI, DSI is DSI, Vulkan is Vulkan, et cetera.
Some of the more complex Adafruit / Pimoroni / Seeed hats are very specifically written for Raspberry GPIO, sure, but they have the problem of keeping you on an old OS after a year or two, unless you're willing to put in the same amount of effort as porting their examples to a different GPIO layout.
If you're into making custom stuff that fits whatever connector/pinout/etc exists, then yeah you can make almost any of these SBCs work just fine, no debate there. My point being there's an infrastructure built around Raspberry Pis that as of yet is not nearly as robust for other SBCs.
Is it worth like, $150 for a scalped Pi4? Almost certainly not. But I'd hesitate to say they're just strictly better. They're just different, and have different limitations.
The RK3588 seems like a beast for performance per dollar, I have one running desktop Linux for emulators and games, but I haven't used the NPU yet, because I haven't taken the time to figure out how to get OpenCV to talk to it.
Is Rockchip's stuff "good", as NPUs go? I'm thinking of buying another 3588 SoC for my robotics hobby - you seem like you'd know if that's a decent idea or not.
Well, I already said it :P RK3588's NPU can only do convolutions and a small list of activation functions. Realistically it's usable only on image (2D, 3D data). The software side is pretty weird: It's amazing the amount of models they support despite the limited fixed-hardware function, but there has been literally 0 development in the last 6 months and it does have a lot of bugs that doesn't seem hard to fix. Even when it comes to images, it doesn't support changing the resolution of the input (you need to ""recompile the model"" for that), which is super weird since hardware pipeline doesn't care much about the size.
Anyway, I really don't recommend it, unless you're making your own model, you know before-hand what's supported and what isn't, and your input is fixed resolution (which is a pretty fair usage in an embedded system) (fixed = doesn't change at every frame. handling hotplug from one webcam with a resolution to another with another resolution is fine)
I think looking at the examples give you a reasonable show of what it can do: https://github.com/rockchip-linux/rknn-toolkit/tree/master/e...
It's mobilenet, yolov3, resnet50. There aren't more examples because they didn't had more examples. There aren't more examples because that's pretty much all you can reasonably run.
As far as I can tell, modern image models using transformer/vit won't be runnable on it. (it acts enough as a coprocessor that it's possible to do some parts in CPU some parts in NPU - and Rockchip framework handles that -, so maybe it's somehow possible)
(Note: I say this as a huge Rockchip lover, their mainline support is top-notch, they make very durable product (their 2015's RK3288 is still far from obsolete), and I bought a RK3588 SBC to play with a NPU accelerator (whose full specification is publicly available btw), in the hope to have a self-hosted LLM voice assistant)
Yeah it’s performance vs cost is honestly nuts. 6 TOPS is a pretty solid NPU, but I don’t know what their software is like. Programming those accelerators is often difficult, especially if you’re a small time customer.
Curious if anyone can weigh in on their SW usability. A quick search for their user level tools showed examples/documentation in Chinese(?)
Yeah it's the first under $100 system I've tried, (and I'm a fan of the genre) that's truly a desktop replacement in terms of being a snappy responsive desktop even with lots of browser tabs, etc.
I do know they have their own special sauce to talk to the NPU. I was discouraged from making the effort myself because their special sauce to talk to the VPU has barely any ffmpeg support, it p much only uses gstreamer, and I'm neither a masochist nor French so that's a non-starter.
Yeah I’m very surprised to see a single board computer at less than $100 for a processor like that. Hard to tell what their actual 1ku price is, but if the random Alibaba I found for $20 is right, then that price for the overall board is absurd.
By VPU are you talking about stuff like ISP, video encoder/decoder, or something else?
Among embedded processors I’ve seen touting vision acceleration, gstreamer support is fairly widespread. I bit the bullet to learn it because my role requires it. Maybe it’s Stockholm Syndrome talking, but I’ve somehow grown to like gstreamer. The learning curve was awkward. I struggled with documentation and learned more by analyzing some examples and trial-and-error.
By VPU, I meant the square on the board that eats h.265 hw_enc and hw_dec and things like that, yes. I've been told it's a separate square from the GPU, by someone who is full-time waist-deep on getting Arch running on that hardware, so I take it as fact.
Oh no. The prospect of gstreamer being the only way... Oh no.
Maybe there's a zsh plugin or smth that autocompletes sane defaults? AAAAAAAAHHHHHH there surely isn't, anyone merciful enough to make one would just use ffmpeg instead...
Interesting. Could you give a bit more of a concrete, specific example of "good pathfinding hurting the experience"? It's an odd sounding idea, to me.
Also, you seem to be deep in this world, I'll also ask you - are there RTS games out there where the specific terrain is crucially important for various unit types - like we've seen in the real world recently, with weather updates waiting for deep mud to dry out being the main factor in when tanks and other sorts of vehicles can be useful? My experience of RTS games is limited, but I remember maps being very flat overall, with very few types of steepness modelled.
It's a well known phenomenon in StarCraft 2 that the super efficient pathfinding increased lethality and reduced defender's advantage compared to the first game. And the game is overall considered to be VERY high lethality with a very weak defender's advantage.
Small fights don't make the difference as noticeable, but larger armies are so much more efficient in SC2 compared to SC1, that it's harder to hold off a larger force with a smaller but better-controlled force. The bigger "deathball" tends to just win, it's harder for someone to come back from an army disadvantage with skillful play.
Another small example there is that "ling runbys" in SC2 are vastly more punishing for even small mistakes in leaving a gap open in a building wall, because a huge number of lings can run through a small gap extremely quickly.
If pathing efficiency is the goal, why not make every unit in an RTS extremely tiny? That would make it more efficient for sure. Or, hell, just turn off unit collision entirely. Or make units all move ultra fast, or get rid of all map choke points? All of these things would improve how efficient pathing is.
Pathing efficiency isn't the goal itself, it's part of the game designer's toolbox. Plenty of things are intentionally pathing-inefficient -- like big, slow units -- as part of the game's design and balance.
The lead designer of Stormgate, which is the closest thing we're gonna have to StarCraft 3 probably, has talked about SC2's pathing efficiency problem himself. Granted, it doesn't sound like he wants StarCraft 1-style pathing, he just wants to compensate for the efficiency in other ways, like maybe making unit hitboxes bigger.
Great insights. The gaming experience and pathfinding relationship can also be expanded to game AI in general. I found Lars Liden's slides specifically mentioning "intelligence! = fun". So, for a better gaming experience, it is better to dumb down the AI.
Well, it really depends on the game and user. Personally I'd love smarter AI in some of my games, for some enemies (I realize that I'd probably hate smart AI in other games).
Like, StarCraft skirmish AI is pretty basic, having a smarter opponent to practice against would be nice. As it stands, I can practice a build vs the AI just to get the timings right, but otherwise the AI is mostly useless because it sucks too much compared to a regular player.
If you look at basic zergling vs zealot combat in SC1 vs SC2 you'll see what I'm saying. In SC2 they almost move like liquid and they don't form accidental choke points. The fight is over much faster and simply rewards the beefier army.
For example in Warcraft 3, which is much smaller scale with 10 - 20 units per player at any time, players constantly look for ways to block each other. While the fight is happening you might sneak a unit around just to block their path when they escape. This wouldn't be possible if the pathfinding was better at steering.
In terms of terrain maybe land/sea/air in Red Alert 2?
The more tactical RTS like Company of Heroes and Dawn of War 2 use the terrain a lot, but in small scale ways like moving from cover to cover and building to building. The terrain is very complex there.
The new Dune Spice Wars only has desert but it has some interesting ideas about movement. It's a much slower RTS and has been described as real time 4X.
Spring-Recoil engine games like Zero-K and BAR have not only various unit types affected differently by slopes and water depth, some maps even has terrain like ice that makes some units faster on it ! (Also Zero-K has terraforming.)
It just concerns some of the artwork, which is a major endeavour to recreate.
For example
https://github.com/ZeroK-RTS/Zero-K-Artwork/blob/master/musi...
is under a Noncommercial License, so you can probably fork ZeroK just fine, as long as you don't have commercial plans.
Unfortunately non-open source artwork is a problem with many games whose sources were released by the original publishers, after they abandoned any commercial plans.
For example I'm a big fan of OpenRA, but its artwork is still non-free.
I think ZeroK is a great game, and BAR probably also, so I didn't mean to distract from the great accomplishments of its FLOSS gameengine authors.
