I’d be very surprised if that was able to damage your speakers. If it could, then so could any sound you play. It would have to be an exceptionally bad design if playing a youtube video could destroy your speakers.

And with a command like ffmpeg a wrong bot command might just as well overwrite your source file.

So like

# Stupid shitty piece of fucking useless waste of compute resources! Do your fucking damn job, you useless clanker!

divideMp4IntoNSegmentsOfLengthT() {
}

Explicit enough?

Looks like a bad LLM’s try at drawing ASCII fish.

I don’t have one in English, but I have some in German for those who understand.

My Granddad had a female coworker that was higher in rank than him. He would always greet her with “Meine Allerwerteste”. It’s a word play because “Meine Werteste” is equivalent to a very formal version of “my dear”. “Aller” is a superlative form, so basically “My very dearest”. But “Mein Allerwertester” (so the male form of what he used) means “my ass”.

The other one is to use terminology like “Er versucht immer sein Bestes zu geben” (“He always tries to give his best”). In Austria, you are legally allowed to ask for a work testimony from your employer when you are looking for a new job. There is some legislation that prohibits negative speech in these work testimonies so that your employer cannot make you look bad in front of your potential new employer (which makes the whole concept pretty useless, but it is what it is). So to get around that, employers adopted a kind of “secret” code where e.g. “tries to” means “fails to”. So you can use the same kind of terminology to deliver something that sounds like a compliment, but for everyone in the know (which is most people by now) it’s clear that you deeply offended the person you are talking about.

It’s called PEPit, and it can be found here: https://github.com/Dakkaron/PEPit

Most of the documentation is in German, since my primary audience so far were people living close enough that I can hand them devices and I haven’t gotten around to translating everything to English. But I think it should be simple enough that auto-translation should be understandable.

I’m not sure what to do about distribution other than just handing them out for free, having them sign waivers, and getting funding from a charity or similar organization.

That’s what I have been doing so far. I “sold” a few of them for the price of the parts. I donated two to two different local hospitals to use with in-patients. I got a physiotherapy device company to donate money for a scientific study at one of the hospitals, where they will hand 30 devices to patients to keep them and measure how it improves their therapy experience. But so far that’s pretty much the end of the road.

I’m already worrying about how I can even do the study without getting in trouble in regards to taxes and stuff.

It would be really cool if someone else would start picking these up and making some for kids that need it.

This is mainly made for kids with Cystic Fibrosis (like my kid, who was my original audience for the device), but I talked to a few people with broader experience in regards to lung conditions, and it would also work well for kids with Asthma (for RMT therapy) or people with COPD (for inhalation and PEP/RMT therapy). PEP is breathing out against resistance, RMT is breathing in against resistance.

“This idea that the lower cost of renewables alone will drive decarbonisation – it’s not enough,” said Daly. “Because if there’s a huge source of energy demand that wants to grow, it will land on these stranded fossil fuel assets.”

Corporations don’t think in savings, they think in budgets. If the cost of electricity goes down, thanks to e.g. renewables being cheaper, that just means that they can afford to use more electricity.

Tbh, no. The device is realistically priced for a niche medical device with low number of units sold. Medical certification alone is around €500k. Development costs for a very custom device like this are also quite high. The price point isn’t crazy at all.

At the same time, health insurances (even more so here in Europe than in the US) are pretty slow to pay for new technology, especially if the benefit isn’t immediately tangible.

As in, “Will this reduce the need for further insurance spending by e.g. preventing hospital visits?” or “Will this allow a person who is on disability benefits to return to work?”

Not, that’s part of the issue. And also a big reason why someone would pay for much more expensive industrial sources.

I recently got into making hardware to be used by people with medical issues. Specifically, I made a handheld physiotherapy game console.

That’s a simple device using off-the-shelf components and a 3D printed shell.

Parts alone cost around €60 if I buy them off Aliexpress and around €100 if I go for more reliable industrial sources.

Assembly (some hand soldering required), flashing the software, testing, packaging and shipping takes about two hours. I don’t have any employees, so if I do this at the rate I get paid at my day job, that’s another €150. If I had employees, it would be similar due to tax and insurance costs.

Now I have a device for €250 plus shipping, but the calculation isn’t done here.

I also have to account for DOA parts, support (in my country there’s 2 years of warranty on electronics like that), returns (we have a 2 week free return law in my country) and a reserve for potential claims if something catastrophic happens (e.g. a battery blowing up and burning down a customer’s house).

So that easily doubles the price to €500.

But we are not done yet. First we need to account for R&D. So far I spent around 200h developing the device and the games for it, so that’s €15 000 in dev costs, and development is not nearly finished. I expect this to easily double.

Then come certifications. I will need CE including the radio part, certification for that will cost €10k-20k and that is if I don’t need to make changes. If the base board that I am using turns out to not be CE compliant, I will have to DIY a whole PCB design that passes CE and do the certification again.

If I want to have any chance of getting this paid for by an insurance company, I need medical certification. I spoke to a large manufacturer of medical devices (I wanted them to take over my project, but they declined), and they said that medical certification for a device like this is around €500 000.

I expect to maybe sell a few hundred devices per year if I am lucky, and I don’t know how long the market for this device would work. Let’s go with a four-year period until I want to at least break even, because anything longer than that would be very risky.

So let’s go with an unrealistic best case of 1000 devices per year, so 4000 total.

That means, the one-time costs would factor in at least €150 per device. If I only sell 100 devices per year (more realistic estimate) I would need to add €1500 per device.

Btw, medical certification only means there is a chance that insurances pay for it. It doesn’t mean they actually will pay for it. So if I’m unlucky, I paid half a million for the certification and the insurances won’t care.

So now we are up to €650 - €2000 for a device that’s €50 in off-the-shelf hardware. And I haven’t made any money from it apart from the salary for assembling it in my bedroom. And on top of that I also need to pay for taxes and stuff.

This is super frustrating. A handful of kids are already using that device, and every single family of them reports that it made their lives much, much easier, their therapy efficiency much better and improved the health of the children.

I even opensourced the design, to maybe give kids access to this device, but so far nobody dared reproducing it.

I don’t know how to spread that device in a manner that people can afford.

Back to OP: the device in question is developed by a real company, having to pay for patents (both they want to hold and the ones they need to license), salaries, taxes, insurances, and so on, and it’s a really custom device with very custom parts. The price is neither unrealistic or crazy at all. It’s, in fact, really low for what it is.

The fact that we can get amazing high tech products like smartphones for a few €100 is totally crazy and only possible because millions of them are produced (economy of scale) and they are produced by exploiting foreign super cheap labour at every stage of the process.

Why won’t these pesky peasants shut up and give us our data?

Who could have known that the people who voluntarily use a tiny niche browser mostly for privacy/idealism reasons wouldn’t wany just another AI browser?

Honestly, how out of touch with their user base can they be?

If I want a good browser that works with every website, I’d take something chromium based. If I want an AI browser, I’d take one of the many chromium based ones.

Tbh, I’ve worked with self-professed “superstar programmers” so far. In every case their cockiness, ther “I’m always right” attitude and their inability to receive criticism or to adjust in any way to the team lead to major issues.

These “superstar programmers” are much more likely to produce live bugs (because they don’t listen to anyone, don’t follow procedure like code reviews and stuff and after a time nobody wants to invest time into reviewing their code properly because it always ends in a fight). They are also really harmful to team cohesion. Their behavior usually ends with most of the team quitting unless they are fired before that happens.

Programming is teamwork. It by definition needs to be unless you work alone. Someone who can’t work well in a team is a bad programmer.

We have a superstar programmer in our sister team. Both teams work on the same project but in different sections, but there’s a core area where we overlap. That guy recently caused a massive 5h outage of our customer-facing website, which is our main access point for much of the business. We have customers in the order of 100 million that couldn’t access the website.

What had appened is that our superstar programmer worked in the middle of the night when nobody was online. He made a non-urgent but critical change and pushed to production without code review or testing by the QAs, because, you know, he’s a superstar and he doesn’t need to follow processes. Our process for a change like that would have been that he needs a code review from his team and from our team (since the change affects us as well), and then it would have to be tested by their and our QAs in the preview env before and on production after the push.

There’s around 20 domains for our website for different countries and different client companies. Our superstar only tested one of them after the push and that one was working, so he didn’t check the rest. Turns out he made a simple typo and all other domains weren’t accessible, until the rest of the team members came online at ~9 in the morning and noticed the massive outage. We then spent two hours trying to troubleshoot what exactly went wrong until someone found and debugged his merge request, because of course he didn’t even inform anyone that he did the change. (He didn’t even create a ticket for it, even though our processes require that.)

Superstar programmers are great at contests but terrible workers.

It’s pretty much the same as why you wouldn’t hire an artisan instagram bricklayer influencer to work on a block of flats.

Analog ones require the USB host to support it. USB DACs on the other hand only require the OS to support them since they just use standard USB features. That’s much more compatible.

Tbh, I would hire none of the competition.

Nobody wants crazies who think they are superstars.

Any decent business wants dependable people who will follow the processes and work in a team. If you can’t do that because you think you are above that you won’t last long.

It kinda is. Assembly is a 1:1 machine-code equivalent, so you just have to run the game through a disassembler and you get the “source”. You just dont get the documentation.

Compared with any modern codebase that’s still tiny.

From what I can see Rollercoaster Tycoon was hand-written by a single person, so it by definition cannot be huge.

Also, the code base will likely be pretty small. If something’s made to be delivered on punch cards and run on devices that measure their memory in KB or maybe MB, it’s not going to be a ton of code. Even if it’s pure assembly, it’s going to be easier than a huge automatically generated codebase.

Hole punch cards are an automated form of that. Punch the holes manually, feed the deck through an automated feeder.

It’s a storage medium that you can write to by hand.