- Almost no formatting on the ebooks you upload (no bold text, missing glyphs, no images/cover art) - The book had to be rendered before being uploaded. I suspect they were uploading series of bitmaps. - This meant if you wanted to change portrait/landscape or change font size/type you had to re-render the book - Bitmap fonts were very ugly.

Overall it was barely workable. More of a proof of concept. The CrossPoint firmware on the other hand:

- Actually renders books as you would expect, in a pleasing manner, formatting and all - Much more reader configuration on device: font settings, margin, spacing, alignment, progress display - Update via USB or OTA - Multiple ways to get your books: Connect to your Calibre library to push or pull books (thanks for introducing me to Calibre!), USB, Wireless file transfer - Sync progress via KOReader

It's the best gift the community could give to the manufacturer. With only the default firmware my X4 would have been in the junk drawer within a week, but now I carry it every day, I've shown it to so many people. It's a marvel. With the news about them attempting to lock it down I can't recommend it anymore. Why would they do that?

I've done my own small scale version of this where I made models for internal distribution of the specialty equipment my employer uses. I doubt they paid Lego anything.

There is software to design your own lego set. Bricklink Studio is what I used. It's essentially Lego CAD software with a component library of Lego pieces. You can do high quality renderings, generate instruction sheets and BOMs.

Lego has a Pick-a-brick service where you can get new parts from a very limited selection at great expense. At third party marketplaces like Bricklink you can upload BOMs and they will assemble shopping carts from different seller's inventories of used pieces. Price and selection is better than Pick-a-brick but shipping / order fees / minimum lot size drive up the cost. I've tried many times but even the smallest 200 piece build ends up needing orders from 3 sellers across the world. There's always some part that was only ever sold in one rare set from 30 years ago and is unobtanium (the CAD program makes it easy to include a piece regardless of actual availability).

There are also businesses that will give you a turn key product that looks very retail-like with parts bagged by step, printed instructions, real Legos, box art, etc.

If you're willing to go with "lego compatible" third party bricks like GoBricks there are many sites that can source your entire build at once with new non-lego pieces. Part quality ranges from "good enough" to "indistinguishable" and the price and ease of ordering is loads better. You get a box of unsorted parts and spend lots of time grouping the pieces into kits.

The business model that works seems to be spectrum gambling. Do the minimum amount of satellite investment for decades until someone with a real business plan comes along and has to go through you to get it.

The cheapest storage tier on s3 with instant retrieval is $.004 per GB-Month which implies AWS can still make money at $4 per TB-Month so $2.50 for consumer hardware sounds reasonable to me.

For bases to work I need to split my stuff up into tiny documents but I'd prefer to have one big document with separate sections. For example I keep one document `book-recommendations.md` with many small sections for books I'd like to read. I can't search through that with bases unless I split those out into many small files in with one recommendation each.

The new Pebble is very similar to the Coros Pace but without the GPS but with hackability and that makes me very interested.

https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/prodview-pwqgz3mnvxvok...

You can always follow the "contact sales" form and see if they give you a higher or lower number than that.

From the bottom of the post I know what they are hoping users will do:

> Suppose your deployed Helm chart is failing to pull images from docker.io/bitnami. In that case, you can resolve this by subscribing to Bitnami Secure Images, ensuring that the Helm charts receive continued support and security updates.

They don't want to give instructions that are too helpful. They want your company CC to be the easiest way to fix the problem they created.

> In the simplest terms, the 80/20 rule requires that insurance companies spend at least 80 percent of the premiums they collect on medical claims, effectively capping their profit margins. If insurers fall under this threshold, they must rebate the difference to policyholders.

Source: https://www.aeaweb.org/research/regulating-health-insurers-a....

So that would mean that the only way to increase the profit is to reduce over head and keep more of the 20% or increase the amount of claims. Paying out less in claims would mean they have to give rebates back to the customers.

As with everything health care related I'm sure it's more complicated than that and I'm missing something. For instance my health care plan is through my employer so everyone pays the same premium and the provider doesn't get to set it based on how healthy each employee is (although certainly the whole group is negotiated when the contract comes up for renewal).

My other question is why would a home seller agree to the exclusive inventory arrangement? It doesn't seem like it leads to higher prices or quicker sales (the article says that 94% of listings in Compass' exclusive inventory ended up selling via MLS).

Then there's [avalara.com](https://www.avalara.com/blog/en/north-america/2025/02/how-to...) saying on 4/10 that it's 120% OR $100, but not clear if filer gets to choose.

The latest I can find is from today (4/15/25) from [metro.global](https://metro.global/news/new-tariffs-and-the-end-of-de-mini...) that says 120% AND $100 per package (rising to $200 June 1st).

Your question is so simply put it seems like there should be an easy answer but it seems like there's a lot of interpretations on what's going to happen. It's possible that all of these sources were true on the day they were posted but the rules are continuously changing.