[I'm sure you won't have any desire for me to explain my position and will regard this interaction positively.]

Many of those as alternative tires will wear out faster, causing increased particulate pollution and wasting people's money.

Many of those tires will cost more money than they save in gas. The limited options on less common sizes will make tires really expensive for some unfortunate folks.

Some of those tires will have less grip than what people otherwise would have bought, causing some additional number of car accidents. That's money and resources wasted on wrecked cars, not to mention injuries, and potentially even deaths.

But it could save people $3/month on gas according to the optimistic numbers the lobbyists calculated, so consequences be damned, you think everyone who doesn't want this is a selfish jerk.

This backlash can hurt modretro, it can affect the author of this game, but the impact on the defense industry is zero. And this thread, fuck, you'd think running JavaScript on an n64 would be the safest place to avoid yelling about US politics in 2026 but here we are. And there's nothing to be gained. A smart person doing cool work published a game through a fun and ethical company that is owned by a person that also owns a defense company, so let's all scream about murdering children. As if that protects anyone from anything.

Now for disassembly, hand sanitizer is usually intentionally thickened to be more of a gel, whereas alcohol will flow into tight spaces. If you're trying to dissolve a glue joint, ethanol or an ethanol water mixture will be orders of magnitude better at penetrating into the joint, and of course you can't dissolve glue you don't reach. So I still think you're gonna want a can of denatured alcohol on hand. It'll leave less residue too.

I think there's a lot of people talking past each other here. Sourcing parts internationally, preventing counterfeiting, slow iteration time, inventory management...all this logistical stuff is hard enough that the conventional wisdom in the software business world is to never attempt it. You're here presenting a counterexample and that's wonderful. The people criticizing aren't talking about this though, they are talking about whether logging digital inputs on an esp32 counts as a real hardware project and they act as if you've insulted their expertise in [signal processing/antenna design/insert specialty here]. You didn't do that, most of us know you didn't do that, but the word "easy" sets a lot of engineers off.

Just ignore the noise and keep writing great articles. My personal request, if I may - I'd like to hear how you did injection molding since I always assumed that was out of reach for small business.

I think it should be done with a clear understanding of what you're giving up, but some people don't want to put practicality first and that's okay.

A 50 year old got excited about a Toyota Corolla and everyone is blaming him for the decline of fucking society.

It's like the blandest thing a person can say, don't get triggered and be a jerk about it.

The interviewer has control over the room. They steer the conversation. They could have stopped this at any point. Instead they encouraged OP to go deeper for 90 minutes.

That wasn't OP misunderstanding a question, that was an interviewer enjoying the power trip.

Acknowledging life has risk tradeoffs doesn't make you an American, but denying it can make you a self-righteous jerk.

The real reasons oem parts cost more is always some combination of these three things: 1. They use more expensive processes and materials. 2. They charge more because they can. People are willing to pay a premium for "genuine" parts. 3. They have a "dealer network" to support, which is convenient but expensive to maintain.

#1 is the only thing I want to pay for. Ultimately it's on a case by case basis whether oem is worth it and you never know for sure.

But I'm really thankful non-oem parts exist, just as long as they're labeled as such and not comingled.

Effort can't be fairly measured so in practice the attempts toward "effortocracy" always seem to replace objective systems with a mess of human biases.

Look at college admissions: instead of SAT scores colleges want to look at skin color and how sympathetic your essays sound. That doesn't measure how much a person has overcome in life, it measures a person by how they fit in to the admissions office's prejudices.

The merit based approach, giving academic opportunity to people with a history of academic success, isn't as fair as we want, but it is useful. Broken, gameable, biased measures of effort are neither fair nor useful.

But uhh, your need to put the author down is revealing.

For greenfield side projects and self contained tasks LLMs deeply impress me. But my day job is maintaining messy legacy code which breaks because of weird interactions across a large codebase. LLMs are worse than useless for this. It takes a mental model of how different parts of the codebase interact to work successfully and they just don't do that.

People talk about automating code review but the bugs I worry about can't be understood by an LLM. I don't need more comments based on surface level patter recognition, I need someone who deeply understands the threading model of the app to point out the subtle race condition in my code.

Tests, however, are self-contained and lower stakes, so it can certainly save time there.