the firmware is usually an extremely minimal set of boot routines loaded on the SOC package itself. to save space and cost, their goal is to jump to an external program.

so, many reasons

- firmware is less modular, meaning you cant ship hardware variants without also shipping firmware updates (the boot blob contains the device tree). also raises cost (see next)

- requires flash, which adds to BOM. intended designs of these ultra low cost SOCs would simply ship a single emmc (which the SD card replaces)

- no guaranteed input device for interactive setup. they'd have to make ui variants, including for weird embedded devices (such as a transit kiosk). and who is that for? a technician who would just reimage the device anyways?

- firmware updates in the field add more complexity. these are often low service or automatic service devices

anyways if you're shipping a highly margin sensitive, mass market device (such as a set top box, which a lot of these chipsets were designed for), the product is not only the SOC but the board reference design. when you buy a pi-style product, you're usually missing out on a huge amount of normally-included ecosystem.

that means that you can get a SBC for cheap using mass produced merchant silicon, but the consumer experience is sub-par. after all, this wasn't designed for your use case :)

quote please

> generously sprinkled with anti-communism

quote please

The flash images contain information used by the bios to configure and bring up the device. It's more than just a filesystem. Just because it's not the standard consoomer "bios menu" you're used to doesn't mean it's wrong. It's just different.

These boards are based off of solutions not generally made available to the public. As a result, they require a small amount of technical knowledge beyond what operating a consumer PC might require.

So, packaging a standard arm linux install into a "custom" image is perfectly fine, to be honest.

What you described is exactly the opposite of how it works. There is no reasonable scenario in how that is how it works. In fact, what you're saying is opposite of the whole point of containers versus using a VM.

> when their favorite way of doing things gets threatened

No, it's when someone (like you) thinks they have an absolute answer without knowing the context.

And by the way, in my scenario, container overhead is in the range of under a hundred MiB total . The thing I'm working on HAPPENS to require a fair amount of RAM.

But you confidently asserted that "1GiB machine can run a lot of server software". And that's true for many people (like you), but not true for a lot of other people (like me).

> most hobbyist run services will not work with a shitton of data or have to handle 1000s of parallel clients

neither of these are true for me but you need to take a step back and maybe stop making absolute statements about what people are doing or working on :)

this is naive

"just as well"? lmao sure i guess i could just manually set up the environment and have differences from what im hoping to use in productio

> 1GiB machine can run a lot of server software,

this is naive

it really depends if you're crapping out some basic web app versus doing something that's actually complicated and has a need for higher performance than synchronous web calls :)

in addition, my mq pays attention to memory pressure and tunes its flow control based on that. so i have a test harness that tests both conditions to ensure that some of my backoff logic works

> if RAM is not wasted on having duplicate OSes on one machine.

this is naive

that's not how docker works...

I use the 16GB SKU to host a bunch of containers and some light debugging tools, and the power usage that sips at idle will probably pay for the whole board over my previous home server, within about 5 years.

that doesn't really mean what you think it means, since they removed that module to replace it with a more standard module. and in addition, the presence or lack of eth1394 wouldn't affect a camera or fire interface in any meaningful way

This is very much incorrect. Maybe the subsystem wasn't built into a custom kernel you're using?

edit: google says improvements through 2026, support through 2029

I don't know why so many people are willing to descend into flippant, lazy conspiracy instead of a 7 second Google search before making a claim?

AG1 was started in 2010 by a police officer from New Zealand and AG stands for Athletic Greens.

There is a fair amount of controversy around the company's claims, so I suppose that is one symmetry between AG1 and AGI.

Yes, there's some "growth hacking" bs, but prompting the user to ask more questions about details is a far distance from what oAI is doing. I agree it's all bad behavior, but in shades.

As a VR enthusiast, I beg to differ. Anyone who had spent a lot of time in the space knew that this was largely a hardware problem.

You need a lightweight, see-through head mounted display. It needs to be aware of local lighting conditions and does more than just room mapping, which means it needs a lot of compute power. It needs to have eye tracking (for minor perceptual angle drawing, at least), a high resolution (or light field) display. It needs to stay cool, and have a 6+ hour battery life (which is one working session). Oh, and people don't like any tethers. Or controllers. Which means extremely accurate hand tracking and integration with a keyboard/mouse. Price doesn't matter, as much as people think. AVP costs less today than a mid tier powerbook 25 years ago. But that also needs to come down.

Apple Vision Pro is the first VR/AR headset to come close, by the way. And even that is very far off. In fact, I'd blame that more for this shutdown than anything single other thing: it demonstrated that Meta's hardware labs were so fundamentally off for what they were trying to achieve that it basically rendered their entire investment useless.

> would it not make more sense to switch to the technology that actually is proven and actually has consumer demand for?

fwiw they started this policy in the 90s, and i definitely agree that they should think about alternatives

If there is a war with china or in the middle east, hydrogen vehicles are somewhat immune to oil or rare earth spikes.

They will likely never roll out hydrogen power in any large capacity but the capability will be there if they need it

For what it's worth, this theory is blown up by hydrogen based vehicles, which Japan has gone heavily in on. Yes, slightly more parts than an EV, but not a ton. And the drivetrain is electric.

That makes sense. The original meme was widespread and this is fairly niche.

> That seems unnecessarily hostile, especially given I was responding to this comment of yours.

No man, I really mean it. Maybe it's hostile, but also, people talking about this legitimately sound, I don't know... unhinged? Off? I am flustered, because of how ridiculous this all is to me. I'm serious.

Like, "the CEO of blue sky said waffles to me and it was a 4d comedy dunk!" or whatever. It's like a Ralph Wiggum quote. What the fuck?

So, I think this topic is at its end. But really, read aloud what you wrote. Seriously, try it, you might find it grounding.

Quote me where I said I've never heard of the pancake/waffles thing? Of course I've heard of it, it's been around for a decade or so.

> I can see that how it could be confusing because there’s “the pancakes/waffles thing” where Jay wrote about about people complaining to the CEO when the moderation team doesn’t respond as being equivalent to that meme, and then there’s “the pancakes/waffles thing” where Jay started posting pictures of pancakes and waffles as some sort of… joke or dunk? I never quite got the 4D comedy chess there. It doesn’t seem like anybody is “doing the pancakes/waffles thing” in either case. Nobody is asking Jay, as CEO, to ban anyone in the thread about Jay not being the CEO anymore. And I don’t think I’ve seen anyone ironically posting metahumor pictures of pancakes. The term has become so overused that definition creep now means that it could mean “anything that might bother Jay” in this context.

I want you to read this out loud, to yourself. Maybe you'll feel as insane as I did when I read it.

Doing the pancakes/waffles thing in the thread about pancakes/waffles is so fucking on the nose and demonstrates a complete lack of self awareness.

> They could have just reiterated their rules and left it at that; instead, they chose to mock their userbase, write them off as harassment, and banned users left and right, abusing their position in network to censor people at every layer of the protocol.

The more I dig into it, the more your one-sided whinging falls apart. I agree they could have handled it somewhat better, but I have very little sympathy for the terminally online bullshit that I'm seeing coming from the banned users.

Anyways, I feel we're apart on this issue. Feel free to have the last word if you wish.

Although, I guess that is the audience bluesky was targeting when they first started. So I guess I understand the criticism.

Also, it is a very ironic demonstration of the pancakes/waffles meme. Interjecting into an unrelated topic to ask the mods to ban someone you don't like is a tradition as old as dial up BBS. So I'm glad to see the torch is being carried forward to a younger generation.

could you provide some examples? i didn't really see this, but maybe i just missed it