Arduino owed its success solely to building a healthy maker ecosystem of folks who simply defaulted to it as a platform, published tutorials, and promoted it through word-of-mouth. That's probably still there. Raspberry Pi had the same thing going on for it, by the way.

Marketing / community building trumps technical merit in almost everything, and embedded computing is not an exception. I'm not lamenting this, it's just a fact of life.

This is different. Many municipalities specifically require all dwellings to have basic utilities (water, sewer, electricity, garbage service), even if you're not using them. Not having that will get you in trouble pretty quickly.

Unincorporated areas are usually fair game.

Practical downsides: considerably lower pay right now compared to a job at FAANG, although certainly nothing to sneeze at. A profession regulated far more than necessary, similarly to many other blue collar fields - for example in California, you need 8,000 hours of apprenticeship to get a license. You are also technically required to deal with municipal bureaucracies and get sign-offs on almost every single thing you do, although most electricians follow these rules rather liberally, and there's a ton of unpermitted work in every older house.

You're less vulnerable to AI, but you sure are vulnerable to downturns in construction.

You serve at the pleasure of your clients. You're gonna be getting emergency calls at weird hours and you're gonna be spending a lot of time in your car.

It's physical labor - you're gonna be spending some time in crawl spaces or other uncomfortable positions, it's rough on your hands, etc.

It is valuable to Facebook to maintain a healthy pltform. But is it really worth $15 a month to you to broadcast this to others?

Unless the culture of the platform shifts to a point where non-verified accounts are considered second-class, the only reason to pay this is basically as a status symbol. In which case, I think the tiered approach makes more sense. And maybe "Facebook Gold" for people who want to pay even more for a badge....

Twitter had their checkmarks established as an artificially constrained status symbol you couldn't buy with money... and then, under Musk, they altered the terms of the deal by saying you have to pay, but you get tangible perks in terms of platform features, visibility of your content, etc. Unless Facebook wants to do that, I can't see people paying this much on their own...

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34667681

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

The point is that basically all Stable Diffusion / DALL-E / MidJourney output is some shade of this; the only new data is that contrary to prior assertions, in some cases, it goes all the way to a verbatim copy.

I think there are some defensible stances one can take. One is to reject the idea of intellectual property. Another is to advocate for some specific legal or technical bar that the models would have to pass for it to qualify as "not stealing". Yet another is to argue it's a morally-agnostic technology like VHS or a photocopier, and the burden of using it in a socially acceptable way rests with the user.

Computational photography techniques on smartphones, on the other hand, were always designed around squishy "user perception" goals to make photos look impressive, details be damned.

I'm sure it's costing them dearly, but there's plenty of niche and industrial hardware like this that lasts much longer than a generation of operating systems, and there's no alternative. Linux pays lip service to compatibility, but ABIs change constantly and it's easy to get stuck in dependency hell. MacOS X is... MacOS X.

My guess would be liability. A lot of what's sold on Aliexpress is... questionable. Fakes, products that are patently unsafe or don't meet US regulations, fraudulent specs, etc.

What's happening right now is basically a bit of a laundering operation where small "front" businesses in the US, often registered to residential addresses, import small chunks of the inventory, collect markup, and resell it domestically on Amazon, eBay, Etsy, walmart.com marketplace, or whatnot.

And if their USB chargers keep catching fire or a big brand gets uppity about trademark infringement, the retailer disappears, and a new one pops up. Amazon gets some flak in the media every now and then, but they are several steps removed from the phenomenon.

If you had a Chinese megacorp with a large US footprint, they would likely soon find themselves in hot water with all kinds of regulatory agencies. Partly because there would be a single party with gobs of money to go after, and partly because of anti-China sentiments.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34523558

Points: 7

# Comments: 1

Not that it buys you much; there's plenty of small / specialty merchants who might offer you a discount for paying with cash or check, but they treat credit and debit the same.

For what it's worth, the formation of an LLC is a state affair, and every state has its own rules around requirements, reporting, transparency, etc. Most states keep the paperwork public; some states don't, but these are not the states where housing shortages are all that profound.