I don't know if it qualifies as a plague of locusts because I do not know where the line is drawn, but the grasshopers were thick one year at my parents' house (which is itself surrounded by flatness and farm fields).
They were ravenous things. That ate everything. Not just "food," either, though eating a snack outside was certainly impossible and merely being outside was treacherous.
These bugs ate things like window screens, cut slivers from a vinyl swimming pool, and dined upon the siding of the house. It was really fuckin' weird even being inside of the house, since the noise of it being pelted by grasshoppers (locusts?) never really slowed down.
That was probably 25 years ago. It never happened again.
Every single one of them has seen repairs like screen replacement and hinge improvement. Every single one has had upgrades to storage, RAM, and CPU -- and at least one battery replacement. Ye olde Thinkpad is presently one hairy-looking BIOS flash away from a wifi upgrade.
I usually buy these machines inexpensively on the used market. And I'd love to buy an inexpensive Framework. Except... The supply/demand ratio seems to be in favor of the seller, as they seem to hold their value surprisingly well compared to many other machines.
Anyway, I don't want one for style points. I want one so I can keep it even longer than the Thinkpads and Dells of yore.
Now that we've got trillion-dollar computing machines that, at best, output indeterminate results, we've entered the realm where it is clear that even the very best computers are only capable of trying to do things. Sometimes they succeed, and sometimes they fail -- but they still try anyway.
Therefore, in journalist logic: It's reasonable to expect that lesser computers have been this way all along.
A $2 Chinese ESP32 dev board is more stout in many ways than the first Pentium machine I had, which sure did feel fast-enough to run the whole world with at that time. :)
In this amazing world full of such inexpensive choices, it seems so bizarre to me to demonize any of them. They're all excellent in some way, and it's OK that there's more than one.
This isn't football, handball, American politics, or Highlander: There can be more than one. It's OK.
This is what I keep repeating in many threads about ESP32, the little thing is actually quite powerful, especially for those of us that experienced MS-DOS PCs.
Do heat cycles mean that the device only lasts half as long as it might if it were kept at some constant ideal temperature? A third as long?
If so, then...so what? The tinkerers using these things aren't broadly concerned about these things. We're all out here running our real-live desktop, laptop, and pocket computers with bursty loads, dynamic clocks, and dynamic heat anyway, and these things are generally doing just fine. We aren't driving space ships with this stuff; it'll be alright.
I insist that there is no merit to holding a lowly Raspberry Pi board to a higher standard than we hold everything else.
Furthermore: If perfection is necessary for some kind of application, then maybe starting with a <$100 hobby SBC isn't the best move. It might be time to look within for a better pathway.
I mean, it's good that they're testing things in different places. Environments vary.
But hundreds of millions sounds like enough money to get some industrial or dead commercial space (even in/around SF) and outfit it to be like an apartment. Or six different ones, and six others two weeks from now, and two weeks after that. The cost of the space and the carpenters/painters/drywallers/handymen/managers/whatevers would seem to be something of such relative insignificance that it doesn't even show up on the budgetary radar.
They want realistic randomness in the apartment layouts. This is a quick, effective way to get that. If they were honest with the hosts, it wouldn’t even be a bad idea.
You don't need that until the very end. They should be modeling many houses first, and they can get that by having employees measure their own house. They should also know something about the edge cases and have a lot of very unrealistic houses modeled.
Then they should have a lab with real furniture and movable walls so they can do controlled real world tests. Once the above tests are done you add confidence with random real world tests.
The types of problems seen here are things that your lab tests should fail and keep you out of real world tests. Particularly when the test subjects don't have some sort of test agreement
I assure you that if randomness is the order of the day, then involving handymen to arrange things is a sure-fire method of getting there.
The cheaper the handymen come, the better the randomness is.
One doesn't even have to tell them to be random; that part happens all on its own in the ways that real apartments ebb and flow.
And the handymen themselves can be rotated out every couple of weeks, as well. The cost of rotation is low. The handymen are plentiful, and they are happy to get hired for a day here or there for literal odd jobs.
(If anyone wants even more practical solutions for robot testing facilities that don't make headlines by pissing people off, please put your contact information in the space provided by pushing the "Reply" button. Thanks!)
I don't think GP disagrees with you. They said it wouldn't be a good idea if they had been honest. Elsewhere they call for the employees to face charges.
Ah, I see. Pardon me making him a scapegoat. My rant in between bouts of wrestling with mobile sandbox subscription testing weirdness should have been directed at a vague cohort of less considerate SV folks, so instead I wish to thank him for trying to make the world a better place, and I wouldn't mind if he invited me skiing or flying sometime so we can discuss how I can help him make the world a better place. :)
Or, just throwing this out there, secretly list their own places and have robots clean up after the guests to evaluate -real places- that have -actually been used-. The key here though is that the places need to be theirs (or at least be a clear contract with the actual owner with full consent and understanding).
A robotics startup at this phase is unlikely to successfully clean an apartment. Usually it’s a lot more about data collection and training. Cleaning an apartment is very hard. The humanoid startup Figure showed their robot moving a few dishes from a nearly empty dishwasher to empty cabinets, and they’re an established company. Actually cleaning is very very hard and the systems are just not very capable yet.
You’re setting yourself up for a supply chain attach here if you trust whatever rocks and boulders are sitting around. A well resourced adversary may have placed power supply boulders and wifi rocks in your back yard.
Straight Outta Lynwood was a great album. One of the CDs that I took out of my case the most often as a struggling nerdling who was still a year or two away from having scrounged up enough spare cash for a secondhand iPod.
Ruined seems like very strong phrasing when nothing important has been ruined.
They sell new Lego sets in stores every day. They might seem expensive for a few bags of plastic bits and some instructions, but then: They've never been cheap.
A kid can still grow up playing with Lego today, just as they've always been able to.
I still remember building my first new Lego widget. Set 918. It was just a small basic spaceship and no real accessories but a little Lego space dude. I'd already scattered the pieces around and stuck them together in strange ways when I noticed that there was an instruction book so I could assemble it the "right" way. That may have been the first instruction book I'd ever followed; I remember the sense of wonderment as I learned the value of it. That model didn't last long before I tore it apart and went back to sticking the pieces together in strange ways. :)
Anyway, it seems like it would have been about $6.50 back then, or about $31 in today's money.
That's not so different from today's prices -- in fact, it looks things may have actually gotten a bit less expensive since then for a given amount of complexity.
That's not ruination; it's the opposite of it. The kids are fine. Lego is fine.
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I do see that someone on eBay that someone hopes to get over $2,000 for a new, sealed copy of set 918. That's a about sixteen more fuckton more than $31.
And I can't justify spending that kind of money on some Lego.
But I don't have to spend that kind of money. If I have a Lego itch that I want to scratch, then I'm a grown-ass adult. I can just go to the store or some online seller or whatever, and buy a new set that I like, and put it together.
I don't need to spend $2k to pretend relive a part of my childhood. I already experienced it once, and I remember that part very fondly.
It's interesting to me that Lego can't be easily made at home in 2026. That whatever they do with plastic, dye and injection molding cannot be easily replicated.
Making even vaguely consistently-repeatable injection molded parts at home is hard work.
The injection molding of a Lego brick is spooky-consistent and very precise. Bricks made 40 years ago work the same as bricks made today do.
Besides that: Cost. Maybe I need 200 1x4 bricks for some project. In the best case, I can spend days or weeks getting the process just-so and eventually smoosh out 200 good-enough bricks (all of the same color) at the cost of all that time, equipment, and some ABS pellets.
Or: 1x4 bricks are sold at $0.15 each from Lego, in any of 40 different colors. So I can just skip all of that work and buy 200 perfect bricks in whatever mixture of colors I want for $30. If I need other bricks for my project, as well, then I don't have to retool for that -- I can just add them to the order.
Ruined as in - Lego sets are glorified EZ-mode puzzles and not creative toys anymore. Too many limited sets means it's trending toward "collector items" and not kids toys.
I see both kinds of sets for sale. I do not see ruination. Both kinds present an empire of creativity when they're disassembled and mixed up together in a box, as tends to happen with Lego. It's fine.
Or, alternatively, it may be possible for a person to be such a profoundly grown-up adult to be unable to see it that way. If that's the case, then I guess you're right: These adults are incapable of being creative with Lego, and therefore adults have ruined Lego. For themselves.
But if that's the case, then it was ruined for the old coots from the very beginning. :P
They were ravenous things. That ate everything. Not just "food," either, though eating a snack outside was certainly impossible and merely being outside was treacherous.
These bugs ate things like window screens, cut slivers from a vinyl swimming pool, and dined upon the siding of the house. It was really fuckin' weird even being inside of the house, since the noise of it being pelted by grasshoppers (locusts?) never really slowed down.
That was probably 25 years ago. It never happened again.
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