I often see charitable groups from the Sikh community in central London serving the homeless. Interesting to hear the background around that! https://asiasamachar.com/2023/10/10/meet-the-sikh-community-...

Well the code is there: https://github.com/voideditor/void/tree/main/extensions/void But it's super basic right now... Like literally just the bare minimum to make an LLM call in a side window and a view to apply/reject diffs. Pretty much a weekend project at this point.

Something worth keeping in mind is that Chinese factories that makes things like IP cameras don't typically have their own (significant) R&D departments and instead work from examples provided by the makers of the chipsets. Sometimes there will be another company involved that provide an "IoT ecosystem" (Tuya is a major player here: https://www.tuya.com/solution/hardware/ip-camera ). So it's not necessarily surprising that the backend still works even if the manufacturer (Amazon brands are not typically the factory themselves, for practical reasons frequently changing "brand names" are used) is no longer present.

Since the topic of the article is about reverse engineering, I think it is extremely important to remember this. R&D time is very expensive. As people predominantly in CS, we should be aware of this, as this is typically how we are classified. And I think everyone innately knows how much more difficult it is to create something from scratch, the help you get just by having a reference, and how much easier it is to copy (or modify) when you have the thing in your hands (or source).

And it is worth noting that prices are vastly different in China. Labor is much cheaper and licenses aren't respected. The cost of living is cheaper to a smaller profit margin goes a much longer way. As tfa mentions, there are identical cameras sold by different manufacturers. It is unclear if this is typical reskinning or designs being taken. Both significantly reduce the cost of things. I have no idea how much hosting costs in China.

Regarding hosting, it's a big pain point for companies building these systems out of China as the "great firewall" makes it really hard to have reliable connectivity between the Chinese Internet (and datacenters) and outside. The ap-east-1 zone of AWS, based in Hong Kong, is very popular in that context as it tends to be accessible from both sides (so cost is fairly typical of AWS costs in that case). Alternatively Alibaba also have cloud datacenters in Hong Kong with similar properties.

A club is one of the few places where this strategy won't work, unless there's an emergency (which the bouncers would obviously know about) the only people who would show up are from the sound and light company whom the bouncers already know.

Fire inspector because they are responsible for doing spot checks on crowd sizes. I've been in a club before that was shut down because the fire inspector came in and counted it to be over capacity. The only problem with this plan, beside any kind of penalties for impersonating an emergency official, is the bouncer might get suspicious when he sees you on the dance floor with a drink in your hand.

Always keep a crew shirt handy, never know when you are going to need to sneak into an event!

I wonder if posing as health inspector or liquor board might work.

It's the curse of being a company with a $xxxB main product line. It becomes really hard to justify projects that could at best contribute a few million to your bottom line...

That doesn't track. As long as the project is generating at least a single dollar (TVM-adjusted) and you're not constrained on resources (SWEs, labs, etc.) that could be reassigned to higher yielding projects, that's all the justification you need.

This isn't true.

The market tracks how profitable you are as company. Tech companies get higher multiples on their valuation because they can be more profitable than a manufacturing company.

This was one big reason why the trend is for conglomerates got broken apart, it lets their high profitability companies get valued higher.

Google focusing on products that are break even or slightly profitable hurts them for this very reason.

So if you are the CFO of google the decision you make is do we keep some of these low profitability companies around and have them drag our multiples down or do we cut them when its clear they won't become high margin profitable businesses.

Given that the CFO of google gets most of their compensation in stock its not surprising that they chose to have a higher multiples applied to them, and therefor higher stock prices, than lower ones.

agreed - there is also opportunity cost. While that particular project - may be earning that dollar - putting those resources somewhere else might be more profitable....

Spinning them off has a cost too; at least to Goog, potential sales proceeds don't seem to justify the sales costs, so they shut everything down.

Also, it may be slightly profitable when run under the umbrella, but not once you consider the cost of separate administration. That's especially true for things like Google Reader --- that project benefited enormously from living on Google Infra, behind Google Login, and you'd have to do a lot of refactoring and rebuilding to get it to run elsewhere, and then you'd have to get people to create new accounts, etc. And there wasn't much revenue there, certainly not enough to make it a viable standalone business.

There is a cost to managing a ton of projects that only yield a single dollar.

But also more realistically, Google reports their margins to wall street and a ton of barely profitable ventures would drag that down.

... yeah, but that's just not how it works inside Alphabet. It's not rational but plenty of us would share that this is absolutely the logic that drives day-to-day business decisions across all of Alphabet's business units today.

This has no weight to it but is just sort of my anecdotal perception, my feeling from googlers I know directly or indirectly feels like, I guess I would say a lot are really vigilant of career risk?

The vibe I always get is that they won't hesitate to abandon stuff that doesn't get huge fast, but a big part is that the manager or teams don't want to get stuck with something that isn't a juggernaut or obviously on its way.

And heck, maybe that is just everywhere, but anecdotally at google, from an outside observer, it looks like the culture dictates being on the 'Big Thing' is how you succeed there.

You might be interested in knowing that LCSC (same company as JLCPCB) are about to offer proper panel / membrane keypad prototyping: https://www.lcsc.com/panel-printing

That’s very interesting - thanks!

That's going to be something similar to IPAdapter FaceID: https://ipadapterfaceid.com Basically you use a facial structure representation that you'd use for face recognition (which of course Apple already compute on all your photos) together with some additional feature representations to guide the image generation. No need for additional fine-tuning. A similar approach could likely be used for handwriting generation.

It's almost as if politicians are less motivated to enact legislation that is inconvenient to politicians.

I mean, imagine having to live on a salary just like (most of) your voters do? The horror! What would even be the point of being elected then? To serve the public?

We've designed the system for corruption. It costs far more to get the job than the job pays. We have to expect that money to come from somewhere.

Pick the ones that give a delivery deadline (5/7 days). No problems at all (at least from UK), always arrives ahead of schedule.

Came to say this too... I was really pleasantly surprised by how easy it was to get a full dev & build & test environment set up with Visual Studio Code, and how well their little WCH-LinkE debugger works (both SWD and UART in one, Segger could learn from that...). Now I'm experimenting with their BLE variant, which is a lot more complex, but still simpler than what I'm used to.