This isn't (entirely) new. I did the electronics design for this lamp: https://www.fridotechnologies.com (nb: not affiliated any more, no stake in the business, just a freelancer).
The modules and emitters themselves are still relatively expensive - $200+ - but can be bought from China if you want to DIY a solution.
They failed to deliver a Pixel phone to me - they never even tried to deliver it and the status said "permanent delivery failure" so I assumed they'd automatically refund me.
Fast forward a few months, I never received a refund and they claim they have no record any more. I could chargeback my credit card but I imagine I'd also be permanently banned from Amazon - so instead I accept they've just stolen $1000 from me with no recourse...
(if anyone from Amazon is reading this, my email is in my bio!)
It seems wild to me to just accept a loss of $1000 for something that isn't your fault. I'd be persistent in each contact with Amazon and if you're really not getting anywhere I'd go to small claims court or do a chargeback.
Like, I know there are some really rich people around, obviously you see them driving around in fancy cars and living in big houses, but you kinda forget that some people can just lose $1000 and ignore it like it's nothing. Crazy.
Yeah, I get that Amazon is incredibly convenient, but $1000 is $1000 no matter which company takes it from you. If some local mom and pop shop effectively stole $1000 from me, you can bet your ass I'd never patronize them again.
They never said they continued to patronize Amazon. Given the thread kicked off with claims about loosing access to DRMed content due to an unrelated delivery/payment issue, the person involved may be concerned about loosing access to digital content. Some people spend a lot of money on books, movies, etc.. The $1000 may be a drop in the bucket.
> I could chargeback my credit card but I imagine I'd also be permanently banned from Amazon - so instead I accept they've just stolen $1000 from me with no recourse...
To some this could imply they wanted to continue doing business with Amazon, so accepted the theft. Not losing access is, in a way, continuing to do business. Not sure if that's what they meant, but I can see it being interpreted as such.
Amazon has no moat today. What is even unique on amazon store these days? Fake chinese crap is what. Which you can also find on ebay, same item same product photos and probably still shipped to you in 2-4 days like what prime has been reduced to. If you can wait you can opt for the 3 weeks from china option at literally a quarter the cost.
Just ask for the refund. If they lock your account you can always make a new one (gonna be a scary day when that isn't possibl cuz they use biometrics or something.....).
But if they just close your account in response to asking for a rightful refund.... Literal thievery
Something similar happened to me. The delivery company returned two packages, two separate orders, as damaged back to Amazon. They were marked as "delivered". They automatically refunded just one item in one of the returned orders.
I had to call them to get a refund for all the items on all the orders, and even then they had a lot of difficulty figuring out what was happening. Isn't Amazon supposed to be a world leader (maybe after Walmart) in this stuff?
the bigger the company is the less they can invest in customer support. Because what the client will do anyway, leave them to some alternative? sue them? very unlikely
No way I'd give away 1000 € in exchange to be allowed to buy from some store. Actually, I don't even have an Amazon account, but if I did, I'd prefer to be banned than to burn 1000 € like that.
Much less money lost, but Amazon is notorious for not providing free game codes that are supposed to be included with GPU purchases. The customer rep at first apologized and offered a small refund (less than the cost of the game). A later rep started implying I was trying to defraud Amazon.
Many people online share similar experiences. Wonder how much money this wide-scale fraud saves them.
Amazon doing dodgy things with PC parts is why I will no longer purchase them from there - I'll happily take the extra £10-20 hit to buy it from another "proper" retailer (ie, Scan or Overclockers here in the UK), knowing that issues can be resolved more easily
Man, for $1000 I'd definitely be checking to make sure it got refunded, and manually requesting a refund after a week had passed.
Waiting a few months is not smart because not every delivery service is going to store the delivery status details. I've generally found that after 3 months, data starts disappearing from services and refund options can become technically impossible. Like, on eBay, even if a seller wants to refund you after more than 90 days, they can't. Part of this is for accounting too -- at some point you just have to be able to definitively close the books and say here are the sales we made, that number isn't going down in the future because of potential outstanding returns.
Amazon no longer having a record of it is absurd given the volume of data they store about all transactions.
For a phone in particular I'd be demanding serial number/IMEI information for the police report and ensuring that the stolen phone was properly reported as stolen. Since they record all of that when they ship it should be readily available.
And risk being locked out of the world’s online marketplace and all of Amazon’s other businesses? Maybe a bit hyperbolic but that’s where we are headed for sure.
It's perfectly feasible to never use Amazon. I don't know your situation, but i think people should go out more and prefer quality over quantity. Most of the stuff that Amazon sell is crap anyway.
> but i think people should go out more and prefer quality over quantity
Whether you find higher quality in your local area depends on your local area and what you're buying. More generally applicable, you can find higher quality with independent online stores.
True, especially the goods shipped "with prime". It's always a 5-10 bucks premium over the AliExpress price of the same item. It depends on how much in a hurry I am.
> so instead I accept they've just stolen $1000 from me with no recourse...
So you basically approve of this behavior. I personally learned some time ago to stay away from these companies.
wait is your email really username@username.net? I registered java.lang.string (at) gmail back when I was learning java 20+ years ago. Haven't really used it in over a decade though.
An A1 Mini requires a smaller nozzle, a customized profile, specific filament, and quite a bit of work in Blender and the slicer to successfully print 32mm figures (approx. 1/56 scale). Even those larger figures aren't anywhere as good as the quality of injection molding you get from a Games Workshop, Archon Studio, Wargames Atlantic or Bandai kit. You typically need an SLA printer for that - which requires PPE and ventilation due to the hazardous materials.
I don't think my A1 Mini would have success trying to print at 1/72 at the same detail as an injection molding process. I've done 28mm figures on it, but it was a lot of work and had a high failure rate.
A bit besides the point, but an FDM printer is definitely not good enough to reproduce these somewhat convincingly. That being said, a cheap-ish resin printer will probably do the job, and they are generally in the same price range.
Please don't resin print at home, especially if you have kids, unless you really know what you are doing. And by that I mean professional experience handling hazardous materials and provisioning a work environment for them.
The internet is rife with influencer content that makes these look OK and "not that dangerous", along with people who want to believe that rather than face buyer's remorse.
It's more dangerous than you think. It's messier than you think. The process steps are more ennui than you think. If you don't respect it you will make unsafe mistakes out of lack of knowledge, or impatience, or lazyness.
This shouldn't really be consumer gear. You can also fuck up on health and safety with FDM printers, but the default beginner lane (printing PLA in common colors) is a lot less risky on zero knowledge entry.
I agree. Kids or animals. Specially dogs that are mindless brutes.
I've been 3d printing with resin for a long time before I had my dog. Now I don't do it, unless I can be sure that I can have the dog out my printing room for several days straight, for the water-washable resin to solidify on the sun after usage, and all the different after-print steps that have to be taken care of.
It's also annoying to clean the plate, and deal with the resin bottles when you stop using them. There's no easily accessible infrastructure to dispose of the waste from the printing process so if you become lazy, you end up creating toxic hazards for anyone in the community. Not a good outcome at all.
Still, safe 3d printing brings me a lot of joy, specially to prepare board games sessions with friends and neighbours. Printing, painting, etc. You just have to be responsible and civic and do the right thing.
There's a safe way to handle this stuff, but you have to be very disciplined about it. Animals and kids complicate that big time.
For hardcore army man enthusiasts, FDM printing will never satisfy their standards.
For my kids, swapping a 0.2mm nozzle into the printer, setting layer height to sub-0.1mm, and reducing print speed to 50% produces surprisingly good results.
Well you can get a roll of PLA for 10€, which is 1kg. I'm not sure how big these sets are but the material cost per unit is basically zero for things this small.
Valid question if you haven’t been in 3D printing. Also depends heavily on the country.
In the US, it’s common to get quality generic PLA for $15 per kg. Buy several spools at once in a package deal and the price can fall to $11-12 per kg. Wait for a sale and buy a 10-pack and I’ve been getting PLA under $10 per kg. It’s very cheap.
For toys I’d prefer to spend a little more on PLA Pro or Plus, which means it has modifiers added for better impact resistance. This helps a lot with small toys I print for the kids.
Well said. I’m often nonplussed at these calculations of some fairly high hourly rate that we seemingly all should be able to command at will at anytime in unlimited supply. Well, I can’t.
If you would otherwise be doing anything with positive expected utility in that time, the opportunity cost is >$0.
The fact that the analysis can be carried out in monetary units (because we don't have a good direct measure of utility) doesn't mean that receiving money itself is the only source of utility that needs to be considered.
Most of the time my time spend operating my A1 Mini is... maybe 2-3 minutes per plate? Drag and drop into Bambu Studio, run the slicer, send the job to the printer, come back in 4 hours and grab my prints. I might need to break off the supports and clean them up - but with an injection molded kit I'd be snipping the sprues, cleaning up mold lines with a knife and gluing the models together anyway.
The commericial overhead rate for an SLA printer is about $5 a plate - the washing and curing steps can be largely automated, or even if they are done manually, it's not that much work.
People who 3D print as a hobby often derive enjoyment from time spent on the printing process. It’s another layer of hobby on top of the hobbies you’re printing
Yeah a lot of my friends legitimately enjoy the art of making or modifying models in Blender, and the science of testing different print profiles, materials and processes.
At 22mm scale the cost of filament is basically negligible (literally pennies), but yes, you would have to either buy STL files or make them yourself in Blender.
> At 22mm scale the cost of filament is basically negligible (literally pennies)
Even assuming no losses, just by volume, something like $0.10 per figure, and packs of 1/72 scale figures that retail for $20 are often a 20-50 figures.
Most people I know buy STL files from MyMiniFactory because the cost of the STLs is already a tiny fraction of the price of buying models at the local store. We spend more on the paint to paint the figures than we do on the digital files. We also like supporting the artists - they often have cheap subscription based models where you get access new files, plus their back catalog if you stay subscribed for a certain period of time or at certain tiers.
Often the artists are solo artists that you can, like, hang out with on Discord and chat directly with.
The exception might be Russia, there's a big 40K hobby there and they're cut off from buying stuff due to sanctions and the terrible state of the economy.
Preview on Mac does automatic OCR. I'm sure other tools exist that are similarly friction-free on other platforms, but it took me under 5 seconds (drag the image from the webpage into my downloads folder, click on it, and then select the relevant snippet and CMD+C to copy it).
I imagine I'd have similar frustrations if I couldn't copy-paste the text easily though!
Notably, the XMOS xcore.ai series of chips have no dedicated hardware peripherals - their 100BASE-TX MAC (as well as UART, SPI, I2C, I2S etc) is entirely software defined. A very different approach to most other microcontrollers: https://github.com/xmos/lib_ethernet
Thanks for your great work! I would love to be able to search by processor (eg look for all boards with an iMX95, for example) as well as search for things like audio I/O channels, I2C pins, etc. Super useful website!
Hmm, the search by SoC should work already, but there have been a few regressions with the search functionality that I need to fix it seems. Notes on the other bits too, it’ll take a couple of weeks I imagine but we’ll get there!
One of the big things this article fails to mention is that TDP/heat budget is way more of a constraint than number of transistors - at small feature size, silicon is (relatively) cheap, power isn't.
There's no way you can use 100% of your CPU - it would instantly overheat. So it suddenly makes even more sense to have optimised hardware units for all sorts of processes (h264 encoding, crypto etc) if you can do a task any more efficiently than basic logic.
There's a couple of factors at play here. One is that AC suffers from capacitive losses over long distances (high power multi-megawatt underground/undersea cables are often HVDC for this and other reasons).
The other more interesting one is that the repeaters in this kind of fibre optic cable are usually powered from both ends, from completely separate electrical grids (so one side sends -5000V and the other sends +5000V, for example). This allows for some level of redundancy as well as thinner insulation. With AC, keeping the phases on both sides aligned would be impractical, as well as the inherent inefficiencies of AC transmission.
The modules and emitters themselves are still relatively expensive - $200+ - but can be bought from China if you want to DIY a solution.
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