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I wanted home assistant compatible plant watering solution that works on a solar panel and does not require being connected to the water line and is Zigbee compatible. Unfortunately, I could not find any. So I did a DIY solution: a big barrel which I manually fill with water, a 12V pump (usually sold for camper vans), some rechargeable batteries, 10W solar panel, a solar charging controller, and Tuya ZG-2002-RF switch.


I dabbled in hydroponics for some years. Due to my inability to get my Rasberry Pi and Arduino working I ended up using a 12V pump and one of those cheap $10 electric timers on Aliexpress. I estimated how much time it took for my hydroponics system to drain and that's what I set on the timer. Other people I followed had all sorts of sensors rigged up, which I would have done if I had the time and skill but I failed, so in the end it was just the timer. I too had single solar panel and battery and the system worked for over 7 years with no issues. I just replaced the pump once or twice.


An art student of mine once needed a way to electrically control precise small amounts of water. We solved that using:

  1. Water tank and gravity  
  
  2. Medical IV flow regulator¹  
  
  3. Servo hooked up to that IV flow regulator via a 3D-printed part  
  
It worked very well. In medical applications off must be really off, so it was also quite safe in that regard as well. Her 3D-printed part had a little bit too much flex in it, but in principle this works quite well. If it is really, really safety critical I would still recommend a mechanical fallback that protects in case of power loss or when the servo fails open (e.g. bending the hose with the force of a spring if electricity is gone).

¹: see https://www.gvs.com/en/catalog/iv-flow-regulators


> If it is really, really safety critical

Your suggestions should be fine for hardware failure but I'd be more concerned about software failure: what if a bug in your software makes it unresponsive and stuck in the state with the flow open? Maybe a watchdog or some other system running in parallel checking for a heartbeat or a max amount of time water can be flowing?


Good point. In my case the program was so simple and the risk low enough that this wasn't needed. The worst thing thar could have bappened was some minor water damage to an exhibition space.

Also my track record of writing stable, bug free embedded software has been pretty solid as of now. But if human life would be on the line (for example) special precautions like multiple independent failsafe mechanisms are non-negotiable.


There are also irrigation controllers that use a ball valve and will work fine under gravity pressure e.g. raised rain barrel. Powered via battery that lasts months and months. No home assistant of course but water usage can be estimated from expected flow and programming.


This feels like one of those cases where DIY ends up being simpler than waiting for the perfect product to exist


I hate the tipping culture in the USA and Germany. Instead of being an extra, it feels like an obligatory surcharge I have to pay just to receive the service, good or bad. I usually don’t return to restaurants or bars that nag for tips. In those few places that I like and visit regularly, I don’t give tips. Me being a regular customer brings them more revenue than any tip I’d give otherwise.

Somehow, employers of these establishments convinced the staff that it's the customer’s fault that their wages are inadequate and that they should go after the customers to get the difference. I would much rather pay a higher price and not hear anything about the tips.


I've been playing this one for a long time now. You can play both on mobile and on the web: https://nonograms-katana.com/ the game has quite big community.


Why? If they instead move to EU, that's a win for EU.


Scientists tell people things they don't want to hear


That’s an odd description


Depends if your career depends on some facts not being true. Scientists can seem like a threat to you specifically if for example you need Climate Change to not be real. The last thing you would want is someone bringing evidence and analysis to that reality.


> for example you need Climate Change to not be real

Isn’t this the consensus of the major world powers?

Is that what these lost PhD students were studying?


Major world powers generally agree on the reality of climate change, the disagreement is on how to address it


It is good for EU but I belive he was pointing to these hurr durr emigrants bad people. Usually the same people which conveniently always forget that they probalby come as much poorer people than these ones.


You know he means some US citizens who are anti- intellectual due to a combination of insecurities and propaganda by the Republican party


EU unfortunately doesn't have the economic investment in education like US for a lot to justify the move.


GP’s point is that because being anti-science is on the rise.


Because academia and University research is broken at best and leftist breeding ground at worst /s


I don't see how this is an AI-specific issue or an issue at all. We solved it already. It's called software development best practices.

> A diff can show what changed in the artifact, but it cannot explain which requirement demanded the change, which constraint shaped it, or which tradeoff caused one structure to be chosen over another.

That's not true... diffs would be traceable to commits and PRs, which in turn are traceable to the tickets. And then there would be tests. With all that, it would be trivial to understand the whys.

You need both the business requirements and the code. One can't replace the other. If you attempt to describe technical requirements precisely, you'll inevitably end up writing the code, at very least, a pseudocode.

As for regenerating the deleted code out of business requirements alone, that won't work cleanly most of the time. Because there are technical constraints and technical debt.


Agree...

Look at “Managing the Development of Large Software Systems” (Royce 1970) Figure 10 on scanned page 338:

https://www.praxisframework.org/files/royce1970.pdf

Whatever you do, do not stop on Figure 2's infamous waterfall!

Understand Royce understood Figure 4, and in Figure 7 proposed prototyping with code to inform the product (and iterate the product).

This was elaborated in the Spiral Model (Boehm 1988):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiral_model#/media/File:Spira...

And then '90s DSDM (under various stripped-down flavors clustered around agile claiming to be True Agile™) turned into basically WGLL spanning 2 decades going into LLMs:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_systems_development_me...

Note that DSDM purports to "fix" cost but not through estimation per se, but rather by flexing the backlog cutoff:

“DSDM fixes cost, quality and time at the outset and uses the MoSCoW prioritisation of scope into musts, shoulds, coulds and will not haves to adjust the project deliverable to meet the stated time constraint.”

Cost is just headcount, quality should be in your + user's success criteria, and time is (generally) driven by some real-world requirement (event, opportunity, runway, competition, whatever). Varying scope means you didn't plan and roadmap every task up front.

Most everything since are variations on this, tailoring to the needs of the variant's author.

Doing all of this in text-as-code (Markdown, Mermaid, etc.) makes it machinable. Any number of shops were already doing this in text-as-code before the LLMs, giving them a spec-driven LLM context leg up.


I'm not sold on the idea that commits and PRs are always easily tied back to tickets. Ideally, sure. In practice? Not always.


And that is where the quality of your engineering org is exposed.


To me, the biggest appeal of the Framework laptop is that I can repair it myself and buy OEM parts directly.

I currently own a Lenovo Legion laptop. Still, a very powerful machine, but the screen now has a spot in the middle with multiple dead pixels, the topcoat on the trackpad is peeling off, and the main body has spots where palms rest. I'd happily buy replacement parts and install them, but I can't.


I don't understand the argument you can buy Lenovo OEM parts pretty easily? Even if something is not available through the pcparts site I ordered a replacement display via support.

https://support.lenovo.com/us/en/parts-lookup


Yeah! I am also surprised. I have a lenovo from 2015 that's gotten it's wifi card, power IC, RAM - all replaced at some point for very cheap across multiple cities in India. And all this is on a Ideapad. One of their budget "professional" laptops, not even a Thinkpad.

While I understand what Framework is doing and the repairability aspect, somehow this conversation always seems to make it seem Laptops are similar to Ipads or something. It's not.


Can you buy a cheap donor laptop and strip it for parts?


I wonder how much variation there is between a person who does certain mental activity regularly vs a person who rarely does it.

If they were to measure a person who performs mental arithmetic on a daily basis, I'd expect his brain activity and oxygen consumption to be lower than those of a person who never does it. How much difference would that make?


I did a fMRI study as a volunteer in college.

It involved going to the lab and practicing the thing (a puzzle / maze) I would be shown during the actual MRI. I think I went in to “practice” a couple times before showing up and doing it in the machine.

IIRC the purpose of practicing was exactly that, to avoid me trying ti learn something during the scan (since that wasn’t the intention of the study).

In other words, I think you can control for that variable.

(Side note: I absolutely fell asleep during half the scan. Oops! I felt bad, but I guess that’s a risk when you recruit sleep deprived college kids!)


I worked in an fMRI lab briefly as a grad student. I suspect you'd be correct but perhaps not exactly why you'd expect. Studies using fMRI measure a blood-oxygenation-level-dependent (BOLD) signal in the brain. This is thought to be an indirect measure of neural activity because a local increase in neural firing rate produces a local increase in the need for, and delivery of, oxygenated blood.

The question then is, do you expect a person who is really good at mental arithmetic to have less neural firing on arithmetic tasks (e.g., what is 147 x 38) than the average joe. I would hypothesize yes overall to solve each question; however, I'd also hypothesize the momentary max intensity of the expert to peak higher. Think of a bodybuilder vs. a SWE bench-pressing 100 lbs for 50 reps. The bodybuilder has way more muscle to devote to a single rep, and will likely finish the set in 20 seconds, while the SWE is going to take like 30 minutes ;)


I don't understand why people willingly pay thousands for these fridges. Just buy a regular fridge without the screen.


Because their old fridge died and they need a new one now, and this is all that's in stock.

Because they didn't buy the fridge, their landlord did.

Because the fridge is installed at a workplace, or community centre, or other location at which the individual has no effective choice.

Because there are no new fridges with other desired features which don't have screens.

Because, at some future date, absent legislation or crushing litigation, no non-screen, ad-free fridges exist.

Substitute for "fridge" and "ads" any of number of other consumer / general appliances: stoves, washing machines, dishwashers, phones, televisions, thermostats, doorbells, petrol pumps, etc., or features: cameras, microphones, speakers, iris scanners, thumbprint readers, facial recognition, etc., etc.


I recently tried this for a new TV - buying a regular “non-smart” TV without the internet features without being “AI-enabled” (whatever the fuck that means).

It wasn’t possible - there was literally no TV available that didn’t have a small computer built in to connect to the internet and send all my usage data somewhere.

I probably have to find a second hand one somewhere or just continue to live without one.

Not saying that it’s the same with fridges - but who knows a few years down the line it might be…


I never understand this type of refrain. Why connect the TV to the Internet?

I have yet to run into a TV that doesn't work entirely offline at any pricepoint


What is the point of a smart TV though?


What do you mean exactly? Some people like being able to watch YouTube and Netflix without utilizing a third party device.

The tv also has a microprocessor to upscale/decode content. Most tvs also have the ability to connect to a variety of sound systems through Bluetooth.

If your concern is additional cost for the bundled features, I believe the ads subsidize and offset the cost. (I'm not pro ad. Again, I do not connect my tv to the Internet, but let's not reject the benefits entirely).

"Non smart" TVs are prohibitively expensive in my experience. They are large format monitors. You can also consider a projector.


While you still can..


"I don't understand... just..." is almost never helpful in these situations.


I searched for this comment for a long time, it should be the first one.


Don't know why your comment is downvoted so much.

Even if this was an accident, isn't it theoretically possible for one of the trustees to intentionally not provide the key to trigger the re-election? There's no guarantee that the people will vote the same. I see this as a kind of vulnerability.


They wouldnt know the result before providing the key.


It's possible to gauge where the election is going; you don't need to see the votes. With social profiling, and people talking in general...


Even knowing that the results of a repeat election are likely to be the same, I can easily imagine someone being petty and "losing" their key to sabotage the process as a demonstration of power. It's just human nature at it's worst.


This is casting accusation as a member of a community, without a shred of a proof.

This is also not realistic and Occam's razor applies here strongly: why sabotage your career and frankly embarrass yourself just to make a tiny election delay, based on uncertain assumptions? This doesn't pass the sniff test.

In short, I think always assuming the worst in people is not healthy and we should trust that this was indeed a honest, unfortunate mistake. This could happen to everyone.


I'm sorry. I should have made it clear that I wasn't discussing the present situation of which I know nothing about and have no reason to doubt the good faith of all involved.

I was merely expanding on the hypothetical case where bad politics overcame a theoretically sound selection process.


yet we know the results of presidential elections before all the votes are tallied, or have a pretty sure guess


Can't find RAM and CPU specs for RTL8372N. Would be interesting to flash OpenWRT onto it.


It is managed by ESP32, so it is going to be something very minimalistic on level of FreeRTOS instead of big Linux distro.

Which means that if you know how to program ESP32 and setup the RTL8372 switch you can have massive flexibility with it. If you don't, then you are stuck with whatever Ubiquiti firmware is being run by this switch.


It's just an ASIC switch, not a SoC.


its basically AISC plus microcontroller - https://svanheule.net/switches/rtl8370


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