It's not overstating it to say I owe my entire SE career to Ruby.
Without it's accessible syntax, I don't know that I would have ever managed to overcome the initial "I have no idea what's going on" barrier. For whatever reason when I started out I found excess boilerplate & ceremony very overwhelming, and Ruby was the first language where I felt the joy of discovery more often than the frustration of cluelessness.
Although I've found myself gravitating away from object-orientation and towards languages that lean into functional principles, I will always hold a lot of fondness and respect for Ruby. For my brain and learning style, it's hard to imagine a better first language.
It's very cool to see how far it's come since 2.x!
I'm sold enough on this form factor to take a flyer on a pre-order. I've been hunting for ways to minimize friction when quickly capturing random thoughts and this is a novel idea that seems to go further than anything else I've tried.
The lack of battery charging/replacement is a bummer, but slimness is far more critical for a ring than just about any other device so I understand the tradeoff. I've also seen stories of injuries from battery expansion in fitness rings, so if the risk of this is significantly reduced by eliminating charge cycles, I personally consider that a notable benefit.
Even though, IMO, there are enough legitimate benefits to warrant this product's trade-offs, I imagine its disposable nature will ultimately make it unsuccessful. Off the cuff, it's easy to look at this as "saying the quiet part out loud" vis-a-vis planned obsolescence, and I understand why many would find that extremely off-putting.
I don't understand why people who are probably OK with ordering Doordash once in a while are up in arms about a disposable device that weighs a couple of grams, lasts for years, and is recycled. You can easily spend more on a single Doordash meal for two people and I guarantee a few Doordash meals have more impact on the environment than this minuscule device ever could.
personally, i worry about what happens when it doesn't last for years. a software bug causes high power draw, or you set your ring down and something gets pushed against the recording button for a few hours, or you fall asleep laying on it. given it only has a 15-hour recording life, this happening just once could be the end of your $75 device
amazing! does it provide any other protections against other battery drain risks? glad you guys though of that haha, definitely will be ordering one :)
I doubt it's about the environmental impact. I agree that the environmental impact probably isn't that bad. My biggest concern is that it's $75 USD (plus shipping, presumably), and if the company ever goes under it's now worthless because I can't get a new one.
That said, if I assume that the company will last long enough, I think $75 USD is worth it even if I only get to use it for 4 years. Although if I end up building workflows around the ring, and then I have to get rid of it, that would be very annoying.
On a monthly basis the cost is quite reasonable IMO. It will continue to work if the company goes out of business. Their software is open source. So you can count on using it as long as the battery lasts.
This thing costs $75. Over 4 years, that's $0.05 a day. Let's say you're 40 and plan to buy these until you die at 80. We'll pretend inflation doesn't exist: $750 for 40 years of use.
It feels like backward objection handling where people can't find a use case for something, but feel like they should, so invent a totally irrational objection to it.
Doordash? What does that have to do with this discussion? It is a completely different market. You use the food right away (food is perishable), and you probably could've cooked yourself a healthy meal with much less money. If you live with multiple people, it is even easier to do so due to scaling and sharing what you like. I am very much not OK with spending 50 USD per person on takeaway food (getting it here costs just 3 EUR or so). It is the amount of money I spend at a (for me) fancy restaurant.
I'll give you another example. A smart TV. A smart TV is more expensive than this ring, but yeah. So a cheap smart TV needs a soundbar for decent audio, and it needs a STB for the OS (streaming) in order to make it a dumb TV. It comes with a computer in it. A computer which you cannot upgrade. They decide to quit support whenever they want to (after 2 years you're generally hosed in EU). Planned obsolescence. We don't like that in Europe. I know, in the USA the current leadership denies climate change even exists. But here in Europe, we follow the scientific method, not BS.
> I've been hunting for ways to minimize friction when quickly capturing random thoughts and this is a novel idea that seems to go further than anything else I've tried.
Since you’re the target audience, I’ll ask you: How do you envision you’ll work through all of the captured notes? Do it all at the end of the day? Go back and look for something after you remember making the note?
I’m wondering if this product will have the same problem that many discover after they buy a Moleskin journal and think it will solve specific problems in their life: Recording the thought or idea is the easy part, but it only defers the action. Additional diligence is required to review the notes and act on them.
For a very specific type of person who is both forgetful but also diligent enough to process the notes thoroughly and in a timely manner I could see this being helpful. For the people saying this will help with easily distracted people I’m not so sure. It could easily become a tool which gives a false sense of handling a task when really it just blackholes the thought into an ever growing collection of 3-second notes that are never revisited. Like the person who clicks the “mark as unread” button on every email with the intention of responding later, but then has 100 messages in their inbox by the end of the week.
The advertised use case of recording 20 short thoughts per day means over 100 notes to process every week. For a highly diligent person who clears their inbox (and now audio notes) every day that’s nothing. For all of the commenters thinking this is going to solve their distractability problems, I have my doubts.
This is the perfect device for me. What I do now is I have an Android quick settings button that opens an email to myself. I jot down a few notes per day and they end up in my inbox. I triage them later whenever I process my inbox. My ideal way for this ring to work is that it would do exactly the same, but without typing. I agree that if the notes are siloed in a separate app then I might ignore them, so I hope that I can get them as emails in my inbox by default.
I also want it to have the additional capability of setting time-based or geofence reminders, timers, alarms, and calendar events. It will be incredibly useful for me to be able to, while I'm driving to work, say "remind me to take out the garbage when I get home" or whatever. You'd expect Siri or Google Assistant to be able to do this and in theory they can but in practice they suck for this use case.
Right now I've got it set where I hold down a button on my pebble and it post it to my Trello but with Advent to LLMS I'm planning on linking it to have that do some of the review process
> How do you envision you’ll work through all of the captured notes? Do it all at the end of the day?
Not entirely sure yet. My current setup involves an Apple shortcut that sends a text blob to my email inbox with the subject "Note to self", where I have a filter set up to send emails with that subject line to a specific folder.
Once the notes are in my inbox, I go through them whenever I get around to clearing my other emails, and I parse each item into my action planner. For that, I'm currently using Mark Forster's "Resistance Zero"[0] system to moderate success, but I've been experimenting with other ways of tracking and actioning my to-dos.
Given the software is open source, I plan to try and hack something together that automatically routes my voice notes as plaintext to that same email filter.
I try to adopt the Unix philosophy when assembling my personal productivity workflow. To that end, I consider this device a composable "quick capture" tool, and nothing more.
> Recording the thought or idea is the easy part, but it only defers the action.
I find that this is very untrue for me.
The tiny bits of friction with other quick-capture systems I've tried add up to a substantial "loss factor" over time. If I use pen/paper, I need to ensure I have my notepad and pen on me at all times. If I use my phone, I also need to have it on me at all times, and then also manage to avoid getting distracted by social media. Either action requires fumbling around with a physical object which is not always convenient or possible.
If this device results in me capturing so many thoughts that I get bogged down and struggle to process them effectively, I would actually consider that a massive success, at least as concerns the specific use-case I aim to address. Any "failure" there is merely an indication that I need to give the "input processing" part of my system some TLC.
> For all of the commenters thinking this is going to solve their distractability problems, I have my doubts.
Fully agree. I have no illusions about this solving anything more than improving the reliability with which I capture thoughts and get them into my system. But anyone who expects this to solve more will likely be disappointed.
Yeah I pre-ordered but for what it's worth I've already been doing this with my pebble for close to a decade but the ring lets me trigger it via a single hand
I think this calls out a subtle, but significant difference between private and public companies.
Public companies as an asset class have to compete with an open market of other investments, so the incentives drive a min-maxing approach to revenue and value. The shareholder mandate dictates the company pursue maximal return in order to stay competitive amongst a sea of other potential investments.
A private company doesn't have this same concern. They still need to pursue profit, but not necessarily MAXIMUM profit. This means that in a sea of hypothetical directions, they are free to choose one that is slightly less profitable but has an abundance of positive externalities, vs. one that is maximally profitable but carries many negative externalities.
I'm personally rooting for "business decision" over "turning over a new leaf".
If FOSS support is motivated by a clear profit motive, then it'll be viewed positively by shareholders and stick around no matter who is in charge. If FOSS support comes from "turning over a new leaf", it could be dropped at a moment's notice in response to a leadership change.
IMO we will always see far better FOSS support from the private sector when the time they invest has a positive ROI that is obvious and easy to brag about in a quarterly earnings call.
Incentives trump feelings for publicly traded companies 99 times out of 100. People constantly anthropomorphize them, but they aren't people (regardless of similarities in the law), and they definitely don't act like people, at least normal ones. At best, you can view them as something like a sociopath. I wouldn't look at a sociopath acting nicer and think "oh, they turned over a new leaf" because they aren't just going to change how their mind works, I'd think "oh, they found a reason to act in a way I like for the time being. I hope it isn't short lived."
I like to call them slow-AI. They are paperclip optimizing AIs. No single component wants the larger outcomes, yet they happen. These slow-AIs are terraforming our planet into a less habitable one in order to make GDP number go up, at any cost.
People changed environment even before these optimizations. I think now it's more a problem of fast enough "catch-up and converge", for example for CO2 : https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita?c... - if the rich countries would reduce a bit faster (using better technologies) then those technologies could be used by the others and impact would be reduced.
It would be great if we could engineer our way out of this situation, but we can't. For many years I strongly believed in our cleverness, after all I was clever and in the narrow domain I worked in - tech - cleverness was enough to overcome most issues. So why not human climate change?
In Tom Murphy's words:
> Energy transition aspirations are similar. The goal is powering modernity, not addressing the sixth mass extinction. Sure, it could mitigate the CO2 threat (to modernity), but why does the fox care when its decline ultimately traces primarily to things like deforestation, habitat fragmentation, agricultural runoff, pollution, pesticides, mining, manufacturing, or in short: modernity. Pursuit of a giant energy infrastructure replacement requires tremendous material extraction—directly driving many of these ills—only to then provide the energetic means to keep doing all these same things that abundant evidence warns is a prescription for termination of the community of life.
> It would be great if we could engineer our way out of this situation, but we can't.
I think it would be much more honest to say we don't know so we shouldn't bet everything on one approach.
Humans care about survival and will impact the world. It is exactly what all other animals do, and there is a dynamic equilibrium: too many predators => reduced prey => less predators. I don't think it's fair to think we humans are special. Or should we blame the algae for one of the previous mass extinctions?
I do think it is reasonable to take more care about the environment (co2, pollution, etc.) than we do because we need it in order to live well (not because I just want a nice Earth). I think most people agree with that, and are slowly adapting. Will see if fast enough.
Our viewpoints don't seem that far apart and thanks for the nuanced take. Personally I believe we know that technology can't fix this by definition because the problem is of social, cultural and economic nature. Our lifestyles are woefully incompatible with a 100k year horizon, even a 100 year horizon in many areas. Our perception of wealth depends on never ending growth, our welfare systems depend on never ending growth, our economies depend on never ending growth. It seems implausible to the point of impossibility that our economies can grow forever [1]. Technology is good at reaching goals e.g. going to the moon is unlikely without science and technology. But in this case the problem is the goal itself. Technology won't motivate us to let go of our conveniences.
I hope this is motivated by shrewd decision-making in response to market pressure, as opposed to being strictly a perception thing.
While it would be great for Qualcomm to "do the right thing" in supporting FOSS, I feel much more confident in that support being sustained long-term when it aligns with some profit motive.
IMO the best case is that Qualcomm sees dollar signs when they imagine their Oryon CPUs and Adreno GPUs dominating the consumer linux landscape. There is definitely room to shake up x86 (especially when it comes to perf/W and idle battery drain), and only a finite window for ARM to do so with RISC-V on the horizon.
And to whatever extent Qualcomm et al now view Linux as a relevant personal computing platform, I think a massive amount of credit goes to Valve. I seriously doubt Linux support even enters the conversation at these companies without the Steam Deck's success.
> When you get new hardware and new features, you don’t want them sitting idle while you wait for patches to get upstreamed. Whether you develop for IoT, automotive, audio or mobile, when you get new features in a system-on-chip (SoC), you want to take advantage of them right now.
Sure doesn’t sound like mainstream consumer pc desktop is the target at all. Yes, they do provide instructions for how to run this on desktop but it’s far from accessible for the overwhelming majority of pc users.
I mean it’s still a good thing for Linux desktop to have this as an option, I’m not complaining. But to be realistic those benefits feel tangential to what Qualcomm is aiming at here.
Fully agree. When I said "consumer linux landscape" & "personal computing platform" I was thinking much more broadly than desktop PCs.
Admittedly a hypothetical Arm-based Steam Deck or Framework Laptop were at the forefront of my mind, but I think any consumer product running linux qualifies, be it "IoT, automotive, audio or mobile".
Whether people are buying EVs with a slick linux-based infotainment screens, gaming handhelds running SteamOS, or smart-devices with fancy local AI features, I think the effect is the same. If Qualcomm predicts significant growth in demand for efficient, high perf devices running customized Linux distros, I think it could be great for FOSS at large.
I suspect it has something to do with LA's large footprint. Comparing to where I'm from in Chicago, LA county is over 4x the land area with less than 2x the population:
Don't know how the math works out exactly, but if they don't have the workforce to cover their patrol area with squad cars, there's probably an argument to be made for covering gaps with areal support. Given that Chicago struggles with workforce shortages, I can only imagine how much worse it'd be if you had to cover 4x the area with half the tax base.
I did a lot of parametric 3D CAD work in college as a MechE student, and switched to webdev after graduating. Recently, I had a hobby project that would have involved dusting off my CAD skills, and was bummed to find that there wasn't any software readily available that allowed me to lean on muscle memory I had built up using Inventor/Creo/SolidWorks/Unigraphics.
A viable OSS alternative, particularly one that prioritizes simplicity and being a gentle on-ramp for hobbyists, would be fantastic.
It wouldn't need (and I would argue shouldn't attempt) to compete with the big for-profit outfits to be useful either. Offering a simplified UX for the most-used features of the pro software would have a ton of utility, while also being a great place to build the foundational skills you need in order to master the more complex stuff.
Furthermore, a project with the mission of complementing the pro tools rather than replacing them would probably be far more likely to succeed, IMO. As long as projects could be exported to variety of formats and brought into some other software when a specific use-case arises, you'd have all your bases covered.
Should Google be doing more to support ffmpeg? Yes.
Should Google stop devoting resources to identifying and reporting security vulnerabilities in ffmpeg?
I cannot bring myself to a mindset where my answer to this question is also "yes".
It would be one thing if Google were pressuring the ffmpeg maintainers in their prioritization decisions, but as far as I can tell, Google is essentially just disclosing that this vulnerability exists?
Maybe the CVE process carries prioritization implications I don't fully understand. Eager to be educated if that is the case.
IMO a huge missed opportunity for these indirect-drive bikes is marketing them as a home exercise bike 2-in-1.
If the pedals are going into a generator with fancy software to emulate the feel of a bike, there's nothing stopping the bike from going into "stationary mode" and acting as an exercise bike. This thing even had a screen on it, so you could do workouts like a peloton.
Then there's the storage aspect -- many people already have (or want) to allocate space to an exercise bike. It would pretty compelling that was also the parking space for your bike-bike.
Then there's the added benefit that your workout is charging the battery. Imagine biking to a park on low charge, doing a stationary workout, and then having enough battery left to bike home with full assist.
Its an interesting idea and the engineer in my agrees with you. Then the product skeptic says that anyone who wants to ride a bike as a form of exercise and get around using a bike, would probably just ride a normal bike.
1. I'd like to ride somewhere and get a workout but I might go farther than I can go normally and rely on ebike assist when I go back home.
2. there are rides I do where I am going for the exercise. There are potential rides I want to do that I can't because I can't afford to be covered in sweat when I arrive. I dont' necessarily want to have TWO bikes or maybe I dont' mind getting a workout on the way home where I can promptly take a shower.
I think it's an incredibly common use case in places where biking is the default transit mode. I like biking for exercise, but I don't necessarily want to be a sweaty mess after my commute for work, or when lugging my kids around, or when getting groceries.
Yup the venn diagram of people who buy an electric bike (ie don't want to work hard to push pedals) and people who want an exercise bike (where the only thing going on is pedal pushing, no moving) has exactly one person in the center piece: op.
I own both! I use my ebike for shopping and visiting my parents who live on a steep hill near the base of a mountain range. And I have an exercise bike in my office to stretch my legs in the winter.
Without it's accessible syntax, I don't know that I would have ever managed to overcome the initial "I have no idea what's going on" barrier. For whatever reason when I started out I found excess boilerplate & ceremony very overwhelming, and Ruby was the first language where I felt the joy of discovery more often than the frustration of cluelessness.
Although I've found myself gravitating away from object-orientation and towards languages that lean into functional principles, I will always hold a lot of fondness and respect for Ruby. For my brain and learning style, it's hard to imagine a better first language.
It's very cool to see how far it's come since 2.x!
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