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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: December 2nd, 2023

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  • The question is always: What do you want to use it for?

    When raspberry started the landscape was very difficult. Small computer boards were expensive, now there’s the N100 if you need a tiny cheap computer. Microcontrollers were really dumb and unconnected, now there’s the ESP32 which has WiFi and Bluetooth and decent performance. Right in the middle of this wide spectrum is the raspberry pi and its clones.

    This is a very different situation than in the introduction era where PCs were heavy and expensive and microcontrollers were dumb. There was a much wider niche for the raspberry then. For a small server I would now get a $100 N100 from aliexpress. For embedded electronics I would grab a $10 ESP32. Only in the middle is the raspberry pi, but the problem is, it’s only in the middle in terms of performance, not price. A raspberry pi with case, PSU, storage etc costs more than a decked out N100, while actually being slower.

    The only remaining usecase I see for a pi 5 would be an electronics project where you need some more compute than a microcontroller can provide, like some machine vision project. Otherwise:

    • Do you want to make some electronics IoT thingy: Get an ESP32
    • Do you want a small light computer or server: Get an N100





  • I don’t think it will.

    Microsoft’s endgame is being the lord and master of AI. AI thrives on knowing more data about the user. What good is an assistant if it doesn’t know your habits, your wishes and desires, your schedule and your attitude towards each person in your life?

    This is not really a feature primarily aimed at helping the user directly (even though it’s currently marketed as such), but to have the AI build up a repository of knowledge about you. Which is hopefully used locally only. For now this seems to be the case, but knowing Microsoft, once they have established themselves as the leading product they will start monetising it in every way possible.

    Of course I’m very unhappy with this too. I’d like to have an AI assistant. But it has to be FOSS, and owned and operated by me. I don’t trust microsoft in any way. I’m already playing around with ollama, RAG scripting etc. It won’t be as good as simply signing up to OpenAI, Google or Microsoft but at least it will be mine.


  • Oh it works great for me. In fact a lot better than the Rift did with its dedicated trackers.

    It’s also handy to just pop it on and not have to set it up. I often bring it to the office and I’ve given a demo for friends, it’s much harder with lighthouses.

    And the cost of them is just insane. If they were 100 bucks for a couple it’s fine.








  • Yeah that slogan really captured very well the intentions at the world economic forum.

    I know it’s not what they officially stated but it really captured (they since walked it back and said it only was meant to “describe emerging trends”) the intentions of what happens when they all come to Davos and divide the world between them.

    But I don’t believe “as a service” models are more sustainable. They will just enable more rent-seeking behaviour meaning we will get even less for our money. The incentive to deliver will be even lower as they will get paid anyhow.





  • That’s true. They actually stopped supporting Nginx recently which really bothered me too because I want to keep using self-signed certs (my server is only reachable internally and I do not want to expose it to the internet). And the new server they use (I forgot which) didn’t really have that option. So right now I’m locked out from updating until I fix that.

    And yes it is totally feasible to use upstream! Not a problem at all.

    I would recommend to use the dockers though, as the whole debian thing becomes a bit of a mess with different python requirements for some of the bridges. I tried that in a long forgotten past and there is a reason I’m trying to forget that 🤭

    Like you I know the ansible playbook has its limits (for example one other thing I run into is that I want to run several instances of the same bridge to bridge eg. 2 whatsapp accounts!) but I do think docker is the way to go. I’m interested to hear how you’re faring though as it’s a long time ago since I tried that.