MCHP has been slowly coming up with decent radio devices, finally.
If you don't use the radio going bare metal is basically effortless, if you need to use the radio the dev Tools are actually improving, though they are still nowhere as good as IDF in hiding the ugliness.
Of course they are more expensive (not much more, really, compared to simillar specced ESPs) but they are western and the peripheral actually work as intended. In my projects with ESP32 i had to basically bitbang every peripheral that i needed to use beyond their simplest mode.
Are you aware that we had overhead cameras on the streets for a couple of decades, or more?
They are used to read - and recognize - plates.
The official use is to check if the car is insured, or if a stolen / marked car is going through the road, in both cases the police is dispatched to check on the vehichle
> Amazon told me to go hang, said I couldn’t return used goods
I don't buy it. Don't we have actual consumer protection laws here in europe? We can return anything we bought online in 14 days time, full refund, no questions asked.
That’s the law, yeah - and if the goods are faulty it’s actually up to two years.
But this is Amazon - they don’t need to follow consumer protection laws - I think their specific get out is that they’re Amazon Spain, and I’m having stuff shipped to Portugal, and Spanish consumer protection regs (which implement the EU regs) only protect consumers in Spain.
I think their specific get out is that they’re Amazon Spain,
IANAL, but I don't think it matters. Any webshop in the EU must sell to all EU customers and they should provide the same warranty, etc. to all EU customers as if you were buying it in the country they are selling from (Spain in this case). The EU is a single market.
Amazon is violating EU consumer protection law here, but they probably do it because most customers will feel helpless and not sue them. If you do not want to sue them, the best thing is probably to file a complaint with the Portuguese consumer authority. It's really important to do this, because only when enough people do such a thing, a pattern can be established and they can warn or sue Amazon.
In my experience in the UK, Amazon is better than consumer protection laws, and miles better than other vendors. They won't question or require lots of information etc. to support things in however many years of warranty, or even outside of it.
Not to mention the standard is 30 day returns, more than double the legally mandated 14 for distance selling.
I don't understand why you were even talking to support - if it was clearly defective within half an hour (much less than 30 days) you could have just created a return yourself without talking to anybody?
Because it’s Amazon Spain and I live in Portugal - they only do return labels etc. for a collection point 200km from where I live, otherwise, you have to ship stuff back at your own expense. No option to automatically open a return.
It’s basically the Amazon uk returns process from 20 years ago.
They should repair it under warranty, period. If they cannot make a return label, you can send it back. IIRC they are also responsible for the shipping cost, but they can refund it afterwards when they are not able to create a return label.
I think your mistake might be that they are sticking to the letter of the law. Don't ask for your 14-day cool-off period, because strictly I think the product needs to be sealed (though many sellers are more lenient):
Instead ask for a repair under warranty, which they are required to do as a seller. They cannot point you to the manufacturer, the seller is responsible for handling warranty for the first two years:
You don't have small claims court? Here in Canada, it's $150 to register, you fill out the form yourself, no lawyers are allowed, and you argue your case in front of a judge.
(A company can have someone represent them, but if it's a lawyer, they must also have a rep. from the company there. and there can be no legalise, and the judge must explain anything to you if you ask)
There is no forced discoverability. EG, the other side cannot ask for all sorts of documents. You just include your evidence in the filing.
There is no ability for the company you sue, to compel costs if you lose.
For $150 you get a lot of joy out of hassling a company behaving like this. And amusingly, they still consult lawyers, and spend on a lot on lawyers. They can't be used in court, but they of course as a company consult legal experts.
I napkin mathed it, the one time I sued a company. I figured it cost them $25,000 to defend when I spent $150. If even a small percentage of people take them to task for breaking the law, they'll turn around quick.
Always use your enemies strengths as a weakness against them.
You should look at the process, but view if from the perspective of a hobby.
They do, but it’s only available to Portuguese citizens - I am a legally resident alien, but am excluded from that system, as it requires a citizen card to start a claim.
Julgados de Paz is available to non-citizens, what are you talking about? So is contacting the livro de réclamations and making a chargeback with your card provider.
How strange to try to claim the legal system has no reconciliation process for tourists or EU passer-bys. You're allowed to say you just couldn't be bothered to go through the trouble.
Go look at the website - you have to use authenticao.gov, which requires a digital mobile key, which requires a citizen card, which I cannot have unless I am a citizen. The offline process requires me to travel 200km each way to spend a day queuing.
Amazon Spain are Spanish, and are not subject to the Portuguese livro de reclamações.
As to making a chargeback - I like having a bank account, and being able to pay for things online - any time you do one you take a risk your bank will decide to throw freezes and KYC at you until you give up.
In theory. In practice, you go to the financas, they hunt around on their computer for a while, and then they tell you it’s not possible without a citizen card. I’ve tried repeatedly, as it’s a pain in the arse not having one, and have repeatedly been told it would be easiest for me to get citizenship first.
And yes, believe it or not, Trás-os-Montes exists. I know you think Coimbra is the northern limit of the country, but people do live up here, and the nearest service desk for many things is Porto.
Anyway, you go vote chega, or whatever it is you do.
Saying "It's not available to not citizens" is wildly and massively different than "It's more work for non-citizens". It's literally a lie and dishonest.
And given you've already said things that are not true, I'm highly skeptical that there are not other means to handle this. I bet there are ways to access authenticao.gov without being a citizen. I bet there are ways that you don't have to go 200km. You can probably send the forms by snail-mail, by post or courier. I bet you're just leaving things out again, or haven't researched properly, as you've shown this to be the case with prior comments.
In terms of what Amazon is subject to, you can get a court judgement in one jurisdiction, and have it enforced in another. You're in the EU too, and I would be astonished to discover this isn't super-easy there. And legislation likely enhances cross-border cases like this. And if companies ship into another country, they can be blocked until recourse happens.
Point is, you're just (again) saying "Oh well!" without really knowing. You're just saying that's the case, because you're presuming that's the case. You don't know. you just say it is so.
Chargebacks are a part of online life. They are common. I've never, ever heard of a bank ever being hostile over them. The very premise is weird and absurd. It's just a part of banking, nothing unusual, nothing surprising, and a process we all have to go through from time to time.
Perhaps you shouldn’t shoot your mouth off on shit you don’t know about and resort to calling people liars.
You can only use authenticao.gov if you have a citizen card. This is a fact. The offline process involves physically going to the office in Porto, which is 200km from me. There are no forms you can just mail. I have been through this. Shit, go try the process yourself if you’re so sure.
You also evidently know nothing about EU law. The EU issues directives. Member states implement them. They are national pieces of legislation, not transnational.
As for chargebacks, the last time I did one, over a hire car that didn’t materialise, my bank put me through the wringer, and I no longer bank with them.
Anyway, thank you for your enlightened fucking comment.
If you're going to provide half truths, and lie about situations, you shouldn't get so upset at it being pointed out. Or at people not believing what you say, after a while.
I would hope that consumer protection organizations can help you with that without having to engage lawyers: similarly, Amazon is not interested in long running legal battles if they see you are serious.
A good starter would have been running the keyfob data on a different CAN line than the one going into the headlights... you know, the one you can reach with your hand from the outside.
Then we could also talk about encryption, but at least making it a tad more difficult to have physical access.
Not that toyota is the only one. If you ever notice a car that has a reinforced grill protecting the front RADAR, or the rear lights... now you know why.
I can assure you one hundred percent, the only thing i ever used "AI" for was for stupid stuff like this: Dall-E to generate low quality absurd images from the most random prompts was my favourite.
This is the complete opposite of AI Slop: A website that turns absurd queries into unbelievable producs, all for the lulz. Well done to the author
And yet i tried setting up manjaro to see what all the fuss was about with arch based systems. In less than ten minutes i understood the origin of all the krashes memes.
I've been running debian stable (with backports) as my desktop for a couple of years now, I find that KDE is updated enough, and wayland is stable enough (on my hardware, of course, a 13 year old macbook and a 8 year old NUC).. honestly, as a simple user, i haven't appreciated any difference between X and wayland sessions, so i just login into wayland.
All the drawbacks are not drawbacks to me.
My projects, my repos, my private server. I don't want nor need to show off ("collaborate") and if i did.. what's the point of self hosting then? Just use github/gitlab/codeberg.
I don't even need to rent a server for that. Everything runs on my router (openWRT is amazing)
> I don't want nor need to show off ("collaborate") and if i did.. what's the point of self hosting then? Just use github/gitlab/codeberg.
Let me repeat this again. We didn't centralize git when we started using github/gitlab etc. We centralized discoverability and reach of projects.
So far, everything else can be decentralized - issue tracking, pull requests, project planning, ci, release management and more. But we still don't have a solution to search projects on potentially thousands of servers, including self-hosted ones.
And we still have forums like this one and Reddit where people can just announce their project. Github is more of a bad code refuge than a high signal project discovery.
Every single thing you showed are places to publish software releases, not post your half-finished project that someone some day might find useful. We need both.
As an example, I had to reverse engineer some kinda obscure piece of hardware and after getting everything I needed for my project, I put everything on github in case it was useful to anyone. A few months later, someone was in a similar situation and built on top of my work. Neither of us made a "package" or even "a piece of software", just some badly written scripts and a scattered notes. But it was still useful to publish somewhere where others can find it, especially a place with very good SEO and code-optimized search.
The subject is decentralization. Your above situation could be you posting on your blog or a forum and the other person getting to know about it that way. GitHub may be convenient, but it’s neither necessary, nor indispensable!
The solution for centralization isn't asking people to put the extra effort to avoid it. You won't convince anyone to accept that. Unless you have a unified interface to search all those projects at once - especially unfinished or unpublished projects, people will keep going back to platforms like github. That unified interface doesn't have to be centralized at all either.
> Unless you have a unified interface to search all those projects at once…
You mean like Google? I can’t imagine ever searching just GitHub for software… I use a search engine and it’ll point me to GitHub or Gitlab or whatever frontend the software is published on.
I also find GitHub’s intra-project search to be so horrible that’s it’s quicker in the long run to just clone the project to my local machine and git grep there. And at least my local git doesn’t inexplicably choose to hide a few relevant results from me the way GitHub constantly does.
I wasn't talking about intra-project searches. But Github does have a search that allows us to put constraints on the results like how web search engines allowed a decade or more ago. This feature is pretty useful that it forms a big part of sourcegraph's business. I do use Google search, but I often end up with Github search when I need to locate a specific type of project.
So if I'm looking for a solution rather than a library or a project to take part in, I need to search a dozen sources to see if anything meets my requirements? What if the project was just abandoned without being published any of those source registries? What if the project was a PoC of some algorithm that didn't need to be published anywhere else?
That sounds hardly like an alternative to what's possible with Github now. The only alternative that came anywhere close to that ideal was freshmeat - and even that didn't achieve the full potential. Check this discussion alone to see how many talk about 'network effects' or 'discoverability'.
The subject is decentralization. There’s a huge value in curation and specific communities. You don’t go to r/all to read about emacs or bash. Instead you go to r/emacs and r/bash. Even those “awesome $thing” list are better than going through pages of GitHub search results.
r/emacs and r/bash are all communities on a centralized service that you can search using a single interface. That is an inaccurate comparison. Meanwhile, I didn't say that a common index has to be centralized.
And Github has the whole software ecosystem. For example I can search for text editors or ebook readers. In that case I am not searching for any specific programming language.
We aren't talking about your preferences alone here, are we? The case that the parent commenter mentioned is exactly what I was talking about too. What if I want a solution? What if I'm looking for algorithms or examples? What if I want to find a group of projects that's tackling a certain problem? How are my needs invalid? Are the projects that don't have such elaborate setups, polish or completion unworthy of discovery and help? You're essentially dismissing requirements that drive others to large platforms.
> Why do you need a search index on your self hosted git server
The search index doesn't have to be on your server, does it? What if there is an external (perhaps distributed/replicated) index that you could submit the relevant information to? Or if an external crawler could collect it on your behalf? (some sort of verification will also be needed.)
There are two reasons why such a dedicated index is useful. The first is that the general index is too full of noise. That's why people search projects directly on Github. The second problem is that the generic crawlers aren't very good at extracting relevant structured information from source projects, especially the information that the project owner wants to advertise. For example the readme, contribution guidelines, project status, installation and usage information, language(s), license(s), CoC, issue tracker location, bug and security reporting information, keywords, project type, etc. Github and sourcegraph allow you to do precise searches based on those. Try using a regular search engine to locate an obscure project that you already know about.
Niche, but (true) satellite communication. If i understand correctly what we have in the pixel 9/10 is not nearly as useful as having a garmin, never mind the fact that it works basically in europe and US only
Yeah, no thanks.
I used to think like this, and i remember exactly what happened the day i installed my first adblocker:
i was already annoyed that some sites i visited employed very annoying ads, on both sides of the window, occupying about 20% of the screen, each. And they were serving an animation with _very_ loud music.
That day instead, when i opened the page 3-4 other pages opened as soon as the website loaded, all serving loud and obnoxious virus alerts, porn and some other crap. But how? I disabled popups a long time ago.
That day i found out about self-clicking ads.
That day i installed an ad blocker.
It is THEM that have broken the social contract. Screw them and screw ads.
(good thing that i wasn't on dialup anymore. Anybody remember that? scam sites that would make your dialup bill go up crazy, as if you were calling a courier's help line)
Of course they are more expensive (not much more, really, compared to simillar specced ESPs) but they are western and the peripheral actually work as intended. In my projects with ESP32 i had to basically bitbang every peripheral that i needed to use beyond their simplest mode.