My original HomePod has recently regressed in its ability to play songs. It can no longer play one song after another without glitching and repeating a little bit of the previous song. It boggles my mind.
Thank you for writing down this memory. It would fit perfectly on https://folklore.org but unfortunately it seems that the site is no longer accepting new memories.
Threads and locks are fundamentally the wrong abstraction for most scenarios. This is explained in complementary ways in two of the finest technical books ever written, Joe Armstrong's "Programming Erlang" and Simon Marlow's "Parallel and Concurrent Programming in Haskell". I highly recommend both.
Thank you for many fond memories of playing Glider and Pararena.
Whoever is downvoting you for speaking the truth should go stand in a corner. Or try maining BeOS for a while, to experience first-hand what happens when application programmers are forced to use threads and locks.
- Nicklisch-Franken and Feizerakhmanov (2024) “Massimult: A Novel Parallel CPU Architecture Based on Combinator Reduction”: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.02765v1
Wow! Thanks! It was a half a thought but that interaction is right up there with "the big red button" and makes the last 20 years of enshitification all worth while!
Just because most of the free software ecosystem relies on unpaid volunteer work does not mean it is a desirable state of affairs, especially with billion dollar companies building on top of said work while hardly contributing anything back.
Both Espressif and Raspberry pi (pico) target OEMs who will buy millions of their chips. They've both embraced the hobbyist market as well, but it's not how they've recouped their investment.
Arduino targets the hobyist market where customers will buy one (or at best a handful) of their boards. Arduino simply has no other way of recouping their investment than selling expensive hardware.
So I don't think it's fair to say that Arduino is being greedy. Also FWIW, Espressif's official dev boards are also pretty expensive. Not Arduino expensive, but several times the price of identical "clones" based on the same reference design and using the same official esp32 module.
If you think the price is unreasonable, don't buy. You have listed what you seem to think are better options. I agree that there are better options. If somebody else wants to spend their money in different ways than I do, let them. If Arduino thinks they can make money this way, let them try. If it works, good for them, I guess. If it fails, I guess the joke will be on Qualcomm. Honestly, Arduino could slash their price to be $1 less than a Milk-V Duo and I'd still by the Duo. If the Arduino was $1 less than an ESP32, I'd still by the ESP32. So I'm not sure lowering prices wouldn't just hurt them.
I have never bought an Arduino. I have bought a few Picos, a few ESP32s, and a couple Picos. And a clone of an Arduino Nano integrated in a system with a Pico for 5V logic, specifically, to implement a PS/2 controller. I don't see any advantage an Arduino has over an ESP32, aside from 5V logic support.
