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yeah the website says a whole bunch of nothing imo & doesnt really define a problem needing to be solved, perhaps they've struck a deal with phone carrier's to get unsold phones that are destined for the landfill as they have a t-mobile logo on their site, thats the only business aspect I can imagine get 10s of million worth of components for like a 1/10 of the price etc

google is telling me around 400k phone like devices are thrown out into landfills everyday, there might be a market to bring down costs eventually if they get logistics properly moving


I think this proving out the concept. A dev board costing. 150 doesn't matter for professional projects. It latters for tinkerers. What matters is unit price for desired qty.

And this has 4G/LTE (because it is a smartphone) so comparisons to base RPis are largely irrelevant.

And in industrial embedded Linux stuff there is essentially no correlation between price and performance. Most don't need performance and they aren't really cost-optimizing this bit of the production line very hard. It just needs to be certifiable, reliable and replacable.

I do hope they come down a lot in price and prove this out over many more phone variants.


> It just needs to be certifiable, reliable and replacable.

I think those are some good unanswered questions here. The supply of used phones is pretty cyclical, and almost all of them are out of production when their supply peaks.

Also pretty much all smartphones rely heavily on components without data sheets and with proprietary firmware blobs that won't be updated or patched without first-party support, or at all.


> And this has 4G/LTE (because it is a smartphone) so comparisons to base RPis are largely irrelevant.

Yes? So have countless new phones at around 150€. Including screen, battery, case, and warranty.

Edit: Just for fun, a list from a german shopping/comparison site, aptly named 'scrooge', selected for LTE, at least 2GB RAM, Octacore, Android 15 to not get too old stuff, in stock, 4 days delivery max, capped at 150€ incl. delivery. Sorted for lowest price first:

https://geizhals.de/?cat=umtsover&xf=10063_15.0~2607_2048~26...

Editoftheedit: To stay with the terminology of the 'largely irrelevant base RPI', they've built (or intend to?) a base board for whatever they are using as CM/Computemodule to plug into. I see some GPIO, some USB, one Ethernet.

A little bit of board layout, soldering of mostly passive components, and that's it.

Best of luck. (LOL)


Im assuming the JS refers to Janes street

That makes sense, I guess I've got web tunnel vision.

I was bit by the same spider that gave you web tunnel vision. In any case, I find OCaml too esoteric for my taste. F# is softer and feels more..modern perhaps? But I don’t think GC can be avoided in dotnet.

You can avoid GC in hot loops in F# with value-types, explicit inlining, and mutability.

Mutability may not result in very idiomatic code however, although it can often be wrapped with a functional API (e.g. parser combinators).


I’m actually kind of a fan, I’ve read your past comments on BEAM and Elixir while digging through HN to get a sense of how people view it. I appreciate your takes, but I’m honestly confused by this one and wanted to push back a bit, I'm not as knowledgeable as you on this topic, but bear with me

I get your point that BEAM’s individual components might not be the best in 2025 and you get the point of uniformity. so whats the point of saying there's a better BEAM like system, but then fail to point out one? Elixir/BEAM community promoting themselves as the only solution to said problems isn't a bad thing imo, because what other system can give me the guarantee without forcing me to learn a bunch of new DSLs or scripting languages, and deal with the idiosyncrasies of a bunch of different systems? With Elixir or Erlang, I can stick to one coherent environment and get all that.

Again you state all this in your post, yet say elixir/beam isn't the gold standard, then what is? As i am having a blast working with phoenix, liveview and nerves and the BEAMS guarantee of a ms soft real time fault tolerant system hasn't failed me yet and there doesnt seem to be anything like it in the market. The only thing I hate about elixir is types and would switch to rust/go if there was a similar offering


"but then fail to point out one?"

I didn't point out one, I pointed out thousands. All the combinations of message busses and serializations and schedulers and monitors you can imagine. Systemd monitoring a selection of processes that read and write from kafka queues in a cluster of VMs. Lambda functions that read and write Amazon SQS/SNS queues written in Go. Azure Functions using JSON to communicate over Azure Service Bus with Terraform configuring redundancy. A microservices architecture orchestrated with etcd based on gRPC services communicating with each other on a NATS message bus. Arbitrary mixes and matches of all of these things, probably the most common architecture of all at a corporate level.

Many of these beat BEAM on some metric or other that may be important at some point. For instance it's not hard to beat BEAM on performance (though it is also not hard to lose to it on performance; it's a very middle-of-the-road system on that front, which I mean completely literally). Another thing that you get very naturally is heterogeneity; if you want everything on a BEAM system you really have to stick to BEAM's languages, which is a pretty big issue in most cases.

The reason I say BEAM is not the gold standard is that there's still people running around who speak as if BEAM is the only way to write reliable software, that it is still the only way to have lots of independent services that communicate by passing messages, that if you don't implement every single one of gen_server's features and work exactly like OTP's supervision trees and if you don't handle errors by crashing processes, then you're not operating at Erlang's Golden Standard.

And that's not true anymore. There's plenty of alternatives, many better than BEAM on many fronts. BEAM is not the natural obvious leader standing above the rest of the crowd, secure in the knowledge that nothing is as good as it is and never will be. It's now down in the scrum, and as long as it is metaphorically running around claiming it's somehow unique I'm going to grumble about it. It's not even good for BEAM itself, which really ought to be pitching integration rather than "Look! We solve the reliability problem uniquely!"

To the extent that people are reading my post and basically backpedaling and insisting "Oh, no, it's the integration all along that we've been pitching"... well, I don't particularly enjoy the rewriting of history, but other than that... yes! Good! Do that! Pitch the integration! It's a legitimate advantage! But it's not 2005 anymore. Every major compiled language can handle tens or hundreds of thousands of connections on a reasonably sized server. Every language has solutions for running this robustly and with decoupled architecture. Every language has solutions to the problems now. BEAM's in a crowd now, whether it likes it or not.

There is no gold standard for these technologies any more. One might as well ask "well, what's the best computer?" There's no answer to that question. Narrow it down to "what's the best gaming computer" and you can still ask "what sort of games" and it'll be a crowded field. There's more options that anyone can even analyze anymore.


i never read the change logs, so just found out the concept of daily notes it looks pretty cool and might be what i need. Do you use any other templates?


may i ask why isabelle over agda or lean?


I know nothing, I am a complete beginner when it comes to formal methods. From reading about it, it seems that Isabelle/HOL is the best when it comes to automation which apparently is something you really want. It might be easier to learn (controversial, some say Lean is easier). It's been used to prove some software (including sel4 and a version of java), Apple and AWS are using it (but then I know AWS uses, or used, TLA+).

At the end of the day, I didn't want to spend more time reading about it then learning two of them (trying one and potentially switch later). The more you read about it, the more options open up (SPARK, TLA+, COQ, etc...).

I do find it ironic to read this article today given that I made that decision yesterday!


[shameless plug]I maintain a collection of proofs of leftpad in different prover languages, so people can compare them. It's here: https://github.com/hwayne/lets-prove-leftpad

[/invalid closing tag]


The main upside Isabelle has over other proof assistants is the existence of Sledgehammer: invoke it, and your current proof state gets handed off to a SMT solver like cvc4, veriT, z3, vampire, etc. If the SMT solver finds a solution, Isabelle then reconstructs the proof.

It's essentially a brute-force button that no other proof assistant (aside from Coq) has.


the issue is how would you define consciousness? if you killed a program and ran it again, it would still be the same program with the same bugs, i/o etc the only changes would be the memory addresses the program runs on & it's PID. But it is still the same program

I think there are net positives to this idea, but the concept is too dystopian for our generation to accept it (if its even possible). I dont think human consciousness is like a state machine, but if it was a copy would not be a copy if you are dead, it would be the canonical verison of you


I dont like sam, but he moves way smarter than ppl like sbf or Elizabeth holmes. He actual has a product close to the reported specs, albeit still far away from the ultimate goal of AGI

i dont see why he should be in jail


Should be in jail for Worldcoin which has pilfered people of their biological identity. I guess you could literally delete Worldcoin and in theory make people whole, but that company treats humans like vegetables that have no rights.


If his sister's words about sexually abusing her are true, he should be in jail.


no, in that case he should have been in the Juvenile incarceration system, unless the argument is that he should have been charged as an adult, or that Juvenile abusers should always be charged and sentenced as adults, or that Juvenile sex offenders who were not charged as Juveniles should be charged as adults.

Which one?

on edit: this being based on American legal system, you may come from a legal system with different rules.


interesting, i was thinking of sharping my maths skill by programming. Have you tried something like lean, agda etc if so how do they fair against apl or j for doing maths

I honestly thought apl was extinct


I've tried Idris. J and APL are great for quick analysis once you know them. I leave J open on my desktop for engineering and stats. Frink too for effortless units work. Haskell and its ilk are good for math. Programming to learn math works really well for some, since you work through a problem incrementally, especially with dynamic interpreters and REPLs. Pluto with Julia or Jupyter with Python or Mathematica too.


i have to disagree, there was a point between like 2013-2021 where every jordan 1 ,4 and certain 11 & 3's would resale for an arm & a leg. Attempting to get a pair for retail was a nightmare from long queues to sneaker bots making it humanly impossible to pick up a pair

now its possible to get most jordans close to retail price in the resale market or pick them up at retail as demands for most jordans is gone, unless its some crazy collab


yeah felt like a really weird move


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