Not, that's part of the issue. And also a big reason why someone would pay for much more expensive industrial sources.
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I recently got into making hardware to be used by people with medical issues. Specifically, I made a handheld physiotherapy game console.
That's a simple device using off-the-shelf components and a 3D printed shell.
Parts alone cost around €60 if I buy them off Aliexpress and around €100 if I go for more reliable industrial sources.
Assembly (some hand soldering required), flashing the software, testing, packaging and shipping takes about two hours. I don't have any employees, so if I do this at the rate I get paid at my day job, that's another €150. If I had employees, it would be similar due to tax and insurance costs.
Now I have a device for €250 plus shipping, but the calculation isn't done here.
I also have to account for DOA parts, support (in my country there's 2 years of warranty on electronics like that), returns (we have a 2 week free return law in my country) and a reserve for potential claims if something catastrophic happens (e.g. a battery blowing up and burning down a customer's house).
So that easily doubles the price to €500.
But we are not done yet. First we need to account for R&D. So far I spent around 200h developing the device and the games for it, so that's €15 000 in dev costs, and development is not nearly finished. I expect this to easily double.
Then come certifications. I will need CE including the radio part, certification for that will cost €10k-20k and that is if I don't need to make changes. If the base board that I am using turns out to not be CE compliant, I will have to DIY a whole PCB design that passes CE and do the certification again.
If I want to have any chance of getting this paid for by an insurance company, I need medical certification. I spoke to a large manufacturer of medical devices (I wanted them to take over my project, but they declined), and they said that medical certification for a device like this is around €500 000.
I expect to maybe sell a few hundred devices per year if I am lucky, and I don't know how long the market for this device would work. Let's go with a four-year period until I want to at least break even, because anything longer than that would be very risky.
So let's go with an unrealistic best case of 1000 devices per year, so 4000 total.
That means, the one-time costs would factor in at least €150 per device. If I only sell 100 devices per year (more realistic estimate) I would need to add €1500 per device.
Btw, medical certification only means there is a chance that insurances pay for it. It doesn't mean they actually will pay for it. So if I'm unlucky, I paid half a million for the certification and the insurances won't care.
So now we are up to €650 - €2000 for a device that's €50 in off-the-shelf hardware. And I haven't made any money from it apart from the salary for assembling it in my bedroom. And on top of that I also need to pay for taxes and stuff.
This is super frustrating. A handful of kids are already using that device, and every single family of them reports that it made their lives much, much easier, their therapy efficiency much better and improved the health of the children.
I even opensourced the design, to maybe give kids access to this device, but so far nobody dared reproducing it.
I don't know how to spread that device in a manner that people can afford.
Back to OP: the device in question is developed by a real company, having to pay for patents (both they want to hold and the ones they need to license), salaries, taxes, insurances, and so on, and it's a really custom device with very custom parts. The price is neither unrealistic or crazy at all. It's, in fact, really low for what it is.
The fact that we can get amazing high tech products like smartphones for a few €100 is totally crazy and only possible because millions of them are produced (economy of scale) and they are produced by exploiting foreign super cheap labour at every stage of the process.
Why won't these pesky peasants shut up and give us our data?
Who could have known that the people who voluntarily use a tiny niche browser mostly for privacy/idealism reasons wouldn't wany just another AI browser?
Honestly, how out of touch with their user base can they be?
If I want a good browser that works with every website, I'd take something chromium based. If I want an AI browser, I'd take one of the many chromium based ones.
Lemmy fetches everything that has ever been posted in any community that any user on that instance is subscribed to and keeps it indefinitely.
Since most activity happens in big communities that most people are subscribed to, most instances keep full, persistent copies of most things that were ever posted to lemmy.
That's why Lemmy scales so badly. If Lemmy was the size of Reddit, every instance would have to have storage capacity in the same order of magnitude as all of Reddit itself.
The problem only gets worse with time, since all that has been posted still remains.
The total replication also means that the copies need to be moderated by every instance individually, since every instance stores a copy of everything. So if e.g. someone posts illegal content on another instance and your instance stores a replica, you are just as legally liable for that illegal content as the original instance. Thus you have to moderate everything that runs over your instance.
Moderation effort is thus also replicated across all instances.
That bad scaling in storage and moderation is btw the reason why e.g. lemm.ee shut down. It was just too much cost and work to keep the instance running.
There's a lot of business around just repackaging things and selling them for multiple times the cost.
They literally give that thing away to any politician who manages to not doze off during the nomination talks.
Yeah, it was 50 for mine, so quite similar.
I'm considering switching to laser/led, since the power consumption should pay for itself after a few years, but didn't get around to it, so now my 12yo projector is on its third lamp.
I always just replaced the bulb and kept the cradle.
Tbh, that lamp+cradle combo is a plain scam. No way the cradle is worth €150, but most people will just check the suggested lamp (which is lamp+cradle) and the projector manufacturer makes €150 off a small piece of aluminium.
Hint for the next time: projector companies only sell the bulbs in a cheap metal cradle and they ask for a butload of money for that.
But you can also get the lamp without the cradle from Amazon or similar places. It's the same lamp since projector companies don't manufacture the lamps themselves, usually its Osram. And if you buy the lamp without the cradle you pay a quarter of the price of with a cradle (at least that's the price difference on my projector).
You then just have to pop the old bulb out of the cradle and put the new one in, it's super easy.
Just look at the bulb in the cradle and google the product name of the bulb.
That's exactly what the article is about. Please read it, it's good.
Tbh, I would classify everything you do regularly at work as your daily work.
The point remains the same: You need to know all these languages. You cannot say "I'm just doing DB stuff today, so I can totally forget QML and relearn it tomorrow when I have a GUI ticket."
Tbh, I've worked with self-professed "superstar programmers" so far. In every case their cockiness, ther "I'm always right" attitude and their inability to receive criticism or to adjust in any way to the team lead to major issues.
These "superstar programmers" are much more likely to produce live bugs (because they don't listen to anyone, don't follow procedure like code reviews and stuff and after a time nobody wants to invest time into reviewing their code properly because it always ends in a fight). They are also really harmful to team cohesion. Their behavior usually ends with most of the team quitting unless they are fired before that happens.
Programming is teamwork. It by definition needs to be unless you work alone. Someone who can't work well in a team is a bad programmer.
We have a superstar programmer in our sister team. Both teams work on the same project but in different sections, but there's a core area where we overlap. That guy recently caused a massive 5h outage of our customer-facing website, which is our main access point for much of the business. We have customers in the order of 100 million that couldn't access the website.
What had appened is that our superstar programmer worked in the middle of the night when nobody was online. He made a non-urgent but critical change and pushed to production without code review or testing by the QAs, because, you know, he's a superstar and he doesn't need to follow processes. Our process for a change like that would have been that he needs a code review from his team and from our team (since the change affects us as well), and then it would have to be tested by their and our QAs in the preview env before and on production after the push.
There's around 20 domains for our website for different countries and different client companies. Our superstar only tested one of them after the push and that one was working, so he didn't check the rest. Turns out he made a simple typo and all other domains weren't accessible, until the rest of the team members came online at ~9 in the morning and noticed the massive outage. We then spent two hours trying to troubleshoot what exactly went wrong until someone found and debugged his merge request, because of course he didn't even inform anyone that he did the change. (He didn't even create a ticket for it, even though our processes require that.)
Superstar programmers are great at contests but terrible workers.
It's pretty much the same as why you wouldn't hire an artisan instagram bricklayer influencer to work on a block of flats.
Tbh, I don't believe anyone who says they do what they love for work.
The difference between work and something you do because you love it is the money.
If you do something for money, you have to do it because otherwise you will run out of money. So even if you aren't in the mood for it, even if you have done it for 8h per day for the last few years you still need to do it because you got dealines to meet and you have to deliver value.
You might like the thing you are doing in general, but as soon as you add the forced extrinsic motivation of depending on the money you make by doing something for work it directly devalues and diminishes the intrinsic motivation you get from doing something for fun.
You might enjoy drawing a painting. Believe me, you will not enjoy drawing paintings if you have to deliver 15 of them by friday afternoon.
People who are saying they do what they love for a living are either so rich that they don't actually need the money at all and thus are actually doing hobby work and get paid for it, or they are lieing to themselves to make themselves feel better about investing their whole life time into work instead of something that would actually be fulfilling.
Tbh, I think they are exaggerating.
In German you do say "I am a farmer/doctor/programmer/manager/..." when talking about yourself, but the same is done in English too.
When asking someone about their job, you'd say "Was arbeitest du?" ("What do you do for work?") or if you want to have a more specific answer "Wo arbeitest du?" ("Where do you work?").
You wouldn't ask "Was bist du?" ("What are you?"), since that question is way to open-ended and imprecise and German generally doesn't do that level of imprecision.
The only circumstance where "Was bist du?" would work for asking for someone's job is when you are already discussing everyone's job roles. So e.g. you are new to the team and everyone's telling you about their roles and you ask the next person about their role.
Analog ones require the USB host to support it. USB DACs on the other hand only require the OS to support them since they just use standard USB features. That's much more compatible.
So you built your own location tracking service for privacy, and then you post your tracking online? ;)
Seriously though, well done, quite impressive!
I think simple "musts" can be helpful on an organizational level to synchronize work. Stuff like "must use one of the approved languages", "must use git", "must use a linter with a given preset", "must get rid of all compiler warnings". That kind of stuff just makes working together easier, but neither of them are dogmatic truths but just stuff to make organization and working together easier.
But I agree that dogmatic views for broader subjects are very often harmful but at the same time rarely bring a lot of benefit. I've worked at a project before where the former lead dev was a really bad and dogmatic developer who managed to get to this position through intimidation. He followed "Clean code" to excessive lengths, which meant that it was quite common that a simple 1 Story Point change required touching 40+ files. Hardly any method was longer than 5 lines, hardly any class had more than one method, everything was split up like crazy.
Imagine writing code, but instead of lines you use classes instead.
I have met quite a few long-term developers with senior titles and sometimes even lead dev or architect titles who follow dogmatic views to the extreme.
I agree that no decent developer would, but that's a bit of a circular definition (since being dogmatic precludes you from being decent).
And I totally wished universities would be better at explaining that design principles are decent guidlines if you don't have any other basis to make a decision, but that they are ultimately tools in a toolbox and a good developer needs to understand when to use them and when not to.
Too many people come out of university thinking that SOLID or Clean Code are the bible.
It kinda is. Assembly is a 1:1 machine-code equivalent, so you just have to run the game through a disassembler and you get the "source". You just dont get the documentation.
This. No bullying in sight.
All I can see is an information why the package was returned. The only thing that went "wrong" is that it was returned to the address of the original sender and not to the address of the person who forwarded the parcel to Bahrein.
If that middle man didn't put their address on the package, it's no surprise that it was instead sent to the original sender.
Tbh, there's not really a story at all. The package contained stuff that's illegal in the destination country and thus was returned. A letter was attached to explain that fact. That's it.