It's at least partly because, starting with NCLB in 2001, schools got defunded if students didn't do well on standardized tests. That resulted in curricula being redesigned around those standardized tests, and in an even more exaggerated way for obvious reasons in poor schools.
Late 40s here. Interestingly, I wasn’t allowed to take home ec - the school considered it beneath me. Latin was thrust upon me as my senior year elective. And I still can’t bake a souflee to save myself.
It just works and it's so, so much faster. Went from an Ender 3 v2 to a Bambu P1S. No more re-leveling the bed, no more first layer adhesion problems, and your prints run 4-6 times quicker.
I would hardly call hardware video decode/encode overrated. A hardware block will do the work with a fraction of the power that the CPU would take to do it, and in the case of something like a Pi 4 or Pi 5, you're now spending all of your limited CPU on video, rather than doing something useful.
Maybe not a problem when you're plugged into the wall, but for those of us using Raspberry Pi's (and other computers) in mobile situations (laptops, robots, drones, etc.), the power consumption is a huge concern.
My main usage of the Pi 4's video encoder was to record the video from the camera "for free" while the CPU was nearly maxed out doing stuff in OpenCV.
You misunderstood what I said. Transcode is not necessary. Pretty much every device that comes in the Happy McMeal box comes with HEVC and h264 decoding capabilities. So you just stream the data directly to the device which does the decoding with little energy as you mentioned. Transcoding is unnecessary.
Some folks have media libraries that can be used outside of their homes, and sometimes they use them with very limited bandwidth.
With transcoding, I can keep my high-bitrate 4k scan of Steamboat Willy at home, and stream the content to my pocket computer with the shitty free wifi on a public bus if I feel like it.
Admittedly this is from a hobbyist perspective, but I'm hard pressed to reach for an ATmega for basically anything these days due to the RP2040, the Pico, and its clones.
I do wish there were more ADC channels though. Even an external analog mux costs more than the whole RP2040...
Commercial 16-bit/4ch ADCs can be obtained for <$0.90 in modest quantities.
The RP2040 ADC is not good, and I am not often sampling something close to my noisy MCU. I'd rather route I2C anywhere than worry about signal integrity routing my analog signal a mile across the board.
You don't even need the 8 :), 4 quadrature inputs will fit on one PIO block.
Some lovely person got a quadrature decoder into 24 instructions, so you can potentially still do something useful on the same PIO block if you only need one or two quadrature encoders.
My main trouble with the emulators/virtual machines is that late-90s and early-00s Windows/DirectX games are a huge dead spot.
There are a ton of titles from this era that just don't work on current Windows, even with dgVoodoo. I just want to be able to comfortably get rid of this Win98 SE / WinXP dual boot box I have lying around...
I started using Gentoo on my personal machines (Desktop, Laptop, NAS) after I needed to understand it for work. Eventually I fell in love with the developer workflow that it allows.
That was seven years ago. These days I feel like I've spent so much time tinkering for little to no benefit. I've been through LFS a few times so I don't feel that being a Gentoo user made me understand Linux any more than I already did.
So much "emerge --sync && emerge -1 sys-apps/portage && emerge -auUDN @world" and then fix USE flags problems and mask problems and keep rerunning the last command until it actually works.
I somewhat self host everything right now - VPN into my home network to access my NAS. But the user experience of documents and media just feels so poor compared to existing cloud services that I'm tempted to just give up on homelab stuff.
The upfront price of 10+ TB hard drives is hundreds of dollars a drive, you need to replace them every 5 years or so to "trust" them, you need redundant disks because you can never trust them, you need a backup solution, time investment to make backups, and the price of power in the Bay Area means you are spending several hundred a year on power to run the gear. Whereas I could just get 10 TB for $50/month from a cloud provider. It's not like I actually watch or listen to any of the blurays or music rips I've made, which represent most of my data...
I bought a PineNote in early 2022 hoping to replace my reMarkable. I've worn out the battery but I don't want to give money to a company that intentionally makes swapping the battery nearly impossible. Along with the fact they're useless at work because you can't directly use a cloud service, you have to proxy through reMarkable's own service.
I thought it'd be fun to tinker on but then I actually developed a healthy social life and exercise routine again and have found little motivation to stay inside when I'm not working.
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