Hey all - I recently finished my mini PC build which uses custom SD card based cartridges. It's all open-source[1] and should be relatively used to recreate if you're interested!
Great write up, will be curious to see if Astro sticks around. It seems like all the static site gens last a few years then fade away - Jekyll, Hugo, Gatsby, etc.
Me too! The closer my framework is to raw HTML, JavaScript (really TypeScript nowadays), and CSS, the less lock-in I feel. Those 3 languages are continue to get better year over year. And we are get better framework abstractions every few years too. Astro feels like it hit the sweet spot, but maybe there is more to come.
This feels right, I can’t think of any consumer product where AI is providing value today.
I assume, like me, most consumers have been saturated with AI, tried it a few times, and found it doesn’t deliver on simplifying/improving anything. They tried it, it hasn’t helped and they’ve adjusted their mindset accordingly.
It's interesting because this may precipitate an AI winter. Everyone is burnt out on sub-standard AI, even if it's improving, most folks have already passed on it. I think it may have been a mistake to popularize what is effectively a beta version so soon, especially with all of the controversy it has created.
Two categories currently saturating consumers: ambiguous AI product advertisements on social media feeds and companies offering AI chatbots instead of a human for customer service or support.
Oh hey that’s my Floppy8! Never woken up to find my stuff on HN before! So cool!
I actually just released a video earlier this week about the progression of my SD card based cartridges[0] which started with the floppy cartridges for this. If you like the Floppy8 you’ll probably enjoy seeing the dozen iterations I went through after this blog post haha
I’m mostly a YouTuber not a blogger so I have a bunch of other projects on my channel[1] in a similar vein which you might enjoy as well.
Heh, was just about to post that this design ended up having issues with chafing between the sdcard read and the sdcard and that the new design (for the reader part at least) addressed this. I love the new version and have been contemplating making one myself. Very nice videos and description, so thank you for sharing your projects
How did you find the servo to eject the cartridge? You mentioned occasional jams, is that because of the style of cog, or the lack of pressure from the servo? I wonder if there is some tensing or alignment issues from the plastic cog..
Fun fact about Hanafuda - you can still buy Hanafuda cards from a specific Japanese manufacturer who has been printing them for over 100 years and the more fun part is that that manufacturer is Nintendo! They still print traditional decks along with ones using newer IP like Mario and Kirby themes.
I own one of the original style decks and it's beautiful. Koi-Koi, played with a Hanafuda deck, is a great poker-style game that makes you feel very smart for knowing how to play even though the rules are pretty simple.
There definitely are but, perhaps by definition, items soft enough to dampen sound are often easily damaged so they aren’t great fits for most commercial locations.
They are also out of vogue as was mentioned, unless you’re a coffee shop then these “cozy” items just aren’t as common right now.
This is a really good discussion of density in different forms. I’ve always thought mobile UIs could have a density renaissance, would love to see folks questioning some assumptions of these devices - especially when the trend with LLMs is “wait a long time for a potentially incredibly wrong output” it feels like we’re going the wrong way.
When we first released our Chat+RAG feature, users had to wait up to 20 seconds for the response to show. (with only a loading animation).
And then we fake-streamed the response (so you're still, technically, waiting 20 seconds for first token, but now you're also waiting maybe 10 additional seconds for the stream of text to be "typed")...
And, to my enormous surprise, it felt faster to users.
(Of course after several iterations, it's actually much faster now, but the effect still applies: streaming feels faster than getting results right away)
This is the unspoken secret of all these mods. They’re built to be built, not played, so if there are subtle instabilities introduced which may impact practical gameplay they will likely never be discovered because the final creation just sits unused on a shelf.
To the same end, when you hire human beings anticipate them standing up for what they believe in and occasionally inconveniencing your immoral business practices. Humans on both sides, opinions and your right to voice them on both sides.
[1] https://github.com/abeisgoat/SHIPx86/tree/main