McDonnell Douglas bought Boeing with Boeings money. Engineering culture died and became bean-counter, lowest common denominator corporate-culture. Lobbying went up, outsourcing to third world went up, quality went down, whistleblowers fired and suppressed.
These organizations no longer exist for the purpose of building great products and pushing the limits of engineering. It's easier to operate on the tit of the state and rake in billions through sleazy backroom deals and lobbying with the state acting as an artificial intermediary between cause and effect.
I was recently in the market for a speaker. Had an odd set of requirements...
- Portable (i.e. bluetooth + battery)
- Loud (as it's predominantly used in my workshop and on the deck - hence portable)
- WiFi support because bluetooth is annoying for connection-sharing. Spotify Connect is predominantly how I like to connect & share.
I looked into Sonos long and hard, and it looked like a complete mess. For the price, it simply couldn't be justified.
Ultimately I couldn't find something that met all my requirements for the price. So I just bought a UE Hyperboom. 20 hours of battery life + USB Power + Optical & 3.5mm Audio in. I bought a M5 Audiocast from AliExpress that provides WiFi Spotify Connect capability.
It's ghastly to me that Google seems to have just given up. There were a bunch of portable speakers coming out with Chromecast. JBL Link in 2017, for example. I have some Sony gear from around the same time (fine speaker, fine Chromecast, but some truly godawful bad wifi connectivity).
But now there's almost nothing coming out. Chromecast Audio feels like an ever shrinking ever less available technology. And there just aren't any alternatives in the running!
It seems like easy money to me to be honest but they seem to have given up like you say. Google assistant is declining at a terrific rate too - I asked it what the time was a few days ago and got a Wikipedia definition.
Honestly whenever I am looking for speaker these days, I reuse some inexpensive HiFi speakers for the second hand market and plug an amp from aliexpress/amazon with bluetooth capabilities.
Only issue is they are usually advertising their bluetooth at all time so anyone in the street can connect to them by mistake. I just power them off when not in use anyway so no big deal.
I have some fine $300 bookshelf speakers and tpa3255 chipamps setup in the living room and office; it's great yeah. I tend to think most people will end up with sub-par gear if they try to go secondhand, won't fully appreciate what value you can just buy new just looking at online recommendations in your price range, but if you want to be persistent & picky & eventually eventually snap up a steal secondhand does come up with some buried treasure sometimes.
I do have to switch inputs between Chromecast Audio and the computer that's plugged in. That's annoying. And I'd rather have Chromecast alike built into the amp like Nexus Q showed. At the very least these chipamps could offer me a 5v1a for powering my Chromecast. There are a couple fancy semi-expensive amps that do have Google's audio casting, but they're big-ish fuller-sized receivers and honestly expensive.
This setup I have has been kind of portable, but mannnn I don't love it. I literally have a chipamps velcroed to the side of a speaker. There's a 6s lipo for the chipamps and a USB battery bank for the Chromecast, plus cables for both power supplies. Audio cables from Chromecast to chipamps to speakers. I've gone long on making this a portable useful anywhere system and it rocks.
The one simplification is using some powered speakers. Micca PB42 and Neumi BS5p both will self-power off the 6s lipo batteries, are ~$150.
But it's just absurd & wild that speakers with networked audio are so un-mainstream. That I had to velcro this package together myself is absurd. How has the ecosystem only narrowed and narrowed? (Meanwhile Sonos is busy committing deep-cut enshittification/de-networkization).
Tangent, but I'm honestly interested in understanding how you use Spotify Connect and why you prefer it over bog standard Bluetooth or even a wired connection.
I'm reading up on this M5 Audiocast product and I'm failing to see how it's anything other than allowing you to stream music to a device via WiFi in stead of Bluetooth. Extra dongle, cables, connections and yet another app for no benefit that I can see.
Maybe I'm out of touch, but when I'm with friends or family, there's usually a speaker somewhere connected to a phone, and that phone is playing tunes. Someone is in charge of the phone and what is playing. Rarely do we care what is playing though because that's not why we are together. If someone wants to share a specific song they like with the group, they can either play it from the "DJ" phone, or just connect their own device to the speaker and play.
Possibly I'm just a 34 year old boomer and I don't understand how the kids like to party these days.
No, honestly it's a great question. And I'm well past the age of big parties, I'm 18 months younger than you.
With Bluetooth, the relationship is Phone streaming directly to the speaker. This places a full dependency on the phone and results in some major issues (IMO).
- With bluetooth you're severely limited by range (between phone and speaker). If you wander off to the bathroom or other end of the house you'll most likely experience degradation, stuttering or disconnects. So your phone must be near the speaker at all times.
- Bluetooth is taxing on phones, sacrificing battery life.
- Bluetooth is painful to share with. Even on the Hyperboom Speaker that has 2x Bluetooth channels. You can't just hand over connectivity to someone else easily.
Spotify Connect changes the relationship drastically and therefore experience. Your phone instructs the Audio Player (M5) to connect to Spotify directly, removing the dependency from your phone. Since the Audio Player will connect directly, this reduces load on your phone and you're free to wander off. It also allows anyone else with a Spotify account to take control of the connection without messy bluetooth disconnect/connect events.
SpaceX is about to launch Starship for the fifth time in a few weeks. If they pull off a controlled landing and catch (which they are rumored to attempt), that's going to be the best ticket to the moon by far. They might actually manage to get there before the Chinese if they put their mind to it and get the resources and backing to do it.
Chinese peer pressure might achieve what years of lobbying hasn't managed to achieve: a sense of urgency. The Chinese establishing a moon base without US boots on the surface would be a major embarrassment. They've done a few unmanned landings now. So, they clearly have the capability to pull this off now.
I miss the carefree days of working in fast food in my late teens and early 20s. Getting stoned with friends, eating crappy food, staying up all night living care free. Glad I'm not doing it now, but there was a sense of wonder and joy in the simplicity of it all.
You put any Verse-Chorus-Verse-Chorus-Bridge-Chorus with a I–V–vi–IV chord-progression and some fake lyrics with auto-tune on the radio and you'll instantly have a fan base.
The mass market for music isn't people searching out good music, it's subscribing to whatever drivel is poured down their throats.
“I first saw this in 2013 - an enormous amount of oxygen being produced at the seafloor in complete darkness,” explains lead researcher Prof Andrew Sweetman from the Scottish Association for Marine Science. “I just ignored it, because I’d been taught - you only get oxygen through photosynthesis."
In research you often learn that such totally unexpected, out of place things are often artifacts. Being too quick to get excited about that leads to disappointment and can seriously damage your reputation in the scientific community.
It seems terrible, but a dampener on excitement is often needed for focus.
1. This is why kernel modules are a bad idea
2. This is why centralism is a bad idea
3. This is why sacrificing stability for security is a bad idea
4. Security still needs to factor in security of supply - not just data safety
Centralisation in a nutshell. Monopolies so big that they become globally fragile. CloudFlare outages break a lot of the internet, and now we can see, Windows-based updates bricking machines across the world.
We've all pushed bad updates but how was this not tested?
Edit: As pointed out by doakes [1], the project is built by a 13 year old. With that context, I want to preface my original comment by congratulating TheGoodDuck on this project. What follows is criticism, but also do not take it too harshly. These are things I'd expect a developer with experience to know, but not a junior. As you might gather, the issues are even common among seasoned developers. So take the comments as a learning opportunity and remember that criticism of a work is not a criticism of you. These are also soft skills which are often not explicitly taught, but critical to growing as an engineer/developer. If you're doing this at this age and you keep up the work and dedication, you will be a force to reckon with in no time. I am not editing my original comment as this is how I would talk peer to peer and you're a peer ;) But I also wanted to give this context and preface because the style of language is a bit strong. Also note that these issues are very solvable and solving them will make your project even better.
The comments are there to help you improve, not to put you down.
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You're not alone. Even worse when it is a product page. Just how often I see some product or project and are unable to actually determine what the thing does or why I would want to use it or even HOW to use it.
I can give GitHub projects a pass when someone else links them, but the poster is the author so no pass. This is "Show HN". Please __show__. I do like to try out new projects and tools, but where's the hook?
Also, do not underestimate the importance of documentation. Hell, I document predominantly for myself. I know I'm not alone in forgetting how things work if I haven't touched a project in awhile (which can even be going to lunch on bad days). This is also critical for any users. Encourage them to add docs, make it easy, and when addressing issues recognize that just because it is in the docs does not mean it's interpretable from user context.
If you want to demonstrate a CLI or TUI tool, a common helper is asciinema[0]. You can record your terminal and they'll host the output for you. You'll frequently see these on GitHub and even a 10 second video that is clunky/slow with key presses (or way too fast) is better than nothing. UIs matter and aren't as simple/obvious as many think.
Also, drop a license file in there. Not just a line in your README. Come on, GitHub even hands these files to you so it is the same work to write in your README as it is to drop that file in (though you should always mod those licenses headers to be about you and your project). Without the license file, your license is ambiguous and may not actually protect your project as intended. The full text needs to exist.
No worries, you're all good. Getting the experience to understand expected norms takes time. Just not that often you see such a young developer on the front page of HN, and especially without mention of age in the title.
And just remember: never fear pushing back (even against seniors) and never confuse criticism about your work with an attack on you as a person. I mean all our code is shit. If a year from now you don't look back at your code and think "this is shit" then it probably means you are no longer improving (conversely if you are feeling discouraged and like you're getting nowhere, go back and look at your old code because it makes the improvements rather obvious lol).
Good luck. Keep it up and you'll do great. So don't stress and don't forget to have fun (very common mistake, especially by adults)
Talking about my shit code: https://github.com/thegoodduck/winternet_social Its a social media framework is started builiding maybe 6 months ago now i look at it its just such a mess... I will need to refactor it... It was time when i was working directly on prod server(even on fridays) and occasinally a bug would make the server go down :-)
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