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Apple Watch with cellular is effectively iPhone mini. There are 3d printable cases to make it into a bar phone.

https://makerworld.com/en/models/1022751-watch-phone#profile...


The Apple Watches have also been getting bigger.

The first Apple Watches came in 38mm and 42mm sizes. That "large" Apple Watch is the size of the current "small" Apple Watch (42mm).


Mostly by shrinking the bezels tho

The 42mm refers to the case size. You are right that screen is bigger on the new models with the same case size.

> The Apple Watches have also been getting bigger.

A large watch face has always been a style people into watches go for. It's not just a digital smartwatch trend.


This was a style thing that tended to ebb and flow. The trend in the 2000s was to have really big watch faces but by the 2010s people were calling them “dinner plates” and it started to be viewed as kind of tacky and ostentatious. Smart watches ended up recalibrating people’s expectations but, if they hadn’t shaken things up, I think we’d be leaning towards smaller faces by now.

In fact, fashionable youths these days are wearing those vintage Casios which come in at 35mm to 39mm.


Pretty much All watch manufacturers have <40mm models.

And the sky is blue. Your comment does not dispute the fact that larger watch faces is a style people like. Because you don't does not invalidate others do

The 42mm measurement on an Apple watch is the lug-to-lug size, which usually corresponds to about 37mm in standard watch size.

I'd like to see anyone try to use this for, like, anything at all. A video of someone posting a HN comment on this thing would absolutely make my day.

Yeah, nah, this isn't anywhere near an iPhone mini in usability. I can appreciate it as a design exercise, but as an actual daily driver? Hell no

unfortunately for me at least the handwriting recognition still seems to be at the "Eat Up, Martha" phase https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RlG_uEd1we0

There are a lot of aluminum cases that transform the watch into an ipod, and some of them are advertised to be used as a phone as well.

To go on a different tangent, I want a round Apple Watch. I know it's not the most efficient use of space, but dangit I don't want the weird little (but constantly-growing) square! If I have to have something on my wrist all day, I want it to look nice and not like a brick.

Crazy idea: Just get a regular round watch :-P

Even better idea: Get a Casio FX-91 [1]. You'll get used to its shape pretty quick - like the 100 Million other humans who already have. Good chance it will still be produced 30 years from now, too, so if you lose it or break it you can get a new one. Costs a tenth of an Apple watch.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casio_F-91W


Ha, she's a beaut. I actually had one way back in the day. Still remember that cute little beep for the alarm/adjustments.

Try Garmin if you want a round smart watch. They get good reviews and the sporty types who own them swear by them.

Can’t imagine Apple ever doing this, though, because a round display is pretty terrible for displaying the sort of content and UI elements that iPhone/Apple Watch users are used to. Much of the UI and all existing apps would need to be completely redesigned.


I have a Garmin for the express reason of battery life. I get 2-3 weeks per charge and it's "oh I should charge it eventually" "about to start a jog - oh it's a 6%, ok charge it tomorrow..."

Yeah I fully admit I'm yelling at clouds here. I have looked at Garmin and they're likely to be be what I eventually settle on. I have my own issues with their design philosophy, or more particularly, the design philosophy of their operating systems and back-end UX, but they're a far sight better aesthetically to these eyes. The watches by "nothing" are also pleasing to the eye but don't seem to be really be good at doing what i want (responsive heart rate monitoring, sport features).

Aside from the fact that it doesn't run iOS and like every other aspect of it?

Almost seems like it’d be easier to spend a couple weeks in Shenzhen getting cables made to your specifications rather than testing everything on the market.

I thought this is exactly what Linus Tech Tips did.

Libraries, not services.


The Alpha CPUs didn’t implement the div instruction and Linus’ assembly version was faster than DEC’s in some cases.

https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux...


That's nice. (Not uncommon in early RISC, (e.g. PowerPC had some similar limitations for 64 bit ints), and various assembly fun ensued).


Don't these things get more efficient as they scale up? One big plant is probably better than 30 small ones.


A better question is why a company is allowed to effectively lie using fraudulent false advertising in its marketing and brand image about being environmentally conscious and become the largest polluter in the country?

Is Amazon too broke to buy the necessary land to build out wind/solar/battery? I thought a company that name sponsored “Climate Pledge Arena” could afford to pay a little bit extra to care about the climate.

A wind/solar/battery solution is not even really much more expensive than gas power and it’s far less dependent on fluctuating fuel prices.


> Is Amazon too broke to buy the necessary land to build out wind/solar/battery?

It's more capital intensive, and interest rates are 8%, because our elected officials are completely incompetent.


8% interest rates don’t seem to be a problem for financing all the data centers and AI hardware.

Amazon can afford to power their data centers with clean energy.

It’s not called “Climate Pledge But Only If It’s Less Capital Intensive Arena”


I'm absoltutely not defending the environmental decision, but these datacenter projects seem to be funded mostly by free cash flow (not borrowed money), from the hyperscaler profit margins.


I am curious how renewables + battery compare here, if at all feasible.

I thought there was a gas turbine shortage?


They’re absolutely not that incompetent. They’re on the pockets of people who profit directly from this.

Follow the money, and all that.


I don’t think business really wants interest rates that high. Without conspiracy theories, a simpler explanation is that this is simply democracy in action. People don’t want the spending reigned in, and they don’t want their taxes raised.


I think in this thread it’s worth posting out that interest rates aren’t actually high historically. They’re pretty normal. They were just wildly low for around a decade or so.

If you look at a 30-year fixed mortgage chart, the <6% rate situation only existed between roughly 2008 and 2021. At no other time in the history of the 30-year fixed rate mortgage was it ever that low. Ever.


If I understand correctly, for speed of deployment they're building a less-efficient simple-cycle plant (instead of the typical combined-cycle). Even though it's larger, the efficiency is worse than a typical natural gas plant.


Natural gas is basically a waste product that gets flared off in many oil-producing parts of Texas. If this private power plant can use that gas for something productive then I guess at least we're no worse off. But it's not clear that is what is happening.


efficient in money, nothing is said about other metrics

it's quite possible to have more product made, thus more pollution (or less materials consumed, thus less)

but concentration definitely will rise


sometime in the energy sector once told me "the solution to pollution is dilution"


If we all just get a little cancer instead of some people getting a LOT of cancer then Amazon will be able to power its robot factories!


Which is nonsense. There's plenty of pollution that's been diluted as much as it possibly can be and is still problematic. CO2 is an obvious example. Or consider leaded gasoline or mercury. You have to be careful not to eat too much fish or you'll have trouble with the mercury in it. That's been diluted by the entire ocean and that didn't solve it.


They meant "to not get caught, we just dilute".


*someone in the energy sector

also, i don't necessarily mean to endorse this worldview in terms of its potential impact on policy, though there may be some truth to it, technically speaking.


uh, that’s nonsense.

co2 is problematic because of concentration - the sheer volume.

leaded gas and mercury are a problem because of bio-concentration.

dilution still helps!


Of course it helps, but where are you going to dilute more co2 these days?


bulk volume is a different problem from concentration

when people suffocate in the fire from CO2 - that's concentration

and dilution helps people to not literally die from that

global warming due to CO2 levels everywhere is entirely different problem. (and if we could dilute CO2 into the space, it would also be solved, lol)


that is exactly the issue. still worse 6” from the tailpipe.


The quip doesn't say "dilution helps." It says "the solution to pollution is dilution." Dilution solves the problem. And not only that, but it's the solution, not merely a solution.

This is just not true, and you seem to agree with that.

Yes, CO2 is problematic because of the sheer volume. The sheer volume means that dilution does not solve the problem.

Leaded gas and mercury are a problem because of bio-concentration. Which means that dilution does not solve the problem.


A bigger unit is generally more efficient, but this is a single plant with a bunch of units, and I don't know that the individual units are any bigger than they would be elsewhere.


I once saw a job candidate take a competing offer from Facebook because they had better snacks.


Back in the day, it wasn't just better snacks - Facebook served three meals a day, they had free drop-off laundry on campus, all the snacks in the world, and that barbecue shack on campus was legitimately decent.

Of course, you had to sell your soul in the process, but particularly for young, single folks just out of university, it was like moving to another better college campus, and if you took full advantage of the perks you could bank another 30-40k of your comp, easy


They believed in the company’s Mission™ (brand tortillas).


Sometimes the reasons people give are not the real reasons.


I came up with a color code based on the wiring: Red for Power Only, Blue for USB 2.0, Green for USB 3 (the ones with the extra pairs connected). I use paint pens to mark every cable I come across with this code. Generally speaking, only the Green ones have special PD emarker chips.

It doesn't cover every possible configuration, but it's good enough for when I'm like "I need a USB cable" vs "I need a good USB cable"

I use this tester: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CF95VL2Y


As much as the original author bemoans having to do the labeling themselves, 99% of people don't care or don't have such a mix of cables as to make it a challenge to find one to suit the task.

If you care, then care enough to do small, practical things for yourself. A little loop of tape. Paint marker. Even just sorting them into drawers/boxes/whatevers by type.


I think the issue isn't that it's this huge ordeal for a person to do, but that if billions of people have to do this then that's a fundamental design flaw that could have been avoided.


I thought blue indicated USB 3.0?


E markers are required for USB3, so that’s why. If you have a cable capable of 100 or 240W, they will also have a marker (it’s required), even if they only do USB2 speeds.


Jul 16 3:18 AM PDT We continue working to resolve the increased 5xx errors for CloudFront customers utilizing VPC Origins connectivity. Customers utilizing other origin types remain unaffected by this issue. Based on our investigation, we believe the root cause is related to a packet processing subsystem responsible for routing requests from CloudFront's edge locations to resources within customer VPCs. We continue to recommend that customers who are able to do so temporarily change their origin type to resolve the errors. We will provide another update by 4:15 AM PDT, or sooner if additional information becomes available.


They aren't actually shipping the new RP2350 silicon revision on Pico 2 boards yet. If you want the errata fixes, you've gotta source the chips and make your own boards.


I toured a sorting facility in Seattle recently. They said the only really profitable output is aluminum, everything else costs more than virgin material.


I worked at a plastic furniture manufacturer in Indiana for a few projects.

They got paid to accept bales of recycled "HDPE" that they could mix at between 10 and 30% into their virgin materials. They get paid to accept it! Negative profit for the waste management company, pure profit for the "user".

This worked best on black, coffee, slate grey, mahogany - you get the idea - the whites and tans and bright colors were basically pure virgin material (and their own internally-recycled offcuts of dyed virgin materials of matching colors) even though their FAQ states:

> What percentage of recycled materials are used?

> The percentage of recycled materials in our lumber can vary depending on the availability of post-consumer and post-industrial plastics. We continuously strive to maximize the use of recycled content in every piece of lumber.

Personally, I don't think that the fact that you started with pure virgin material, extruded some plastic, cut it up and used most of it, but put some of what was virgin material a few hours ago back into the grinder and extruder makes the resulting plastic "recycled".


That says a lot, doesn't it? HDPE is one of the most recyclable plastics and recycling feedstock still has a negative market value.


It's 100% recycling, if the alternative was just "throw away the excess". For all practical purposes, recycling just means "repurposing material that you would have otherwise sent to a landfill".


My understanding is that glass gets downcycled into a lot of products like concrete or asphalt or aggregates. It's not profitable, but it's really easy to provide at a low loss.


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