Technology

They should absolutely ban disposable but as long as they're smart about it and don't try and make it a general vape ban. Anything with a microcontroller and OLED display should need regulation to be "disposable". So fucking wasteful.

Vapes can and have always been something you can pop a battery and cartridge and custom juice in. There's zero reason to make it disposable. Make the coil/cotton/juice cartridge disposable... Like a juul was last I checked? That's reasonable.

And then next regulate how much nicotine can be in per ml. 60mg/ml is fucking insane. That is heart issue level of nicotine. I got buzzed off 12 mg/ml, used 3 or 6mg/ml regularly, and quit at 1.5mg/ml. There's no fucking reason other than harm and addiction to provide 60mg/ml.

https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/2023/07/10/council-adopts-new-regulation-on-batteries-and-waste-batteries/

The regulation provides that by 2027 portable batteries incorporated into appliances should be removable and replaceable by the end-user

Coming soon...

Because an existing SoC at scale is cheaper than a custom ASIC.

You see this all the time, custom keyboard running ARM+Linux, SmartNICs using RISC-V cores/FPGAs instead of ASIC accelerators. Even Microsoft refuses to commit to ASICs for network processing in their DCs and use FPGAs instead.

Well the PY32F002B (costing a few cents) even though it has a 32-bit (entry level) ARM core @ 24MHz is literally cheaper than older and less powerful microcontrollers.

Granted, if you don't do anything else than react to a push button it's still cheaper to use discrete electronic components than a microcontroller, but given that this device has a LiPo battery (meaning there's battery control involved) and judging by the picture a USB-C connector, there's probably a bit more digital logic in it, by which point a 3 cent microcontroller plus a cheap SMD crystal and some caps is cheaper than using discrete components.

The domain of embedded systems has evolved to the point that it's the best option for almost everything in consumer electronics, mainly because at the lower end there are so many stupidly cheap and easy to use choices were you don't run an OS in it but instead just a single block of single-threaded code directly on the bare metal accessing registers directly.

It's so you can have a spinny animation when you hit the button.

To control the amount of voltage used in making the heat and not immediately burst into flames, for one.

It's probably cheaper and simpler to modify (say you suddenly want it to turn on when you click 3 times) to use a 0.1€ chip than to figure out how to do it and build it with discrete components.

20 years ago I was all "computer (chips) can do everything! We can use them everywhere! Replaceable, reprogrammable, fantastic!"

And no one cared.

Now they are everywhere and it's just a fucking mess 😔

Maybe 20 years from now the EU will have forced standards onto everything and you can (again) fix your dishwasher (and start it from work!!1!).

What happened to vaping?

I specifically remember refillable vaping was exactly what you had when you vaped. You had the battery unit or a "mod" as it was called, on top of that you screwed a tank that had the coils, cotton and liquid, all that shit could be individually replaced and everybody had their own frankensteins combination of mod tank and other peripherals they liked to use.

Why did that stop being a thing in favor of these absurdly wasteful disposable pens?

The 10 year old phone OS probably is slowing all of that. If they flashed phone as a dedicated webserver it would probably be fine

The webpage he hosted was a copy of his own blog post explaining the hack. It just about fit into the 20KB of available flash storage.

We can infer that on every request, the whole static page needs to be spooled out of flash onto RAM (in chunks no larger than 3k), then sent out over Ethernet.

That's an awful lot of work for the chip. I'm not surprised at all that it errors out under heavy load. The request queue probably grows until it collides with the buffer that bucket brigades the web page to the network.

I'm afraid to look up what optimizations were necessary to get that level of performance. It's damned impressive work.

Ok here's my trillion dollar idea:

SmartVape CloudBar. A range of premium smart home vaping devices that connect to (and depend on) the cloud so you can smartvape remotely (e.g. in the bed, on the job, or even when travelling).

Vaping, even locally, always works, unless your subscription has expired, there's no internet connection available, or any of the necessary cloud service are down.