This is the real answer, there are soooo many Mormon gun companies and defense contractors it's fucking wild.

I'm adjacent to the industry. This is dumb but I understand the reasoning. We're getting left behind in the electronics world. Nobody is creating hardware startups because every few months there's a viral blog post with a "hardware is hard" title on HN and none of the VC assholes want to fund anything but web based surveillance capitalism ad tech because it's a surefire way to make money. Even if you do get funded and you're US based you're absolutely doing all your manufacturing in China if you're remotely consumer facing (b2big-b has different rules). That means Chinese companies get all the benefits of all the labor from your highly trained engineers when they get the design files. If you try to build anything at volume in the US you have strikingly few options for boards and parts. Everything is whole number multiples of fucking PCBway and half the time it's lower quality unless you're paying aero-defense prices which is the only business anyone wants.

AGPL just in case they try to put your brain waves into the cloud

Yeah but the people running this seem to only be interested in pivoting between whatever the current grift is. We should come up with a word for people who do that, maybe something like "grifters".

IME those groups aren't very libertarian, they're closer to American Taliban religious fundamentalism.

The unspoken part is that unless Gabe has a very strong plan involving some sort of employee co-op, when he retires or dies the company will likely get sold by the estate to private capital which is 100x worse than being a public company.

This...isn't how the current paradigm of ai works at all. We've built glorified auto-complete bots, not something that can make a physical robot behave at a human level. Best case, they build something that can carry on a conversation long enough to excite a tech journalist and aimlessly meander like the Boston dynamic bots but without the pre-programmed tasking (assuming they don't cheat and add canned routines).

So that leaves one option: it's a moonshot project to convince the tech illiterate public to take them and their stock price to the moon long enough for a few people to make an obscene amount of money.

Don't use TikTok, don't really care too much either way, but watching this whole thing unfold is starting to open my eyes to the ways these companies can shape public opinion.

They're apparently sending notifications to people to contact their reps and it seems very likely that they're promoting content that advocates against the ban.

I'm not a fan of censorship or blocking internet services but TikTok really seems to trying to make a good case for it.

Hardware person here, these standards groups are getting out of control. They want thousands of dollars from anyone who wants to make anything compatible with their specs and while hardware and drivers are becoming cheaper and easier than ever to get into, they have become the main roadblock.

It's like the MP3 days all over again.

Yeah, a surprising number of people don't want these hyper complex cars with thousands of microchips and millions of lines of code operating them. Give me an electric 2012 Honda fit/Toyota matrix equivalent that just fucking works and costs $20k or less new.

Recommendation: report the pop-up as a bug with the provided link. Just act confused and claim to not be using an ad blocker. Muddy the waters and make life hell for their devs.

I'm not intimately familiar with the BCM2711 but I believe it's a reasonable, albeit somewhat overpowered, processor for the application. It can be put into a variety of low power states and probably pulled out of sleep by various events like the GSM chip sending packets or accelerometer motion (frequently the peripheral chips have dedicated "wakeup" pins that you can wire to interrupts). It's not the most cost effective option by far, there are sub $5 microcontrollers with multiple cores for handling communications and real time motor control concurrently but you'd need to hire someone like me for a few months @$200/hr to write the low level drivers and design the boards. The rpi lets random web-only devs fumble their way through hardware development using whatever GitHub Python libraries they can find. If you only need a hundred scooters it makes more sense to just yolo it and buy up the remaining supply of rpis to start your grift.