Really useful to hear about your experiences actually coding. None of the video reviews have touched on this, so thanks for that.
With regards the ‘smearing’, not sure how familiar you are with VR tech but, could you characterise it further?
Some things it may be off the top of my head:
Is it the display not switching pixel state fast enough? This was a problem with early Oculus headsets until we figured out how to strobe displays for ‘low persistence’.
Or, is it eye tracking lag, resulting in the foveated rendering not keeping up with where you are looking quickly enough? Human eyes can move extremely quickly from point-to-point (called saccades).
Be great to get your thoughts on the possible cause / tech limitations.
Is anyone else tired of the euphamisms SaaS companies and cloud providers use when they have an incident like this?
Whether it's, "experiencing technical difficulties", "Degraded performance", "Increased error rates", "Access will be delayed" or whatever - they all mean the same thing...
The service is down.
So why not just be straight with your customers?
Not a fan of the corp b.s. My 2p anyway.
(Context, for what it's worth: Paying Protonmail customer, on the 'visionary plan'.)
I was hand-rolling my own. I had it doing a basic 640x480 buffer with some basic character generation and sprite support & HDMI/DVI output
These days I'd probably consider forking my friend Randy's C64 VICII implementation (VIC-II Kawari) and just expand framebuffer size, sprites, colours, etc, since he put so much work into it.
It was a lot of fun, but I got stalled on the SD card interface. That was more complexity than I felt with dealing at that point. And I was working at Google at the time and so they owned all my thoughts and deeds and going through the open sourcing process for it would have been a hassle. If I wasn't hunting for work and needing to make $$ right now, I'd pick it up again maybe? Was more of a verilog learning process.
If you think about it as a diminishing returns curve, it becomes something that can be understood and explored. Of course, the sales people will try to get you to expand quickly and your most efficient spend will come first - after your inflection point, your incremental return will decrease.
However, fighting that pull is the optimization opportunities enabled only at scale. If I run 1 ad, I know how that performs. If I run 1000 ads, I know which ad performs best.
An EV with great range (e.g. 300mi), good performance (doesn’t have to be a sports car), and classic controls.
You could go real minimal on computers. You’d just need a microcontroller to monitor speed, temp, charge, battery health, etc. Basic cruise control of the 1990s type would be nice but not essential. A radio with a USB plug for a phone to play music and good speakers is all you need for an entertainment system.
Basically I’m describing an electric 90s Civic with mid range options.
Oh and no cellular modem or spyware.
Put all the money into drive train, battery, and reliability. Design it to have easily swappable and upgradable batteries and to last for 25-35 years.
You’d have one customer at least.
You could probably make a pickup version with killer torque and be like Tesla for red states. Rednecks will be sold on the electric thing once they see what instant full torque means.
So what exactly are the frills that you're setting aside? XM radio? Regen, DC-DC converter, all of these things require more than just a single microcontroller.
Modern engine should meet California emissions. It might require a modern engine control computer and all that jazz; which may be less serviceable but whatever. I'd take a modern computer controlled fuel injected what not over my old carburated v8 that was easy to adjust, but needed adjustment all the time. Just starts every time for me thanks.
But, ignoring engine adjustments, what I'd love in a car is things like using the most common lights; and making the lights easy to access. Because changing the lights is a normal and necessary thing to do.
Don't make it take 30-45 minutes to change the (12V) battery, because changing the battery when it dies is a normal and necessary thing to do.
Basically, design around ease of maintenance, more than making it look cool and hip. I'm not necessarily going to do all the maintenance, but if important things are easier to get to, it saves me money, because it saves my service shop time.
I'd love it if it wasn't 2 cm off the ground, so you could get under it to change the oil; but I'm not going to win that, because I'm exaggerating a bit, but low clearance helps fuel efficiency, and fuel efficiency is required. I'd also love less of the under body panels to help with airflow that get banged up and then fall off or drag and cause terrible noise.
