I agree with everything you're saying, but if you consider that this is a single-person company, the "hardware is as hard as you make it" statement makes sense. He saw a need, found out that it would be feasible to make a product to fill that need with very simple hardware, and chose to make the product. If solving the problem would've required hardware outside beyond their budget or skill level to make then presumably they wouldn't have pursued the whole project. Which I guess is sort of the point, but of course the title of the blog post doesn't really convey that.
I think "hardware is as hard as you make it" would've been a better title. The author made the smart decision of keeping things very simple on the hardware side, and that happened to be possible for the kind of product he wanted to make.
Interestingly I've heard a very similar story and sentiment about hardware vs software from another single-person maker (also a software engineer by trade) of a hardware product, also in the music space. And this one was comparatively a more complex product on the hardware side, and did face some supply challenges during covid and tariffs, forcing at least one redesign and price raise. But in both cases, I'd say they made smart choices about keeping the hardware simple. By not pushing the envelope on that front they gave themselves the freedom to invest a lot of time and effort into the software. But not every hardware product is like that (which the author also does acknowledge).
Yeah, I think a lot of the "hardness" of hardware is of a different flavor than software. The author mentions how many lines of code are in the software, but that really is more of a symptom of something that makes software "easier": you have way more flexibility to iterate, and try new things, at a relatively low risk and cost, even if it's embedded software (at least for non-critical applications). Hardware is just more unforgiving. There's no cheap way out of the kind of scenarios you mention.
They are simpler and can be read by more devices, especially legacy devices that are still pretty widely deployed. Other than that, not much to say in their favor. They have lower data density compared to 2D codes such as QR or datamatrix. Many linear barcode symbologies have weak or nonexistent error correction capability. But often you don't need that extra data, and the cost of changing processes and equipment to upgrade to a new barcode format is seen as not worth it.
Very cool work - refreshing to see a of different approach. I learned about Kuramoto oscillators many years ago from a book called Sync, by Steven Strogatz, which I highly recommend.
There's also git-annex and iterative DVC. I used xethub a fair bit (was the earliest user, in fact) and I thought it was better than git annex, git-lfs and DVC, but still did start to struggle past a certain size. I think part of the problem was just git itself, and the compromises required to have a hybrid repo. So I'm happy to see this vcs doesn't use it. xethub did start shipping a version of their product that did not use git but I didn't get the chance to try it. I've also tried oxen and it wasn't bad at first, but soon ran into some weird issues with the repo state which I didn't really try to debug.
It is clear to me at this point, given my experience with all these systems -- none of which I've been 100% happy with -- that "git for data" is a nontrivial problem.
Of course it can. Is it good at it? I guess we'll find out, for sure people will try (I might if I get some spare time). At a glance some of the tech used resembles that of xethub (of which I was a user, until they got acquired by huggingface), which was marketed towards AI/ML/data science (to version control data/models/etc).
Yeah, that's the main challenge in research. Once you get immersed in an area, it's not that hard to come up with ideas that haven't been done before. It's also not that hard to do things that improve the performance of some method or system, at least by a little. It can be fairly hard to do things that are both novel and actually useful.
I usually feel the same when starting something new. The "STUFF" is annoying and often feels like overkill when a project is new and minimal. Installing/building ROS, the package boilerplate, etc. And often I can get away with more minimal alternatives like just a single (possibly multithreaded) process, or multiple processes with a simple IPC. But then again I often end up wanting a lot of the extra stuff you get with ROS like the bags, the viewers, the cli tools, etc. LLMs help on both fronts though - they're decent at making DIY versions of ROS-like functionality, but they're also pretty good at handling the ROS boilerplate. (Which is one area where I'd see peppyOS being a severe disadvantage).
I think how it works usually is that they let you use the features from higher tier plans than the one you're on; once you use them enough they send you an email asking to upgrade. That's what happened to us and I've seen other users mention it. Not sure how I felt about it, OTOH maybe it was less friction than explicitly subscribing for some "2 weeks free trial" or whatever but OTOH it did feel weird and unexpected. Anyway, we felt the extra features were worth it so ended up paying.
Yeah, they're not direct replacements. I think both models have have their pros and cons. In fact I tried both around when covid shutdowns started (server being in the office, me at home), and liked zerotier better; it was faster, and a more generous free tier. But now tailscale has won out for a couple of reasons; the main one, it's simply less flaky for us on macOS, especially for devs working overseas. No idea why and maybe there's simple fixes (that don't involve repeated connections/disconnections, hopefully). The other, tailscale has a few extra things that are nicer and easy to use like identity-based ACLs, funnel/serve, magicDNS, ssh management, etc.
Our company pays for the premium business plan, $18/mo/user. You have to pay for at least the lower tier plan once your team grows beyond a handful of people. And there's several quite useful features (though maybe not essential) on the premium plan like serve/funnel and SSH.
On the other hand, I do wonder about zerotier. before tailscale we used zerotier for a few years, and during the first 3-4 years we paid nothing because as far as I can recall there was nothing extra that we needed that paying would've gotten us. Eventually we did upgrade to add more users, and it cost something like $5/mo (total, not per user).
About 5-6 years ago, I worked a fair bit on an iOS app, primarily in swift (there were some obj-c and C++ bits). Until then, 90% of what I had written was either C++ or python on Linux, and I had never worked on a mobile app and had barely used MacOS (or iOS for that matter, I've always had android phones). From that experience I had an unexpectedly favorable impression of the swift language. I thought the ergonomics of the typing system and error handling compared quite favorably to C++, with better performance and safety compared to python. I didn't really like the Apple frameworks though, it felt like they were always making new ones and the documentation was surprisingly poor. Nor did I really gel with XCode (which is virtually a requisite for iOS development) or MacOS itself. But I actually liked swift enough that I give it a try outside of ios for a few test apps. Unfortunately, at the time swift outside iOS wasn't really mature and there wasn't much of an ecosystem. Not sure how much that has changed, but these days I'd probably reach for rust instead.
This is neat! It's a bit amusing in that I worked on a somewhat similar project for my phd thesis almost 10 years ago, although in that case we got it working on a real drone (heavily customized, based on DJI matrice) in the field, with only onboard compute. Back then it was just a fairly lightweight CNN for the perception, not that we could've gotten much more out of the jetson TX2.
I preordered the hardware version sometime before it was released. At a $50 price point, I thought it was worth a gamble. I wasn't disappointed! It's more of a hacker's device at the moment - for better or worse - but it's fairly powerful under the hood. AMY is a very impressive synth. And the device is clearly a labor of love from the creator.
PNGs of screenshots would probably compress well, and the quality to size ratio would definitely be better than JPG, but the size would likely still be larger than a heavily compressed JPG. And PNG encoding/decoding is relatively slow compared to JPG.