i know it's maybe an unpopular thing to say to OEMs, but i do think some should adopt an open firmware stack to prevent post-discontinuation bricking and flex that somehow in their marketing. I'd buy that, especially for a larger appliance.

There's a name for when they don't: e-waste.

I had the exact same thing happen to me. Took CS107 at Stanford; cap stone project was a heap allocator. I ended up expanding it post course completion and published what I thought was a more clever approach. A few months later, I got a pretty stern email from our professor (shoutout to Julie Zelenski who was amazing) asking me to take it down :( Luckily i didn't get in trouble for this. kinda dumb on my part in retrospect.

Luckily you didn't get into trouble? It's the professor's responsibility to stop their students cheating, not yours! Heap allocators are hardly unique and the internet is full of source code.

It's really time to stop considering degrees evidence of anything. Universities let students cheat, they let professors cheat. What does having a good degree really prove? Why does anyone still ask for one?

Yes to your first paragraph. Library to your second.

And no, Internet access is not the same as reading in a library. Academia is the quiet place we learn to ask questions.

And meet people who are really good at asking questions.

What reason would your professor have to have you take it down, at least past your due date? One could claim copyright on the project itself if you shared the files, or if you kept the original framework a course might provide, but the work you did is yours.

It's not like heap allocators are hard to come by, there's one right there in the Linux source code.

I've had plenty of courses where professors were afraid of answer sheets leaking out because they intended to use the exact same tests and practicals the year after. Those were always the courses where someone had a copy of last year's answers that was passed around between groups of students. You can't rely on secrecy to save yourself from having to come up with different tests if you hand out a piece of paper to 50 or even 300 people.

Our 2nd year CS maths course the answer sheets were all uploaded to the server with sequential numbers so it was trivial to grab them all.

The idea that someone would reach out to you and actually expect that you would take something down because students were using it is absurd. It shows a lack of understanding of both how the internet works, and more so the idea that an action like this is really improving the outcome of the students. If the student outcome depends on you taking something OFF the internet, that is the problem.

i loved playing ShenzhenIO! So much so that i ended up buying and registering the domain of the fictitious company you were hired by in the game. That domain redirects to Seam now

This was my exact intuition. At 450 metric ton, we're three orders of magnitude away from what large container ships can do. It's a nice PoC but this is clearly just PR from DHL.

Air freight is also an odd comparison since it's usually time-sensitive and/or pricey ($100+ per pound).

It's DHL. If you want your package or pallet shipped to some island it might take a long while until a big container ship makes the next stop there. If it can stop there at all. For a package/freight company, the capability to run ships on your schedule to small harbors is valuable. And a catamaran could be a competitive alternative to other smaller container ships

What I don't understand is that they are talking about running it trans-Atlantic. Taking longer than a normal container ship, while taking less cargo. You save on fuel, but surely the crew costs must be eating up all those savings. And you're not really faster. Unless the plan is to go point-to-point between smaller harbors, making up any lost time by saving on cargo handling time

You might not need much crew for a vessel that small. Automation can take care of most of it, and with the right equipment the ship can basically sail itself. Then you just need a captain and maybe some maintenance crew to keep the automation running.

Your crew isn't emitting hundreds of tons of CO2 burning the dirtiest fuel available on earth, though.

Smallish container ships are used a lot. Look at traffic from the big ports like Rotterdam to small ports like Orkanger or Kristiansand.

A lot of containers take a small-ship trip after the big-ship one.

i don't get all the hate in this thread. I literally was about to build this today, using my home server, tailscale, and some kind of web frontend. thanks for saving me time :)

Thanks, we try to make it much easier than self hosting and managing your own tunnels! Let us know how it goes.

Correct me if I'm wrong but they seem to proxy all your conversations.

FYI Uber reported a net income of $2.6B in Q3-2024 and $1.9B for 2023. That's no Google but that's also no "barely makes any money" territory, no?

Source: https://www.google.com/finance/quote/UBER:NYSE?hl=en

eh... I'm pretty sure I mentioned net income (which i think is pretty close to profit in some circles) but if we care about debt servicing, buybacks...etc, let's just look at cash flow. And there too, in Q3, they posted $1B+ for quarter.

I'm not sure I understand the point of your analogy with respect to wining/losing at a casino. If I follow it, you are effectively saying something akin to, when Google first became profitable, its achievements should have been completely dismissed because of a decade of prior losses. That's not how tech companies work. Most of the value creation is 5-10-20 years out. You bear enormous losses with the knowledge that returns compound and eventually render irrelevant prior years' losses.

Yeah, and also a loss of $8.5B in 2019, loss $6.7B in 2020 and loss of $9.14B in 2022. Hell of a business they got there.

So? I can make the exact same point about Google and other tech companies that endured years—decades sometimes—of eye-watering losses, only to eventually build enormously valuable businesses.

Of course. But it's a bit premature to say it's a good business and making money.

It may or may not become a good business.

Let's say Tesla does manage to launch a cheap Robotaxi, fully autonomous, next year ? (Of course they won't, they are decades away from that)

Uber would be pretty much dead, and all it would have done in it's lifetime is massive losses.

yeah but even then, it's still just a contract. The legal math behind Cisco's decision might just be to extend support just long enough to meet obligations and tolerate the risk that the remaining customers might sue.

Anyone here know customers affected? I'm wondering if Seam could build a LoRaWAN gateway and get these guys out of this mess.

yes at Seam we've seen a number of large deployment in multi-family buildings where you need to deploy devices (locks, thermostats, water leak sensors) but wiring the whole building with wifi isn't an option.

> wiring the whole building with wifi

Now there's an oxymoron

I don't know if it will count as DIY, but take a look at LEGIC and their devkit for this. We (seam) work with them and I recall seeing a couple of startups doing demo's of their UWB solution at their LEGIC Connect conference.