Unfortunately it’s very hard to buy a decent dumb TV these days.

That’s absolutely not true. Bluetooth has many “profiles” which define different capabilities. Here’s a list of them. These are all defined in the official bluetooth standards.

Maybe you were thinking of the “core specification” which defines the underlying protocol but doesn’t define the profiles? But that’s just the way they broke up the spec documents. The profiles are still official parts of bluetooth.

Apple’s proprietary extensions for audio are not part of any official specification though.

Not in reliability…

But they’re probably still selling more CPUs to your average buyer who always buys Intel, doesn’t read tech news and never even heard about the controversy.

Intel didn’t actually manufacture the chips.

The chips with the oxidisation issue were manufactured by Intel at their Arizona fab plant.

The workplace isn’t high school.

It can be. I’ve definitely seen cases which were more high school than a professional workplace.

Celebrities get wide latitude to protect themselves from imitators. Impressionists can do “satire” etc. but this isn’t that. It’s explicitly a reference to her voice in the movie, and as such she’s protected by law from them going around her and hiring someone else to imitate her.

It was explicitly represented as her voice when he tweeted “Her” in relation to the product, referencing a movie which she voiced. It’s not a legal grey area in the US. He sank his own ship here.

He tweeted “Her”, which explicitly tells us it’s a deliberate imitation of Scarlett’s voice in that movie. And he tried to negotiate licencing her famous voice, which she rejected.

So it’s more than just a coincidence, it’s deliberate bad faith behaviour. Legally you can’t misrepresent a product as being from a famous person when it wasn’t, and he very much did that. I guess he was hoping she’d give in and accept the licensing agreement post-facto. But instead it looks he’s in legal deep water now.

All this tells me is that they have a great PR department.

Meanwhile Mercedes has already reached level 3.

They have devices installed which include GPS and an accelerometer. They report back to base via a cellular connection when you drive erratically or aggressively etc.

It’s not just EVs - most new cars have these tracking devices where they sell your data to your insurance company to be used against you.

The STM32WB55 in the flipper has a versatile wireless peripheral built in which can be used to implement various protocols including Bluetooth, zigbee, etc… Support for I2C, I2S and CAN is pretty standard stuff - the ESP32 is nothing special in these respects.

Maybe they chose the STM32WB55 because its wireless support is more flexible than the ESP32 and allows them to implement a wider variety of protocols? Or possibly just better documented, giving them the chance to do things they can’t on the ESP32? I haven’t compared the inner workings of the two chips’ wireless support so I can’t say for sure.

The ESP32s are nice chips, but the STM32s are also really nice to work with and will work fine for this task. Changing to an ESP32 wouldn’t make any real difference to the user so the choice is moot really.

I’ve designed products around both CPUs and they’re both pretty nice. The STM32 has somewhat better documentation, has cleaner low power modes and is a bit simpler when delving into the nitty gritty details. The ESP is more powerful and has some nice if complex features but I don’t like its low power handling as much.

Overall I think I’d choose the STM32 for this task since it’s a little easier to make small, battery powered devices with it.

I found one from the early 2000s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LOxSWzi9G_g

I don’t think it was specifically DARE here but I do remember some super cringe anti-drug ads in the late 80s or maybe early 90s.

Democracies usually have laws and some kind of government. There are no laws in Freetown Christiania and there’s no individual who has direct power over another.

I think this is a common misconception about anarchies - that there’s no social control of any kind. If you look at actual real world anarchies like Freetown Christiania in Copenhagen they don’t believe in a complete absence of organisation. Far from it - they develop community-based committees which have no actual power in themselves but are used to develop concensus on issues that affect the whole community. So rather than abolishing all rules they’re all about human collaboration and concensus.

For instance when hard drugs became a problem in Christiana the residents got together and banned hard drugs. It’s not a law as such but everyone’s in agreement that if you try to sell hard drugs you’ll be ejected.

It’s not a perfect place and it’s hard to say that their brand of anarchy works well as a system of government. It seems to have been a mixed experience for many people who’ve lived there. But it’s definitely been an interesting social experiment.

There are plenty of documentaries on youtube if you’re interested.

Or rather bad press for Daihatsu, who this is actually about.

The headline is terrible and misleading.

It’s a normal sized guitar and an unusually large cat.