Kind of like how if you take a bunch of traditional radar systems, sync their LOs, and add some DSP, you get a phased array. Pretty good analogy, actually.

Wow, that looks really good! I like the labels on each server! Are the 3d printed parts custom or did you find them online?

I didn’t watch the video, and I only found out about the blog post through Lemmy.

IMO the blog and video seem a little click-baity. Yes, he technically does acknowledge (in the video, not the blog) that older Pi models are still being produced, but saying the SBC market is dying is crazy. How many projects really need the specs of a Pi 5 in that form factor? If you need that performance, you probably have space for something a little bigger.

Here’s the author’s own tl;dr:

But if you’d like the tl;dr:

Unless the DRAM pricing situation changes radically, I think the hobbyist SBC market is dying—or at least on life support. And I don’t just mean Raspberry Pis, but all SBC vendors. LPDDR chips now account for the majority of board cost from the vendors I’ve checked with.

Raspberry Pi would have been fine if they stopped at the Pi 3. I’m not saying they shouldn’t have made the 4, or even 5… but the Pi 3 and Zero 2 are (IMO) their best products in terms of price-to-value. The SBC market is fine.

“Buried in the video” isn’t the same as “talked about in the blog.”

Which blog? If you mean the OP, could you quote the section you’re talking about? I don’t see any mention of Pi models besides the 4 and 5.

The thing that these complaints about RPi pricing always seems to miss is that most Pi models are still manufactured and supported. Most projects don’t need a Pi 5 with 16GB of RAM, even a Pi Zero 2 (under $20) is overkill for a lot of projects.

What’s next, my drug dealer will start checking IDs? /s

They’re going to put age verification on pirating too!?

Some of them might know how to use a torrent client though.

Sometimes RTFM is valid advice. Still condescending, but also valid.

I interpreted their question differently. It sounds like they’re taking about Radarr having to download a movie before they can watch it, whereas streaming services have a “complete” (compared to a new *arr setup) library available to stream instantly.

Some bittorrent clients can start playing a video before it’s done downloading, and prioritize the torrent chunks in the right order so there aren’t any interruptions as long as there are seeders and you have enough bandwidth. But I don’t think plex or jellyfin can do it, and I don’t know of any alternatives that can.

Until a few years later when all the used TVs have cell modems. The same thing is already happening in the used car market, it’s getting harder and harder to find a reliable vehicle that doesn’t have a cell modem and a long T&C that let’s them spy on you.

Cell modems are getting cheaper and cheaper, it’s only a matter of time before cheap smart TVs will flood the market with always-on telemetry and intrusive personalized ads.

It’s fine until it’s not… The problem is you can’t really predict when it will fail.

Just make sure you back them up. Bit rot is real.

BASIC? That’s cute.

If you don’t think EE students learn how circuits (including ICs) work, what exactly do you think they’re doing while they’re in school?

OK, but that doesn’t really answer my question, and I’m getting the sense you don’t know how deeply some engineers understand how the hardware works. Plenty of embedded programmers have EE degrees, and can write VHDL just as well (or just as badly) as they can write C and ASM.

You think people writing C(++) for baremetal systems don’t understand how their hardware works?

Even things like HDDs that don’t become “obsolete” in 18-24 months get sold with plenty of life left (unplanned downtime is more expensive than new hardware), but obsolescence makes it happen even sooner.

Regardless of who owns it or what they do with it, those GPUs will get sold on the used market with plenty of life left. Older AI GPUs, networking equipment (eg 100GbE), SAS drives, etc have been easy to find on eBay and other sites for a long time, because data centers replace hardware long before it’s expected to fail.