True, such a low number of production units design would really only make sense if you could find an off the shelf solution to drive multiple displays.

If these displays are not supposed to be animated and they’re reasonably low resolution (say, 800x600 20bit RGB or less), they could be connected via SPI and pretty much every microcontroller out there has multiple SPI ports, so even a cheap SBC would work for that). However I expect that getting XWindows or Wayland in Linux to work with such displays would be a PITA.

I’ve only ever got software running under Linux to control a tiny 2-tone display via I2C - on an Orange Pi SBC - and it’s totally its own thing which happens to be running under Linux sending low-level commands via the I2C dev and not at all integrated with X-Windows or Wayland. This would also work fine if the comms was via SPI (in fact the code barelly changes since I’m using a library that does most of the low-level work for me).

To just display a static image or a sequence of static images loaded from storage in a bunch of screens low-resolution enough to support SPI (so 800x600 or less) I expect something like that would be fine.

The more I think about it, there more I expect this thing could run on a single $50 SBC as long as the connector exposes at least an SPI device and 8 independent I/O lines (given how SPI works, shared SPI bus is fine with one separate Chip Select line for each screen as long as the SPI device under Linux can run on a mode that lets your code control the CS line itself, and the other 4 I/O lines are for touch detection) assuming touch position is irrelevant.

Human replaceable printed paper labels, manual stick.

What I describe goes well beyond things with screens.

For example computer mice have a microcontroller inside (and unless it serves a mechanical function, not much more than that) and cars have several, only one of which actual handles a proper screen (it’s actually a microprocessor rather than a mere microcontroller).

The simplest microcontrollers have nowhere near enough memory to handle any half-way decent display (some nothing at all, some can just about handle a two-tone 320x200 display over I2C or SPI, some can handle 640x480 16-bit RGB but without animations as they don’t have enough memory to actual have a buffer for image composition) and yet they keep getting sold in massive numbers.

Pretty much all digital electronics out there no matter how invisible to users has been replaced by embedded microcontrollers or, in a some use cases, single function controllers (which are basically microcontroller programs converted into integrated circuits).

Embedded computing was a massive revolution in digital electronics.

Yeah, I really missed pretty much the entire domain of sweet things.

Sugar!

Before Europeans discovered the sugarcane they only had the natural sweetness of things to make sweet food, the sweetest of which is sugar beet, whose sugar is lot harder to purify than that of sugar cane.

How sweet can cake be without some reasonably pure form of sugar you can add. Did the concept of cake even exist in Europe before that?

Edit: nevermind - I forgot the sweetness of fruit (oops).

GoG has A TON of payment processors available to buyers, at least in Europe.

I know because I checked it yesterday following all this shit about payment processors pressuring game stores to stop carrying NSFW games, as I intend to start using a different payment processor as the one I usually use (as it turns out, one of those alternative payment processors is already integrated in the banking app of one of my bank accounts).

The difference in what can be done and the amount of work that needs to go into it between discrete digital electronics and just having a microcontroller or even microprocessor there is HUGE.

Also with microcontrollers and microprocessors most of the work moves from Electronics Engineering and circuit-design space to Software Engineering and software development, and the latter experts are easier to find plus the development cycle is way more friendly when it’s just code which you can change and upload at will rather than physical circuits were simulation can only go so far before you have to actually create the physical hardware.

Even more entertaining, microcontrollers are so stupidly cheap (the most basic ones cost a few cents) that throwing in a microcontroller is almost always significantly cheaper than doing the control stuff with discrete electronics.

(For example a screen that size can be controlled by as ESP32 which if you embed it in your circuit yourself costs maybe $1 or $2, though that wouldn’t be running Linux and programming it be much more low level, plus it’s probably the cheapest you can go)

I actually got an EE degree back when we embedded circuits were just starting to be used so I didn’t really get taught how to use them, then went for a career in software instead of electronics and came back to digital electronics years later and it’s like night and day between the discrete digital electronics age and the everything is a computing device era.

Is it just me who feels that having one processing unit per display is a waste?

I mean, I get it why they did it (it’s way easier to just have one SBC per-display, both on the hardware and the software sides), but if designing such a system I would still try to come up with a single board solution if only because waste gets on my nerves.

Unless things have changed massively in the UK in the last 5 years or so, in my actual experience you don’t unless you make a profit.

The yearly baseline costs of opening and operating a Limited company in the UK are pretty low (less than £100 if I remember it correctly).

There really is no greater pleasure and no greater value adding activity for a Senior Dev than to wade through masses of code produced by pretty much understanding-free copy & paste from stackoverflow by an automated version of the most junior and clueless coder imaginable.

“You plebs should know your place”

For starters, the whole “Progressive” thing is an American concept born out of the American environment (with its very deep religious moralistic strain amongst a large fraction of the population) and does not really applicable to Britain because, at least until recently, they didn’t really have regressive tendencies.

Beyond that Labour hasn’t been Leftwing since Tony Blair took over in the 80s and started talking about it being New Labour - they’re Neoliberals and quite strongly so, so pretty rightwing.

What they did was performative Identity Politics like in the US: theatrics in the Moral space to make them seem different from the other mainstream party, rather than actually having genuine Liberal Principles.

Of late they even ditched that and seem to be trying to outfascist the Fascists.

As I see it, that’s both a problem of low self-confidence and passiveness (or maybe underdeveloped values).

For the first, we all have several qualities, but people often don’t recognize or value certain qualities, especially people driven mainly by what they think others value and hence who end up valuing pretty much just the qualities modern Society focuses on - namely Wealth, Beauty and Brains - which is a typical low self-confidence thing.

For the rest, as I see it, having some inherent quality that one was born with isn’t exactly something deserving of much pride because it’s not something one did anything to achieve. If that much one’s parents deserve the recognition for the “achievement”, though they didn’t actually do it on purpose, so maybe not even them. Having pride in being born with a high IQ makes about as much sense as having pride in being born in a rich family: it’s masturbatory ego stroking about one’s luck rather than a celebration of one’s successes.

Well, the point of Neoliberalism is to de facto destroy Democracy by making the powers controlled by voters (the State) be secondary to the power of Money.

I guess the end stage will be something similar to Feudalism, or maybe just Fascism (a number of very Neoliberal nations have of late become a lot more Fascist).

In the transition stage, the politicians are needed keep up the Theatre Of Democracy and distract the masses with ever louder shows of conflict around things which Money doesn’t really care about (hence the Identity Politics Wars).

Whilst I can’t speak in an informed way about Japan, I can about The Netherlands and they have been degrading in terms of quality of public services during the Neoliberal era.

Certainly by the time I left (about 15 years ago) the trend was well establish in that country of having Scandinavian levels of tax (but only for people, not for companies) and ever more American-level of public services. For example, they don’t have a National Health Service (instead they have Health Insurance) even though taxes there for individuals are significantly higher than in countries which do have one such as Britain or Portugal.

They also use to have a high level of public housing but haven’t been building much of it in the last few decades and now have a giant realestate bubble.

The Netherlands is a great example of how even countries which started with a higher level of policies geared towards the good of the many, have a decay of those over time as we get further and further away from the post-War era, especially during the Neoliberal years.

That requires political will to achieve objectives other than wealth maximization, or in other words a political philosophy other than Capitalism which, at least sometimes, is dominant over Capitalism.

The whole point of Neoliberalism from the beginning was eliminate those and make Capitalism the dominant political philosophy rather than just a trade philosophy, so almost 50 years into it the effects are all around us and painful to see.

In Capitalist nations, the further we are from the era of peak Unions and in general civil society movements (which was just after WWII) the slower infrastructure improves from one year to the next, something visible not just in trains but at all levels (even National Health Services for those countries which have them).

The same thing will happen in China now that they’re getting more Capitalist than Socialist.

It was never the Capitalist part doing the kind of improvements that benefit most people, it was the stuff outside Capitalism (that used it as a Trade Philosophy only) constraining it and guiding it for policy ends which were independent of Capitalism.

This slowing of improvements of course itself accelerated with Neoliberalism, since that stuff is mainly about making Capitalism the sole definer of policy, or in other words make Capitalism the entirety of politics, hence unconstrained and unguided by interests other than those of Money, so ever less policy was done for the greater good.

Capitalism is reasonably decent at optimizing Trade in the short and mid-term, but is completelly shit for non-Trade interests such as Quality Of Life, as well as for anything which doesn’t have direct and reasonably immediate action-consequence links such as situations where negative effects are very delayed in time (for example, companies enshittifying their products but keeping on going for years on the inertia of brand name) or emergent in nature (i.e. things that appear due to the accumulation of the actions of many actors, such as Global Warming).

People at the peak Dunning-Kruger point of intelligence - just above average intelligent enough to feel they’re “above” most people but not enough to properly understand the full nature of intelligence and its limits.

It’s my impression that people tend to be more attracted to the unusual, so if you’ve grown up surrounded by big booty latinas, they’re not as appealing as otherwise.

As far as I can tell, most people out there have expectations about high IQ people which are straight out of Hollywood films and wholly unrealistic, so best just leave then with whatever de facto impression of brightness they have about you than mention a number and trigger the “Mental Superman” expectations.

Also going around parading your IQ falls straight into the rule “the more a person brags about some great personal quality, the less strong it is” - if you’re really that bright, brave, strong, beautiful, confident and so on, there is no need to mention it since it’s generally obvious to others.