I understand that there's always a hesitation to invest in what looks like an expensive and large tool, but if there's one thing that I could go back in time and force myself to get years sooner, it's a stereo microscope.
It's the single largest difference between frustrated and feeling like a ninja. You will, quite simply, never regret it.
There are lots of pedals these days that are designed as performance instruments in their own right. Check out the Erica Synths Nightverb; it's all chonky knobs and it doesn't even have stomp switches. You'd never put it on your floor.
Storm Summoner takes a pedal with lots of parameters [that would normally be set-and-go] and gives it that missing live performance UX. Singers in particular could use the sensors to modulate their voices.
What excites me is the flag-based system described in the review video at 11:45. You can set up stuff to happen (launch an LFO?) in response to other things that happen, like a value crossing a threshold. That takes it out of the realm of a dumb controller, and we already have enough dumb controllers.
Austria: Federal Environment Agency / approved dual system. P €810 + W €1,110 = €1,920/yr. Battery: +€1,110.
Belgium: IVC/CIE; Fost Plus for household packaging / Valipac for commercial packaging. P €585 + W €585 = €1,170/yr. Battery: +€585.
Bulgaria: Executive Environment Agency / Ecopack or another approved system. P €375 + W €990 = €1,365/yr. Battery: +€1,195.
Croatia: FZOEU / RPPO. P €780 + W €1,315 = €2,095/yr. Battery: +€1,315.
Cyprus: Green Dot Cyprus or applicable national system. P €375 + W €910 = €1,285/yr. Battery: +€910.
Czechia: Ministry of Environment / EKO-KOM. P €385 + W €1,110 = €1,495/yr. Battery: +€910.
Denmark: Danish Producer Responsibility / approved PRO. P €1,110 + W €925 = €2,035/yr. Battery: +€730.
Estonia: Pakendiregister / approved PRO. P €385 + W €775 = €1,160/yr. Battery: +€775.
Finland: Producer Responsibility Register / Rinki. P €810 + W €925 = €1,735/yr. Battery: +€925.
France: ADEME/SYDEREP; normally Citeo or Leko. P €585 + W €985 = €1,570/yr. Battery: +€790.
Germany: LUCID/ZSVR plus a dual-system contract; WEEE: Stiftung EAR. P €360 + W €1,185 = €1,545/yr. Battery: +€705. Germany illustrates why the service price and actual environmental fee should not be confused: LUCID registration itself is free and one current small-volume packaging example is only about €39–€41/year if handled directly.
Greece: EOAN/EMPA / HERRCO. P €790 + W €985 = €1,775/yr. Battery: +€910.
Hungary: national registration / MOHU. P €1,120 + W €1,185 = €2,305/yr. Battery: +€985.
Ireland: EPA / Repak as applicable. P €585 + W €1,170 = €1,755/yr. Battery: +€1,170.
Italy: CONAI and relevant consortium. P €805 + W €1,305 = €2,110/yr. Battery: nominally +€1,305, although this provider offers a WEEE+battery bundle.
Latvia: State Environmental Service / approved recovery system. P €1,290 + W €1,365 = €2,655/yr. Battery: +€1,375.
Lithuania: GPAIS / approved PRO. P €780 + W €1,365 = €2,145/yr. Battery: +€1,375.
Luxembourg: Valorlux. P €375 + W €1,485 = €1,860/yr. Battery: +€1,500.
Malta: ERA / GreenPak or Green MT. P €780 + W €675 = €1,455/yr. Battery: +€675.
Netherlands: Verpact; electronics commonly through Stichting OPEN/Wecycle. P €385 + W €385 = €770/yr. Battery: +€385.
Poland — Packaging/WEEE registration through BDO and appropriate recovery organisation. P €910 + W €1,110 = €2,020/yr. Battery: +€985.
Portugal: APA/SILiamb / Sociedade Ponto Verde or another scheme. P €1,195 + W €1,390 = €2,585/yr. Battery: +€1,390.
Romania: AFM / approved OIREP. P €880 + W €1,195 = €2,075/yr. Battery: +€1,195.
Slovakia: Ministry/ISOH / ENVI-PAK, NATUR-PACK or equivalent. P €750 + W €1,120 = €1,870/yr. Battery: +€1,125.
Slovenia: ARSO / approved PRO. P €1,485 + W €1,615 = €3,100/yr. Battery: +€1,630.
Spain: MITECO / Ecoembes. P €790 + W €985 = €1,775/yr. Battery: +€985. This provider also quotes €595 one-time for obtaining the Spanish NIF where required, plus official/apostille costs.
Sweden: Naturvårdsverket / NPA. P €810 + W €1,110 = €1,920/yr. Battery: +€505.
Using the published list of concierge prices above, covering all 27 EU countries for a batteryless electronic product would cost approximately:
A few months ago folks were understandably annoyed when Microsoft dropped their heavily subsidized per-request pricing model because it was figuratively burning cash.
Well, I'm here to tell you that whatever is going on behind the scenes at Cursor with this Space-X acquisition in the works, the Auto setting is clearly routing all prompts through "Cursor Grok 4.6 High" right now.
This is a degree of subsidy that makes the Microsoft thing look quaint.
I reduced my $200/month subscription to the $20/month level and have proceeded to do what I would have paid about $1500 to do with Opus 4.7 or thereabouts, which is how Grok 4.6 High feels like it compares. I don't have anything remotely like hard evidence to back this estimate up beyond what I'm watching it do and I still somehow have ~10% of my monthly Auto capacity left on my account. It's completely nuts.
Can't say much more because I have more backlog to run before someone comes to their senses.
I'm not part of the Musk fan club either, you can count on that.
However, I've been using Cursor since it came out. I have a massive amount of institutional knowledge locked into their platform, and vastly prefer it to the other options available even if the switching costs were zero.
Going through what would amount to significant effort/time/cost to switch to a different coding tool as a sort of performative political rebuke is just not how I would recommend anyone protest DOGE.
How well does Cursor work with heavily agentic workflows?
I usually keep 4+ agents churning, many of them on tasks that take hours or day. I only played with Cursor a bit, but it seemed to want input from me every 10 minutes or so.
Grok 4.6 XHigh uses 2.52x fewer tokens per task than Fable Max. It's much more efficient. It also has low market penetration, which is why SpaceX is selling so much of their compute to Anthropic et al. From a business perspective, they're capitalising on the market very well. If Grok becomes more popular we should expect to pay more.
I'm sure that these are good or even excellent books, but this topic is deep in my nerd wheelhouse and as a list it's alarmingly sparse on the titles people who are deeply into this stuff actually recommend.
The single most glaring omission is the absence of "Combating Cult Mind Control" by Steven Hassan. This is the first book to read or listen to about cults, full stop.
His other books ("The Cult of Trump" and "Freedom of Mind") are solid, too.
I feel like you're getting hung up in semantics such that your essay doesn't say the obvious: coding is "easy" relative to confidently knowing how and what to do next at every stage.
The comparison does not imply that coding is an easy thing to do, just that it's easier than being really, really good at the bigger picture.
What Carmack did wasn't hard because writing C is hard.
Don't worry, though: each unit comes with 128 hours of free preview for these premium features. If the analyzer is powered on, the timer is running. Leave it on when you head home for the day? Whoopsie!
Everyone's experience will be different, but I will say that I have not received significant network effects traffic on Substack nor have I ever been tempted to click on suggested posts to others' content.
In short, I think that for the vast majority of casual posters, the aspirational upsides of joining a network are going to fall flat. Like with most aggregators, the popular things tend to be promoted more.
So, for me at least, if I'm going to get very low traffic, I'd prefer to get that very low traffic on my own website. It might be a pyrrhic victory but I sleep just a little better knowing that as one of the 1% that actually creates stuff, I did what little I could.
Same, every time I end up on a substack post, it's from an external source. Maybe there is a network effect on substack that makes it easier to get these external links, but I doubt most actual readers are coming from inside the substack ecosystem.
> Same, every time I end up on a substack post, it's from an external source.
I think the parent was talking about having a substack, not reading things on Substack.
But I also think the direct network effects don't come from casuals (other than that they repost to social networks.) People who are paying for a substack will look at others because it doesn't involve another signup or separate bill, they can just add the subscription for a buck or two. Now they can tour the subscriber content, and they can drop it after a little while if it doesn't ultimately appeal to them with just a click or three.
For non-subscribers, a substack isn't any different from any other blog.
Maybe I'm an outlier, but I find that my main reason for discontinuing Ground News/Nebula/whatever is that I subscribe aspirationally and never actually make time to consume the content. One year I got my partner and I subscriptions to Masterclass and at the end of the year neither one of us had watched a single video.
Basically, I don't know anyone who is ever bored. Who the hell has time to click on and read random posts? The entire value of HN is that other smart people surface the top 1% of 1% of stuff I'd probably find interesting.
The notion of reading Substack posts just because I'm a subscriber seems like fantasy.
I have serious beef with ChatGPT's text-based circuit schematic drawing abilities. Even though the model itself appears to be fully coherent about the big and little picture aspects of whatever's "on bench" I have wasted too much time trying to parse its attempts to draw circuits. I consider them actively harmful in their current form. I quietly hope that one of the LLMs will start actually generating netcode that can be pasted into KiCAD, or even rendering circuit snippets inside of the chat stream properly.
I've seen KiCAD running in the browser, so it's not like this isn't completely doable. It's just a question of resource allocation.
Without any deep knowledge, I was able to build at least a working board with a mcp server [1]. It’s always about the interface. I had to solder a few parts. Yes there where a lot of vias placed. Nice grid but it worked.
Thanks for reminding me that that exists! I'll have to give it a try, as it seems to have matured significantly since I last checked.
That said, outside of casual experimentation, I have almost zero need for an LLM to lay out my circuits for me. It's not just that I do have the deep knowledge, but there's so much more to board layout than routing. What parts I've worked with, what I have in inventory and on my PnP.
I also just really love laying out boards, and I'm in no hurry to give that up.
That said, I've found ChatGPT to be extraordinarily useful for part comparisons, getting second opinions on approaches, figuring out resistor divider values, troubleshooting drivers, and so much more it's difficult to enumerate.
It's the single largest difference between frustrated and feeling like a ninja. You will, quite simply, never regret it.
I recommend this one: https://www.strangeparts.com/a-boy-and-his-microscope-a-love...
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