pardon_me
To clarify, "=/=" is to denote "not equivalent", in that not all technology or advancement is progress.
I used to be naive and use/recommend things I now wish never existed. Not because they aren't useful or a potential future, but because of who owns and controls them now.
As time goes on, it's clear how dangerous certain tools can be in the wrong hands. If we aren't careful, the feedback loop can end up destroying us and/or limiting our freedoms. Unfortunately it appears this is the current road we are on.
On this forum, it's likely that the power we have starts with careful analysis of what we are building and who can use it in (unintended) negative ways.
The predictable congestion gets a bit tedious and makes the game impossibly difficult quite quickly. It guarantees needing to keep readjusting almost every plane, otherwise a crash happens while trying to select the correct plane to move. It's a great mechanic earlier on and as a tutorial, because collisions happen rarely, but knowing that so many planes spawning or taking off on a calculated crash path when it's already chaotic seems to actually take skill out of the game as it progresses.
Planes that land should turn gray as it's confusing vs. planes taking off (especially consecutive takeoffs).
Volume slider rather than just on/off.
Drawing paths to the landing area should be more forgiving. If there's a short section of weird path at the end, it messes up timing for the planes landing and causes crashes.
The traditional baby monitor system had three states (ON and functional, ON and non-functional, OFF). It provides a constantly available and instantaneous test for "functional" - as long as you can hear sound from the other unit, it's almost guaranteed to currently be in a safe condition. Monitoring is constant, human-first, and all human. The system is relatively fail-safe.
Your design replaces this with a multi-state system and algorithms (adding ON in listening mode, ON in delay mode with output off, ON and partially-functional etc.). It removes any reliable method to prove an obviously "functional" state at any given time. Monitoring is non-constant (for the human), machine-first, and human as last resort (like corporate customer services). The system is not fail-safe despite being machine-first and at higher risk of error or malfunction due to complexity.
The risks include a few failed notifications or incorrect delay timing leading to early developmental trauma, such as fear of abandonment. It doesn't take much. We are still learning to deal with this human-human, before adding invisible unknowns.
If nothing else, what are babies likely to learn in a pre-verbal state where the days are spent sensing and observing their environment to develop the brain? It'll probably be how to game the baby monitor algorithm.
> Also during the day it's really handy to be notified when baby has woken up from her nap. Let's us be out of the house, or in a distant room, and still keep track of what's going on.
If you are going out of earshot of the baby by doing this, you are fully relying on the technology being functional. That would seem unnecessarily risky, and not nice for the baby (they can sense this stuff). The odds of a catastrophe are low in a singular environment, but still enough to worry. Almost inevitably it would end badly if this were scaled to a mass consumer product.
The idea is interesting from an engineering view, but from a human one it feels dystopian to insert a machine between parent and baby to this extent. It removes/replaces a layer of human-human connection. Where does engineering the natural human experience out of life end? Automated feeding? AI nannies and teachers? Then onto AI therapist?
My suggestion would be to do a lighter version of the features in a system which focuses on safety (always being able to monitor no matter what, for example on the ESP32, you could have the second core independent and direct-output the feed if the first core hangs or crashes). Feature-wise, rather than not alerting for 10 minutes, you could apply a DSP algorithm which reduces harsh frequencies for this period, whilst slowly increasing the output volume of the monitor.
I like the idea of alerts because it expands the base features without risk, and crucially makes the babies life better, as alerts could be sooner for important things that do need attention quickly. As an experiment, you could add an SD card and record snippets of cries which ended up in alerts, tag them with an ordered list of what you did to soothe or what was wrong, and see if AI can make anything of the data. Maybe certain cries can trigger alerts sooner, or cries over an extended period may indicate fever.
Are you talking about fully assembled (pcb + components + solder mask + pnp + soldering + test) at 17EUR/unit? If so, that's incredible cheap for a finished product delivered to your door. If not, you're doing something wrong.
At first the process is subconscious, then chaos enters as our conscious awareness develops, morphing the control loop into second or third order states of "correcting corrections" as we perform inner tasks such as ruminating, or external tasks such as group discussion and logical planning.
The perfect prediction machine would be a simulation running an entire up-to-date universe model, but between our limited physical resources and available energy in reality, our evolved aim is efficiency, by creating a state of awareness and reactive patterns with minimal information (lowest entropy). We do this by making assumptions, testing the world, then processing the response and updating our control loop. The tradeoff is lack of precision, as a model without complete information has guaranteed errors.
Children who form a more realistic core worldview through guidance, opportunities and experience are best set up to create solid foundations which are more adaptable to future unexpected situations. Whether this is learning emotional response in social settings or math, the ability to integrate future conscious experience depends on early neuronal structures formed by subconscious expectations of the world. If measurement error is too great from expectations and our current loop/wavelength, our options are to discard this information or learn from it by reflecting on sources of inevitable prediction error through reasoning.
Being specific to misunderstandings is an element that's overlooked.
This advice tends to be taken onboard (often to extremes) by those who take it as a free pass to just say whatever comes to their mind, whenever they like, without explaining how they arrived there. Any excuse to avoid putting in effort to be understood or be conscious of the fact that human beings have emotions.
We are not robots.
I'm glad commenters here are aware of this, as HN sentiment is getting close to the point of treating each other as machines, whilst we train bots to have better communication skill such as empathetic reflection, and allow them more creativity and freedom.
Some people are more patient and sympathetic towards computers making mistakes and not following commands perfectly, or being too verbose, than we are with our fellow human beings.
Without knowing how you arrived at "the point", you are pushing all the work onto the recipient (or worse, every reader of your comment on HN) to verify what you say and how much they can trust you. That could involve researching, checking your credentials, or putting in effort to understand/overlook the emotional tone.
"This is the answer. I have the answer" style dumping of information is a poor form of human-human communication, unless you are directly answering a closed-ended question.
Even if it did make sense to "move fast and break things" inside working critical systems, doing so should surely be within the law and without going against the most basic of known security measures.
If you think about PFI etc. and how those contracts were crafted, it's no different to what happened to the UK's oil. That didn't eventually go to the citizens like Norway. Every last bit of the UK is being extracted now.
2026 is not based on wants and needs except in isolated situations. We are at the hypernormal point of manufacturing problems to sell solutions, because there's very little rent or work left to extract from assets. Lives of excess are maintained by depriving others of necessities. The intense control and misdirection required to keep this somewhat stable is starting to be felt.
Some projects have been forced so far, by diverting resources (either public-funded or not-yet-profitable VC money), but these efforts have not proven to be self-sustaining. Humans will be perpetually stuck where we are as a species if we cannot integrate the currently opposing ideas of up-front planning vs. move fast and break things.
Society is slowly realizing the step-change in difficulty between projects in controlled conditions that can have simplified models to these irreducibly complex systems. Western doctors are facing an interesting parallel, now becoming more aware to treat human beings in the same way--that we emerge as a result of parts which can be simplified and understood, but could never describe the overall system behavior. We are good examples of the intrinsic fault-tolerance required for such systems to remain stable.