Unfortunately how I feel about it too. I gave an honest effort at getting into the ecosystem and tested it out with a few close friends. The rough edges brought the experience down compared to other stuff that “just works”, and losing community support for the IRC bridge took a huge use of my own away from it.
The first time I went through the theme picker, I was tickled to see a theme I had made years ago included. Realized later it was due to it including all of the themes from iTerm2 Color Schemes automatically.
It made for a more fun first experience with a terminal emulator than I expected to have.
Where is it clear that there is great market demand? The only time I see devices like this discussed is in the small maker community. And the technology limitation of not being a fast updating display limits it to more niche uses.
Half of all supermarkets in Finland have e-ink screens for product price tags along shelves. It saves tons of printing. In a country full of trees. Must be great value.
I think the primary savings of e-ink pricetags is in labor, not materials. Being able to just send price changes directly to the shelf without having humans go through and change them out is a big deal, so to speak.
Also less error prone and more importantly much faster.
Being able to update prices in near real time would also potentially allow for more efficiency in setting prices, meaning you can set them in real time.
With real time stock information, you could handle sudden demand spikes much more gracefully. Have you prices automatically adjusted between an minimum and maximum price based on current stock and demand. Basically get you targeted stock turnover for the best possible price. (Best coupled with a self-checkout system so the customer consents to the current price).
Not that any supermarket I know of is currently smart enough to do that but they could. With all the hoarding due to shortages I could see them smartening up one day.
> Not that any supermarket I know of is currently smart enough to do that but they could
This may or may not be illegal as fuck. Picking up an item that costs 1$ and having it cost 1.2$ by the time you get to the checkout is all sorts of wrong.
The Price Accuracy Policy allows customers to be compensated in case of a pricing error at the register. If the price of the article you are buying is higher at the register than what was shown on the shelf, the merchant must:
give you the item for free if the item costs less than $10;
sell you the item at the shelf price, minus $10, if the item costs more than $10.
So pricing could change at store close, but it'd be risky to change otherwise. And of course, it should* be a problem. You pick up a product, get to cash, and the price sneakily changes and you don't notice? Uncool.
Paper price have to be changed every week for specials even in Quebec.. it is very labour intensive and very error probe. They also often fall off. Eink price displays are meant to help that.
I used to work in a groceries store and changing price used to take so long that we had to do even while opened with shopping customers..
There's a whole slew of ways to scam retail prices. Sometimes customers used to just peel a price tag off one product and place it on another. (Store employees used to, less than 40 years ago, put a price sticker manually on every box. Then they'd key the price into the register.) Sometimes if there's a SKU sticker rather than the preprinted UPC sticker on the package from the manufacturer people will still try this.
This is a posted price, marked by the store. They'd need to forge it, the logo, font, etc.
That said, there are usually security cameras, and that would be fraud.
People shoplift too, so it is a similar type of crime.
You're assuming sub-day changes. Stock doesn't necessarily come in every day and responding to demand spikes on a day by day basis solves this for any non-24h shop.
You could also do sub-day lowering of prices, although I think day by day changes adds a lot on its own if you want to have dynamic prices in response to demand.
I think there are some self-checkout solutions where you scan the barcode while taking the product off the shelf instead of at the end. The price should, of course, not change between picking up and payment.
Automatic pricing updates on shelving displays have been around for awhile, eink versions have gotten more popular because they use so much less power. That combined with low power bluetooth has made it even easier to roll them out.
I live in Kazakhstan which is country without trees. I never saw eink price tags. They're paper. I doubt it has anything with trees. Paper is too cheap.
Sure they are eInk? On Carrefour here they have had plain old LCD ones for ages now. It looks like e-ink, but on close inspection it is definitely not (e.g. mirrorish background color). Polarized glasses also help detection :)
And that is what I do agree e-Ink is overrated. People have trouble distinguishing it from reflective LCDs (remember the Pebble).
On the flip side, they're doing away with loot boxes in Overwatch 2 and replacing it with a battlepass and straight-forward shop[1]. Plenty of opportunity to screw that up, of course, but at least it'll be easier to see than having to dive into drop rate algorithms and best guesses at such.
I liked the formula of having a price and then loot boxes. This is because they had to make the lootboxes content available eventually, which it is what happened: I have all the skins I like and I haven't spent a dime for them.
Being free + bp they can lock all cosmetings behind $$$ and push even more fomo tactings to your face
Based on this open issue on the repo [0], it only has federated timeline support. The lead developer of Mastodon had this to say with regards to not adding it to iOS[1]:
> The omission is intentional and I do not intend to add these types of timelines into the app. They might have made sense for early Mastodon in November 2016 when there were less than 20k people total and all from a homogenous demographic but nowadays the signal to noise ratio makes them a liability in almost every aspect.
> [...]
> The local and federated timelines are not going away from other apps or the web app, to be clear. I’m simply not adding them to this app, and if that bothers you, simply don’t install the app.
This saddens me, and I truly believe it's because Mastodon's author, Eugen, also runs the largest server, mastodon.social. Of course the local timeline there is utter chaos, basically like the Twitter firehose. That's absolutely not the case for topical servers, like ones that specialize in posts about cats, or a friend group, or a particular city. I don't think Eugen opposes the idea out of malice, because he seems like a pretty good guy. I think he just has a particularly narrow view of what Mastodon is, as seen from his perspective.
> This will continue to limit its opportunity for wide adoption.
I don't see this having any practical effect. Unlike other services, you aren't locked into one app. There are others, and perhaps more importantly, they were here first.
Pixelmator Pro uses it for some of its ML functionality. Image scaling can use it, and it provides a cleaner image when upscaling, removing some compression artifacts and just smoothing it out more naturally. I’ve found it can work well downsizing too, although less of an effect. They also have an ML auto-crop tool and ML denoiser. All of these will hit the Neural Engine pretty good.
Apple's GameplayKit also includes an ECS system. Not a patent lawyer, so not sure how broad or not this particular claim is. But that was introduced back in 2015 or 2016, so there's prior art there.
