Talking of cheap and powerful devices one can also look at Chinese UZ801 4G LTE (Qualcomm MSM8916) dongles. They cost like only $4-5 and pack quite impressive HW: 4GB eMMC, 512MB RAM, actual 4G modem sometimes with 2 sim switching support. Since it's actually old Android SOC there is even GPU and GPS in there. And a lot of work was already done on supporting them:
So yeah if you looking for hardware platform for weird homelab projects that's can be it.
happyhardcore 5 hours ago [-]
I've found [1] to be the best guide for getting started with them; you need to make a copy of the firmware partitions that you re-flash after installing Linux onto it in order to get the 4G modem working. It's honestly absurd how much you're getting for a fiver with it; add a power bank (or make your own from scavenged vape batteries in the spirit of this post) and you have a full Linux machine with WiFi and 4G that can work almost anywhere.
What an interesting gadget! It looks like it has most of the features of an Orange Pi Zero, but at around 1/5th of the price.
sitzkrieg 5 hours ago [-]
it's almost like everything matching the pi footprint is severely overpriced!
motorest 3 hours ago [-]
There's a silver lining in raspberry pi and it's clones being so relatively expensive: they create a market and demand for hackable devices. In an age with so much pressure to plug every single digital hole, these devices bring some much needed market pressure to the opposite direction.
user_7832 5 hours ago [-]
> Qualcomm MSM8916
Well hullo there, turns out that's my old mate, the Snapdragon 410! Quite an unexpected surprise!
And funnily in retrospect, my Moto G3 from 2015 (which I still occasionally use for whatsapp!) has the exact same processor, and turns out base android (7) is (un?)surprisingly efficient when you're not doing much! I totally believe you could get a lightweight linux distro going on; I'm more impressed by such an old (and mobile!) chipset still having some sort of vestigial support!
(Fun fact, iirc this was one of the first processors to get 64 bit support for android but motorola wasn't able to port it over in time for the launch. Hence it runs 32 bit android instead!)
Rzor 3 hours ago [-]
In case anyone wants a few links containing this SOC or similar, there's an entire article on Hackaday and a bunch of links shared in the comments:
Well I take my gamble, wait 2 weeks and see what I'll get
mrandish 11 minutes ago [-]
Just fyi, the device at that link is currently showing $9.62 for a single unit, once logged in and the one-time-only "Welcome deals" are eliminated. But AliExpress pricing can vary hour by hour based on seller, inventory, algorithm, RNG.
VladVladikoff 4 hours ago [-]
Speaking of cheap and powerful, I’m looking for a dirt cheap android phone that has a decent camera. I used to ship out GoPros to my customers but I don’t actually need them to film in 4K, 1080p with a decent CCD would be fine. And lately new GoPro models have become a pain to setup, they require pairing with a modern mobile phone which my customers sometimes don’t have.
b.) My lack of skills and time to build something really cool with something like this
A while ago i bought a licheerv nano (similar to luckfox pico or Milk-v duo) to build an open source iPod nano via usb-c audio Jack and the open source buildroot for the licheerv nano.
I did not find a suitable 2.4 inch or at least < 3"touch display that worked with the integrated MPI port.
With LVGL it should be doable to build a small portable audioplayer with acceptable features... But not for me :-)
e145bc455f1 5 hours ago [-]
Where do i get a MSM8916 board for commercial usage at low volumes(1k)?
dolmen 4 hours ago [-]
What about disassembling 1k dongles?
tonyhart7 3 hours ago [-]
"What about disassembling 1k dongles?"
deadass this literally what they do in china, they just disassemble e-waste that don't get used and resell that oversees
cjaackie 3 hours ago [-]
underrated comment, probably the way to go with an older chip and under 1k volumes.
$5.92 each for 500-2999 orders. What a time to be alive.
greenavocado 1 hours ago [-]
How much work is it to rip one of these open and reprogram?
WorldPeas 28 minutes ago [-]
probably 2 screws at most or some glue/snaps, then put a jtag brush over the contacts, do some sort of unit test and you have a unit. Could take a few hours with a motorized screwdriver and a simple specialized CLI program for programming/testing
mschuster91 38 minutes ago [-]
Now what I'd like to see is the other way around - you know, like the "old" UMTS sticks, just for 5G. No OS, especially not one so prone to all sorts of security like Android, just a pure baseband chip, some interface chip that talks USB3, two built-in antennas and the option to connect more powerful/higher directionality external antennas.
MuffinFlavored 1 hours ago [-]
Do any of the modem bands work in America? If so... what carrier?
WorldPeas 28 minutes ago [-]
I've heard T-mobile works well with Chinese phones
x187463 7 hours ago [-]
Re-using this sort of device is super cool. I can imagine a post-apocalyptic scenario where a city is run on a hodgepodge of random computing devices like this.
I will say, though, disposable vapes with microcontrollers inside (and even full games and screens from recent reporting) are an egregious source of e-waste. Many layers of stupid are present here.
patapong 6 hours ago [-]
Another example: One-time covid tests with a microcontroller, optical sensor to read the result and bluetooth to connect to a phone to display the results. Previous discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29698887
chrisldgk 4 hours ago [-]
Don’t forget the Tom7 video[1] where he made a „hard drive“ from disposable Covid test kits.
I've been aware about the perfectly reusable lithium batteries inside these disposable vapes, which is egregious enough.
But the one in the FTA comes with a full fat microcontroller and USB-C connector! I'm not clear if these connectors are accessible outside or if you need to break open the packaging before being able to get to it.
Like you said: "Many layers of stupid are present here"
All that hardware must surely be worth more than half the value of the actual product!
pbhjpbhj 4 hours ago [-]
>All that hardware must surely be worth more than half the value of the actual product!
I'm constantly struck at how bread (a pastry, say) in a plastic tray, wrapped in plastic, is so crazy to me. The effort and technology that went, and goes, into oil extraction and such - only to throw the packaging away immediately that I get home ... it's just so unsustainable.
I wonder when in the West we'll start mining rubbish dumps ('refuse sites' where household waste is buried)? Maybe we already have? I know in developing countries people spend their days manually picking over such places.
parliament32 4 hours ago [-]
> I wonder when in the West we'll start mining rubbish dumps
Never, because we have virtually unlimited space for landfills, and landfill tech has quietly been improving over the last few centuries, to the point that landfills are cheap, non-polluting, and entirely carbon neutral. Countries with less land mass (Europe et al) prefer incineration (mainly to save space, despite it being significantly worse for the environment and much more expensive (although with the newer energy reclamation efforts this is getting better)).
IMO it's not worth worrying about landfills too much. Household waste makes up about 3% of total landfill waste (when you add commercial/industrial/agricultural) in North America. You and your bun wrapper are truly irrelevant in the grand scheme of things.
alanbernstein 2 hours ago [-]
This is backwards, it's not about eliminating the landfill, it's about recovering the materials which were previously not scarce but now are or will be soon.
rblatz 2 hours ago [-]
I think it’s less about managing the environmental impact of landfills and more about eventually the concentration of desirable materials in landfills may end up higher than in known natural deposits. Or at least easier to refine and separate.
BizarroLand 2 hours ago [-]
Landfills are likely chock full of Aluminum, Nickel-Cadmium, Lithium, copper, brass, and all sorts of useful metals and chemicals.
Sure, the grand majority is going to be food waste, but if you threw it all into an incinerator and melted down the ashes there is probably a decent blend of valuable material mixed in with the waste.
numpad0 3 hours ago [-]
Not sure how those are related. We only eat food coming in packaging comparable to transplanted organ because companies can't afford poisoning lawsuits because humans are so expensive.
Lots of people especially those generally "up north" undermine risks and therefore costs of food poisoning, but it's real. Haven't those people seen things growing molds?
userbinator 2 hours ago [-]
As soon as there is demand, I'm sure they'll start mining. Provided it doesn't leave the planet, everything is recycled on a long enough timescale.
jazzyjackson 4 hours ago [-]
The cheapness of plastic just to speaks to the enormous demand for all the other oil products sold, it's practically a byproduct.
carelyair 4 hours ago [-]
What will happen to the price of plastic when demand for oil starts reducing for mobility and heating with the move to electricity energy?
Dilettante_ 2 hours ago [-]
Flying pigs will deliver our food directly from the production point, no more need for packaging.
toss1 1 hours ago [-]
Not much; I used to think the same thing. But there are many ways to make the same chemicals from bio sources, either directly grown (corn or soy as feedstocks) or more processed, or bioengineered so bacteria convert some bio input to the desired chemicals
thescriptkiddie 3 hours ago [-]
somebody once said oil is too valuable to burn for fuel. the important part are the petrochemicals, but the demand for fuel is so high that's where the money is
rglullis 6 hours ago [-]
Between (a) component that costs tens of cents to mass produce and can be bought off the shelf and is reusable vs (b) component that needs actual experienced electronics engineers working on a single-use design that can not be repurposed later, I think we'd see that (a) might end up being less wasteful.
afiori 6 hours ago [-]
> can not be repurposed later
whether it can be repurposed is worth little in being wasteful if >99% go to the landfill.
> I think we'd see that (a) might end up being less wasteful.
Monetarily? sure. Environmentally? unlikely
jayd16 5 hours ago [-]
It's not so much that 99% go to the landfill, but this product does. Other products that use the same parts might be more reusable.
The point is that, most likely, the controller existed before this vape. Buying an off the shelf part can be cheaper than trying to bring up some custom part, both in cost and possibly in overall resources.
rglullis 4 hours ago [-]
Environmentally, there is very little difference at the landfill if the PCB has an 8 bit microcontroller or a 64 bit ARM chip.
The only environment-friendly solution is to forbid this product to exist in the first place.
carelyair 3 hours ago [-]
Exactly.
Why not just sell a reusable vape that can be filled with the extract you want?
genewitch 42 minutes ago [-]
if this is a serious question:
it's because politicians bend to pressure from lobbyists and outcry, such that the very idea that a resuable vape means that children can vape pina colada flavored liquids.
There was a federal push during Trump v1 to only allow iqos devices in any stores. The two vape brands (maybe 3) allowed in general in my state are manufactured by... if you guessed RJR and PMI, you are correct. The big tobacco farmers and cig manufacturers.
Reusable vapes with custom or pre-mixed flavors were attacked hard. I still have a couple liters of 100mg/ml nicotine in my freezer, for making custom flavors at home. I don't even know if you can still order nicotine in that ratio anymore in the US.
dijit 6 hours ago [-]
I don't follow the logic.
Because humans are expensive? Or because we can maybe re-use the components if an (expensive) human comes and retrieves the components?
Sorry for being dumb here.
rglullis 4 hours ago [-]
A combination of:
- humans are expensive.
- If you want a custom part, you will need specialized equipment to build that part.
- If you want a custom part, you will maybe need to transport that part all around the world, while the off-the-shelf components might already be available close to your assembly plant.
dole 4 hours ago [-]
The USB-C connectors are mostly for charging, and IME it'll take 4-6 full cycle charges until most are out of vape juice and disposable so they're always accessible. The packaging usually is snap-together with no screws so it's a puzzle.
I'm still surprised to see the fancier LCDs used which range from 2x4cm - slim 1.5x3cm (Digiflower, Raz is super popular.) Most LCD vapes which range from $20-25 are starting to fall by the wayside for $13-15 vapes with simple SMD LED displays with color overlays, (Kadobar, Geek Bar, Cookies, North) easy to make 7-segments for battery/juice status. Some are elaborate with wraparound displays that I've mistaken for flexible OLED and are deceptively cheap.
palata 6 hours ago [-]
The fact that selling such a thing is profitable means that we lack regulations somewhere.
gwbas1c 5 hours ago [-]
No, it means computing has gotten so %$#@ cheap that it's cheaper to just cobble together cheap parts instead of spending the money to design a purposed device.
palata 4 hours ago [-]
That's not mutually exclusive with what I said.
Laws are not here to make money, they are here to decide what kind of society we want. If electronics is too cheap and it creates wastes, I'm of the opinion that we should make it illegal, period.
lyu07282 4 hours ago [-]
I completely agree, these disposable pens end up in ditches or best case scenario are improperly disposed in regular waste bins even though they are hazardous waste that need specialized disposal. They should not exist as a product at all. Just because someone profits doesn't mean it's a good idea, I know foreign concept to brainrotten liberals/libertarians.
2 hours ago [-]
datameta 3 hours ago [-]
I was with you until the last clause of the final sentence, which I believe is against the HN guidelines.
MattGrommes 3 hours ago [-]
Does liberal mean something different where you live? Where I live, the right-wing republicans are the ones who are prone to letting corporations do whatever they want without regard to the people/environment getting hurt.
ruds 2 hours ago [-]
In most of the world, "liberal" doesn't mean the left half of the political spectrum. In many places it's the centerish part and in a few places it's the rightish part. In the US, until recently, almost all mainstream politicians were liberal in this sense (even while many of the Republican liberals used "liberal" as an epithet in campaign ads).
From wikipedia:
> Liberalism is a political and moral philosophy based on the rights of the individual, liberty, consent of the governed, political equality, the right to private property, and equality before the law.[1][2] Liberals espouse various and sometimes conflicting views depending on their understanding of these principles but generally support private property, market economies, individual rights (including civil rights and human rights), liberal democracy, secularism, rule of law, economic and political freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, and freedom of religion.[3] Liberalism is frequently cited as the dominant ideology of modern history
steezeburger 3 hours ago [-]
Liberals generally want more regulation what are you talking about and why are you breaking the HN rules?
ramesh31 5 hours ago [-]
>The fact that selling such a thing is profitable means that we lack regulations somewhere.
It's the exact opposite. Tobacco is so heavily regulated and taxed that these become profitable. If cigarettes were 3-4$ a pack (which they would be without sin taxes and regulatory overhead), the vape market would come down as well and there's no way these could be profitable. As it is, they retail around $20 and contain the same nicotine as multiple $10 packs of cigarettes.
rebolek 5 hours ago [-]
The regulation was written in time when there were no such devices. Are they "healthier" (less damaging) for the user? If yes, let's tax them lower. Are they less damaging for whole population? Considering the e-waste, I guess not, but it's not up to me to decide. If they aren't, they shouldn't be taxed higher that cigs, if yes, let's change the regulation.
lyu07282 3 hours ago [-]
Because they contain so much more nicotine they are way more addicting, way better for the lungs than smoking but still bad for cardiovascular health. Disposables should be illegal for environmental protection reasons, that's a bit unrelated though since these companies can very easily switch to reusable/pod-systems.
We want people to vape rather than smoke tobacco, obviously, it's not a zero-sum issue.
rixed 2 hours ago [-]
Cigarettes could sell at 3-4$ a pack only because some regulation are in place that enforce the total separation of manufacturing and selling those packs from paying the cost for the societal damages wrt. health, pollution, littering...
There are many possible ways to slice the economical cake.
andoando 4 hours ago [-]
They need to regulate the nicotine content. In Canada its 2% at least. In the US its pretty much 5% juice only.
5% is 50mg/1ml. A cigarette pack has about 25mg. A geek bar has 16ml of juice = 800mg of nicotine = 32 packs of cigarettes.
dpc050505 4 hours ago [-]
You can get 10 packs for 20$CAD on reservations in Canada, and that's for decent cigarettes in packaging, the really cheap ones in ziploc bags go even cheaper. 3-4$ a pack is still a decent markup.
palata 4 hours ago [-]
> It's the exact opposite. Tobacco is so heavily regulated and taxed that these become profitable.
It's not the opposite at all. Tobacco should disappear just as well.
fkyoureadthedoc 4 hours ago [-]
Juul was very popular and less wasteful (although not perfect of course) as you disposed of the liquid pod rather than the whole device, they were regulated out of existence though. The regulations had loophole/oversight which paved the way for the disposable vape era.
golemiprague 4 hours ago [-]
[dead]
spacephysics 5 hours ago [-]
The fact something is profitable (even vices) does not mean it requires regulations, unless the regulation in mind is direct or indirect cap on profit margins?
0xffff2 5 hours ago [-]
The missing regulation is some kind of tax or other disincentive against e-waste. I believe the premise of the GP is that such things can only be profitable if we chose to ignore their environmental impact.
strbean 4 hours ago [-]
I think it's a lack of regulation to prevent negative externalities. Particularly with respect to waste management / product lifecycle.
rixed 2 hours ago [-]
...and consumption/dispersion/degradation of the finite/rare/precious resources used in the manufacturing process, which we could also factor in, if we wanted to be serious.
palata 3 hours ago [-]
E-waste like this exists because it's legal and profitable.
I believe that we as a society don't want e-waste (at least I don't). And when the society does not want something profitable to be done, it sets regulations.
If it wasn't illegal to steal your neighbour's car and sell it, then it would be profitable. But we as a society don't want it to happen.
You begin by making a pen "from just the elements", then work your way up to there.
In other words, it's a huge challenge, but 6502 is closer, in complexity, to the pen than to the, say, AMD Ryzen.
But the primary idea behind Collapse OS isn't to run from 6502 built from the ground up (although it partly is), but to run from frankenstein cobbled up machines made from scavenged parts.
mm263 5 hours ago [-]
If I scavenge any machine today, how likely would I be to find a 6502 vs something more modern? I’d argue that some people might have a NES at home and one could get a 2A03 from it, but in a hypothetical scenario where I need to scavenge some computational power, I’d find an Android phone
tlavoie 4 hours ago [-]
DuskOS apparently runs on ARM, so one of these vape boards running FORTH would likely feel very roomy indeed.
BogdanTheGeek 3 hours ago [-]
I have ported zForth to an even weaker chip, the famous 10c risc-v micro ch32v003 (16k flash, 2k ram) so no issue running on this: https://github.com/BogdanTheGeek/zForth
vdupras 4 hours ago [-]
Even for a Forth, 3KB of RAM is rather tight. Dusk OS intentionally de-prioritize compactness and it couldn't run on that amount of RAM. It can get a C compiler loaded in about 100KB of RAM, but 3? not enough to boot.
tlavoie 3 hours ago [-]
OK, so we'd play with zForth then, as BogdanTheGeek notes here. That reminds me, I have a Scamp board sitting here on my desk that I really should play with more.
https://udamonic.com/what-is-a-scamp.html
vdupras 2 hours ago [-]
"we'd", you mean in a collapse scenario? Forths are, by nature, "collapse-friendly", but one particularity with Collapse OS and Dusk OS is that they are fully self-hosted. This includes the tools necessary to improve upon themselves.
From a quick glance, it looks like BogdanTheGeek's Forth is written in C, which means that it's not self-hosted. If all you have is that disposable vape with this Forth in it, you lack the tools to deploy it on another machine or to improve it in place.
One could also port Collapse OS to ARM. I guess it wouldn't be a very big effort.
tlavoie 1 hours ago [-]
Good points! Really, I should start with learning Forth on the devices I have first, before getting to concerned about others. ARM does seem like a useful target though, given that they're basically everywhere these days.
vdupras 4 hours ago [-]
You're much more likely to stumble one something more modern, but that modern something is also much less repairable. It's great if it works and if it can run Linux or Dusk OS, but when it can't, you're out of luck.
With a 6502 or other such CPU, the machines you scavenge them from are much more repairable and adaptable. You can use those components like lego blocks. It breaks? either repair it or strip the working parts to use in another frankenstein computer.
mm263 3 hours ago [-]
I get the idea of making a frankenstein computer, I just disagree that 6502 is THE platform to do it on. Practically, there's no way for me to find it. Other comment mentions ARM, which is a much more interesting proposal to me
vdupras 2 hours ago [-]
ARM is an interesting proposal if you want to order a SBC online and run software on it. Soldering an ARM CPU with low tech tools? That's something else.
amelius 5 hours ago [-]
OK. It would be nice though if Collapse OS contained tools to build an AMD Ryzen.
robterrell 5 hours ago [-]
holy crap, what a rabbit hole you sent me down.
gadders 4 hours ago [-]
Disposable vapes were banned in the UK. Which in practise has meant that manufacturers have added the cheapest possible charging port which is non-standard so nobody can charge them and no way to open them to refill them.
This is amazing, it reminds me of a biology article about a new life form that is not quite virus, not quite bacteria, but something that manages to blur the line between them.
Resource extraction eventually fills all niches, for better or for worse.
chuckadams 2 hours ago [-]
Maybe they should start charging a deposit per vape, and make the manufacturers pay the cost of recycling or proper disposal.
schlauerfox 4 hours ago [-]
I do wonder if there would be a workable law where companies are permanently responsible for what they produce, they must always accept back and responsibly recycle/break down to resources what they put out there, and do away with the shifting of responsibility of waste to society? Seems like a terrible engineering challenge but the right thing to do.
hn_acc1 8 minutes ago [-]
That would create a lot of work for corporate lawyers to create shell companies, merge/push-responsibility-onto/unmerge transactions, selling of "waste cleanup credits" by companies who then quickly go bankrupt (after the founders take all the $$ out of the company), etc...
1718627440 3 hours ago [-]
A lot of EU regulation goes into this direction, but we are still far away from having it for every product.
Pxtl 2 hours ago [-]
Disposal fees were a thing here in Ontario, the idea being that consumers should pay up-front for the cost of disposal, and therefore expensive-to-dispose things (like things containing batteries) should cost more.
We rewarded the government that brought this plan in by replacing them with Doug Ford, the brother of the infamous late Toronto mayor Rob Ford who was a literal crack-smoking drunk.
spicyusername 6 hours ago [-]
It's a shame negative externalities like this are basically impossible to include in the up-front price.
palata 6 hours ago [-]
I feel like a law saying "don't put electronics in disposable products" would do the job.
uyzstvqs 4 hours ago [-]
Almost every electronic device becomes disposable at some point, some sooner than others. Just make sure you bring them to an e-waste bin when that time comes. E-waste recycling is a profitable business, so there's always one nearby in my experience.
If you have some old Samsung Galaxy Gio from 2011, it'll provide far more value by recycling it back to raw materials than it would if you'd somehow try to keep it usable in 2025.
The problem here is planned obsolescence in a product's design. That is what needs to be made illegal.
palata 4 hours ago [-]
> Almost every electronic device becomes disposable at some point
And we're all gonna die, why would we have laws at all?
When we say "disposable vape", it's not to say "it will eventually stop working". It's more to say "you use it, you throw it away".
> E-waste recycling is a profitable
I don't doubt it's profitable, but it's most certainly not a good thing for the planet. Recycling is generally not a solution to waste.
> The problem here is planned obsolescence in a product's design. That is what needs to be made illegal.
Seriously? We're talking about DISPOSABLE VAPES. They are built to last as short a time as possible. At this point I am not sure if you think you disagree with me, are just nitpicking for the fun of it, or something else?
uyzstvqs 3 hours ago [-]
I am not disagreeing with you. I agree that these disposable vapes should be made illegal. What I meant is that "disposing" is a broad term and is not always bad. Many good products eventually become naturally obsolescent, at which point it's often best to responsibly dispose of them.
The actual problem here is how the product is intentionally designed to only be used once, when that's absolutely unnecessary. We both agree on that. That falls within the issue of planned obsolescence, and that's what regulation needs to target.
palata 3 hours ago [-]
Right, got it.
Though I don't believe that when someone talks about a "disposable" product, they mean that "this is a product that you will dispose of before you die". Usually "disposable" means that it's meant to have a short lifetime.
A laptop or a smartphone are not "disposable" in that sense, even though we don't keep them for our lifetime.
conductr 4 hours ago [-]
Would you include RFID tags in packaging? If so, you're law needs more nuance back to the drawing board.
palata 3 hours ago [-]
Sure, there is a need to draw a line somewhere. The plastic wrapping is disposable as well, and it's not always a solution to just not have it.
But a disposable vape is very clearly on the side of "should not exist, period".
lapetitejort 3 hours ago [-]
Drawing the line will be the hardest part of writing a theoretical law banning electronics in disposable products. And the line will probably be obsolete a few weeks after the law takes effect. Which is why the line should be continuously drawn by a regulatory body, which in America are being an endangered species.
palata 3 hours ago [-]
Make a list of tolerated disposable electronics.
RFID chips, maybe (and even then, not sure how much they are needed). What else? I don't think that I consume disposable electronics every day...
stockresearcher 2 hours ago [-]
So they’ll get rebranded as decorative plastic sticks with a bonus temporary vaping feature, and the packaging will say that you must never throw it away, ever.
I really hope you are starting to understand the difficulty in regulating products like this. A lot of people don’t want to do the right thing.
Someone1234 5 hours ago [-]
What about Smoke Detectors, since they too are a disposable electronic?
palata 4 hours ago [-]
Do I misunderstand what we mean with "disposable vapes"? It's not the first such comment I see.
When we talk about "disposable vapes", we don't talk about something that lasts 10 years, do we?
Or do you think that the very word "disposable" should not exist, because after all, nothing will last longer than the sun?
x187463 5 hours ago [-]
You throw away your smoke detector? Just replace the battery.
My guy is out here pulling off the whole thing and tossing it in the trash.
Someone1234 5 hours ago [-]
Yes, Smoke Alarms should be thrown away. The element that detects smoke has a 10-year maximum life span, which is exactly why most have moved to a non-replaceable battery that forces you to throw it away (for safety).
bityard 4 hours ago [-]
I'm going to need to see some data to back up that claim. Americium-241 has a half-life of 432.6 years. The detector itself isn't going to degrade in any meaningful way after only 10 years.
Plus, many smoke alarms these days use a photoelectric sensor which don't wear out but are prone to false alarms from dust, etc. Smoke alarms SHOULD be cleaned at least once a year, by blasting them with compressed air. Dust buildup is a very common reason that smoke alarms stop working as well after any number of years. They require regular cleaning, just like everything else in the house.
Non-replaceable battery smoke alarms are popular because they are much more convenient to own. And you should NOT throw them away, the batteries in these contain lithium and must be recycled.
palata 4 hours ago [-]
So you're comparing a smoke detector that lasts 10 years to a disposable vape? Do disposable vapes last 10 years?
jtarrio 5 hours ago [-]
Modern smoke detectors, at least here in the US, have a 10-year sealed non-replaceable battery.
hn_acc1 3 minutes ago [-]
Interesting. We bought a bunch (5 pack, 6 pack?) from Costco IIRC about 3-5 years ago, and they all take 2 AA batteries, which is great because we've doubled down on Eneloop batteries for everything possible..
sitzkrieg 5 hours ago [-]
every smoke detector i've seen takes a 9volt battery. maybe this is true for commercial units
Someone1234 5 hours ago [-]
Most of those smoke detectors are old and already passed their 10-year-lifespan. People keep putting 9-volt batteries in them, but they shouldn't.
If you go look at modern smoke detectors, many-to-most, now have a non-replaceable battery for exactly that reason.
wpm 4 hours ago [-]
I didn't have to look far to replace my combo CO/Smoke detector or do a ton of hard searching to find one that just took a 9-volt. The first two results on Amazon US for "smoke detector" take 9-volts.
Someone1234 4 hours ago [-]
> The first two results on Amazon US for "smoke detector" take 9-volts.
I did the same thing, and the first four results were Kidde and First Alert Smoke Alarms with non-replaceable 10-year lifespan batteries.
It is likely because you recently purchased one, and Amazon has targeted your results based on your purchase history.
sitzkrieg 3 hours ago [-]
thank you for the information, i bought some in 2023 and they all take 9v batteries so i am quite surprised by this
conductr 4 hours ago [-]
Those exist and are still available but are fairly outdated in the US. The sealed lithium 10-year disposable is the newer standard. And, actually, building codes for last several year requires them to be hardwired so no batteries at all.
The landlord special on older construction (maybe >10 years old, can't remember when the hardwire code went into effect) will usually be the 9v. Because they don't care about you having to get on a ladder to change the battery every year. They get to save $5-10 per smoke detector. Practically any homeowner is going to choose the 10 year option as the batteries don't have to be swapped.
5 hours ago [-]
reaperducer 6 hours ago [-]
It's a shame negative externalities like this are basically impossible to include in the up-front price.
You mean like add the cost of a MRI to the price of a pack of cigarettes?
hamomrye34 5 hours ago [-]
> "A merry little surge of electricity piped by automatic alarm from the mood organ beside his bed awakened Rick Deckard."
> Dick writes of the IoT being a source of vast-artificial-living-systems functioning on collective compute.
Mistletoe 7 hours ago [-]
Will the Butlerian Jihad find all the vapes?
ffsm8 6 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
i80and 6 hours ago [-]
This is an exceedingly strange comment -- you made up a silly thing to get upset about, and are making fun of people who aren't upset about the thing, because you think it's the sort of thing they would be upset about, even though it isn't and you say as much?
This feels like a whole new category of straw man.
jeej 6 hours ago [-]
"thinking of inventing a new type of person to get mad at on here. maybe people who carry too many keys around.. i dont know yet"
-Dril
Findecanor 6 hours ago [-]
The word "jihad" has a wider meaning than "holy war". It would better be translated into "worthy struggle" — with "worthy" being very subjective.
Islam is in fact the largest religion (by worshippers) in the world today, so Frank Herbert's assumption that a culture derived from it would be dominant in a future society is just extrapolation.
kpil 5 hours ago [-]
I think the current estimate is that there are almost a half a billion more Christians than Muslims (in 2025.)
One reason is that the number of Christians in Sub-Saharan Africa is growing.
But extrapolating the trends, yes Islam will probably become the largest religion in the coming decades.
Or at least maybe - looking at birth rates, it seems as second generation muslim immigrants to Western countries have even lower birth rates than the native population. That might happen also in regions say like Pakistan and Indonesia and other fast growing regions, depending on economical or other changes.
ffsm8 5 hours ago [-]
> Islam is in fact the largest religion (by worshippers) in the world today, so Frank Herbert's assumption that a culture derived from it would be dominant in a future society is just extrapolation
Fyi,
> Dune is a 1965 epic science fiction novel by American author Frank Herber
The distinction you're making wrt Jihad is also super modern and did not apply back then
int_19h 4 hours ago [-]
There are many discussions on this exact topic online.
TL;DR: while Dune has many references to various concepts coming from Islamic societies throughout, the Fremen are the obvious stand-in for Arabs specifically, and so get the most attention. And, in the context of the first book at least, Fremen are the "good guys" in many ways - if you reframe it in modern terms, they are the natives fighting against a colonial empire that subjugates them in order to extract a valuable resource from their lands, and then on top of that there's also the more subtle ecological angle.
zknow 6 hours ago [-]
Really? I thought that it was kind of a ecumenist religion that included themes from many religions.
overfeed 6 hours ago [-]
I hope gp goes on a tear about the Orange Catholic Bible next, and how outrageous its non-subtle references are.
NemoNobody 6 hours ago [-]
It is.
ffsm8 6 hours ago [-]
not really, pretty old overview on it - but kept up to date it seems (current references to interviews)
its true that the concept of a _holy war_ isnt unique to the muslim faith though. I never claimed that either however.
It's slightly surprising to me how few people seem to be aware of that in HN. Was expecting the general readership here to be a little less obsessively righteous and uninformed on a topic like this, but ymmv I guess
staplers 6 hours ago [-]
obsessively woke people
Because most "woke" stuff is made up or blown out of proportion by people on the internet. One person might do one thing and the video/meme goes viral and people eat up the story like its some movement
motorest 3 hours ago [-]
> Because most "woke" stuff is made up or blown out of proportion by people on the internet.
I think you are misinterpreting the issue. I'll explain why.
There are attention-seekers which were given access to platforms with unprecedented reach. Some of these types tap into outrage culture as their engagement mechanism. This creates a vicious cycle of outrage which feeds on outputting outrageous claims and taking the resulting outrage as input to further double down on outputting outrageous claims. You then end up with opposing outrage camps of whatever subject you can think of which exist to generate a larger volume of outrage than the opposing camp.
The problem is that the terminally-online types confuse this sort of discourse with reality, and the outrageous claims as representative of what happens in real life. That's how you end up with people outraged with outrageous claims that are so outrageous to the point they are unthinkable.
maeln 6 hours ago [-]
Hope you don't get caught in Luddic Path's space with your stash of contraband disposable vape
jerf 7 hours ago [-]
The mismatch between the Ancient Specs of Yore is kind of interesting. The Commodore 64 had 64KB of RAM, but that RAM was attached to an 8-bit, 1MHz CPU. This thing has call it half the RAM of a Commodore 64, but it's attached to a 32-bit 24MHz CPU the 1980s could only dream of. And it's disposable in 2025. Pretty impressive in a weird way.
justincormack 6 hours ago [-]
Its only got 3k of RAM, 24k of flash. Although modern flash is sometimes the same bandwidth as memory was if you go back a bit, although not latency of course.
masfuerte 3 hours ago [-]
The CPU isn't that fantastical for the 1980s. The Archimedes had an 8MHz ARM in 1987. It was expensive though and came with at least 512KB RAM.
P.S. After I wrote that I looked at the Wikipedia page. Which helpfully reminded me that 1987 was 38 years ago :(
jerf 2 hours ago [-]
Fair enough. I've gotten out of the habit of thinking exponentially about computer performance. Modify my original post to that 1980s 8-bit era of personal computing. I did intend to compare it on the basis of the RAM available, which as is observed in another correction puts this more in the VIC-20 era...
... for those of us old enough to even have a mental distinction between "the VIC-20 era" and the "Commodore 64" era rather than just being a smear of bittyboxes all equally uselessly small....
xenospn 3 hours ago [-]
The 386SX came out in 1985!
Narishma 6 hours ago [-]
It's got only 3KB of RAM, less than even the VIC-20.
jerf 6 hours ago [-]
Whoops, yes. I stand corrected. Tack another order of magnitude or so on to the mismatch.
zero_k 6 hours ago [-]
I am happy they demonstrated how useful these devices are. Marking these as "disposable" is a kind of insanity. I recovered a few of them "disposed" (i.e. "randomly thrown away into") in an empty flower pot, and took out the LiPo batteries from them -- which are rechargeable, and have charge circuitry (non-trivial for LiPos). That we somehow decided that it's OK to design these to be used only once feels wrong.
This is the opposite of repairability. We specifically made them impossible to reuse and refill. Makes my tinkerer (and eco-friendly) heart very sad.
cluckindan 6 hours ago [-]
There are reusable vapes and reputable stores carry only those, but they are generally many times more expensive than disposable vapes, which are favored by smugglers (profit margins) and underage users (price point and potential seizing by parent/teacher/police).
Disposable vapes put young people in contact with career criminals and organized crime, who will be only too happy to oblige even if the customer has no money. The result is young people in debt to criminals, which has the exact same ramifications as getting in drug debt. Those young people can then be coerced to commit other crimes to cover their debts.
dpc050505 4 hours ago [-]
My reusable vape cost like 15$. It's basically the same components as a disposable vape, except I can refill a pod and switch the pod if I burn the wick.
cluckindan 27 minutes ago [-]
Well, lucky you, I guess? Here they are considered tobacco products and taxed as heavily as cigarettes. I think the cheapest models are around $50.
That amount buys 10-200 disposable vapes from China, depending on how much you order at once and whether you care about the quality. Meanwhile, street resale prices are about $20 per vape. Smuggler’s heaven.
The smugglers / bulk sellers do sell to school kids, who then resell to their friends and even online (telegram most probably). Seen so many teenagers walk over as a random car pulls up to exchange vapes for cash. Even seen a big time dealer arriving at a teenager’s house party in a new, expensive car with a trunk full of vapes, accompanied by muscle, talking about how many of each flavor the customer is going to buy.
Maybe things are better on the other side of the big puddle, even if it means the same things are sold quasi-legally.
ThrowawayTestr 3 hours ago [-]
Everything you said is wrong. Refillable vapes are around the same price as disposables and kids get them from gas station attendants that don't care. What's this about organized crime?
cluckindan 59 minutes ago [-]
Not everyone lives in the US. In my country, disposable vapes are banned, so everyone selling or buying them is committing a crime.
HaZeust 3 hours ago [-]
>"Disposable vapes put young people in contact with career criminals and organized crime, who will be only too happy to oblige even if the customer has no money. The result is young people in debt to criminals, which has the exact same ramifications as getting in drug debt. Those young people can then be coerced to commit other crimes to cover their debts."
This feels like pure fearmongering, and it's not even believable when most people here grew up around cigarettes, dip, or vapes in secondary school throughout the decades, and the dynamic was never anything like what you’re describing. Nobody was getting shaken down for cigarette or vape debts by “organized crime.” It was usually just some older kid or significant other, ex-student, or friend with a hookup who’d buy a pack or device and resell at a small markup. Sometimes it was even just a straight favor.
Trying to paint disposable vapes as a gateway to mafia debt collection just doesn’t square with lived experience in the US. Plenty of us experimented with nicotine products when we were underage - or know someone who did, and while that had its own health and legal issues, coercion into crime to cover “nicotine debts” simply wasn’t part of it lol
--
More people get into organized crime from their local Wal-Mart denying their job application as their only realistic ways to make money from labor, than ever do from nicotine products
cluckindan 59 minutes ago [-]
Not everyone lives in the US.
Eric_WVGG 5 hours ago [-]
There's a pretty amazing video where a guy makes an entire functioning e-bike battery out of disposable vapes that he gathered around a music festival. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VcVp9T8f_W4
I can't fathom why disposables are legal. Really believed that the post-boomer generations actually gave a damn about waste.
tonyhart7 3 hours ago [-]
I like to start doing like this, but as you can see I'm like most people here don't have experience on electrical or electronic equipment
do you have an idea where I can start doing shit like this??? not up to professional of course but as a hobby where I don't need to electrocute myself would be nice
nusl 6 hours ago [-]
Disposable vapes are an abomination that somehow society has normalised.
mcdonje 6 hours ago [-]
Society tends to normalize things that have ad budgets.
toast0 4 hours ago [-]
Do vapes have ad budgets? All I see are anti-vape ads?
isoprophlex 4 hours ago [-]
They represent the most viable pathway for big tobacco to exit regular cigarettes, which are in decline or at least struggling. AND vapes have huge traction with younger people. It's basically The Thing that big tobacco needs to go all in on if they want to keep selling carcinogenic air to people for the next 50 years
mcdonje 4 hours ago [-]
Yes, like all tobacco products. These days a lot of marketing is targeted and subtle, especially for an industry used to dealing with advertising restrictions.
Not to mention the EXTREME damage it can do to a person's lungs, and do this damage very quickly.
cluckindan 5 hours ago [-]
Probably not, unless there are very specific substances in the liquid being vaped.
There are two known culprits: diacetyl is/was used in some flavorings for its buttery taste, and liquid Vitamin E oil was used in clandestinely produced THC vape cartridges (which are really not relevant for the topic at hand). Both of those have largely disappeared from the market.
Sure, some cheap components can in theory leach heavy metals into liquids. The amounts are insignificant compared to what you will be breathing in just by walking on city streets, even outside rush hour.
And at least vapes don’t contain polonium-210 like cigarettes do.
jrmg 21 hours ago [-]
I wouldn’t want to be the lawyer who one day will have to argue how a device with USB C and a rechargeable battery can be classified as “disposable”.
I thought the point of making them like this was that they technically are reusable, so they can sell them (to people who for some reason keep buying them and throwing them away!) in places where disposable vapes are banned.
Zak 21 hours ago [-]
I'm confused by why anybody would buy one of these when entirely reusable versions exist, but then vaping seems unwise to me in general except as a way to quit tobacco.
jimmaswell 18 hours ago [-]
Vaping nicotine doesn't seem that bad to me. AFAICT the dangers outside simple addictiveness are moderate lung irritation and cardiovascular effects, but no strong evidence of cancer caused by vaping alone - far better than cigarettes, and still better than an equivalent drinking problem.
dns_snek 14 hours ago [-]
Vaping causes inflammation, nicotine suppresses the immune system (which is probably pretty bad news for fighting any other diseases), and nicotine cessation has been linked with an increase in development of autoimmune disorders in the 12-24 month period after quitting.
I had elevated white blood cells counts and I developed an autoimmune condition a few months after quitting vaping. I had good health record leading up to it and no family history of any autoimmune disorders. White blood cells eventually normalized but autoimmune is forever, although it's under control and I'm lucky that it was caught early.
In the final ~4 years of vaping I didn't use any flavorings either, just 70/30 mix of VG/PG and nicotine.
It's not terrible as far as vices go, much less harmful than the alternatives, but it's definitely not as harmless as I thought going in. I wish I hadn't started and went for the ADHD assessment right away instead of subconsciously self-medicating with nicotine.
hoppp 6 hours ago [-]
Word. I quit nicotine and it triggered auto immune response, I got celiac disease.
Never touched it ever again and I had to stop eating like a normal person. No more fast food for the rest of my life.
wpm 4 hours ago [-]
> linked with an increase in development of autoimmune disorders in the 12-24 month period after quitting
No shit, I had no idea.
That explains a lot. I quit smoking (well, the first time I tried to quit) when I was 19 (2 years smoking). 3 months later I was in the hospital with sclerosing mesenteritis, a rare disorder for an older person but baffling and way out of left-field for a 19 year old with no prior history autoimmune issues. We only got a diagnosis after full exploratory surgery that earned me a six inch incision scar on my stomach.
Don't start smoking, kids.
gleenn 17 hours ago [-]
I don't think adequate studies have taken a look into the long term effects of all the solvents and oils they use aside from the nicotine. Intuitively, this just seems like a terrible idea putting non-water-soluble vapors into your lungs but I am definitely not a doctor.
burgerone 16 hours ago [-]
Vapes are practically unregulated with how many sre being imported from overseas. Health impacts have barely been studied yet.
xp84 17 hours ago [-]
This is why to me it’s so damn disappointing to me that vaping is targeted so forcefully by the various scolds in the “regulate everything” camp when smoking isn’t yet eradicated. Things like banning flavor and stuff. They want it to be as unpleasant as tobacco, which reduces the likelihood of people switching from tobacco to vaping, killing many of those smokers as a way to “save” teens from taking up an overall not-very-dangerous habit.
dns_snek 13 hours ago [-]
> They want it to be as unpleasant as tobacco
I vaped for around 8 years, about 4 years with typical flavorings and the last 4 years unflavored. IME unflavored vaping really isn't that bad, I accidentally switched to it because I ran out of flavoring one time and after a few days I didn't really miss them anymore so I just stopped using them.
I would compare it to people who drink soda all day, they can't fathom how people can drink "boring" plain water all day and they have a really hard time switching, but people who are used to drinking water find it as refreshing and satisfying as anything.
I think these flavorings cause more harm by luring young people to start vaping than they help smokers by luring them away from cigarettes. In an ideal world adults would be allowed to vape whatever they want, and teens wouldn't be able to get their hands on vapes in any capacity, but clearly that's not working so I think that flavor bans are a decent compromise.
I don't buy the argument that flavor bans will make teens go back to smoking. Cigarettes taste awful, they make you smell terrible, they irritate your lungs far more, they're far more expensive. If I was a teen I would still pick up unflavored vaping over cigarette smoking any time, but I'd be less likely to get into vaping without the flavorings.
afavour 16 hours ago [-]
A counterpoint:
> A third of UK teenagers who vape will go on to start smoking tobacco, research shows, meaning they are as likely to smoke as their peers were in the 1970s.
> The findings suggest that e-cigarettes are increasingly acting as a “gateway” to nicotine cigarettes for children, undermining falling rates of teen smoking over the past 50 years.
Maybe I'm just an old geeser but when I went back to grad school I was absolutely shocked at how many people vaped, and it seemed to have been because they started smoking flavored vapes. People would go to a party, either in high school or college, and the party would be permeated by some sweet smell. Curious kids/people would investigate, try vaping, and eventually get their own, becoming addicted.
As far as I can tell, banning flavored vapes has had a significant impact on reducing vaping/smoking new users, which is the ultimate goal. People who are currently addicted should primarily be motivated to quit, not find better tasting alternatives
rasse 17 hours ago [-]
There are numerous other options for supporting smoking cessation that do not risk lung injury.
dns_snek 13 hours ago [-]
Counter-point: For someone who's used to smoking or vaping, the craving to "take a puff" can be a very strong, maybe stronger than the chemical dependence on nicotine itself.
I noticed that in myself when I was trying to quit, vaping nicotine-free liquids helped my cravings more than nicotine itself. It didn't help the physical withdrawal symptoms but it mysteriously stopped the cravings for a while.
xp84 4 hours ago [-]
Sure, and removing one appealing option that many people like still means some people will keep smoking who would have quit.
bloqs 21 hours ago [-]
i have owned lots. they taste better than most permanent vapes. ive tried the whole buy all the best components and perfect juices etc with various tanks of different flavours. disposables just work and taste good, no leaks. they also have a logical end point like a pack of cigarettes. Its nice to switch flavour more frequently, and the packet/vape body colours pressed deep monkey brain buttons for fruit etc
reassess_blind 18 hours ago [-]
Yeah, the sweetener they put in the disposables is like crack. If a liquid could replicate it then the switch to reusable would be a no brainer, but I never found one. Alas I switched to nicotine gum and haven’t looked back.
gilfoy 19 hours ago [-]
Looking back, the Juul product seems preferable to the current situation
MarcelOlsz 19 hours ago [-]
I did the math and Juul was 47x more expensive than the liquids (this is in Canada). Then I switched to the juice vapes, and finally to kick the juice vaping I picked up pipe tobacco. Pipe tobacco is way cheaper than cigs nevermind vapes, the highest quality, and tastes incredibly good (also, you can also get that "first cigarette headrush" every time if you like by inhaling, works every time).
gilfoy 6 hours ago [-]
I meant in terms of e waste mostly, disposable pod vs disposable device
kristianp 17 hours ago [-]
I used to love the smell of my Grandfather's pipe smoke. I still enjoy the occasional 2nd-hand smell of a rollup. Is pipe tobacco different to rollies?
MarcelOlsz 2 hours ago [-]
What the other guy said. Do yourself a favour and pickup some Mr. B's Crème brûlée just to smell it. It's like the best thing I've ever smelt even outside of tobacco. It's not an acquired taste where if you say something smells amazing it's implied that it's within the range of something objectively nasty.
zxexz 16 hours ago [-]
Substantially. It is way more coarse, usually much more moist as well. Tends to be more “pure” tobacco with less additives, though I’m sure that’s not universal. I know somebody who does not smoke but buys it to keep in cabinets and various drawers because they love the smell. I must admit I am partial to the smell as well.
MarcelOlsz 2 hours ago [-]
This is an excellent idea, ty.
helf 20 hours ago [-]
[dead]
loumf 20 hours ago [-]
But, then where would you host your website?
Ygg2 20 hours ago [-]
Used milk carton. It probably has more TFlops than Commodore 64.
s-lambert 16 hours ago [-]
In Australia you need a prescription to get nicotine liquid but every convenience store in any big city sells disposables illegally for cheap.
csomar 15 hours ago [-]
Because reusable versions are a hassle. Cleaning, Charging, Changing Batteries, Changing liquid, etc. Whereas with reusable, well, you just puff and worry about nothing. Which is why people vape in the first place :)
bombcar 21 hours ago [-]
Just like how places with bag bans often just end up with thicker plastic bags that can be sold for ten cents and claimed as “reusable.
orev 21 hours ago [-]
They are reusable, which many people take advantage of. And it has dramatically reduced the number of tumbleweed bags clogging up nature.
privatelypublic 20 hours ago [-]
Reasonable people already reused single-use bags. Trashcan liners, dog walk bags, cat scoop bags, etc.
Having recently been reminded that it used to be common to see eviscerated VHS tapes by roads, I've been reminded that we'll always have people who litter.
orev 6 hours ago [-]
I’m not sure what your point is: because one type of litter is reduced, it doesn’t matter because people still litter in other ways?
In every place where plastic bags are banned, there’s a dramatic and obvious reduction in the amount of them clogging up trees, roads, fields, waterways, etc. If people need them for other purposes, they can buy them, while everyone else who doesn’t need them, doesn’t.
ewoodrich 4 hours ago [-]
Yep, every so often I remember staring out the window on the highway in the car as a kid and seeing single use bags snagged on fences or trees pretty much anywhere inaccessible or not routinely cleaned.
I also catch it on B roll footage in movies or shows from the 90s/2000s a lot. It’s a specific type of visual blight I rarely ever see after those ultra flimsy single use bags that could be carried dozens of miles on a gentle breeze were eliminated.
(This children's book was written basically at the tail end of the era where seeing a bag flying could conjure the imagination)
The bag bans in general are good - and heavy bags aren’t that bad, especially since they don’t blow as far or as easily.
ViscountPenguin 20 hours ago [-]
The majority of people reuse those bags, they're pretty great actually. Most people I know have slightly more expensive bags made out of fabric though.
pavon 17 hours ago [-]
Not here. Standing in line at stores like target that have them I see maybe 1/20 people checking out in front of me bring in reused disposable sacks, while 15/20 leave with new ones. Certainly not enough reuse to justify the extra thickness.
bombcar 9 hours ago [-]
I do really enjoy the thickness, and they do displace the cheaper ones in the tube of spares at home, but they’re just bags at the end of the day.
meibo 20 hours ago [-]
You've misunderstood the assignment if you don't reuse those, they are perfectly fine for that and will last a long time. Just have one in your bag or car. I've even reused paper bags for more than half a year since the ban.
WD-42 21 hours ago [-]
They make perfect office/bathroom trash can liners
xp84 17 hours ago [-]
They do, but they still don’t make it back to the stores enough, and nobody has 16 wastebaskets to line every week. Also the old ones were just as suitable for wastebasket duty.
The bag laws have done nothing but increase the consumption of plastic, since stores still go through nearly as many, but they’re 5x thicker now.
WD-42 15 hours ago [-]
The only time I even get one of those things is if I forget my regular bag or I buy too much stuff to fit. That happens like once a month.
Why are you going into the store empty handed and coming out with 16 plastic bags?
xp84 4 hours ago [-]
Not everyone is you. 16 is mild hyperbole, but I'm not even speaking normatively on what people should do. I'm speaking about what people do do. I'll stipulate that everyone including me should always keep at least 10 bags in my car so that I can do about 2 typical shopping trips even if I forget to put them back in the car. And we should always remember to carry them in. But that isn't happening with the current hilariously poor incentives in place (50 measly cents to buy 5 bags and no bag deposit either.)
I predict that if you spend 10 minutes observing the checkouts in your supermarket you'll see exactly what I see: At least 75% of people buying new plastic bags for the transaction, and zero people depositing bags into the special bag recycling bin at the store - which in the US is basically the only place this type of plastic is even accepted for recycling.
And again, these bags appear to be 3-5x as thick as the old bags, so the bag law is a huge win for Big Plastic who sells more plastic than they used to, and it mostly goes into the landfill.
The solutions:
• Admit this is a failed policy
• Everyone everywhere stops being imperfect, forgetful and lazy -- 100% of the time.
California is still hoping for the latter to pan out!
what 16 hours ago [-]
Why are you buying 16 bags worth of stuff every week? That seems like the bigger problem.
bombcar 9 hours ago [-]
If you have a family and a grocery store in walking distance you can do it easily; I would hit 16 if I forgot my shopping bag - which I do on occasion.
zdragnar 21 hours ago [-]
Some have replaceable pods / tanks, but most have no user serviceable parts whatsoever.
One the liquid is low enough, the coil will burn a bit, and the whole thing should be disposed of.
One shop near me would take used ones and send them off to be properly taken apart and what not, but most people just toss them I suspect.
jdietrich 16 hours ago [-]
The coil is part of the pod and therefore user-replaceable. The point of a pod system is to keep the coil and liquid in a self-contained system, which practically eliminates the risk of liquid leaks. All of these quasi-disposable vapes with replaceable pods and a charging port can be re-used hundreds of times.
I don't know why people dispose of the whole thing rather than just changing the pod, but at least it's a boon for electronics hobbyists.
Gigachad 21 hours ago [-]
Some of the new ones have the coil and vape juice in a disposable section while the battery and charge circuitry are reused.
ChrisMarshallNY 19 hours ago [-]
Each morning, I walk 5K. I start off in the dark. By midwinter, the whole walk is in the dark.
I am constantly walking past disposable vapes in the street, with their LEDs still shining.
macintux 19 hours ago [-]
Growing up, smoking was quite common. A lot can change in 20-30 years, so I'm cautiously optimistic that maybe vaping will eventually become as socially unacceptable as smoking.
extraduder_ire 19 hours ago [-]
If you're in the EU/UK the WEEE directive means anywhere selling them should take them back like-for-like to be directed into the correct waste stream. (they get paid some of the deposit on them to do so)
I would be more fine with disposable vapes like this if almost all of them were recovered somehow, for the amount it subsidises production of Li-ion batteries.
xp84 17 hours ago [-]
Theoretically a high enough deposit could probably “fix the problem.” Like, if the empty was worth a $25 deposit most people would 100% take them back to the store. It would be annoying for people to have the high deposit, but it’s really a one-time expense.
On the other hand at least in the US, a deposit of a buck or two wouldn’t do much. California has that for cans and bottles, yet only maybe 10% of people turn them in. Most end up in curbside recycling (which doesn’t refund) or the garbage, indicating people don’t care about getting their nickel or dime back.
nicbou 16 hours ago [-]
That's the theory. I practice, even in famously recycling-obsessed Germany, it's impossible to return electronics in places that are required to accept them, even two years after that law passed. The staff is really confused when you try.
cjaackie 21 hours ago [-]
No, it’s there because the battery can’t hold enough charge for the ratio of vape liquid they put in it. So you get 2-3 full charges and it runs out of liquid.
NoSalt 6 hours ago [-]
The current state of technology is ... weird. From AI doing our art instead of our work, to hosting a website on an eCigarette. "Weird" is the only word I can think of at this moment.
droobles 7 hours ago [-]
Long live hacking! This is what Hacker News is all about. Great article and fun project!
tgtweak 37 minutes ago [-]
Missed opportunity to put a 503:Vape Unavailable http error.
isoprophlex 5 hours ago [-]
Could one say that the author found the ultimate computing platform for running vaporware?
RedShift1 7 hours ago [-]
We need to reduce microplastics.
Let's put microcontrollers into disposable vapes.
I don't know if I'm sad or happy.
grues-dinner 6 hours ago [-]
The micro in this thing is a WQFN-16 (W = very very thin, thinner than V for very) with 3x3x0.75mm body. That's around a fiftieth of a gram of plastic.
I think the bigger SOIC chip is probably the battery charge IC. And then maybe a gram or two of PCB epoxy. And the plastic in the battery pouch and membranes which you need anyway.
In terms of plastics waste volume, the casing and tank is probably nearly all of the content. So the problem is a disposable vape bring a thing at all, not really the microcontroller in there.
It feels mad and somehow wasteful that you can get a CPU at that price point, but the die itself is a tiny sliver of silicon. You can even embed an (even tinier) and weedier application-specific) IC in a paper metro ticket. Compute is just so ridiculously cheap that you can have a hundred of functional ICs for the cost of a single largish cup of hot bean water.
citizenpaul 6 hours ago [-]
The mfg/mining process for the chips is probably equally bad.
All for a device to help you develop health problems.
grues-dinner 5 hours ago [-]
There's more silicon in the battery charge controller probably (bigger transistors). The MCU is just a speck.
Ironically making these disposable vapes "reusable" causes more e-waste as now they need a connector and charge controller and a bigger PCB.
cluckindan 5 hours ago [-]
You could say that for a lot of devices.
It is indisputable that anyone switching cigarette smoking to vaping is making a healthier choice.
jumploops 3 hours ago [-]
Meta comment: I don’t think I’ve ever seen a HN thread with this ratio of upvotes to comments (8 vs. 251)
Disposable vapes are an extreme failure of legislation, but this is a cool hack nonetheless!
busymom0 3 hours ago [-]
Regarding the meta comment, it's due to comments being moved from a 4 hour older post into this brand new post by the mods (a bit strange).
By law, neither electronics nor batteries can be disposed of with generic waste. This is the case in the EU, at least. So how are people then disposing these devices?
Disclaimer: I do know the answer, but I'd rather pretend that people actually follow the law.
avian 6 hours ago [-]
The vape comes with a miniature laser-engraved WEEE crossed-out trash can symbol so everything is fine.
tgtweak 36 minutes ago [-]
Missed opportunity to put a 503: Vape Unavailable http error message.
curvaturearth 2 hours ago [-]
I used to see disposable vapes dumped on the street until they were banned (thankfully). All those wasted batteries and microcontrollers is really wasteful.
dev0p 14 hours ago [-]
I am SHOCKED everytime I am reminded those Disposable Vapes exist.
My friend, that is a Portable Computer you are holding in Your Hands, and You are THROWING IT AWAY after ONE SINGLE USE?
Insane.
At least the fact that we got to this point in the first place is certainly an achievement for humanity as a whole?
zsimjee 2 hours ago [-]
Can someone please make a zyn tin container for these?
peteforde 7 hours ago [-]
I see that as of the time of this comment, he hasn't run Doom on it.
Yet?
jsheard 7 hours ago [-]
3kb of RAM and 24kb of flash is a bit tight for Doom unfortunately. It has been ported to another Cortex-M0+ microcontroller, the RP2040, but that has 264kb of RAM plus megabytes of flash and the game still barely fits.
xigoi 5 hours ago [-]
So you’d just need about 100 vapes. If you have a friend who uses them, should not take long to collect.
reaperducer 5 hours ago [-]
3kb of RAM and 24kb of flash is a bit tight for Doom
I see that as of the time of this comment, he hasn't run Doom on it.
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of them…
cruffle_duffle 4 hours ago [-]
I was just thinking about that slashdot meme the other day. Like Beowulf clusters were the dream! Imagine one! I wanted one! Everybody did!
And now you can spin that shit up for pennies an hour and then throw it all away when you are done.
Who would have seen that coming back in, what, 1998…
mdavid626 45 minutes ago [-]
Any lucky ones? I got only 504-s.
1970-01-01 6 hours ago [-]
I always forget about the idea that IPv6 was intended to allow literally everything to have an address. The mouse, keyboard, display, etc. Seems like a bad idea now, but back then it was considered as part of the overall plan for the nearly infinite space. Maybe the joke is still missing a punchline. We've had this generic device interface for decades but decided on proprietary and arbitrary standards of device communication to make our lives easier in the short-term.
Has anyone done the joke about "next big cloud platform" yet?
analog31 21 hours ago [-]
So the EEs are right. Electrical circuits run on magic smoke.
koliber 3 hours ago [-]
How does the device compare to the computer we used to put a man on the moon?
fragmede 1 hours ago [-]
Running at 24 Mhz, the vape is umpteen times faster but interestingly enough the AGC had 36 KiB of ROM while the vape only has 24 KiB. Umpteen is a technical term denoting that a straight comparison isn't possible, as the Cortex M0 does more in a single clock cycle than the AGC does but they're also different architectures and the programs running are different.
6 hours ago [-]
accrual 6 hours ago [-]
This is really impressive. I laughed when I got 503 Unavailable on the hosted URL. I guess we're all hugging that little vape CPU a little too hard. :)
rozumbrada 5 hours ago [-]
This is why I go to hackernews every day <3
6r17 5 hours ago [-]
Hei ; Preact would be deff appropriate in that scenario ; it's a clone of react that is meant to be small !
I found of these that had a built-in retro game console with screen. Like, the kind of little game that a small child would be interested in. So frustrating.
rpcope1 15 hours ago [-]
So a question maybe someone can clue me in on here: while the specs on that MCU seem imminently reasonable to me (especially compared to some of the PIC12F and similar I've used in the past) the thing that feels odd is the high clock speed ARM core. Is it really that cheap and easy to drop an M0 core or ip block into an MCU? Why not more RAM and a simpler/slower core? The M0 feels grossly overkill.
NoiseBert69 7 hours ago [-]
I bought a few hundred Puyas for my lab as stock for projects. They are quite capable and very cheap uCs to have around.
grues-dinner 7 hours ago [-]
Apparently they're cheap because they're a flash memory company that bolts a little CPU onto their own flash, rather than a CPU company having to then buy the more expensive flash with a markup.
6 hours ago [-]
jsheard 21 hours ago [-]
You think a Cortex-M0+ in a disposable vape is wasteful, wait until you see the ones with colour touchscreens and Bluetooth radios. It's probably only a matter of time before they start running Android on them.
malfist 21 hours ago [-]
What's insane is how cheap all those components are. A quadcore processor with ram and memory, WiFi and Bluetooth for pennies at wholesale.
The latest and fastest GPUs might be a marvel of technology, but so is the tech that let's us make and esp32 for almost nothing
balder1991 13 hours ago [-]
I guess at this point it’s safe to assume humanity won’t regress to a time before computers anymore.
ta12653421 7 hours ago [-]
yeah, in 1992 we ran Doom on a 386DX 20Mhz and 320x200 VGA mode :-D
(and it was slooooow and ugly!)
ants_everywhere 20 hours ago [-]
Imagine a beowulf cluster of... wait probably not
marstall 4 hours ago [-]
how long til they have GPT-5 level LLMs?
20 hours ago [-]
braunshizzle 1 hours ago [-]
VaPS
Dilettante_ 20 hours ago [-]
I respect the point about not wanting to send the manufacturer any business, but I would love to know the brand so I'd know which ones to rescue if given the chance.
efilife 19 hours ago [-]
I am probably stupid so bear with me. I don't get the part about not naming brands if you are certain they won't ever sponsor you. I feel like it just hurts the value of the article with nothing gained
Dilettante_ 9 hours ago [-]
It's not about sponsorships and integrity, it's about preventing the pipeline "Person reads article -> Sees this brand of vape has micocontrollers -> Buys this brand of vape".
(If I understood the author correctly, y'know, not to speak for them)
efilife 2 hours ago [-]
Ok, but what's bad about this?
Dilettante_ 43 minutes ago [-]
Contributing to people buying stuff that's bad for them, and giving money to an industry that profits off it, presumably? Again, I'm just assuming the author's position(which, for the record I do not share) here.
acuozzo 19 minutes ago [-]
Possibly greater e-waste than there would otherwise have been.
BruceEel 6 hours ago [-]
This is quite amazing. Dumb question: is there a way to run it in QEMU?
BogdanTheGeek 5 hours ago [-]
Maybe, I'm not sure how you would connect a debugger to qemu, and you would have to emulate the ram and flash, but other than that is pretty standard arm cortex m0. The code is pretty generic too.
BruceEel 5 hours ago [-]
Makes sense, thank you. Congrats on the extremely cool project.
This is cool, but, man, I felt like such a pathetic excuse for a human being when, brutally craving nicotine, with my vape empty of the fruit-flavoured juice that I am literally addicted to like the stupid pathetic baby that I am, and stuck with the cravings because all the shops are closed until morning, and so, in need of a distraction, I opened Hacker News. FFS.
Sometimes the only option is to laugh at your own expense! Clearly this is a sign. I should buy more juice next time. And maybe start smoking more actual cigs.
midasz 3 hours ago [-]
Quitting smoking was the best decision I made and I wish I did it earlier. If you feel ready Allen Carr's book worked for me. I wasted so much time smoking.
panarchy 19 hours ago [-]
Having an addiction doesn't make anyone "a pathetic excuse for a human being"
gabriel666smith 18 hours ago [-]
I agree wholeheartedly.
I've been (I am?) addicted to many substances, from fruit-flavoured nicotine juice through to heroin.
I find self-deprecating humour useful, personally. It helps me not wallow, to take the cravings less seriously. I of course wouldn't say the same about anyone who isn't me.
Because, as you say, someone who has an addiction isn't lesser than anyone else. It's a state of being that requires an awful lot of strength.
That said, having to use that strength on 'mango e-liquid' is, I think, funny in an absurdist way. We live in strange times!
867-5309 5 hours ago [-]
504 timeout -- fug of breath
BogdanTheGeek 21 hours ago [-]
so I had to throw nginx in front of it so my little router wouldn't explode, but I hope some people will get to experience the relaxing loading experience live.
temp0826 20 hours ago [-]
The HN way is to colocate a cluster of these and put them behind a F5
metal696heart 19 hours ago [-]
It would be nice to pool ideeas for what they could be recycled into. Imagine the amount of automatic cat feeders the world could build with these.
madcow2011 2 hours ago [-]
I've actually been trying to look into something similar? I have a pile of old vapes from friends/family I want to re-purpose, but don't really know where to start.
HardwareLust 23 hours ago [-]
Your GitHub link in the doc gives me a 404. Otherwise, good stuff!
BogdanTheGeek 22 hours ago [-]
Thank you, it's fixed now.
shadowgovt 6 hours ago [-]
That's gotta be between 75 and 90% less damaging to humanity than the designed use of a disposable vape. Well done, Bogdan!
I'm reminded of the project Tom7 put together a few years back where he used the surplus components inside a digital COVID kit as spare memory. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcJSW7Rprio
dudeWithAMood 21 hours ago [-]
What were you doing to get traffic from the open Internet to your webserver at home? I always felt that was a risky proposition, but I might just be stupid.
mysteria 19 hours ago [-]
I've hosted at home for years and if you have it properly setup it's not any more risky than using a VPS. I have 443 open on my router and basically all web traffic is routed to a container on my server. The container is on an isolated vlan and basically runs nginx as a ssl reverse proxy.
The actual web services behind the proxy run in their own containers and with proper isolation and firewall rules the effects of a security compromise are limited. At most an attacker will be able to take over the containers with an exploit (and they could do that with a VPS as well) but they won't be able to access the rest of the network or my secure internal systems.
If I was this guy and wanted to let people connect directly to my vapeserver I would simply host it on another vlan and port forward the HTTP connection. Even if someone manages to take over such an obscure system they're not going to be able to do much.
rovr138 21 hours ago [-]
Open a port or if their router supports it, assign their device to a DMZ.
Why do you think it’s risky? Maybe we can talk about ways of securing it.
Like any server, it’s as safe as the server software (and its configuration).
Aachen 20 hours ago [-]
Done it since before I properly knew what I was doing. Haven't had issues. Even though n=1, also now that I'm actually working in IT security, I don't think the risk was ever much bigger than what I could oversee
The main thing is that, if someone gets onto the server system, then they're in my network and they can do attacks on other devices in that LAN (guest wifis are a nice way to isolate that nowadays; that didn't exist back when I started). Same as when I take my laptop to school for example, then others can reach it. I've had issues with others in school doing attacks because the internet was unencrypted http back then (client-side hashing in JavaScript limited the impact though), but not from anyone who tried to hack into the server. Only automated scans for outdated Wordpress, setup files for Phpmyadmin, ssh password guessing... the things they simply try blindly on every IP address. If any of this is successful, you're most likely going to be turned into a spam-sending server or a DDoS zombie; not something with lasting impact once you discover the issue and remove the malware
Most attackers don't do targeted attacks on your system or network unless you're a commercial entity that presumably can pay a nice ransom, or are a high-profile individual. Attackers aiming for consumers send phishing emails and create phishing advertisements, look for standard password vaults if you run their malware, try using stolen credentials on Steam and hope you've got a payment method stored... the usual old things. Having a server doesn't make any of those attacks easier, and besides, self hosting is very uncommon. Even if you and I had a similar enough setup at home with a straightforward path to exploitation, it's a few thousand people that self-host in a country with millions of people. It's not worth developing attacks for
GJim 10 hours ago [-]
> What were you doing to get traffic from the open Internet to your webserver at home? I always felt that was a risky proposition,
How times change.
Once nearly every self respecting IT pro ran servers from there home network. The modern drive to outsource and consolidate the interweb to a handful of big players I find rather odd; perhaps even counterproductive in the long run.
happyhardcore 21 hours ago [-]
VPS with public ipv4, connected to home network over Tailscale and forward the traffic with socat. You'd probably be fine opening a port directly but a small VPS is free most places so might as well make the most of it.
sunsetonsaturn 16 hours ago [-]
Could you elaborate more on the "a small VPS is free"? Except Oracle's free tier offer, I am not aware of others; I'd appreciate it if you could point me in the right direction.
happyhardcore 5 hours ago [-]
For this I used GCP free tier -- not sure why everyone acts like Oracle are the only free tier around when GCP and AWS offer always-free tiers too. It's just runing socat to forward to the vape over tailscale. Is there something I'm missing?
ruperthair 7 hours ago [-]
I'm not sure where to go for the free VPS, other than Oracle Cloud, as you mention, but a Cloudflare tunnel will get traffic into your LAN even behind CGNAT or other nonsense.
ornornor 15 hours ago [-]
You can put the public facing stuff on a separate VLAN and have firewall rules that don’t give the VLAN access to LAN stuff. I only know how to do this with IPv4 though, IPv6 confuses me and I’m scared to get it wrong so I disabled it.
koolala 20 hours ago [-]
People might hack your toaster and burn your house down? Smart ovens? Smart microwaves? Smart fires?
23 hours ago [-]
ivape 7 hours ago [-]
I wonder how much cost would be added if they included a small usb storage drive in those things. You could incentivize non-disposal because people would have a million of those things.
It’s really hard to quite vaping btw.
zetanor 7 hours ago [-]
Add a GPS and a few propellers to vapes so they can fly themselves directly into the nearest river, lake or (as a last resort) ocean once they're empty.
Rebelgecko 5 hours ago [-]
I know you're joking, but it seems like a great option for IEDs. Cheap, hard to trade (might even come with a patsy's DNA preinstalled)
ch4s3 7 hours ago [-]
Why wait until they're empty, let he fish vape I say!
Y_Y 6 hours ago [-]
Self-smoked salmon
shadowgovt 6 hours ago [-]
If the eels get car batteries, the fish can have a little vape, as a treat.
ch4s3 5 hours ago [-]
It seems like depending on the dose, Zebra Fish rather like it.[1]
They put addictive stuff in vapes, because of course they do.
Dilettante_ 6 hours ago [-]
The Addictive Stuff™ is literally the core feature of the item. Your comment makes it sound like the producers are nefariously and covertly adding nicotine to a product which normally would not have any? It's like saying "These scoundrel breweries! They're making beer that gets you drunk!"
cardanome 6 hours ago [-]
I mean disposable vapes are just complete idiocy to begin with.
Vapes with pods are less expensive in the long run and offer a vastly superior vaping experience. You can get liquid for dirt cheap. If you smoke heavily, you might offset the initial investment in a week or two.
Disposable vapes offer zero advantages. They are only good if you want to "just try" it once or that is what you are going to tell yourself in your career of producing e-waste.
unmotivated-hmn 6 hours ago [-]
What they offer is ubiquity and the turnkey nature.
You can walk into any nearby smoke shop, get one and use it immediately. You don't have to carry around a bottle of liquid and extra coils and paper towels/napkins for the inevitable leak.
I stopped vaping a little while ago but when I did vape, there was no clear standard of pod systems. You sure could walk into a nearby smoke shop but it was unlikely that you'd find your ideal pod/coil/liquid.
It's hard to take back the convenience people have gotten used to. I think one idea could be that disposable vapes become recyclable vapes. They should cost $15 more and buyers should get back $10 when they return it for recycling. This is nicotine we're talking about so the buyer is always coming back anyway.
cardanome 4 hours ago [-]
While I do believe that disposable vapes should be banned even if they happen to be more convenient, I really don't see it. When I vaped myself I liked having a re-usable vape so much more than the disposable crap.
With the disposable it would always be a gamble how long they would last. I don't get how people manage. Do they buy multiples at once and carry them around?
It was so much more convenient to carry that small bottle of liquid with me and have the peace of mind that I wouldn't run out of juice for the night. Never had issues with spilled liquid.
Not having a standard for pods sucks but you don't need to buy them that often. I just ordered them online anyway.
Of course it might be a bit of a cultural difference as well. Most of my smoker friends roll their own cigarettes which is way more inconvenient.
Scubabear68 5 hours ago [-]
I wonder when an Android phone will be released that includes a vape attachment.
Don't think Apple would go there, but who knows....
jdoliner 7 hours ago [-]
Hey can you print this paper off my vape bro? I need to turn it in to my next class.
panarchy 19 hours ago [-]
Now make a cluster of them running on load balancer
https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Zhihe_series_LTE_dongles_...
https://github.com/OpenStick/OpenStick
So yeah if you looking for hardware platform for weird homelab projects that's can be it.
[1] https://wvthoog.nl/openstick/
Well hullo there, turns out that's my old mate, the Snapdragon 410! Quite an unexpected surprise!
And funnily in retrospect, my Moto G3 from 2015 (which I still occasionally use for whatsapp!) has the exact same processor, and turns out base android (7) is (un?)surprisingly efficient when you're not doing much! I totally believe you could get a lightweight linux distro going on; I'm more impressed by such an old (and mobile!) chipset still having some sort of vestigial support!
(Fun fact, iirc this was one of the first processors to get 64 bit support for android but motorola wasn't able to port it over in time for the launch. Hence it runs 32 bit android instead!)
https://hackaday.com/2022/08/03/hackable-20-modem-combines-l... (search for Alibaba/Aliexpress/Amazon)
Before stumbling on this link I actually found one that mentions a MSM8916 in the description (it even has a screen, sadly no RAM information):
https://aliexpress.com/item/1005007496178143.html
Aliexpress has this as the best selling one though the chipset is not confirmed https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005006924641101.html
Well I take my gamble, wait 2 weeks and see what I'll get
a.) the world of electronics is moving too fast
b.) My lack of skills and time to build something really cool with something like this
A while ago i bought a licheerv nano (similar to luckfox pico or Milk-v duo) to build an open source iPod nano via usb-c audio Jack and the open source buildroot for the licheerv nano.
I did not find a suitable 2.4 inch or at least < 3"touch display that worked with the integrated MPI port.
With LVGL it should be doable to build a small portable audioplayer with acceptable features... But not for me :-)
deadass this literally what they do in china, they just disassemble e-waste that don't get used and resell that oversees
$5.92 each for 500-2999 orders. What a time to be alive.
I will say, though, disposable vapes with microcontrollers inside (and even full games and screens from recent reporting) are an egregious source of e-waste. Many layers of stupid are present here.
[1] https://youtu.be/JcJSW7Rprio?t=1560
But the one in the FTA comes with a full fat microcontroller and USB-C connector! I'm not clear if these connectors are accessible outside or if you need to break open the packaging before being able to get to it.
Like you said: "Many layers of stupid are present here"
All that hardware must surely be worth more than half the value of the actual product!
I'm constantly struck at how bread (a pastry, say) in a plastic tray, wrapped in plastic, is so crazy to me. The effort and technology that went, and goes, into oil extraction and such - only to throw the packaging away immediately that I get home ... it's just so unsustainable.
I wonder when in the West we'll start mining rubbish dumps ('refuse sites' where household waste is buried)? Maybe we already have? I know in developing countries people spend their days manually picking over such places.
Never, because we have virtually unlimited space for landfills, and landfill tech has quietly been improving over the last few centuries, to the point that landfills are cheap, non-polluting, and entirely carbon neutral. Countries with less land mass (Europe et al) prefer incineration (mainly to save space, despite it being significantly worse for the environment and much more expensive (although with the newer energy reclamation efforts this is getting better)).
IMO it's not worth worrying about landfills too much. Household waste makes up about 3% of total landfill waste (when you add commercial/industrial/agricultural) in North America. You and your bun wrapper are truly irrelevant in the grand scheme of things.
Sure, the grand majority is going to be food waste, but if you threw it all into an incinerator and melted down the ashes there is probably a decent blend of valuable material mixed in with the waste.
Lots of people especially those generally "up north" undermine risks and therefore costs of food poisoning, but it's real. Haven't those people seen things growing molds?
whether it can be repurposed is worth little in being wasteful if >99% go to the landfill.
> I think we'd see that (a) might end up being less wasteful.
Monetarily? sure. Environmentally? unlikely
The point is that, most likely, the controller existed before this vape. Buying an off the shelf part can be cheaper than trying to bring up some custom part, both in cost and possibly in overall resources.
The only environment-friendly solution is to forbid this product to exist in the first place.
it's because politicians bend to pressure from lobbyists and outcry, such that the very idea that a resuable vape means that children can vape pina colada flavored liquids.
There was a federal push during Trump v1 to only allow iqos devices in any stores. The two vape brands (maybe 3) allowed in general in my state are manufactured by... if you guessed RJR and PMI, you are correct. The big tobacco farmers and cig manufacturers.
Reusable vapes with custom or pre-mixed flavors were attacked hard. I still have a couple liters of 100mg/ml nicotine in my freezer, for making custom flavors at home. I don't even know if you can still order nicotine in that ratio anymore in the US.
Because humans are expensive? Or because we can maybe re-use the components if an (expensive) human comes and retrieves the components?
Sorry for being dumb here.
- humans are expensive.
- If you want a custom part, you will need specialized equipment to build that part.
- If you want a custom part, you will maybe need to transport that part all around the world, while the off-the-shelf components might already be available close to your assembly plant.
I'm still surprised to see the fancier LCDs used which range from 2x4cm - slim 1.5x3cm (Digiflower, Raz is super popular.) Most LCD vapes which range from $20-25 are starting to fall by the wayside for $13-15 vapes with simple SMD LED displays with color overlays, (Kadobar, Geek Bar, Cookies, North) easy to make 7-segments for battery/juice status. Some are elaborate with wraparound displays that I've mistaken for flexible OLED and are deceptively cheap.
Laws are not here to make money, they are here to decide what kind of society we want. If electronics is too cheap and it creates wastes, I'm of the opinion that we should make it illegal, period.
From wikipedia:
> Liberalism is a political and moral philosophy based on the rights of the individual, liberty, consent of the governed, political equality, the right to private property, and equality before the law.[1][2] Liberals espouse various and sometimes conflicting views depending on their understanding of these principles but generally support private property, market economies, individual rights (including civil rights and human rights), liberal democracy, secularism, rule of law, economic and political freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, and freedom of religion.[3] Liberalism is frequently cited as the dominant ideology of modern history
It's the exact opposite. Tobacco is so heavily regulated and taxed that these become profitable. If cigarettes were 3-4$ a pack (which they would be without sin taxes and regulatory overhead), the vape market would come down as well and there's no way these could be profitable. As it is, they retail around $20 and contain the same nicotine as multiple $10 packs of cigarettes.
We want people to vape rather than smoke tobacco, obviously, it's not a zero-sum issue.
There are many possible ways to slice the economical cake.
5% is 50mg/1ml. A cigarette pack has about 25mg. A geek bar has 16ml of juice = 800mg of nicotine = 32 packs of cigarettes.
It's not the opposite at all. Tobacco should disappear just as well.
I believe that we as a society don't want e-waste (at least I don't). And when the society does not want something profitable to be done, it sets regulations.
If it wasn't illegal to steal your neighbour's car and sell it, then it would be profitable. But we as a society don't want it to happen.
https://duskos.org https://collapseos.org
In other words, it's a huge challenge, but 6502 is closer, in complexity, to the pen than to the, say, AMD Ryzen.
But the primary idea behind Collapse OS isn't to run from 6502 built from the ground up (although it partly is), but to run from frankenstein cobbled up machines made from scavenged parts.
From a quick glance, it looks like BogdanTheGeek's Forth is written in C, which means that it's not self-hosted. If all you have is that disposable vape with this Forth in it, you lack the tools to deploy it on another machine or to improve it in place.
One could also port Collapse OS to ARM. I guess it wouldn't be a very big effort.
With a 6502 or other such CPU, the machines you scavenge them from are much more repairable and adaptable. You can use those components like lego blocks. It breaks? either repair it or strip the working parts to use in another frankenstein computer.
https://www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/disposable-vape-ban-loo...
Resource extraction eventually fills all niches, for better or for worse.
We rewarded the government that brought this plan in by replacing them with Doug Ford, the brother of the infamous late Toronto mayor Rob Ford who was a literal crack-smoking drunk.
If you have some old Samsung Galaxy Gio from 2011, it'll provide far more value by recycling it back to raw materials than it would if you'd somehow try to keep it usable in 2025.
The problem here is planned obsolescence in a product's design. That is what needs to be made illegal.
And we're all gonna die, why would we have laws at all?
When we say "disposable vape", it's not to say "it will eventually stop working". It's more to say "you use it, you throw it away".
> E-waste recycling is a profitable
I don't doubt it's profitable, but it's most certainly not a good thing for the planet. Recycling is generally not a solution to waste.
> The problem here is planned obsolescence in a product's design. That is what needs to be made illegal.
Seriously? We're talking about DISPOSABLE VAPES. They are built to last as short a time as possible. At this point I am not sure if you think you disagree with me, are just nitpicking for the fun of it, or something else?
The actual problem here is how the product is intentionally designed to only be used once, when that's absolutely unnecessary. We both agree on that. That falls within the issue of planned obsolescence, and that's what regulation needs to target.
Though I don't believe that when someone talks about a "disposable" product, they mean that "this is a product that you will dispose of before you die". Usually "disposable" means that it's meant to have a short lifetime.
A laptop or a smartphone are not "disposable" in that sense, even though we don't keep them for our lifetime.
But a disposable vape is very clearly on the side of "should not exist, period".
RFID chips, maybe (and even then, not sure how much they are needed). What else? I don't think that I consume disposable electronics every day...
I really hope you are starting to understand the difficulty in regulating products like this. A lot of people don’t want to do the right thing.
When we talk about "disposable vapes", we don't talk about something that lasts 10 years, do we?
Or do you think that the very word "disposable" should not exist, because after all, nothing will last longer than the sun?
My guy is out here pulling off the whole thing and tossing it in the trash.
Plus, many smoke alarms these days use a photoelectric sensor which don't wear out but are prone to false alarms from dust, etc. Smoke alarms SHOULD be cleaned at least once a year, by blasting them with compressed air. Dust buildup is a very common reason that smoke alarms stop working as well after any number of years. They require regular cleaning, just like everything else in the house.
Non-replaceable battery smoke alarms are popular because they are much more convenient to own. And you should NOT throw them away, the batteries in these contain lithium and must be recycled.
If you go look at modern smoke detectors, many-to-most, now have a non-replaceable battery for exactly that reason.
I did the same thing, and the first four results were Kidde and First Alert Smoke Alarms with non-replaceable 10-year lifespan batteries.
It is likely because you recently purchased one, and Amazon has targeted your results based on your purchase history.
The landlord special on older construction (maybe >10 years old, can't remember when the hardwire code went into effect) will usually be the 9v. Because they don't care about you having to get on a ladder to change the battery every year. They get to save $5-10 per smoke detector. Practically any homeowner is going to choose the 10 year option as the batteries don't have to be swapped.
You mean like add the cost of a MRI to the price of a pack of cigarettes?
> Dick writes of the IoT being a source of vast-artificial-living-systems functioning on collective compute.
This feels like a whole new category of straw man.
-Dril
Islam is in fact the largest religion (by worshippers) in the world today, so Frank Herbert's assumption that a culture derived from it would be dominant in a future society is just extrapolation.
One reason is that the number of Christians in Sub-Saharan Africa is growing. But extrapolating the trends, yes Islam will probably become the largest religion in the coming decades.
Or at least maybe - looking at birth rates, it seems as second generation muslim immigrants to Western countries have even lower birth rates than the native population. That might happen also in regions say like Pakistan and Indonesia and other fast growing regions, depending on economical or other changes.
Fyi,
> Dune is a 1965 epic science fiction novel by American author Frank Herber
The distinction you're making wrt Jihad is also super modern and did not apply back then
TL;DR: while Dune has many references to various concepts coming from Islamic societies throughout, the Fremen are the obvious stand-in for Arabs specifically, and so get the most attention. And, in the context of the first book at least, Fremen are the "good guys" in many ways - if you reframe it in modern terms, they are the natives fighting against a colonial empire that subjugates them in order to extract a valuable resource from their lands, and then on top of that there's also the more subtle ecological angle.
https://baheyeldin.com/literature/arabic-and-islamic-themes-...
its true that the concept of a _holy war_ isnt unique to the muslim faith though. I never claimed that either however.
It's slightly surprising to me how few people seem to be aware of that in HN. Was expecting the general readership here to be a little less obsessively righteous and uninformed on a topic like this, but ymmv I guess
I think you are misinterpreting the issue. I'll explain why.
There are attention-seekers which were given access to platforms with unprecedented reach. Some of these types tap into outrage culture as their engagement mechanism. This creates a vicious cycle of outrage which feeds on outputting outrageous claims and taking the resulting outrage as input to further double down on outputting outrageous claims. You then end up with opposing outrage camps of whatever subject you can think of which exist to generate a larger volume of outrage than the opposing camp.
The problem is that the terminally-online types confuse this sort of discourse with reality, and the outrageous claims as representative of what happens in real life. That's how you end up with people outraged with outrageous claims that are so outrageous to the point they are unthinkable.
P.S. After I wrote that I looked at the Wikipedia page. Which helpfully reminded me that 1987 was 38 years ago :(
... for those of us old enough to even have a mental distinction between "the VIC-20 era" and the "Commodore 64" era rather than just being a smear of bittyboxes all equally uselessly small....
This is the opposite of repairability. We specifically made them impossible to reuse and refill. Makes my tinkerer (and eco-friendly) heart very sad.
Disposable vapes put young people in contact with career criminals and organized crime, who will be only too happy to oblige even if the customer has no money. The result is young people in debt to criminals, which has the exact same ramifications as getting in drug debt. Those young people can then be coerced to commit other crimes to cover their debts.
That amount buys 10-200 disposable vapes from China, depending on how much you order at once and whether you care about the quality. Meanwhile, street resale prices are about $20 per vape. Smuggler’s heaven.
The smugglers / bulk sellers do sell to school kids, who then resell to their friends and even online (telegram most probably). Seen so many teenagers walk over as a random car pulls up to exchange vapes for cash. Even seen a big time dealer arriving at a teenager’s house party in a new, expensive car with a trunk full of vapes, accompanied by muscle, talking about how many of each flavor the customer is going to buy.
Maybe things are better on the other side of the big puddle, even if it means the same things are sold quasi-legally.
This feels like pure fearmongering, and it's not even believable when most people here grew up around cigarettes, dip, or vapes in secondary school throughout the decades, and the dynamic was never anything like what you’re describing. Nobody was getting shaken down for cigarette or vape debts by “organized crime.” It was usually just some older kid or significant other, ex-student, or friend with a hookup who’d buy a pack or device and resell at a small markup. Sometimes it was even just a straight favor.
Trying to paint disposable vapes as a gateway to mafia debt collection just doesn’t square with lived experience in the US. Plenty of us experimented with nicotine products when we were underage - or know someone who did, and while that had its own health and legal issues, coercion into crime to cover “nicotine debts” simply wasn’t part of it lol
--
More people get into organized crime from their local Wal-Mart denying their job application as their only realistic ways to make money from labor, than ever do from nicotine products
I can't fathom why disposables are legal. Really believed that the post-boomer generations actually gave a damn about waste.
do you have an idea where I can start doing shit like this??? not up to professional of course but as a hobby where I don't need to electrocute myself would be nice
https://tobaccoatlas.org/challenges/marketing/
There are two known culprits: diacetyl is/was used in some flavorings for its buttery taste, and liquid Vitamin E oil was used in clandestinely produced THC vape cartridges (which are really not relevant for the topic at hand). Both of those have largely disappeared from the market.
Sure, some cheap components can in theory leach heavy metals into liquids. The amounts are insignificant compared to what you will be breathing in just by walking on city streets, even outside rush hour.
And at least vapes don’t contain polonium-210 like cigarettes do.
I thought the point of making them like this was that they technically are reusable, so they can sell them (to people who for some reason keep buying them and throwing them away!) in places where disposable vapes are banned.
I had elevated white blood cells counts and I developed an autoimmune condition a few months after quitting vaping. I had good health record leading up to it and no family history of any autoimmune disorders. White blood cells eventually normalized but autoimmune is forever, although it's under control and I'm lucky that it was caught early.
In the final ~4 years of vaping I didn't use any flavorings either, just 70/30 mix of VG/PG and nicotine.
It's not terrible as far as vices go, much less harmful than the alternatives, but it's definitely not as harmless as I thought going in. I wish I hadn't started and went for the ADHD assessment right away instead of subconsciously self-medicating with nicotine.
No shit, I had no idea.
That explains a lot. I quit smoking (well, the first time I tried to quit) when I was 19 (2 years smoking). 3 months later I was in the hospital with sclerosing mesenteritis, a rare disorder for an older person but baffling and way out of left-field for a 19 year old with no prior history autoimmune issues. We only got a diagnosis after full exploratory surgery that earned me a six inch incision scar on my stomach.
Don't start smoking, kids.
I vaped for around 8 years, about 4 years with typical flavorings and the last 4 years unflavored. IME unflavored vaping really isn't that bad, I accidentally switched to it because I ran out of flavoring one time and after a few days I didn't really miss them anymore so I just stopped using them.
I would compare it to people who drink soda all day, they can't fathom how people can drink "boring" plain water all day and they have a really hard time switching, but people who are used to drinking water find it as refreshing and satisfying as anything.
I think these flavorings cause more harm by luring young people to start vaping than they help smokers by luring them away from cigarettes. In an ideal world adults would be allowed to vape whatever they want, and teens wouldn't be able to get their hands on vapes in any capacity, but clearly that's not working so I think that flavor bans are a decent compromise.
I don't buy the argument that flavor bans will make teens go back to smoking. Cigarettes taste awful, they make you smell terrible, they irritate your lungs far more, they're far more expensive. If I was a teen I would still pick up unflavored vaping over cigarette smoking any time, but I'd be less likely to get into vaping without the flavorings.
> A third of UK teenagers who vape will go on to start smoking tobacco, research shows, meaning they are as likely to smoke as their peers were in the 1970s.
> The findings suggest that e-cigarettes are increasingly acting as a “gateway” to nicotine cigarettes for children, undermining falling rates of teen smoking over the past 50 years.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/jul/29/third-of-uk-...
As far as I can tell, banning flavored vapes has had a significant impact on reducing vaping/smoking new users, which is the ultimate goal. People who are currently addicted should primarily be motivated to quit, not find better tasting alternatives
I noticed that in myself when I was trying to quit, vaping nicotine-free liquids helped my cravings more than nicotine itself. It didn't help the physical withdrawal symptoms but it mysteriously stopped the cravings for a while.
Having recently been reminded that it used to be common to see eviscerated VHS tapes by roads, I've been reminded that we'll always have people who litter.
In every place where plastic bags are banned, there’s a dramatic and obvious reduction in the amount of them clogging up trees, roads, fields, waterways, etc. If people need them for other purposes, they can buy them, while everyone else who doesn’t need them, doesn’t.
I also catch it on B roll footage in movies or shows from the 90s/2000s a lot. It’s a specific type of visual blight I rarely ever see after those ultra flimsy single use bags that could be carried dozens of miles on a gentle breeze were eliminated.
(This children's book was written basically at the tail end of the era where seeing a bag flying could conjure the imagination)
https://www.amazon.com/Bag-Wind-Ted-Kooser/dp/0763630012#ave...
The bag laws have done nothing but increase the consumption of plastic, since stores still go through nearly as many, but they’re 5x thicker now.
I predict that if you spend 10 minutes observing the checkouts in your supermarket you'll see exactly what I see: At least 75% of people buying new plastic bags for the transaction, and zero people depositing bags into the special bag recycling bin at the store - which in the US is basically the only place this type of plastic is even accepted for recycling.
And again, these bags appear to be 3-5x as thick as the old bags, so the bag law is a huge win for Big Plastic who sells more plastic than they used to, and it mostly goes into the landfill.
The solutions:
• Admit this is a failed policy
• Everyone everywhere stops being imperfect, forgetful and lazy -- 100% of the time.
California is still hoping for the latter to pan out!
One the liquid is low enough, the coil will burn a bit, and the whole thing should be disposed of.
One shop near me would take used ones and send them off to be properly taken apart and what not, but most people just toss them I suspect.
I don't know why people dispose of the whole thing rather than just changing the pod, but at least it's a boon for electronics hobbyists.
I am constantly walking past disposable vapes in the street, with their LEDs still shining.
I would be more fine with disposable vapes like this if almost all of them were recovered somehow, for the amount it subsidises production of Li-ion batteries.
On the other hand at least in the US, a deposit of a buck or two wouldn’t do much. California has that for cans and bottles, yet only maybe 10% of people turn them in. Most end up in curbside recycling (which doesn’t refund) or the garbage, indicating people don’t care about getting their nickel or dime back.
Let's put microcontrollers into disposable vapes.
I don't know if I'm sad or happy.
I think the bigger SOIC chip is probably the battery charge IC. And then maybe a gram or two of PCB epoxy. And the plastic in the battery pouch and membranes which you need anyway.
In terms of plastics waste volume, the casing and tank is probably nearly all of the content. So the problem is a disposable vape bring a thing at all, not really the microcontroller in there.
It feels mad and somehow wasteful that you can get a CPU at that price point, but the die itself is a tiny sliver of silicon. You can even embed an (even tinier) and weedier application-specific) IC in a paper metro ticket. Compute is just so ridiculously cheap that you can have a hundred of functional ICs for the cost of a single largish cup of hot bean water.
All for a device to help you develop health problems.
It is indisputable that anyone switching cigarette smoking to vaping is making a healthier choice.
Disposable vapes are an extreme failure of legislation, but this is a cool hack nonetheless!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45249287#45252845
Nice to see Perl get positive press. Fun project, Bogdan!
https://github.com/BogdanTheGeek/semihost-ip/blob/main/lib/u...
Disclaimer: I do know the answer, but I'd rather pretend that people actually follow the law.
My friend, that is a Portable Computer you are holding in Your Hands, and You are THROWING IT AWAY after ONE SINGLE USE?
Insane.
At least the fact that we got to this point in the first place is certainly an achievement for humanity as a whole?
Yet?
You can play Doom on an Atari 2600: https://forums.atariage.com/topic/323152-doom-the-2600-demak...
Just need to outboard a little extra RAM.
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of them…
And now you can spin that shit up for pennies an hour and then throw it all away when you are done.
Who would have seen that coming back in, what, 1998…
Very inspiring work btw !
The latest and fastest GPUs might be a marvel of technology, but so is the tech that let's us make and esp32 for almost nothing
(and it was slooooow and ugly!)
(If I understood the author correctly, y'know, not to speak for them)
Sometimes the only option is to laugh at your own expense! Clearly this is a sign. I should buy more juice next time. And maybe start smoking more actual cigs.
I've been (I am?) addicted to many substances, from fruit-flavoured nicotine juice through to heroin.
I find self-deprecating humour useful, personally. It helps me not wallow, to take the cravings less seriously. I of course wouldn't say the same about anyone who isn't me.
Because, as you say, someone who has an addiction isn't lesser than anyone else. It's a state of being that requires an awful lot of strength.
That said, having to use that strength on 'mango e-liquid' is, I think, funny in an absurdist way. We live in strange times!
I'm reminded of the project Tom7 put together a few years back where he used the surplus components inside a digital COVID kit as spare memory. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcJSW7Rprio
The actual web services behind the proxy run in their own containers and with proper isolation and firewall rules the effects of a security compromise are limited. At most an attacker will be able to take over the containers with an exploit (and they could do that with a VPS as well) but they won't be able to access the rest of the network or my secure internal systems.
If I was this guy and wanted to let people connect directly to my vapeserver I would simply host it on another vlan and port forward the HTTP connection. Even if someone manages to take over such an obscure system they're not going to be able to do much.
Why do you think it’s risky? Maybe we can talk about ways of securing it.
Like any server, it’s as safe as the server software (and its configuration).
The main thing is that, if someone gets onto the server system, then they're in my network and they can do attacks on other devices in that LAN (guest wifis are a nice way to isolate that nowadays; that didn't exist back when I started). Same as when I take my laptop to school for example, then others can reach it. I've had issues with others in school doing attacks because the internet was unencrypted http back then (client-side hashing in JavaScript limited the impact though), but not from anyone who tried to hack into the server. Only automated scans for outdated Wordpress, setup files for Phpmyadmin, ssh password guessing... the things they simply try blindly on every IP address. If any of this is successful, you're most likely going to be turned into a spam-sending server or a DDoS zombie; not something with lasting impact once you discover the issue and remove the malware
Most attackers don't do targeted attacks on your system or network unless you're a commercial entity that presumably can pay a nice ransom, or are a high-profile individual. Attackers aiming for consumers send phishing emails and create phishing advertisements, look for standard password vaults if you run their malware, try using stolen credentials on Steam and hope you've got a payment method stored... the usual old things. Having a server doesn't make any of those attacks easier, and besides, self hosting is very uncommon. Even if you and I had a similar enough setup at home with a straightforward path to exploitation, it's a few thousand people that self-host in a country with millions of people. It's not worth developing attacks for
How times change.
Once nearly every self respecting IT pro ran servers from there home network. The modern drive to outsource and consolidate the interweb to a handful of big players I find rather odd; perhaps even counterproductive in the long run.
It’s really hard to quite vaping btw.
[1]https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S027858461...
They put addictive stuff in vapes, because of course they do.
Vapes with pods are less expensive in the long run and offer a vastly superior vaping experience. You can get liquid for dirt cheap. If you smoke heavily, you might offset the initial investment in a week or two.
Disposable vapes offer zero advantages. They are only good if you want to "just try" it once or that is what you are going to tell yourself in your career of producing e-waste.
I stopped vaping a little while ago but when I did vape, there was no clear standard of pod systems. You sure could walk into a nearby smoke shop but it was unlikely that you'd find your ideal pod/coil/liquid.
It's hard to take back the convenience people have gotten used to. I think one idea could be that disposable vapes become recyclable vapes. They should cost $15 more and buyers should get back $10 when they return it for recycling. This is nicotine we're talking about so the buyer is always coming back anyway.
With the disposable it would always be a gamble how long they would last. I don't get how people manage. Do they buy multiples at once and carry them around?
It was so much more convenient to carry that small bottle of liquid with me and have the peace of mind that I wouldn't run out of juice for the night. Never had issues with spilled liquid.
Not having a standard for pods sucks but you don't need to buy them that often. I just ordered them online anyway.
Of course it might be a bit of a cultural difference as well. Most of my smoker friends roll their own cigarettes which is way more inconvenient.
Don't think Apple would go there, but who knows....