Recurring revenue, K-factor, long shelf life and low actuation rate.
Few verticals outside of video storage could support a monthly subscription putting negative pressure on supporting a shipped product.
Most smart home products are anti-social and had a low k-factor. You don’t want to share access to your scale to more than a handful (2?) people. This makes market adoption slower than a social networking app.
Touched on in the video but median shelf life for these $200 products is 8 years. Thats very “bad” relative to most other consumer hardware. Especially say a $1500 smartphone that’s replaced every 2 years.
Actuation rates on many categories are abysmal. Your smart smoke detector may go years without sending you a message. Compare to say screentime for ChatGPT on mobile averaging hours per day.
Interestingly a lot of those floundering smart home products became thriving businesses when pivoting to smart office focus. Subscriptions go up, user counts go up, utility goes up.
Watched this when it came out. I felt like it had that typical Technology Connections problem where it will take one under explored point along a Pareto frontier and conflate it for the global optimal design.
At least that was my experience with the toaster, microwave, and dishwasher detergent episodes.
While Hybrid System II is very clever and non-intuitive coming from an ICE or EV frame of reference there are reasons even Toyota hasn’t placed all their chips on this bet. In fact as Japan’s largest manufacturer they want to have a bet on every point of Pareto frontier which is why Toyota makes cars with their own competing iForce hybrid design (I’m a big fan of the generator + torque assist), hydrogen cars, electrics, plug in hybrids, diesels, propane and yes gas.
Specifically Hybrid System II is best if you can 1) only have one car 2) don’t have a place to charge it 3) do lots of starts and stops driving around town.
This recent article[1] answers a lot of these questions with great photos too. I would go so far to say it’s the most authoritative piece to date. Previously [2].
I mean there are multiple, multiple boundaries in place for this reason. I’d start by saying most “in the middle of the night” updates target non-safety critical systems in the car like the IHU. The update I received last night has a build date of 2024 reflecting extensive validation before general availability in 2026. It was field tested in limited markets after factory validation and had staged rollouts through dealers before going to general OTA availability.
Independently, I had to take my car into the dealer to get a safety critical recall installed via Ethernet that affected a braking system in certain edge cases and this was not installable OTA “in the night”.
While, yes, I am annoyed that the dealer price for my “infotainment” unit is $2k and reflects the technical specs of a 2016 mid tier android tablet running Intel cores; I do feel that vehicle is far safer with its airbags, 360 camera, lane keeping, and AEB on net than my 1970’s classic.
While the fire resulted in the total loss of the house it was actually the water from the fire department not the heat that did proportionally more damage.
As a mental model you shouldn’t think of it as “what if my house burns down?” so much as “what if nice strangers roll up to my windows and chainsaw through my roof and spray 50,000 gallons of water in here?”
Yes everything in the mechanical room melted but everything in the rest of the house got hot, smoky, soaked and then moldy.
For root of trust materiel like social security cards, cash, passports put in a ziplock bag in a fireproof, waterproof safe. But for other storage I use clear “Ezy Storage” brand stackable 50L tubs labeled with Homebox QR codes. In the US, Target and Home Depot frequently stock them. I am very anti black and yellow tubs.
The majority of work post-fire goes to itemizing your house inventory for insurance. Even cataloging all your bathroom’s soaps by brand name rather than generic can make $100 difference. Multiply that by 500x different things.
From a threat model perspective I look at rooms from a “what would be salvageable in here if I emptied a swimming pool’s worth of water from some fire sprinklers”. Furniture and TVs are easy to replace. Other stuff less so.
I’ve seen it a lot in ‘90’s hacker / net adjacent cultures. It always reads as gen-x/elderly tech millennial to me - specifically post 1993 net culture but prior to mass adoption of autocorrect.
It was the norm on irc/icq/aim chats but also, later, as the house style for blogs like hackaday.
Now I read it as one would an hear an accent (such as a New England Maritime accent) that low-key signifies this person has been around the block.
Even more recently is a minor signifier that this text was less likely generated by llm.
That unreplicability between chips is actually a very, very desirable property when fingerprinting chips (sometimes known as ChipDNA) to implement unique keys for each chip. You use precisely this property (plus a lot of magic to control for temperature as you point out) to give each chip its own physically unclonable key. This has wonderfully interesting properties.
Thanks. Higham explicitly addresses the authors substitution crime in section 2.5. Wonderful resource.
My complaint stems more to the general observation that readability is prized in math and programming but not emphasized in traditional education curriculum to the degree it is in writing.
Bad style is seldomly commented on in our profession.
I wish there was a Strunk and White for mathematics.
While by no means logically incorrect, it feels inelegant to setup a problem using variables A and B in the first paragraph and solve for X and Y in the second (compounded with the implicit X==B, and Y==A).
While I understand the spirit of this comment, if you look at the fossil record you’ll see that’s objectively not true.
Roughly half of the shifts in the last 11 evolutionary periods, over the last 500 million years, were caused by changes that occurred in a-few-hours-to-a-few-thousand-years with 75%-90% species lost.
Aside from the skin lotion thing[1] that got popular recently, what is the state of the art in 2025 for allergy prevention? It feels like there is a lot of common ignorance in this space but literature is full of better practice.
A few ways. This particular project is doing it by hand and very tedious.
The traditional way of transplanting large trees while keeping the root system intact is with a hydrovac. A machine the size of a jet engine that liquifies the soil with water and then vacuums it up. [1]
More recent developments have tried using an AirSpade which doesn’t use water but compressed air to blow apart and then suck the soil without making a slurry which is better as the soil can be redeposited in the same hole rather than discarded[2]
Few verticals outside of video storage could support a monthly subscription putting negative pressure on supporting a shipped product.
Most smart home products are anti-social and had a low k-factor. You don’t want to share access to your scale to more than a handful (2?) people. This makes market adoption slower than a social networking app.
Touched on in the video but median shelf life for these $200 products is 8 years. Thats very “bad” relative to most other consumer hardware. Especially say a $1500 smartphone that’s replaced every 2 years.
Actuation rates on many categories are abysmal. Your smart smoke detector may go years without sending you a message. Compare to say screentime for ChatGPT on mobile averaging hours per day.
Interestingly a lot of those floundering smart home products became thriving businesses when pivoting to smart office focus. Subscriptions go up, user counts go up, utility goes up.