Grandparent might be referring to Agaricus bisporus [0]. At least in my and some of the neighboring countries' languages we refer to these as <local transliteration of champignons>.
I would like to caveat that a bit. I'm running two Visionect screens at home (I really do love them, hardware-wise especially) from a similar setup (local Visionect server running on Raspberry Pi).
As far as I understand though, they have stopped offering support for non-subscribers, and they also seem to have stopped producing builds for ARM devices a couple of years ago (but the server software works even with new firmware versions). I am still betting on them supporting local installs for a while (based on my understanding that at least some of their corporate clients would want an on-prem solution), but am a little bit worried it might not be as openly available forever. I am therefore slowly researching my best migration path from a Raspberry Pi to some affordable and reasonably low powered x86 thing. Suggestions welcome.
P.S.: The biggest selling point for me compared with some other (more open) E-ink screens is the battery. I keep mine on the fridge with a magnet and can't really use one that needs to be plugged in all the time in the same place. If anyone knows of anything similar and controllable locally, I'd be very interested to read about it.
My significant other has been using it as their primary desktop computer for over 6 months now (with a probably-too-big computer screen attached to it). They use it to work on their PhD with LibreOffice and browse the internet (we have some "smartness" in our home and some common online tools we use, but all of those work as simple websites). It's been great, this is their first time seriously living with Linux and open source software. The form factor helped a lot with onboarding (it is quite cute, and the book that comes with it is a really nice addition for non-technical people, even if they never read-read it).
Their complaint is that Calc sometimes lags/hangs with a few thousand rows of heavily formatted data (they're not a data scientist, but still need to deal with government-issued xls[x] files). It wasn't a serious problem though and a great opportunity to "look under the hood" of what was happening and introduce them to CSV files. The other "problem" is that online shopping websites are often horribly slow, but again, I'd say there's a lesson in there and it could be viewed as a feature.
So all in all I am a huge fan. I think it's a great way to onboard people on good-enough-computing and open source. There is something magical about its form factor that resonates with "non-technical" people. Also quite cheap and accessible.
Not sure why you are downvoted (edit: were downvoted I guess), I think this is a great use for it. It's much more powerful than you'd think.
You are also one of the few that specifically gives a use case for the pi 400 (basically a Keyboard with a pi inside [0]), not just a normal pi, which I think has many other use cases (more server-y). The pi 400 is a desktop computer indeed.
I find the consistent use of the plural "they/their" really jarring and for some reason it stands out even more than normal in this post. I hope this fad will pass and people will finally accept that it is fine to say "he" or "she" again like has been done for centuries without problems. Considering that acceptance of differences - between male and female, between heterosexual and homosexual, between religious and secular, between "white" and "black" and between any other potential identity category - has been the focus of society for the past half century it is counterproductive (to say the least) to suddenly start hiding behind plural pronouns. This trend is even stranger when considering the fact that it has become fashionable to explicitly proclaim membership of other identity categories.
Language evolves naturally, true, but this tends to be a relatively slow process for larger changes like this. What we're dealing with here is not a natural evolution of language but a directed revolution. I prefer evolution over revolution, hence my counter-revolutionary language.
Change is change. It will stick or it will not. This seems like one that might stick.
I have to add, if someone is gay or straight, tall or short, black or white, fat or thin, or has any shade or variety of other attributes we don't immediately reveal that with a pronoun. Perhaps gender should be the same. Unless you think gender is special? In which case, well, maybe that is the problem.
Well, yes, sex - which is what I'm talking about - is "special" in the sense that it is a central and essential part of mammalian life, which we are but one example of. Without it none of us would be here after all.
The fact that what I wrote just now is considered to be "controversial" is a good indicator of the revolutionary drive behind the language change - had I written this 10 years ago nobody would have blinked an eye or if they would it would have been for me stating an obvious fact.
Honestly it kind of seems like you just want it to be controversial. You’re post was off topic (as you prefaced) and I just don’t think it’s constructive.
Anyway, “they” is a perfectly natural way to refer to a person of unspecified gender. I wish HN posters used “they” more often instead of just assuming everyone is male
Sure, but gender-neutral pronouns aren't special. True, English hasn't recently had one. Now, it seems, it does. Why is that a big deal? Just because trendy people think it's a good idea?
Well, I'm not super trendy and on balance I'm in favour of it.
But neither of our views will carry much weight in the long run. It's not up to us.
Also, I have to say, there's a lot of stuff that used to be treated as "obvious fact" that was hugely prejudiced.
Imo a very good "alternative" perspective to Thinking: Fast and Slow (very well researched and very well argued, although the basic premise was quite unintuitive - to me at least - it only started to "click" towards the end of the book) on how (evolved, human) reason might work is the book The Enigma of Reason by Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber. It was suggested to me by an American forensics professor and was probably one of the most important books I read in 2019. I don't want to hype it too much, but I sort of also do. I highly recommend it even (or especially) if you won't agree with everything they have to say. It's quite long, but totally worth the time and effort.
I would just like to point out that the existence of (what I assume you mean when you say) "objective ethics" isn't a sure thing. I don't mean to imply that ethical nihilism (basically saying ethics aren't "a thing") is the only way forward though. We can probably assign ethical value to human action even (some would say especially) if "objective ethics" don't exist.
Another meme covering an (at least slightly) overlapping set of guidelines/ideas is "humane technology". Not saying it's the same thing as what all of you mean, but we shouldn't forget that our tools impact non-users as well (i.e. people who never used Uber feel its impact still).
Maybe it's because the claim that the smartest, toughest, bestest people win in capitalism has little to no grounding in reality.
The article is basically begging the question of what capitalist markets prefer in terms of "properties" its actors should "hold". I don't know of any evidence that contemporary capitalism rewards "intelligence" apart from pop cultural and ideological claims. In that sense, the conclusions presented are in no way "new" or "informative".
It's just a restatement of a deeply seated wish that we could somehow explain away the largely immoral differences in the standard of living with some property suposedly outside of moral consideration (intelligence, gender, race - it doesn't really matter).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agaricus_bisporus