Marble water wheel to charge your phone

Marble water wheel to charge your phone

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Engineezy wanted to see if he could create a steel ball water wheel to charge a phone. He spends a surprising amount of time and effort getting the balls to roll smoothly and not jam (he takes inspiration from Wintergatan‘s marble machine). While the finished machine is an impressive feat of engineering, it (obviously) uses tons more electricity than it outputs.

It would have been interesting if he talked to some modern hydro power engineers or old water mill operators since it seems like there is a lot of overlap with hydro power generation and the problems he encountered when it came to extracting power from the balls.

Long term OLED burnin testing results

Long term OLED burnin testing results

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OLED displays are renown for their vibrant colors, popping contrast, perfectly dark blacks, wide viewing angles, and fast response times – making them great for game systems. The cons are that they are dramatically more expensive than LCD, tend to have a shorter lifespan as the organic elements degrade. Most importantly, though, like old plasma TV’s, they are notably susceptible to burn-in. But how much burnin?

Techspot has done a good job stress testing some popular OLED displays over the last 9 months. They have a great breakdown with lots of analysis and pretty good testing scheme.

They also do a good job of explaining things. They note that burn-in with OLEDs is directly related to hours of usage and is cumulative. Mixing in dynamic content between periods of static content usually won’t improve the burn-in results – it’s all related to the cumulative number of hours displaying the same static content on screen. Running at a lower brightness and using dark mode will extend the lifespan because burn-in is correlated to brightness output. The safety features in most OLEDs also seems to really help.

Conclusion: they give a relatively positive update on the burn-in after 9 months of heavy static content usage (around 2,000 to 2,300 hours of total use). They report visible signs of burn-in, but the level of degradation between their 6 month and 9 month reports have been relatively minimal.

The results are that for gaming and content consumption (watching movies/etc) – you should be fine. For those that are using it for work and lots of static work, they do note there are times you can see the burn-in on apps that have large sections of the same color. The task bar at the bottom has also shown to be problematic as are the way they arranged some side-by-side content as many do with large monitors.

But if we’re honest, we were expecting to see more burn-in after 9 months. The levels we’re seeing right now are still very tolerable, and with realistic, sensible usage, we think most people won’t run into proper burn-in problems within the first 12 to 18 months of usage on this sort of QD-OLED panel. Maybe some light burn-in here or there, a few edge cases where you’ll notice it, but nothing that ruins the experience.

I do agree with this statement though:

Getting two good years of usage out of an OLED, though… that’s probably not going to cut it when we’re talking about high-end, $1,000 monitors. 

That said all said, OLED is probably not for me right now. If I was just play games or watching movies it might be ok, but I do too much static productivity content all day and really love the flat, large Asus ROG 38″ 4K HDR 144Hz display I currently have (and was on a smoking sale for $499). I will probably keep the display for multiple years as I waterfall them down to other systems. The cost for a similar OLED is about $900–$1200 right now – making it about 2x more expensive.

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A fish chariot

A fish chariot

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The Youtube channel I did a thing got bored line fishing that he convinced himself he could pull a boat using fish. After time-wasting and some of the silliest conversations in the world, he succeeded. He gets them into their harnesses at 12:30 and then the maiden voyage of the fish chariot at 13:20.

Summary: Yes, it works. It takes 4 barramundi fish weighing a combined 16kg to pull a boat at 2km/h for 2 minutes. Then they slipped their harnesses and got away.

Still playing old games? Most other people are too

Still playing old games? Most other people are too

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Valve’s Year In Review for Steam revealed interesting statistics about its player base.

Only 15 percent of Steam players spent their time on games released in 2024. 47 percent of players devoted their time to games from the past 1-7 years (called “recent favorites”), and 37 percent played titles from eight or more years ago (“classics”).

While that seems low, it’s actually in line with historical trends. In fact, 2023 was particularly bad with players only spending 9% of time on games released in 2023. In 2022, players spent time on 17% of games released in 2022.

The ratio for ‘recent favorites’ for 2022 and 2023 were 19 percent and 52 percent, respectively, and ‘classics’ for each year were 62 percent and 38 percent.

YearTime spent on games released that yearRecent Favorites (1-7 years old)Classics (8+ years old)
202415%47%37%
20239%52%38%
202217%19%62%

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No more software engineer hiring in 2025?

No more software engineer hiring in 2025?

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Generative AI is reaching greater and greater heights. Google has proven that they can migrate software at rate of up to 80-90% faster by using AI assisted coding tools. More and more companies are finding AI assisted software development can dramatically help certain tasks and predict AI assisted development will soon be sweeping the industry.

Now Salesforce, Microsoft, Replit, Meta and other CEO’s are all saying they might not be hiring a lot more software engineers very soon.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has gone so far as saying Salesforce is looking at essentially freezing hiring for software engineers in 2025 owing to agentic AI: 

I think in engineering this year at Salesforce, we’re seriously debating maybe weren’t gonna’ hire anybody this year because we’ve seen such incredible productivity gains because of the agents that work side-by-side with our engineers, making them more productive. And we can all agree, software engineering has become a lot more productive in the last two years with these basically new models.

Mark Zuckerberg also piped with similar sentiments

In 2025, AI systems at Meta and other companies will be capable of writing code like mid-level engineers. at first, it’s costly, but the systems will become more efficient as time passes. eventually, AI engineers will build most of the code and AI in apps, replacing human engineers.

Microsoft Copilot Studio can now create new agents through Copilot Studio and integrate them into Copilot. Microsoft’s CEO said:

The way to conceptualize the world going forward is everyone of us doing knowledge work will use Copilot to do our work and we will create a swarm of agents to help us with our work and drive the productivity of our organizations.

Replit’s CEO Amjad Masad went even further by saying that ‘We don’t care about professional coders anymore’. They have grown their revenue five-fold in the last 6 months thanks to artificial-intelligence capabilities that enabled their new product called “Agent,” a tool that can write a working software application with nothing but a natural language prompt. “It was a huge hit,” Masad said.

So what’s a soon to be out of work software engineer to do?

A recent report by The World Economic Forum (WEF) and AI expert Tak Lo both estimate about 92 million workers are about to be displaced by AI, but claim there will be the creation of 170 million new jobs.

I always approach these reports skeptically. Just because you claim it will create new jobs doesn’t mean those that lost their jobs have the skills or capability to take one of those new jobs. Jobs that often require very different skills or appeal to very different people. In fact, they predict 39% of current skill sets will become outdated by 2030.

The report indicates that manual labor jobs will be the safest: construction, farmers, laborers, medical/nursing, truck drivers, etc. They claim that knowledge workers should be largely safe, but that’s definitely not what technology leaders are clearly saying – implying this rosy report is probably not right.

Cognitive decline?

Additionally, a study by Uplevel found that the productivity of developers hasn’t improved because of AI coding assistants, and their code has become more buggy.

Research is also starting to show that AI may be contributing to a decline of critical thinking skills:

The effects of AI on cognitive development are already being identified in schools across the United States. In a report titled, “Generative AI Can Harm Learning”, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania found that students who relied on AI for practice problems performed worse on tests compared to students who completed assignments without AI assistance. This suggests that the use of AI in academic settings is not just an issue of convenience, but may be contributing to a decline in critical thinking skills.

Greg Isenberg had an interesting interaction with a young Stanford grad who claimed he was forgetting words now due to his near constant use of chatGPT to finish his thoughts. https://twitter.com/gregisenberg/status/1869202002783207622

The new skills

There’s also a great article by Dev that outlines the mindset and skills developers will need to develop to stay relevant.

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Removing Portland’s hoboats in 2024

Removing Portland’s hoboats in 2024

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Portland’s homeless don’t just camp on the streets – they’re also living on ramshackle and abandoned boats at an ever-increasing rate. Unfortunately, they are a source of a lot of solid human waste and pollution – especially when they sink or are abandoned. Recently they’ve been parking them right in the middle of downtown right beside OMSI children’s museum or St Johns.

The problem is only getting worse. 44 boats were removed from the river in 2024 through funding from the Oregon State Marine Board and the American Rescue Plan Act. Over the past three years, a total of 88 boats were retrieved from the river including 25 in 2022 and 19 in 2023. It doesn’t help that the parks department is forced to store the boats for 30 days before they can clean up the mess.

Either way, it’s costing us millions to get rid of them.

In a step sideways; the city is spending a lot to dispose of voluntarily surrendered boats before they’re abandoned. It prevents them from being abandoned/taken by homeless, but still costs taxpayers to dispose of them.

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New kind of multi-color LED bulb

New kind of multi-color LED bulb

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There’s plenty of color changing bulbs out there – but they usually only display one color at a time. The Moonside Star-Bulb allows you to have mulitple colors from the same bulb. Make one side one color, the other side another, or have the colors rotate and move in interesting ways. Very resonable at only $37 per bulb.

Wayne Enterprises

Wayne Enterprises

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Are you a millionaire? Want to live the real Bruce Wayne lifestyle? Warner Bros partnered with a PR firm to create the luxury Wayne Enterprises company. How luxury? How about buying one of 10 real life, functional, Wayne Enterprises Tumblers – for a cool $2.9 million?

Or perhaps $20,000 custom chairs, $5,000 shoes, $120,000 wall clocks, $21,000 lamps, or $3,000 luggage? All of these ultra-luxury items are real and for sale.

Head over to Wayne Enterprises website and start living the luxury lifestyle you never knew existed.

Pixeldarts kickstarter

Pixeldarts kickstarter

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This is an interesting twist – instead of the old dartboard – how about a digital pixel art dart board. It can be programmed with images to change gameplay and to display art, data, and even play retro games.

It uses silicone suction darts with a sensor chip that can send data on its exact position on the board to keep score. They also plan to make NERF-compatible sensor darts.