Electronics usually wants to control the temperature range more tightly than a butane soldering iron could do. Fine for plumbing work, though. Electronics soldering irons usually don't have the thermal mass to handle plumbing work.
My biggest complaint about the ts100, Pinecil, and the iFixit station is that the tips are specialized and rather expensive.
I have a ts100, and the barrel plug is loose enough that it sometimes disconnects in the middle of working and loses its temperature setting. Got a Pinecil to replace it, but haven't used it much yet.
Firmware was always there in a soldering iron more sophisticated than an old, dumb Radio Shack wall plug iron. That's how you get good temperature control. Pinecil is just letting you modify it officially.
How precise are you talking? Usually, cheaper soldering stations get that way by not having a lot of thermal mass, which is particularly needed for desoldering. Otherwise, the PID control tends to keep things good enough. Tuning the PID parameters can make a difference, but once you have a heater and a heat sensor, the software is more or less the same for everyone.
You're probably adding $25-35 to that for a USB-C power supply that can handle it, but yes, it's cheaper than this. $50-75 if you want it battery powered.
But yeah, I'm not sure what iFixit is bringing to the market that's better than what exists.
How about some kind of federated alternative instead? But maybe with a better pricing model than what Lemmy does, where instances have 1% of their users tossing in a few bucks, and many smaller instances have the operators paying for most of it out of their own pocket. This would take a lot more bandwidth, storage, and CPU/GPU than a Lemmy instance would.
This is what I expect to happen when AI gives solutions to climate change. Which is what Sam Altman bangs on about in interviews to justify all the power AI models are taking up.
The solutions are all sitting right there. What people actually want is solutions that cost about three fity and don't require any lifestyle changes. ChatGPT will just tell us about all the solutions sitting there, but that's not the answer people like Altman want.
Here, I'll make a lot of you oblivious folk feel better about yourselves. I've been propositioned at a house sex party and I was still completely oblivious.
USB in 1996: Let's make one connector that handles everything
USB in 2024: Let's make one connector do thirty different incompatible combinations of things
The Caprica spinoff, you mean? It was really slow for most of the season, suddenly picked up at the end and got really good, and then it was canceled.
Case in point: another Battlestar Galactica reboot is apparently in the works.
Why is this a need? The constant push for better and better has not been healthy for humanity or the planet. Exponential growth was always going to hit a ceiling. The limit on Moore's Law has been more to the economic side than actually packing transistors in.
Sure you can, today, and this is why:
Regardless of the reasons, the AAA space is going to have to pull back. Which is perfectly fine by me, because their games are trash. Even the good ones are often filled with micro transaction nonsense. None of them have innovated anything in years; that's all been done at the indie level. Which is where the real party is at.
Would it be so bad if graphics were locked at the PS4 level? Comparable hardware can run some incredible games from 50 years of development. We're not even close to innovating new types of games that can run on that. Planet X2 is a recent RTS game that runs on a Commodore 64. The genre didn't really exist at the time, and the control scheme is a bit wonky, but it's playable. If you can essentially backport a genre to the C64, what could we do with PS4 level hardware that we just haven't thought of yet?
Yeah, there will be worse graphics because of this. Meh. You'll have native 4K/144Hz just by nature of pulling back on pushing GPUs. Even big games like Rocket League, LoL, and CS:GO have been doing this by not pushing graphics as far as they can go. Those games all look fine for what they're trying to do.
I want smaller games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less, and I'm not kidding.