It was nice knowing Raspberry Pi while they lasted. Going to suck losing something that has changed the homegrown embedded system hobby forever.
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Sooner or later capitalism ruins everything.
Then it’s a good thing that no countries have pure capitalism for their economy.
We need regulation on corporations to keep them in check.
I can’t wait till those regulations get enforced.
You’re right. You CAN’T wait for it.
Because waiting for it would imply it would eventually happen.
If you’re having trouble finding when it is enforced you can look at websites like this one that list out the many cases brought up against companies (for the U.S. at least).
then it’s a good thing that no countries have pure capitalism for their economy
America: 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🦅🦅🦅
America doesn’t have a pure capitalist economy.
A pure capitalist economy would have a free market system with no government intervention.
Almost every country has a mix between capitalism and socialism for their economies.
A pure capitalist economy is terrible just as much as a pure socialist economy would be terrible.
The trick is finding the right balance between the two.Government doing things ≠ socialism.
Government regulating things ≠ socialism
Roads and parks ≠ socialism
Socialism is based in the collective ownership of companies by the workers who make everything happen, rather than execs and managers. Socialism isn’t when government does stuff or when healthcare.
I’m just going off of the definition here:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/socialism
any of various egalitarian economic and political theories or movements advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods.
We definitely don’t have a pure capitalist economy since that would mean that there is no government intervention in the market.
And we do have parts of the economy that are owned/run by the government as socialism would suggest.
What would you call it, if not a mix of capitalism and socialism? Maybe a mix of Capitalism and Communism would be more accurate?
This article would seem to suggest that: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/economy.asp
I would argue that the very means of communist ownership relying on the state means that state capitalism is the means in which communism is reached, and the Soviet Union definitely aligned closer to that, but this is a topic of dispute with scholars.
I like how enraged you were that your comment just abruptly ends. It comes off like you were ranting in front of a microphone and got so worked up you walked away mid-rant. Just ranting down the hallway, and down the street…but we don’t hear it, because you’re away from the microphone.
It’s supposed to be in the style of those “socialism is when government does stuff” memes. That’s pretty much how all of them end
Never seen one.
Youre thinking of laissez-faire capitalism, maybe even libertarian capitalism?
America is absolutely capitalist in every sense of the term. The entire nation is corporatized and the government has no particularly influential anti-capitalist entities. Both competing parties are capitalist. The social framework by which we raise children is structured to indoctrinate them into the ideologies of neoliberalism and American economic exceptionalism. The propaganda that American society is meritocratic is enforced throughout our entire lives, all with the aim of suppressing the class consciousness of the working class.
People are responding to you with derision because what you’re saying doesn’t make any sense. Capitalism and socialism are not based entirely on hard rules. They’re both economic ideologies and social philosophies packaged into cultural frameworks. America is actively anti socialist. They have a very long history of anti communism and anti workers’ rights. America is the holotype of post-Reagan neoliberal capitalism. It is one of the worst countries in the world in terms of wealth disparity and income inequality. It is one of the least regulated economic powers in history, with it being open knowledge that billionaires rule the country and can essentially do anything they want without facing any kind of material consequences.
When I say pure capitalism, yes, I’m referring to laissez faire capitalism.
I can’t think of any countries that currently have that, and I don’t think we should want that.
Socialism is likely not the best term here, but when I’m referring to it economically I mean in the sense that the government has ownership of some businesses and is regulating other businesses as opposed to what would happen with laissez-faire capitalism.
Perhaps it is better to say that the U.S. is a mix between Capitalism (a market economy) and Communism (a command-based economy) as this article explains? https://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/economy.asp
It is one of the worst countries in the world in terms of wealth disparity and income inequality.
That has not been my experience when visiting/living in other countries, but I am curious if you have some data to back this statement up?
Although I do agree that we have a problem with wealth disparity and income inequality.
I think we should look to other countries that have much higher levels of happiness (Such as Sweden) compared to the U.S. and try to imitate what they are doing.
Even in the case of looking to economies like what Sweden has, it is still a mixed economy. So completely doing away with capitalism is not something we should be striving for.
There is no aspect of the US that is in any sense communist. Communism refers very specifically to a style of government which directly owns and controls the means of production across all forms of industry. This style of government is controlled by the proletariat. That is not the case for any industry in the US. The link you provided is propaganda not based on any actual communist beliefs. Communism is not a “command based” anything, it is a philosophy with regards to the distribution of the means of production and how the fruits of the working class’s labor should be shared.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/gini-coefficient-by-country
The US gini coefficient is 39.8 as of 2021. Making it one of the worst countries in the world for income inequality. There are plenty of areas in the southern states especially where entire towns are below the poverty line, some very significantly below it.
Well the U.S. isn’t entirely capitalist either.
On one extreme you have a completely free market economy. On the other extreme you have an economy that’s completely controlled by the government (such as Communism).
A pure free market economy doesn’t really exist anywhere among all the countries, what we have instead are a lot of countries that try to find the right balance between letting the market control itself and having the government control the market.
So call it whatever you want, but the US does have a mixed economy when placed on that scale.
The US gini coefficient is 39.8 as of 2021. Making it one of the worst countries in the world for income inequality.
I don’t know how you can say it’s one of the worst when it’s not even in the bottom third in that list of 162 countries.
According to that source, the worst country is South Africa with a Gini coefficient of 63.0.
The best country is Norway with a Gini Coefficient of 22.7.
The US. Ranks 57th with a Gini coefficient of 39.8.
If anything that places it in the middle rather than “one of the worst”.
Regulated capitalism is still capitalism. There’s no such thing as “pure” or “impure” capitalism, the social relationships to capital are the same. Lassiez-faire capitalism is just a flavour of it.
It’s like ice-cream: you may prefer chocolate ice-cream over vanilla ice-cream, but they are both flavours of ice-cream and you wouldn’t say “yea, that’s not pure ice-cream”. Some people may even dislike ice-cream altogether and prefer cheesecake.
Imagine a scale, on one end is a market economy where the government does not regulate it in any way, and does not own any part of it in any way. This is pure capitalism/laissez fair capitalism, whatever you want to call it. And you are correct, it does not exist today in any country (and that’s a good thing in my opinion).
On the other end of that scale would be an economy that is completely controlled/owned/regulated by the government (for example, communism).
In economic terms, every country falls on that scale with some balance between a completely free market economy and how much regulation they impose as well as what kind of industries they control/own.
If someone is going to blame capitalism for “ruining everything” they are basically asking for a market system where everything is controlled/owned by the government. Where monopolies are rampant, and the citizens have no choice except for what the government or dictatorship has decided. In my opinion, this is also a bad choice.
If I am wrong about what they are asking for, feel free to point out the economy of a country that they are saying we should follow. In other words, if not capitalism, what are you asking for?
I’m a commie, so I’m all for social ownership of the means of production, but that’s neither here nor there. The point is, there isn’t a scale of how pure capitalism is: a Keynesian model is as capitalistic as laissez-faire is because the underlying relationships to capital are the same. Communism isn’t at the other end of any scale because it’s an entirely different model, not just more or less regulation.
Some may argue that no country is socialist because they are still transitioning, and that they are still capitalist, but that’s not a scale: they are not socialist (yet, hopefully) because their mode of production is still capitalistic.
You’re downvoted, maybe because people think you promoted the current system (I don’t see that), but what you wrote is technical correct.
The US has less regulations than it used to have, but there are still rules (e.g. laws against insider trading and stock manipulation, labour laws, consumer and environmental protection etc.).
Unfortunately the existing rule are being gamed into oblivion and I’m not saying they are sufficient nor do I deny their decline. I’m just saying it could (and maybe will) be worse than now.
In America, the government intervention is whatever corporations pay politicians to say and do… it’s actually worse than pure Capitalism and they managed, through regulatory capture, to turn the government against the people or competition for their paymasters
The fact that regulations make capitalism less dangerous doesn’t mean that capitalism is fine as long as its regulated.
Hand grenades have a tonne of safety features, but you wouldn’t let your kid play with one. “Safer” isn’t the same thing as “safe”.
What would you propose as being better than the mix of capitalism and socialism that almost every country already has for their economy?
Both extremes lead to terrible outcomes.
Has any country actually TRIED anarchy? I know it sounds terrible on paper, but like…could it possibly be any worse then whatever the fuck north korea is doing? The dictator and his dogs eat very well. Nice beef meals. Whereas the citizens are more like prisoners within a country. Most never even seeing beef because it’s too expensive.
Would their lives actually be any worse off if there was just no government, no police, no military, no rules, just everybody for themselves?
Because it kind of seems like they got nothing to lose. It be an amazing case study.
There was the Capitol Hill Occupied Protest. It’s not a whole country going anarchist and no doubt the limited amount of people with the nessisary skill sets to have a functioning society (judging from the food garden they set up) held back the viability of the protest, but in general the Capitol Hill Occupied Protest was widly seen as a wild failure.
It’s an interesting thing to look up on, and I’d definitely recommend anyone who is serious about anarchism to study it for the potential pit falls of an anarchist society that they would need to work out first.
“Listen, we already watered down our deadly poison a little and it’s still killing us. Unless you have a better idea we’ll just have to keep drinking deadly poison.”
I’d let my kid play with a grenade. Then again, I don’t have kids by choice, so to imply I had kids would be to imply that at some point something went terribly wrong. But rectified in the most absurd method possible.
Plus, you couldn’t go to jail for child abuse, because what parent is “double checking” that the grenade he’s playing with is in fact a toy? BECAUSE WHERE THE HELL DOES THIS 3 YEAR OLD GET A GRENADE???
That logic would track in court. A very sad, very bizzare set of circumstances. That theres no way you could blame the parent for.
And so begins “Line must go up” and the inevitable enshittification .
That began in 2020 for them.
It’s how you get to the IPO … so yeah
ootl-- what happened in 2020?
During covid they essentially stopped selling to people and only sold to corporations with big orders which caused ridiculous scalping whenever a measly batch dropped for consumers. It wasn’t until around the end of last year that people were able to buy them at regular prices again.
I’m willing to bet they’ll start adding telemetry features in RPiOS for “quality purposes” a few years from now.
They already have that proprietary and opaque GPU that has full memory access akin to the Intel ME, and its programming is very difficult to audit. There has been something quite fishy about them ever since they left their educational mission behind after the Pi 1 and went for-profit.
Isn’t the GPU documented now?
https://docs.broadcom.com/doc/12358545
There are reverse engineered docs as well: https://github.com/hermanhermitage/videocoreiv
AI nonsense privacy disrespecting “feature” coming next week
Announcing: Raspberry pi recall
Yeah, expect nothing more than enshitification. That way, if they don’t enshitify like every company does, then we’ll be pleasantly surprised.
The nice thing about being a pessimist is that you are always either right, or pleasantly surprised.
Not with my luck
That’s the spirit!
The shit winds are coming, Randy
Tech companies as soon as they are publicly traded:
Let the enshitification begin!
The Pi5 is already a shitshow with crazy power usage requiring a special power supply instead of a normal USB C phone charger.
We’re lucky that the SBC space has gotten really solid over the last couple years. ARM-based, X86-based, and even some RISC-V systems.
The PI isn’t the only only game in town now, and actually gets beat in several different applications depending on use case.
As shareholder value and line-must-go-up takes over the company culture, progress and innovation will happen more and more in the hands of companies and orgs that actually care about their product’s quality and features.
Still disappointing though, the Pi was my first introduction to IoT and low power computing.
Yeah I’d take a 3b-ish PI for say 30€ any day (IDK if that’s realistic pricing). If I need beefy hardware I just use a PC?
The Pi4 had a good price on release. Then Covid hit.
With the Pi5 the Pi foundation is just milking it. Overpriced chip on an inefficient outdated 28nm process node.
They’ve crossed the event horizon of enshitification.
N100 mini PCs are where it’s at these days anyways. Unless you need the GPIO pins or are running some weird niche configuration, you’re better off grabbing any N100, they’re cheaper too.
I look for broken but working sff/tiny deals. Scored a sweet i5 7500 /16gb system for $100CAD. Just had a broken audio port I was never going to use.
The fool you will be revealed to be once I complete my Ethernet Over Audio implementation.
Ethernet Over Audio
Isn’t that just a telephone modem?
No, silly, that’s Audio Over Ethernet! /j
Oh boy, you’ve got a lot of protocols you can borrow for your OSI layer 1. ribbitradio and the telephone modem spec.
It is I! USB-C-MAN! Begone with you foul villain!
I just want you to know this is one of my favorite comments of all time.
After some light searching, am I missing something? I don’t see n100 cheaper than rpi 5
Yeah, they’re nearly twice the price.
Far more capable though, and typically specced with 16GB RAM and a 500GB SSD.
You’re forgetting to include the Pi heatsink, the Pi power supply and the Pi enclosure.
Yeah good point, adds $10-$30 on top of rpi
Cheapest I’ve seen was $105
PIs are kind of screwed from N* on the higher power end and ESP32 (or similar high power micro controllers) the lower end.
It’s become an underpowered middle player no one needs.
It was good while it lasted. PI3’s for $30 we’re amazing.
GPIOs are the easy bit. You can get those no issue on x86. It’s I2C and SPI that are the issue with x86. You can get the buses sure, but all the device drivers are Device Tree based. You can’t just throw in Device Tree overlays on x86.
Added benefit of most using low power intel CPUs
They’re not actually lower powered, they just have a TDP limit set.
E.g. A 8500 and 8500T will idle at the same power consumption, but the 8500T has a TDP limit set.
I have a pi 4, how would the transfer work? Can you install pios on the n100 and just clone stuff over?
N100 is a standard Intel x86 family chip, so no. Plenty of power though, so you’d be able to install any Linux distro or even Windows if you wanted to disgust Lemmy.
Can you swap the hard drive between any generation and still have it boot and work 100%? To me that was the second biggest feature after all the gpio and i2c buses I used to hack all manner of stuff together. Heck I even have a cargo trailer powered by a pi!
Or get a used Thinkcentre tiny, way cheaper. Some have a serial out too.
I picked up a radxa zero last year and have been quite enjoying it. the hardware is better than a pi zero but costs less. same with a lot of other SBCs
but raspberry pi has a lot of inertia behind it, a lot of software and hardware support. people will keep using them, just like they keep using Ubuntu, even though it’s a soulless corporate husk of what it one was
As long as I’m not locked into using their OS on their hardware I’ll still be interested. I have a 3,4&5 doing various tasks around my house and enjoy the little boards.
I had never heard of radxa. Looks awesome!
Orange PI comes to mind, getting better over time too.
When a company takes on shareholders, whatever goals, mission, or ethos they had is erased. They now exist as a vehicle to make as much money as possible at literally any cost. That’s it. Was nice while it lasted.
Literally my exact first thought, but you were more eloquent.
Everyone here seems pretty negative on this news. Any particular reason?
Going publicly traded fucks every company up with nextquarter-itis.
Mostly that IPOs put companies into ‘infinite growth mode’ which is obviously impossible, so their product just degrades over time. They can’t just do ‘good enough’ anymore.
Also the reason why every company that is consistently ‘good’ is run privately. If you answer to nobody but yourself you have a lot more room for long term plans
The real sad thing is that you and the person you replied to are talking like “publicly traded” and “private” are the only two options, because worker cooperatives are so rare everybody forgets about them.
For me anything “private” just means you can’t buy shares publicly. Worker cooperatives would be included in that (since you need to be a worker to own a “share”)
And those go public anyway. I used to work for the largest employee owned company.
Costco might be an exception here, though may degrade once the leading team dies or exits.
Well, the founder made death threats and I for one believe him.
Wut. When was this?
If I ever become famous, I hope it’s for a quote with context as great as this.
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I heard someone suggested they raise the price of the $1.50 hot dog…and he just lost it.
…/shitpost
Just because you are private, doesn’t mean that you answer only to yourself. It depends on how the company is structured and what shares (if any) the leadership holds. In some cases it can be worse because the person who has the shares to force you to do what they want will be able to keep their position without any oversight. Boards in public trades companies are at least public.
Discord is a great example of this. They are privately held and their quality is starting to go down.
Shout-out to Patagonia.
Raspberry pi foundation was launched as a charity, and the end goal was to produce a ton of very cheap computers to help children learn about programming. Since then, it has been soo ubiquitous for embedded stuff that for the last couple of years they have basically become unaffordable for the very audience they were intended for. Now they are seeking an ipo because they are used in everything, except as cheap computers for children.
Are they really used in a bunch of stuff? I still onlt see them included in hobby/homelab/maker/education stuff.
Every time a company goes public, they become more and more profitable until the only way to continue on that trajectory is to worsen their own product.
Think they’ll still be selling the Pico for $4 or the Zero for $15 after they’re reporting to shareholders?
Big pharma companies jack up the prices of life saving medicine that’s been affordable for decades and don’t lose a bit of sleep. You bet your ass a hobby electronics company will jack up prices as far as they think they can.
Price is one thing but the push for returns on investments is massive, this means that it’s time to start cutting corners on everything (except maybe marketing! Yea!). Quality, repairability, and innovation all start to crumble.
Don’t call Raspberry a hobbyist electronics company. Their primary consumer has been business and enterprise customers for years now, industrial/controls companies jumped all over the pi as a super easy drop-in board that can be programmed by any code monkey.
The Pi hardware shortage of the last few years has mostly been because of this demand, with Raspberry openly saying they were prioritizing bulk corporate orders foe their production volume over hobby consumers. Fuck the little guy, Pi is dead.
Going public introduces shareholders that prioritizes return on investment as opposed to making technology and knowledge about technology accessible for many.
It doesn’t always end this way but often enough to worry about it…
Because the more commercial they get, the more they stray from their original purpose as a charity to provide low-cost machines for kids to learn about computer science.
First there was the Dynabook, then OLPC, then Raspberry Pi, and now we’ve basically got to start over yet again because enshittification is imminent.
In Tech, an IPO means the business is market ready to be sold off in pieces, ie stocks. The people who buy the product don’t care what it does, they use the product maker as a vehicle to more growth and profit. Typically that means the people who now own the business make poor choices about cost cutting, like off shoring support and removing unuseful documentation while removing people with critical tribal knowledge about processes. Each step the new owner takes will be to make the business more profitable, and in the world of business, the only thing they care about are the numbers and not the environment or people that created those numbers.
Opening up to institutional investment means opening yourself up to ownership by a culture that demands infinite growth. In recent years this has gotten particularly bad; with the rise in interest rates, stocks can no longer deliver moderate growth and still be considered worthwhile investments. Everything is either a rocketship to the moon, or its a sell. Combine that with a string of US court cases that have interpreted tge law in such a way as to foster the belief that its illegal for companies to put anything ahead of shareholder value, and what you get is a top down imperative to squeeze the maximum profit out of everything. When you see Microsoft mulling over ideas like putting ads in your start menu, or EA talking about in-game advertising, this is why. When you see Spotify raising prices multiple times while crowing about how their content production costs are basically non-existent and changing their contracts so that smaller artists literally don’t get paid for their music, this is why.
They did spend the last few years screwing over any customer that wasn’t some giant corporation on a product that was originally created as a low cost tool for educational purposes.
They think that it’s gonna ruin the company
And they’re right.
There are a high proportion of far-left types on here. I could see them wanting something to be government-owned or something. But wanting a company to be privately-owned rather than publicly-owned seems odd to me.
And the “enshittification” comments seem odd too.
“Enshittification” isn’t some sort of catch-all term for a company doing worse. Doctorow coined it to refer to a point where a company that had been losing money to grow a customer base ends the rapid-growth phase and starts monetizing that base.
That makes business sense for some companies with low marginal costs and high fixed costs, and especially where there is network effect, like social media companies.
But here, the company is profitable, and not unreasonably so. Like, they don’t have a monetization phase that they need to transition to.
In 2023 alone, Raspberry Pi generated $266 million in revenue and $66 million in gross profit.
Raspberry Pi priced its IPO on the London Stock Exchange on Tuesday morning at £2.80 per share, valuing it at £542 million, or $690 million at today’s exchange rate.
We’re mostly negative on publicly traded companies because their ceo is legally obligated to squeeze blood from a stone or they quite literally will get sued by the shareholders, plenty of examples out there. The exceptions are usually there because the previous owners wrote contracts, etc to help keep the company as it was prior but even then it only works for so long. Check out Ben and Jerry’s and their whole debacle on the subject.
There are certain fiduciary obligations that CEOs hold to shareholders. But on the flip side, if someone opposes the transition of privately-owned companies to being publicly-owned, then their position is that only the wealthy, those who can outright own a company rather than only part of it, via shares, may own companies. That seems quite like a policy exceptionally loaded towards the wealthy. It would make capital much harder to get, so it would be harder for someone who wants to start a company to do so. Only very wealthy entities – stuff like very wealthy families – would be able to own companies of any significant size. They would have little competition for their capital, and would be able to demand extremely favorable terms for it. Less-wealthy people would be intrinsically disadvantaged by their inability to must outright buy companies. Less capital availability would tend to impact wages negatively.
It seems to me stupendously at odds with the sort of thing that I would expect someone on the left end of the spectrum to want.
So, what are the alternatives?
https://lemux.minnix.dev/c/sbcs
There are so many!
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn’t work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !sbcs@lemux.minnix.dev
There’s tons of similar SBC’s out there from Chinese manufacturers, like Orange Pi, Banana Pi, etc; usually using mediatek RISC-V or rockchip ARM processors. They’re all poorly supported on the software and documentation side though and take more work to get going, which has always been where Raspberry shined- nobody else has made embedded computing so easily accessible with click and go OS options and continuous kernel maintenance.
Probably the only board closest to software parity is the pine64 boards… but it’s still not quite as good.This is the key point for alternatives. None seem to have the community and support (docs, s/w quality etc) that is remotely close to that of the Raspberry Pi.
Guess the community for some of these is about to get much bigger. I’m not in the market for an SBC but this is a big negative against the Pi.
They have more features though, like extra Ethernet, PCIe brackets and M2 slots on the board
Those features don’t mean shit if you can’t use a modern OS after a couple of years.
Why could you not run a modern OS after a couple of years? Those SBC manufacturers did not invent an entirely new processor architecture for their computers, you can just generically compile the kernel (plus maybe some slight device tree work).
you can just generically compile the kernel
Not always. I have numerous old now useless SBCs that never merged their shit with the mainline linux kernel so my only option is to run something 10+ years old.
Beagle bone
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Orange pi is getting better and better. Far from raspberry though.
I got a ‘LePotato’ a few years back when Pi had stock issues, and it worked quite well as a Pi 4 clone.
LePotato is a great budget board for pi-hole.
I think Pine64 is pretty cool.
Unfortunately they use Chinese CPUs (made by Rockchip)
Which Pi alternatives don’t?
Libre Computer offers some SBCs with Amlogic CPUs. I think the Le Potato might be the most popular one. I just ordered an Alta AML-A311D-CC. I’m really excited to try out how well it performs!
Libre Computer itself is a Chinese company, though, no?
Okay, and?
“The attack by Chinese spies reached almost 30 U.S. companies, including Amazon and Apple, by compromising America’s technology supply chain, according to extensive interviews with government and corporate sources.”
Perhaps they’re worried about something similar happening.
Yeah, that’s certainly a thing, but I’d be surprised if China messed with something like Pine64, that’s a pretty low-value target to spend so many resources attacking. The bigger targets would be large corporations like Amazon and Apple, as well as military institutions and contractors.
It’s certainly a valid concern, but it’s also a pretty minor one.
I suppose you’re worried about embedded spyware?
Radxa as well. I have a Rock Pi 4B running as my home server and it has been a great Pi 4 alternative. I also have an Indiedroid Nova with RK3588S which should be better than the Pi 5 bit the GPU drovers aren’t quite there yet. Once GPU drivers are in it should be an incredible board.
I like your attitude!
Oh jees… welp it was great while it lasted.
Welp. Fuck Raspberry Pi. The entire stock market is one big scam.
