I just got one of these (https://aiphor.com/products/bluefox-nx1-4-0-android-smartpho...) that I'm hoping to try and make my weekend phone. It's a small Android phone. It runs WhatsApp / Google Maps. I am going to set it up to forward my calls to it on the weekends. It just arrived, so I'm excited to try it out.
For teens ages 13-18, Hack Club is running a free grant program to help kids learn to solder! They can sign up and get a free kit from us at https://solder.hackclub.com/
Hey, you should join Hack Club! I was just at an event where a high schooler designed and built a continuous variable transmission (https://outpost.hackclub.com).
You’ll meet a ton of interesting, friendly teens who are all helping each other build awesome projects.
Cool project!
(Hack Club is a nonprofit and I’m the founder of it)
As a teenager that spent some time somewhat around Hack Club things, I felt that being a part of Hack Club pressured me to live live faster than I was ready to (like 16 year olds doing summer internships / cohabiting with their partners). I want to say a lot of the people I knew online on Hack Club Slack went to places like MIT, so I guess there's that, but there is some beauty in taking life more slowly. I also didn't want to be boxed into running my school's club with what Hack Club provided. I think they do good things (eg. Hack Club Bank helps students run events before they can financially) and I interacted with a lot of really cool people. But if it is anything like the past, I wanted to share this.
You can just join their Slack workspace (it's a bit like Discord) on their website: https://slack.hackclub.com/
Then in the #announcements channel you'll see all the different projects they're running, just pick and choose the ones that interest you.
I went to one of their meetups "Horizons Europa" last week and had a great time!
If you go to https://hackclub.com/clubs, there’s an application form. Once you fill it out you’ll get a response within a week. If anything comes up, please email jared@hackclub.com who runs the clubs program (or post in the clubs channels on Slack).
I once set up a 1 month hotspot with Verizon when I moved into a new place that didn’t have internet yet.
After the month, I returned the hotspot to the store and they told me I was all good (in writing too!).
Then I started getting monthly bills that I couldn’t cancel online or over the phone. I repeatedly went into the store and they told me it was a billing mistake and they’d fix it.
Eventually they sent me to collections, my credit score dropped, and a debt collector started coming after me.
It took 2 years to finally get them to stop and to remove it from my credit history.
Verizon is a bad company that doesn’t care about its customers.
This was modus operandi for Comcast as well, along with continuing to bill you for service at an address after you'd canceled and moved off the property. IIRC one older woman went to their local offices and started whaling on things with a hammer in response to this.
I had a very similar story with T-Mobile! I couldn't get the account cancelled without going to the store and presenting ID in order to prove I was the customer because I had forgotten a made-up PIN. This was years ago and even this month they sent me a bill (for zero dollars, but still- why?!)
At Hack Club we have made tremendous investments to help teenagers get into electronics and design their own PCBs over the last 2 years.
It’s much harder to fake and in many situations much more exciting than software, especially for beginners. Some of you might like this video from a recent event at GitHub HQ: https://youtu.be/kaEFv7e49mo?si=sLer815jCJIyWR9Y
We have an upcoming event called Hack Club Fallout where we’re bringing a bunch of high schoolers from across the USA and world to Shenzhen for a 7 day hackathon because it’s one of the few places you can get same day PCB turnaround: https://fallout.hackclub.com
This kind of absolutism is crazy. People who are doing 90% of what we want them to do should be greatly celebrated and rewarded. Else we penalize idealistic people who are not perfect instead of penalizing the people who are actually doing the opposite of what we care about (ex. Autodesk).
Do you want software to become as closed source as mechanical engineering? No! So let's celebrate people building software that's open source, even if it's VC funded! They are awesome for doing that!
The problem with VC-founded projects is that there's some kind of rug-pull, ads, privacy violation (e.g. using repos to train AI) or "feature enhancing" subscription likely coming.
As a user who would need to invest time and effort in using Tangled, I think it's fair to ask to have the plan explained. I'd rather see explicit price for services than see enshittification happen.
Just like engineering, monetizing is an iterative process. As long as they don't make it hard to move off their platform, IMO it's completely fine for them to try different monetization models.
We should celebrate people building open source stuff and in the public. The alternative is for the software tooling ecosystem to look like EE or mechanical engineering tools - all closed source, proprietary, and with super expensive licensing.
It's easy to take open source for granted - 'information wants to be free', but we are at risk of the open source movement dying with proprietary AI completely changing everything about software.
If we penalize people who are working toward the right goal, we contribute to that decline.
This is how you get bad stuff. This mindset will turn the software ecosystem into mechanical / electrical engineering. Closed source, bad, and expensive tools.
This is a website created by a professional lobbyist who still has an active role taking lobbying contracts through a firm they founded called Steinhauser Strategies.
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