Praised by most customers, probably. As an engineer I appreciate Bike Friday's attention to detail and I own a good few "artisan" devices myself, but the reality is that most people want a mass-produced bike that is "good enough" within their budget.

There's no doubt that your bike is higher quality than the Decathlon one, but the average customer doesn't appreciate how well engineered it is or how many patents (??) are involved.

Having lived in Italy and used the btwin folder quite a lot, I can assure you there are lots of basic folders in its category and price range which are much better. I'd look into Dahon and Tern for a basic folding bike.

Folding bikes are complex and hard to make safely, and the folding mechanism is costly to engineer right. This means that the manufacturer of a cheap bike is either providing you with a dangerous folding mechanism, or is putting a lot of the cost of the bike into the folding mechanism, so there's not much money left for the rest of the parts. Either way, it means that cheap folding bikes are a bad choice, and the btwin folder is a good example of that.

As to patents: yes, there are patents.

I have several bikes. My decathlon foldy is great.

Out of curiosity, what do you use the higher 20gbps transfer speeds for? Video production?

I use USB-C displays, but they run in DP Alt mode. I don't have many (any?) storage devices that can max out a 20gbps connection, and usually don't exceed 5gbps

This goes back to another point I've historically made which is that except for storage devices, pretty much nothing supports those speeds. I think there are some USB adapters that don't use alt mode and that can have some advantages on some hosts but usually that's a disadvantage.

USB interface chips are, as far as I've seen, a Cypress/Infineon FX3 or a bit more rare FTDI FT600/FT601. I even talked with the FTDI guys at s conference and they said nobody's asking for higher than 5gbps. Infineon just recently, after I think 10+ years, came out with 10 and 20gbps chips. But only for receive. Seems to be for cameras mainly. So surprisingly yes, video production.

But I want it for other reasons professionally. For example, if you look at the signalhound (which uses the fx3) series of products, they often cap out at 40 Msamples/sec for USB. This is a classic 5gbps limit. To compete with the big boys they need 250 MHz if not more. That's 8 gbps before protocol overhead. It doesn't help that USB is extremely dependent on host compute capability to keep throughput up but assuming your PC is up to the task, 20 gbps could interface some serious data to the real world.

Besides storage devices, i.e. external SSDs, which are very frequently used and they need a USB port as fast as possible, the other frequent application that needs the fastest USB ports is the use of USB Ethernet interfaces.

Also eGPU. I have a tiny NUC-size system with decent internal GPU and a (physically much larger) game system with a slower CPU that idles at only a bit under twice the maximum power of the NUC. It would be handy to be able to just plug in an eGPU when needed. The power and cooling requirements of fancy GPUs are so much higher than that of CPUs that large cases designed around the CPU don't make much sense. Even the pysical stability of a large GPU in an ATX style case is not ideal.

Any external NVMe SSD from the last 7-8 years easily saturates a 20 Gbps connection, because already from that time the NVMe SSDs were able to saturate a 32 Gb/s PCIe 3.0 4-lane connection.

For at least 7-8 years I have been using USB external enclosures for M.2 Key-M NVMe SSDs, which always saturated whatever kind of USB port they were connected to, i.e. 5/10/20 Gb/s.

I do not remember when I have last used a SATA SSD, which is slower than 10 and 20 Gb/s USB, but I think that this was about a decade ago.

The wires count seems to be the number of conductors in the cable (i.e. the number of wires you'll find if you cut a cable in half, including ground and power).

It's true that the actual data is sent over a lower number of diffpairs.

I suspect the shield is not included in the number of wires, since all USB cables have a shield (not sure if usb 3.0 has an extra return ground wire for high speed).

It still would't be right. Full-featured USB-C has 8x superspeed (tx1p, tx1n, rx1p, rx1n, tx2p, tx2n, rx2p, rx2n), 2x high-speed (dp, dn), 2x power (vbus, gnd), 2x SBU, 1x CC. That's 15 wires.

A full-featured USB-C connector has 24 pins, as shown in a diagram in the parent article.

The "12-wire" count of the parent article refers only to the main wires, i.e. the 4 USB 2.0 wires + 4 differential pairs for USB 3 or 4.

Similarly, the "8-wire" count for Type A connectors refers only to the main wires, i.e. 4 USB 2.0 wires + 2 differential pairs for USB 3.

I wonder if the real problem is short-term thinking in culture and incentivised by markets. By optimising next quarter's profits over investing in long-term growth and capability, things like this happen.

What hardware do you use?

Most of those have custom quants for Mac Studio M3 Ultra 512GB. You'll typically see them mention it by name.

All of that list but the last three run at these sizes. For last three, look for a custom quant, e.g. 9.5 bits and/or the Ultra M3 512GB mention.

Not sure which direction I'm surprised but Macbook Pro M5 Max ticks over models at the same speed. With "only" 128GB look for models of 116 GB (the absolute max that retains reasonable stability) or less.

I think the answer to this is:"yes"

a Beowulf cluster of 256 x Raspberry Pi 3.

I used to maintain a 2000 pi 4 cluster, before LLMs were relevant, with around 6gb free ram per node. I wonder what I could have done with something like this.

All of it.

I can speak Chinese fluently but I need to improve my reading hugely. This sounds like exactly my usecase. I would actually be willing to pay for this (though less certainly for a subscription, preferably Pleco-like one-time fee - even if larger).

Looks promising, but what's the signup wall for? Also, I guess I can't try this until I get an FPV controller/game controller that I can connect to my computer?

> Looks promising, but what's the signup wall for?

Major turn off for me as well. Instant No.

Is an FPV controller any different than a regular video game controller? I interested in how hard it is to fly a drone even in a sim environment.

The left stick is generally used for throttle and is not centered with springs but rather adjustable and holds its position in the Y-axis direction.

You should be able to use the controller calibrator to calibrate a regular video game controller and use it.

Only use the upper half of the left stick per the spring issue folks mentioned above.

Yes, one of the axis on FPV controllers usually is not springing back to neutral position, for throttle. This may seem like a small difference it is important.

You can also use your keyboard or the virtual joystick if you are on a touch screen!

The 192 other comments from interested people seem like pretty strong counter-evidence to your claim.

You've also listed a few questions that seem pretty interesting to me, from a curiosity perspective.

Useful overview of PCBWay's capabilities. I might consider switching from JLCPCB.

Design critique - I would put the mounting holes further from the board edge, for added strength. The screw heads are going to overhang a certain amount anyway.

I suspect more and more hobbyists are using 3.3V microcontrollers like the ESP32, Raspberry Pi Pico, and countless Adafruit offerings. Unless you know your project won't need much processing power, I don't see much reason to use a 5V "ATmega..." -based Arduino these days. Much easier to use a cheap £2 32-bit overkill processor than to deal with running out of RAM, etc. Also, most advanced sensors I've seen have 3.3V logic levels now.

I noticed when I visited Japan that the crossing chimes quieten once the barriers have fully lowered.

Just another example of Japanese attention to detail and human oriented design.

Not where I am standing right now!

(I mean, maybe you’re right in some places, but it’s certainly not everywhere. Ironically, I happened to be standing next to a completely empty crossing, gates down, bonging away, while reading your comment.)

The nearest crossings where I live indeed stop the chimes when the barriers have been lowered. This doesn't actually make much of a difference really, because the train arrives only a few seconds after, and, because it's a local line, there are never more than three cars in the train so it passes very quickly.

Not that I'm bothered by the chimes at all. And grandson loves them.