It would be great to clarify what it is in the first sentence.
Not to make everything political, but I wonder how the US tariffs will affect electronics-adjacent hobbies. Anecdotally, the flashlight community on Reddit has been panicking a little about this.
I know the Hong Kong post also recently blocked outbound packages entirely sent to the US [2], so I don't know how that's impacting shipments of tech like this & etc byt would be curious to know.
[1] Arduboy creator says his tiny Game Boy won’t survive Trump’s tariffs https://www.theverge.com/news/645555/arduboy-victim-trump-ta...
[2] Hong Kong suspends package postal service to the US after Trump’s tariff hikes https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/15/business/hong-kong-suspends-p...
For what it's worth, this type of Lidar scanner was possible to make well over a decade ago with ROS1, a Phidgets IMU, a webcam, and a lidar pulled out of a Neato vacuum (the cheapest option at the time). This would be around the difficulty of a course project for an undergraduate robotics class and could be done with less than 200 USD of salvaged parts (not including the computer). Hugin was also around over a decade ago.
It's still a nice little project!
Being all polite and non-political and shit is what brought us to this pass.
Never lose an opportunity to make the people who voted for the current state of affairs feel isolated, rejected, guilty, and generally bad. Being nice to them doesn't work.
I logged in to make a comment regarding something within my area of expertise: the technology present in the parent link and how this technology has been accessible to hobbyists for over 10 years.
If it's political to wonder how tariffs impact the cost of the project we're discussing, then everything is political, and it's pointless to complain about politics being "injected into everything."
You’re feeding into the confirmation bias I already have about how the opposition thinks, which only serves to affirm the choice I made.
It's wild that you acknowledge your cognitive bias and then blame others for it instead of working on it. If I wrote something like that, I hope I would have the wherewithal to notice that something is seriously wrong with my thinking.
I’m illustrating how the original behavior feeds confirmation bias instead of establishing a basis for constructive dialog.
Even many in the opposition agrees with many of his goals (control immigration, protect American industries, shrink the government).
You cannot have constructive dialog about astronomy with someone who thinks the sky is made of green and purple polkadots because that's what someone told them, and dismiss all evidence to the contrary as a massive conspiracy.
They don't even believe in democracy or constitutional rights - at least, for anyone but them.
I hope they decide to develop some disruptive stereo/structured light/tof cameras eventually too, those are still mostly overpriced and kinda crap overall.
How China/US interact will determine the longer term future of that economic relationship but many companies are already adjusting because he future is currently uncertain. With the free trade agreement with the EU and more producers moving to the US I think that it's been a good disruption even if I'm now also scrambling to find alternative PCB manufacturers.
There is no such agreement.
>more producers moving to the US
How many will follow through with these announcements? During Trump's first term, announcing huge projects in the US and then not following through was a common tactic for companies dealing with Trump. Foxconn, for example, announced a new $10 billion factory in Wisconsin. They made some initial investments and stopped when people stopped paying attention. Instead of the promised 13.000, they now employ about 1.000 people there.
And what about all the companies that will have gone out of business by then? This mainly affects small companies, which are exactly the companies you need for a healthy economy. In some cases, they have shipments already paid for that they can't accept because they don't have the liquid assets to pay the unexpected tariffs, so these companies are now at risk of going out of business completely unnecessarily.
It never makes sense to use tariffs for economic reasons. It just does not work. Tariffs can make sense for strategic reasons if you're willing to take an economic hit to lower dependence on other countries for critical industries or technologies. However, the idea that taxes are ever "a good disruption" for the economy does not bear out.
This week two USA companies from which I bought some products from Europe sent me an email explaininig how they have to rise their prices due to tariffs, as they need to import from China for now.
Guess who will be faster: these companies finding an alternative supplier in the US that match China quality-price, or I finding an alternative supplier from China? They just admited that they are buying from China anyways.