There are multiple Thai tailors that fly around to major US cities. They'll take your measurements, and then sit down and design a bunch of custom clothes for you.
Quality is amazing, fit is incredible, and the price is only 20-30% more than off the rack, but the clothes can last a decade+.
Sometimes the ancient solution (meet another person with a measuring tape) is the best one.
You can also get a local tailor to take your measurements and then order direct from tailors in Thailand or Singapore, and it tends to be cheaper than off the rack.
It has been a long time since I used the services, the shirts I got a decade ago are still good, but it was like $130 for a really nice shirt where I got to customize everything including the stitching and the buttons.
I have one shirt where each button hole has contrast stitching around it, an absolute baller of a shirt.
Even if they cost me $200 today it'd be worth it. They last so long and being able to define your exact own personal style feels great.
For dress clothes at least, Maxwell's is great. I have some of their shirts and a jacket and they all fit and feel great. They do tours and measure you in a hotel conference room:
ChatGPT has helped me find multiple niche products and vendors. It is really good at that. Products I fruitlessly tried to find for years, ChatGPT found right away.
> I can imagine lots of cases where people with specific needs would find benefit from the “AI clothes buying” experience,
That is kind of the idea of serving the long tail. Everyone is unique, and there are a lot of everyones.
That said, I don't get online clothes shopping. The fit is 80% of the product.
> That said, I don't get online clothes shopping. The fit is 80% of the product.
Indeed it is, but when you are p95 (at least for height, but not overweight), you'll soon learn that you do not have any other option: common sizes stop growing in length (at least noticeably) usually at XL or even L, so you are looking for specific fits (long, slim) and those are rarely stocked in stores. Sometimes I'll try a model from one brand and buy a different colour online.
But enter online shopping and 14-30 day return windows.
Still, for formal wear (shirts, jackets, suits), I simply stick with made-to-measure and custom tailoring.
I bought a used laptop with the help of ChatGPT last month and was amazed. It helped me narrow the model that suited my needs based on my prompts. I needed to renew my old Thinkpad T480. It also helped me find an ad and negociate with the seller.
I ended up with a T14 Gen 4 and I'm super happy with it.
> ChatGPT has helped me find multiple niche products and vendors. It is really good at that. Products I fruitlessly tried to find for years, ChatGPT found right away.
isn't that what search engines were built for? we've just forgotten how to build a search engine that's not just an ad factory, so instead we're putting an ad factory into our new search engine?
ChatGPT and similar are, in some sense, a semantic web search engine combined with an operator that's able to jot down its findings, pivot to different lookups, and filter/combine outputs.
I use Kagi to search, and claude to help me find things. These are different tasks.
If I know what I'm looking for, Kagi is much easier.
If I don't know what I'm looking for (I have hobbies that involve learning new techniques, and my method for learning a new technique seems to involve getting inspired by short-form videos, which don't come with a glossary of terms or a dictionary of tool names, so I often don't know what I'm looking for) then I can describe it to claude who can usually come up with a name for the thing, some useful advice about it, and where to start looking.
Last time, as an example, was all about enamalling and cloisonne, which was quite a rabbit-hole. And yes, I could search for beginner guides for the thing. But that is going to land me at a YouTube video which has 5 minutes of "hi welcome to my show, hit the like and subscribe" and then 15 minutes of waffle before finally getting to "the thing you want is called a trivet". I can read way, way, faster than people on YouTube can get to the point, so I prefer talking to claude.
I wonder if LLMs will actually kill Youtube for those who are like you (and me)? I am curious to see if anything happens to earnings from Youtube over the next few years as people increasingly do not need to sit through whole videos.
I used YouTube extensively when getting into 3D printing a few years ago, though it drove me to distraction because of all the wasted time waiting for them to get to the point, even at 3x playback.
So yeah, I can see YouTube content creator revenue drying up around this. Though I also had ad-blockers and had perfected the art of skipping through product placements, so I doubt they were making much revenue from me anyway.
It means Google will show you the top 5 brands for a product category and then give up. If you want something more specific you have to search through reddit threads. Or you can have chatgpt search through reddit threads for you.
We decided to go with a low device cost and subscription to make it cost effective to purchase when finances allow us to get to a monthly instead of yearly subscription.
When I worked on Microsoft Band, we wanted to have really nice side buttons. Great feel, not only the material, but the perfect spring tension, a great clicking sound, everything. We had someone who obsessed over them month after month, trying different polishes, colors, materials, spring types, everything.
$2 a button, 2 buttons, $4 total on the BOM. Absurd. Yes the buttons were great, but we couldn't justify $4 for them. But that was the best any of our suppliers were able to do for metal buttons. We had spun off the Xbox accessories team, so we really knew buttons, but we really knew plastic buttons of a certain type. Metal buttons were kicking our butts.
Then someone asked: "have we tried a watch supplier?"
So yeah, like 25 cents per button for the exact same buttons. It wasn't that our other suppliers were ripping us off, they just weren't setup to make the type of buttons we needed, in those quantities, at the price we needed.
So what I'm saying is, your base product is already expensive. It costs the same as an entire smart watch capable of running an operating system. You probably have lots of specialized components, lots of custom hardware, but your base price is already high and I hope you don't have any $4 buttons in the product, they are easy to overlook. I also get it is because you are doing small batch runs, and you are amortizing all the tooling and dev work over a small number of units, but you are not low cost. You are an unknown product selling adjacent to a bunch of snake oil people, if you were just $200 by itself I could maybe see it as an impulse buy to try out, but plus the subscription, ouch.
I have a brand new Microsoft Band still in the box! When I ordered one, Microsoft sent me two and refused to refund me and take the 2nd one back :) I still look at that device fondly.
What makes you think an EEG headband is not just a smartwatch in a different form-factor? We're running an nrf53 plus extra storage. We don't have a screen, but screens are fairly inexpensive. We've got a full EEG system.
We have actually done pretty well at limiting the number of parts. The headband is so thin it's buttonless. We didn't have room for a button and created a fully buttonless interface.
There are parts you wouldn't think would be expensive but are. Bone-conduction transducer, heart-rate sensor, etc etc. Yes, we could ditch the HR and save some money but we feel it will be beneficial.
Watches are a thing that exists. EEG sleep headbands aren't. We had to create our own materials for EEG sensing. Everything else on the market have limited life and aren't comfortable enough for sleeping.
Of course, all the plastics and TPU are custom. The fabrics are custom. Our scale is also very small right now, so I fully expect the cost to come down significantly with scale.
Yeah I get the custom parts thing, curved screen, curved batteries, and our optics stack for hr was custom built, now days those are off the shelf and a dime a dozen.
I guess my main point is that your device's price is firmly in the luxury impulse purchase category. It is only low price from the perspective of high earning coastal tech workers.
> Of course, all the plastics and TPU are custom.
Ugh getting the coating right on band took so long. Sunscreen stains everything.
That and a lens cover for the UV sensor that was transparent to UV and not just cheap plastic that'd shatter the second you slightly banged into it.
American here, only every heard it meaning someone who likes fancy food.
Never heard of it being a fat person, except in so far as the word is old fashioned enough to conjure the image of a fancy dressed fat person eating fancy food.
Same. "Gourmand" has always been linked to "gourmet" in my brain. However wrong according to the "dictionaries", I've seen it mean the same in colloquial use in a couple of languages I'm familiar with.
Other countries have $15k new electric city cars for sale. The US doesn't. Our domestic car manufacturers are either uninterested or unable to make them, and import bans are in place on foreign cars that meet that price point.
Also our infra not being 240v is hurting us. The rest of the world can just plug in overnight to any regular outlet and it is good enough for almost any commute.
My EV on a 120v outlet I can manage, but it'd be hard with a second EV.
The lack of ecosystem for good electric scooters is also sad. The weather in much of cali is perfect for it. Last time I went back to China the streets were so quiet as all the electric scooters drove by. An incredible change for the better.
I remember stepping into an apartment parking garage that was filled with scooter charging spaces, like hundreds of them. It was crazy.
Then I went to Taiwan and while walking around I barely talk over the noise from all the gas mopeds.
I joked that the streets in China and quiet and the sidewalks noisy, and the streets of Taiwan are noisy and the sidewalks are quiet.
I think most of the US has 240 to the home. Look at your power feed, if there are two insulated conductors on an uninsulated line, those are two 120V lines of opposite phase/polarity. I have a friend who temporarily ran a 240 volt welder by plugging into a custom outlet box, wired with two plugs that went to two outlets on different legs of the breaker box. Electric ovens, ACs, hot tubs, dryers, etc. are all commonly 240 and work with the right house breaker and wiring setup.
The difference is other countries have 240 running everywhere. So apartment garages can have cars charging (slower than the max possible speed but faster than if they were on 120v), without tens of thousands of dollars in retrofits.
I just got an estimate of 3k for running basically 6ft of conduit for a new 240v line in my own garage (my breaker is right next to my door, super short run!)
Now thinking about my last condo I lived in, retrofitting even a small condo parking garage for EV chargers for, say, 20 spaces. Let's estimate 30 feet on average line run per space. Assuming a discount on price, maybe 12k per parking space to install a 240 plug, with lines split to cover multiple spaces.
The price is just absurd. That's 1/3rd the cost of a reasonably priced car.
Most residential mains is 240v on two legs that gets divided to 120v outlets. However, major appliances like dryer/HVAC will use the 240v. I had a 240v outlet added to my garage for larger equipment. It is absolutely possible to add a 240v charger at single family homes with a visit from an electrician. The US standard of 120v is not an issue.
The bigger problem isn't the 240v, it's that a lot of people just don't have parking that's practical for plugging in without extensive rewiring (a vast majority of condo/apartment garages) or running a hundred-foot extension cord down the building and across sidewalk (https://i.imgur.com/ou0uYmb.jpeg).
> Also our infra not being 240v is hurting us. The rest of the world can just plug in overnight to any regular outlet and it is good enough for almost any commute.
US homes don't need any significant accommodations for 240 volt infra. Plenty of US home appliances are already 240 volt; this is a solved problem.
In other countries every outlet is 240, a regular extension cord to outlets in a apartment complex garage is 240. It is less overall amps than the beefy 240v an American dryer plugs into, but it is good enough.
Meanwhile $3k to get 5 feet of 240 ran in a conduit and an outlet installed in the US.
For many apartment and condo complexes, it just isn't doable as a reasonable retrofit.
> Meanwhile $3k to get 5 feet of 240 ran in a conduit and an outlet installed in the US.
If you're the homeowner you can do this work yourself, and the permits and inspections will cost a tenth of that. If you live in one of the few states where this isn't true, that's a you problem.
> For many apartment and condo complexes, it just isn't doable as a reasonable retrofit.
The problem with charging in apartments and condo complexes is not that US outlets are not 240 volts, it's that if those places provide places to park at all then there's little chance those parking spots are electrified at all in the first place.
Yeah this confuses me. I was under the impression that every electric oven and clothes dryer in the US was 240 (220) volts already. I was not aware or tracking that 240v was an issue. Is that the case in places in the US?
Keeping in mind that US electric infrastructure is the oldest in the world and fragmented across a slew of jurisdictions with their own building codes that electrified in different decades, thus making it impossible to say anything with 100% certainty: US homes already have 240 volt service, but split-phase so it often appears to be 120 volts. I edited the prior comment with an informative video.
Nearly all US homes have 240V to the electric panel, and some have it for specific places in the house (though many places are almost entirely gas dryers/ovens), but you would need a special outlet run to charge your car at 240V since almost all regular receptacles are 120v. Even the heavy duty receps in garages and utility spaces are most often just 20A/120V instead of the standard 15A/120V.
Quotes for a new 240V line are often >$1K which is affordable in the context of a household improvement but not exactly pocket change.
I’m a huge advocate for discouraging learned helplessness. I’m not special, I can run wires and connect them properly, I can do brakes/calipers/plugs on a car (and a lot more, self-taught, but anyone has the ability to do those).
When you realize as a software person everyone thinks what you do is black magic (someone told me that today actually, and I told them I could teach them if they wanted to learn), and then you realize that thinking of wiring, plumbing as black magic isn’t true, a whole world opens up.
It’s liberating really, I highly encourage everyone to try and learn these skills.
It is funny that propaganda has somehow convinced conservatives, people who used to idealize self reliance and independence from government dependencies, to move away from solar and EVs.
A EV and a home solar setup with a large battery bank, is the ultimate in self reliance.
I remember even 10 years ago you'd see the occasional right leaning homesteader talking about the benefits of being off grid with a solar setup.
Now days removing our dependencies on foreign powers is somehow a liberal conspiracy. O_o
I was very pleasantly surprised at how much my single cargo e-bike can handle. It is big, nearly the size of a tandem bike, but it served me well for 5 years of not having a car.
Curious about your maintenance needs. I have a guy that comes out once a year for service and tunes it up for me. After 3 years, I replaced the chain. I've upgraded to hydraulic brakes by the same guy. Other than that, it's been smooth riding. Or are you saying your EV needs so little maintenance that even the low maintenance on a bike seem high?
Maintenance should be amortized. The first time you do brakes and tires it will cost more than 5+ years of ebike maintenance. It adds nothing to the conversation to pretend otherwise.
Conservative bots are out strong in Pacific NW forums slop posting against new "green energy" energy projects. Blaming the (not yet built!) green energy projects for upcoming rate increases.
Nevermind that solar is why Texas has such cheap electricity prices.
> no gas bans.
I'm all for the free market.
Price into gas the expected increase in healthcare costs due to air and ground water pollution. Stop subsidizing it for non-critical uses.
Same for extra tire dust from EVs (that shit is toxic AF).
Right now I see astroturfing that EVs are why our electricity infrastructure is overloaded (rather than blaming 50 years of neglect), or that the cars burst into flame (no more than other cars and newer battery tech not any more).
Subsidizing EVs is interesting because it is obvious that EVs are the future (battery tech gets ~6% better year over year, compounding, ICE designs haven't seen improvements in decades), but recent removal of government support caused American car companies to basically give up on anything except the domestic car market, which spells their long term doom (which the Ford CEO has pretty much come out and admitted.)
There's already like 90c of gasoline tax in California and some of the highest auto registration fees, and that's on top of other rules that make it more expensive.
Not anymore. Disney now targets high income earners, not the average American.
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