I regret building this $3000 Pi AI cluster

It's a pretty rough headline, clearly the author had fun performing the test and constructing the thing.

I would be pretty regretful of just the first sentence in the article, though:

> I ordered a set of 10 Compute Blades in April 2023 (two years ago), and they just arrived a few weeks ago.

That's rough.

That's the biggest regret; but I've backed 6 Kickstarter projects over the years. Median time to deliver is 1 year.

Somehow I've actually gotten every item I backed shipped at some point (which is unexpected).

Hardware startups are _hard_, and after interacting with a number of them (usually one or two people with a neat idea in an underserved market), it seems like more than half fail before delivering their first retail product. Some at least make it through delivering prototypes/crowdfunded boards, but they're already in complete disarray by the end of the shipping/logistics nightmares.

Not completely related, but do you know if hardware kickstarters typically have any IP protection? I'm surprised there haven't been any cases of large companies creating patents for ideas from kickstarter at least that I've seen

One cannot (or at least, one is not supposed to be able to) patent someone else's invention.