aarongough

I have been lucky enough to work with a lot of great people, and I definitely found a lot of enjoyment in a lot of the work I've done, but I definitely wish that time had been spent doing work with more of a positive impact... Luckily there's still lots of time and I'm working on more impactful stuff now!

I'm 35. Luckily I'm now running my own manufacturing business where I get to work on a much wider range of stuff!

Correct!

Interesting point you make: there is definitely selection bias going on because of this, but I've honestly never thought about it that way before!

Unfortunately I agree with this. A great quote I saw a while ago:

“The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.” –Jeff Hammerbacher

Every paying software job I've ever had was in some way involved getting people to click on ads. Either directly making a product where ad click rate is a measured metric, or products that helped people make products where clicking on ads was a metric...

I have usually been able to find a lot of joy in solving the problems in the smaller areas where I was focused, but whenever I took a step back and looked at what I was helping work towards it felt very meaningless.

I think finding a job today where you feel like the work you do does genuine good for the world is an incredibly rare and difficult thing...

Ooof, that is a lot to deal with. Really hope things start looking up for you soon.

[citation needed]

Yeah I'm not sure about that either... All the parts look FDM printed too which is definitely way cheaper than that if you already own a printer. Perhaps they had some company print the parts?

Honestly for that kind of money you're getting kinda close to having them SLS printed which would be much sturdier and look nicer...

Off topic: over the next couple of years I'm looking to develop a small-scale ion-beam coating system for applying DLC as part of a single-piece-flow process cell. I currently send out my products for DLC coating, and the coater does a good job but they keep making process changes (which affects color) without warning me, so I want to bring it in-house to avoid that and to eliminate the need to batch components for them.

I would release the design as open source after it's completed. Sounds like you have some knowledge in this area so let me know if you'd be interested in collaborating!

The footage is hugely slowed down, hence the deep pitch of the rocket motor sounds (they are usually very 'hissy' at this size), and the slow speed of the sparks coming from the motors. Also if you listen closely when the rocket is descending and deploying parachutes you can hear the greatly-slowed-down sound of a DSLR shutter actuating repeatedly (ka-thunk-beep) as photos are taken of the descent.

Very interesting methods you used to detect the changes! Out of curiosity: was there a reason that taking an xray of the devices was not an option? Industrial/veterinary xray machines can often be had quite cheaply...

Care was taken to make sure these invasive species didn't get imported in the first place, but clearly that didn't work... What makes you think preventing the altered species from being transported back will be any more successful?

Interesting, I didn't realize that was done at scale... As the comment above me said, seems harsh to use CO2 for that...

Source?