edmundhuber

Often tastes better too, tbh. Lots of restaurants overuse salt to make up for lack of flavor.

I quit everything but Reddit (which I pretty much only lurk in, and only do hobby talk) and LinkedIn (until I strike it rich, I still gotta have a job). It's been excellent since I no longer waste my time being angry about things I can't change, or seeking attention or approval. Obviously some people can cope with the demands of social media more than others, but it didn't work for me, and I think, like me, a lot of people are putting themselves through unnecessary pain to stick to a platform which actually brings little or no value to themselves. In short, fuck social media.

In the US, our bureaucracies seem to attract some of the least intelligent people who have no interest in improving their institutions, just in riding the gravy train forever. I think that this is an outcome of how we treat all bureaucrats as equal. There are no entrance exams, or university -level courses for being a bureaucrat. There's no national standard. There's no pride or recognition in being a good bureaucrat, and few if any consequences of being a mediocre one. IMO it seems like a problem with what the US views is the acceptable structure of government, with many overlapping state and federal agencies and endless finger-pointing. There's rarely a "the buck stops here" moment, and so no need to ever improve. If you're familiar with the bozo theory, basically the entire bureaucracy is already full of bozos and thus irredeemable.

Circa a few years ago (maybe their obscurity scheme has improved since then), they just used a binary blob that decrypted the (Ruby) source then passed it to a Ruby interpreter process. If you replaced your Ruby interpreter with one that would also print the source, you had all the code. :P

It basically sounds like "n*gga" when said fast.

Depends on what you mean by self-flying, which is why I pointed out that BI probably has different ideas than Airbus.

To most people (and BI?) it will mean "taxi, takeoff, navigating/obstacle avoidance, landing". To the extent that driving a car isn't "what you see is what you get", flight is much worse.

In the simplest case of flight, you are in cruise (neither takeoff nor landing), and depending on what kind of airspace you're in you may need to: * listen to ATC for commands, and advise them of what you're doing, * avoid weather, * look out for traffic, * watch your gauges, * stay on a heading, altitude, and generally fly the plane. (This part is routinely done with autopilot.)

In short, if it seems easier, it's because pilots make it look so casual.

A thing they teach pilots is: "Aviate, Navigate, Communicate". This is the basic priorities for your attention. If you're pointed at terrain your priority is to fix that first. The point of autopilot today is to free you (to some extent) of that first responsibility, especially during routine parts of flight, so that you can do the other things. Airbus is looking for more things to automate to let pilots do more strategic thinking in general.

Contrast this with a car, which is probably more in line with what BI is thinking. The kinetic energies are much lower, there's no need to communicate, the rules for driving are pretty straightforward (get to where you want to be, without hitting other people, while respecting traffic lights and speed limits), and to top it all off, if the AI feels that it's in over its head than the car can just stop whenever and everyone can climb out of the vehicle.

> The 737 MAX fiasco shows that Boeing still hasn't caught up with what Airbus was doing in the 1980s.

The Air France 447 accident demonstrated to me that Airbus hadn't really thought things through either. Pilots entered conflicting inputs and the plane averaged them out instead of giving (good, actionable) feedback.

Side question: is fly-by-wire an obviously good idea for passenger airplanes? It's ubiquitous in e.g. fighter jets because of the inherent aerodynamic instability of those platforms, making them hard or impossible ("Hopeless diamond") to fly without computer assistance. Passenger jets have different goals and are built to have stable flight -- the plane wants to fly level. My takeaway from Air France 447 was that I want more Boeing-style (linked, mechanical) controls in passenger airplanes than I want fly-by-wire. Am I off base?

Counterpoint: I've spent a total of an hour (ish) futzing around with my Debian install, for my home/hobby laptop. I feel like my work (OSX) laptop gives me much more to do, but that could be because I'm expecting more of it. My Linux workstation(s) require basically 0 maintenance.

For me, writing a thing down gives me the option to forget it. People are different I suppose.

Have you tried journaling? It lets you get ideas out (adding or remixing ideas from the previous days), without investing in getting a project up, writing code, etc. A lot of times, for me, I just want to explore an idea and I'm not actually interested in working through it. But if I spend enough days journaling an idea and I'm still interested in it, then I go for it.

The other thing that's helped me is realizing that anything worthwhile is hard. If you want to stick with a project until it's done, you're going to get bored, you're going to run into roadblocks, and you want to cultivate a sense of "this is what I want to do, and that is just a temporary issue that I will work through".

Last thing that's helped me is finding a support group. I use irc, specifically I hang out on irc.darwin.network (shameless plug, I kinda co-run it), there I can chat with people about what I'm working on, they can ask cool questions, etc, keeps the juices flowing and reminds me why a project is worth sticking to.

Cisco-Meraki | Bringup/platform engineeer(s) | SF or SJ, CA | Full-time

Meraki makes easy-to-manage cloud-connected APs, cameras, security devices, cellular gateways, (more to come!).

I'm looking for engineers who are comfortable in the kernel and device drivers, and who have a passion for making complete and stable products. Drop me a line at [email protected] if you're interested!

If a system is not documented in terms of what it does, how it does it, and common remediations for when things go wrong, then it's a fragile system depending on one person to keep it going.

You need to get (particularly, senior) engineers to buy into the mindset of documenting everything and making the documentation the first place to look (not after all else fails). Leads should hold be held accountable for their docs meeting some standard of "this is a useful doc".

If I were in your shoes I'd get senior engineers in a room and be honest with them about the situation. You're going to need them to do work that they might not be naturally inclined to do, or work that might not seem like a "productive" use of time. You might want to get them to agree on what a good doc looks like (the standard), and what things need to be documented. Maybe take a whole day to do this, with snacks and coffee. Good luck!