ehnto

If you are a technologist/generalist, aiming for small companies is a good strategy. If you're not in SV even better, you may end up in a real grass roots business and a really interesting problem domain that is ostensibly Not Software.

I personally, cannot stand the software for software industry. You, me, we have all built such arbitrary bullshit machines that link together in a web of unnecessary business. We lambast redundant jobs and useless management, but a moment of reflection for our industry and just how much software we have built for entirely self-serving purposes. So many man hours spent on the ephemeral whims of software. Sorry for the cynicism.

Less cynically, I feel the smaller the company, self-funded, the more likely a generalist will thrive and the business domain will be real-world and impactful. If it's venture funded and can pivot to advertising, it probably will. If you move away from tech hubs the wages are lower, but you might find a more fulfilling role.

That's fair. I would love for this to be studied one day, it would be good to know with some accuracy what proportion of creative/software is slop-factory versus novel, interesting work.

It would seem Google account details have been compromised or otherwise correlated, with not a peep from Google, we are getting reports of scam calls to people's real phone numbers about the "business opportunity" available in their attached Youtube properties.

Another possibility is advertising shadow profiles are able to correlate logged in accounts across YouTube and other properties.

Why not have the engineers, or "implementors", known for systems thinking, build things with AI? A team of product managers building things is like saying I want my factory floor manager on the tools, running the machines. The evolution of that role just lands you at a team of implementors again, who still need a leader. You already have that.

In a sense, you're demoting your managers to implementors, and getting rid of their leadership role altogether. Simultaneously getting rid of your prior engineers and all the domain and tribal knowledge they had built up.

Its going to be wildly distributed and varied so hard to spot, but look for companies where the main output was commodity B2B assets and you can see a real impact. Marketing copy, images, graphic design in the low and mid tiers. Real businesses supplied that stuff and even adopting AI wouldn't help, since their customers could just do it in house now.

There's heaps of companies between small and conglomerate and the middle area is where the commodity asset companies lived. Generating low stakes copy, art, apps and websites for small companies.

Tools have no morality but they do have effects and outcomes. That's where we make our judgement call on whether you're good or bad for using them.

In general yes, resin and FDM printers both produce toxic VOCs.

But FormLabs for this printer and resin have focused on safetey and acquired a certification on their Alpha resins which show low VOCs that should be safe to print in an indoor room with low ventilation.

I still wouldn't, I would add ventilation and wear PPE, it's still going to be releasing some VOCs even if it comes under a tolerable limit. But I do appreciate what seems to be the first ever initiative in 3D printing to address the elephant in the room of VOCs directly at the material level.

It shouldn't be that your options are a corpo-phone or a dumbphone though. Currently you can run something like Graphene and will probably be fine, but in NSW specifically there is law that could be used against you if you're suspected of crime.

I did say "tucked neatly away", not "at the forefront of law enforcement".

Anyway, it's probably nothing. Let's ignore it until it becomes an issue.

At least most my ESP32s are off any net, and pretty low stakes applications.

The Dedicated Encrypted Criminal Communication Device Prohibition Orders Bill 2022 introduced law that says it is illegal to posess a modified communication device (ambiguous) that is encrypted (or otherwise impedes law enforcement from snooping). It has some nuance to who it applies to in that you need to already be under suspicion of a serious crime, but there is a great deal of other pretty trivial things that can put you under suspicion. It's ambiguous enough (in my opinion) that it could pretty easily be targeted at a regular joe by an eager enforcer. I did not feel then nor now, that the qualifiers were sufficient enough to protect against abuse.

Tucked away neatly in Australian law is the concept that a phone that is not iPhone or Android is a criminal device, similar to owning lockpicks. Something like GrapheneOS. I forget the exact term they used but it wasn't "jailbroken". The act of refraining from corporate tracking as illegal is in that way already codified.

That's why I feel it's super important hardware developers get on board with open source OS support for mobile, much like some are for Linux already. It should be the norm to not be tracked by corporate entities and advert networks, it should be the weird option to opt into that.

You could out-type other prompters though. Words Per Minute might end up back on my resume yet!

Hopefully, but seeing some of the other American "trucks" hitting our pedestrians, sorry I mean hitting our roads, I wonder if anyone is really keeping that in check.

I think not-a-keyboard is probably the better use case. A modular plug and play, configurable keypad would be pretty useful for sim enthusiasts or various workstation uses. You could solve the "picking up" problem by putting the modules on a baseplate.