milesvp

You should talk to musicians about digital equipment. They talk about latency in terms of how far away the instrument feels. It’s wild, good musicians can describe latency on the order of low tens of ms. What’s crazy to me is how good they can get at adjusting. If 8 play a game like rock band, if I don’t adjust for video and audio latency, I just can’t play at all.

And it gets worse, since equipment gets chained. If you add more than a few ms to the wet channel, it accumulates and can be very problematic if you ever feed the wet back into the dry signal.

Source: have shipped multiple digital pedals

> same amount of money to do less work

Um… work is not important. Value is important. Your employer is employing you because they expect your value to be higher than your cost. Moreover, if you are busy, your marginal value is likely declining. You are not taking the time to think about things that will actually have high impact. This to me is the biggest problem I see with AI assisted work, it makes it very easy to feel productive, when in reality you only worked on the easy low value things.

What’s more, is I have a very distinct experience working on a team years ago that decided to do less work. The team actively started turning down tickets and commiting to fewer tasks each week. And the counter intuitive thing, was that not only did that force only the higher value tickets get closed, we actually ended up closing more tickets. Was really wild to watch and experience.

In the fastest shrinking industry at the time? I think the phrase has something to do with blood and a turnip…

I was actually thrilled with my cola that year along with the required vacation time.

Honestly it was a very weird time. Less than a year prior I had worked in a real estate office, and there was a lot of scary stuff already starting to happen.

very much this. I was denied 2 rounds in 2008. I knew too many of the systems to risk losing me. Was sort of ok with it in at the time, and the length of the recession made me really happy in retrospect. Today I recognize offering to be let go as risky, since upper management may see you as a flight risk, which changes future layoffs and makes you slightly more likely to be included.

> "Your phone knows its position in space"

This is not wrong at the pop sci level of the video.

Your phone undoubtedly has a gyroscope, accelerometer, and magnetometer all in a single IMU IC. Data from this IMU can be used to create a position cloud.

Add in some other sensor data to help collapse the position cloud, and your phone absolutely knows its position in space. Incidentally part of why IMU have magnetometers is that it’s basically one more sensor data to help collapse position clouds from just the orientation and acceleration data.

I think the only leap is how precise your phone would be with only gyroscopes generating orientation and acceleration data. But the video sort of hints at this when talking about the first rocket design using this data.

The turning point against pro corporatism for me after years of schooling in economics happened a few years ago from a simple argument that I can’t get out of my head.

Technological advancements in an owner controlled factory leads to fewer employees. The same advancement in a coop leads to more leisure.

I know it’s super simplistic, and ignores pluses and minuses on both sides, but it really seems to sum up a fundamental problem with increasing efficiencies in society, and I can’t help but wonder if we are failing to capture the leisure that society has made possible.

10 print "hello"

20 goto 10

I’m still on the fence about closing the door for a short task like pouring milk. My understanding from the physics of opening the door, you’re mostly already replacing all the air in the fridge with air from outside the fridge. So convection already did its job of robbing your fridge of cold. Closing the door to open it again a minute later just gives you a second convection inducing action for air that might have been trapped the first time.

I would love to see someone at the level of technology connections do a breakdown of the physics here, and where the likely crossover point point is for different kinds of fridges. My current (probably illformed) belief from the suction and imagined resulting air exchange of all the fridges I’ve lived with is that leaving the fridge open on the order of seconds is better than opening-closing-opening-closing in terms of cold loss.

Your question seems disengenuous, and it’s not clear you read the post. But I would reckon many of us are having very similar experiences with how our daily activities are shaking out. The author’s story likely resonates with many devs here, who lament the loss of what many of them found interesting or compelling about the work they did.

> I believe you. I don’t need the details. Tell me what we're changing.

Yeah, for me in these situations it’s often about messaging to stakeholders, and so management in general feels like the problem has been addressed. I do think there’s one important thing missing from the final statement of the post, that he sort of covered briefly when talking about too much process, and that is what is the tradeoff/cost of implementing the change we’re making. Engineering is fundamentally about tradeoffs, and any significant proposed change requires some tradeoff and all too often I see management not asking about this explicitly. I’ve had enough once in a blue moon errors have retros, where the team decided it made no sense to make changes, and others, where the cost was high enough it was worth increasing workflow headaches. I think these tradeoffs being explicit are important at the director and above level, since there are potential real impacts to the team, and that is the level to deal with morale or headcount pressures due to changes to processes.

I had to stop reading one of my favorite authors when I was doing infant duty with my oldest. The books kept getting thicker, and I could no longer one hand them comfortably reading either end of the novel due to the book's balance. I found a kindle mostly solved my problems, and I could keep reading again one handed.

That said, it never occurred to me to just cut up my book, so I could continue to read it comfortably. I think I might have chosen to do so though, since I find the tactile nature of reading a physical book to be more memorable than digital. Where the words sit on the page, and the act of turning the page, the smell, all does something to my neurons. For my junk novels, I don't really care, but for the authors I cherish, the closer to the printed word I can get the better the experience I have, and the more memorable the writing in general.

I saw 10million quoted recently, and that sounds about right. 300k is a super safe withdrawal rate for that much money and you have a pretty comfortable life at that income level most places.

Good to be skeptical. Remember, though, that there is zero cost to displaying ads. That means they get bundled at places like indeed. If you’re HR and have 3 openings, but have 4 ads you can run for less than the price of 3… Personally, I might run an ad for some kind of triple threat that has no chance of finding someone.

Also, the cost of screening ad responses is near zero compared to 30 years ago.

So we have economics that encourages ghost job listings. Personally I’d like to see big taxes on job postings scaling for company size, maybe duration too. Would solve this particular problem.

I had an interview once for a firmware position dealing with (relatively) high wattage transmitters. They wanted to know how I’d deal with some conditions where I’d need to turn off the power quickly. After talking a bit about my experience with hard real time deadlines, I sheepishly asked why they didn’t have diodes to mitigate the problem. I think it was one of the questions that got me an offer. Apparently having firmware engineers with even minor EE background and will think about analogue design is a little uncommon.

Today, I’d ask about more ways to push the responsibility away from the firmware to stop catastrophic failures. If the debugger pauses the CPU you can’t use the CPU to regulate things. I’ve worked on things where the failure mode can be explosive and it makes dev really harrowing if you can’t rely on hardware interlocks.