rossng
Joined 13 years ago
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207
Member since
Dec 4
Recent submissions
Comment · 24 days ago
I was rather disappointed by this book. Felt that it spent a lot of time waffling about irrelevant detail[1] and failed to really present a coherent narrative about how precision engineering was developed.
Conversely I rather enjoyed The Origins of Efficiency by Brian Potter, which tackles the topic of how manufacturing became scaled and efficient. I would love to read a similar book on precision.
[1] particularly the endless guff about Rolls Royce, which I felt really detracted from the book
Comment · 1 month ago
MONUMENTAL | https://www.monumental.co/ | Amsterdam, The Netherlands | Full Time | Onsite
We make robots that autonomously construct buildings, starting with bricklaying.
There's a lot of vapourware in robotics, but we're deploying robots across multiple concurrent sites today - and generating revenue. In the last couple of months, our robots have built affordable social housing, health care living units, canal walls in the historic city centre of Amsterdam, and a youth sports centre. Help us to build things that matter in the long run.
We're looking for experienced software engineers for many roles. You can help us solve problems like:
- Data sync and analytics queries across a fleet of robots (that can be offline for hours at a time)
- Modelling buildings in code and finding the right UI for operators to edit them
- Designing systems for robots to drive safely and fully autonomously around a building site
Check out the progress we've already made on Atrium, our operating system for robotics: https://www.monumental.co/atrium
We're rapidly scaling up operations - we'll be building in the UK soon - and we need experienced engineers who can build the systems that manage all of that complexity. If you think that 'full-stack' could reasonably mean debugging firmware, mixing buckets of mortar _and_ writing React components, we are looking for you. Robotics experience not required!
Take a look inside our software stack: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eh9BfQoKCy0
Comment · 1 month ago
You might be interested in Dan Davies' book The Unaccountability Machine[1].
It talks a fair bit about 'accountability sinks', which are exactly these systems that (intentionally or not) essentially serve as a way to unlink responsibility from any given person and allow 'the system' to be blamed instead.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unaccountability_Machine
Comment · 1 month ago
Maersk[1] might be the worst so far (and that was ransomware rather than state-sponsored aggression). It's still too niche for most people to care about.
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/notpetya-cyberattack-ukraine-rus...
Comment · 1 month ago
writes are isolated to a certain scope, reads aren't. But I think access control rapidly becomes the most complex thing if you are in a bigger org.
Comment · 1 month ago
We created a very simple platform for shipping internal-only static web apps that can talk to a document database for storage. There's a Claude skill that describes how to write and deploy apps.
This is for a robotics company, so we're pretty ops-heavy. Non-engineers quickly found all sorts of use cases for making specialised forms/databases (inventory management, scheduling etc.)
Comment · 2 months ago
MONUMENTAL | https://www.monumental.co/ | Amsterdam, The Netherlands | Full Time | Onsite
We make robots that autonomously construct buildings, starting with bricklaying.
There's a lot of vapourware in robotics, but we're deploying robots across multiple concurrent sites today - and generating revenue. In the last couple of months, our robots have built affordable social housing, health care living units, canal walls in the historic city centre of Amsterdam, and a youth sports centre. Help us to build things that matter in the long run.
We're looking for experienced software engineers for many roles. You can help us solve problems like:
- Data sync and analytics queries across a fleet of robots (that can be offline for hours at a time)
- Modelling buildings in code and finding the right UI for operators to edit them
- Designing systems for robots to drive safely and fully autonomously around a building site
Check out the progress we've already made on Atrium, our operating system for robotics: https://www.monumental.co/atrium
We're rapidly scaling up operations - we'll be building in the UK soon - and we need experienced engineers who can build the systems that manage all of that complexity. If you think that 'full-stack' could reasonably mean debugging firmware, mixing buckets of mortar _and_ writing React components, we are looking for you. Robotics experience not required!
Take a look inside our software stack: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eh9BfQoKCy0
Comment · 2 months ago
> Interest in magnetic tape is only increasing further today because the cost of random access memory (Ram), a form of computer memory that doesn't rely on tape, is skyrocketing.
hmm
Comment · 2 months ago
We're using it in the same way - running NixOS on robots.
Overall I think it is succeeding, though it definitely doesn't 'just work' out of the box. We've invested a fair bit of effort into things like:
- containerised services[1]
- UI for branch deployment/service management
- delta patching (at the byte level, to save bandwidth)
The main problem was always that nixlang/nixpkgs are arcane and have a steep learning curve. The majority of your colleagues (in any workplace) don't care about build systems and just want things to work. I think that has been more or less solved by LLMs, and it's now more viable than ever to adopt Nix.
Comment · 2 months ago
MONUMENTAL | https://www.monumental.co/ | Amsterdam, The Netherlands | Full Time | Onsite
We make robots that autonomously construct buildings, starting with bricklaying.
There's a lot of vapourware in robotics, but we're deploying robots across multiple concurrent sites today - and generating revenue. In the last couple of months, our robots have built affordable social housing, health care living units, canal walls in the historic city centre of Amsterdam, and a youth sports centre. Help us to build things that matter in the long run.
We're looking for experienced software engineers for many roles. You can help us solve problems like:
- Data sync and analytics queries across a fleet of robots (that can be offline for hours at a time)
- Modelling buildings in code and finding the right UI for operators to edit them
- Designing systems for robots to drive safely and fully autonomously around a building site
Check out the progress we've already made on Atrium, our operating system for robotics: https://www.monumental.co/atrium
We're rapidly scaling up operations (recently announced our Series B!) and we need experienced engineers who can build the systems that manage all of that complexity. If you think that 'full-stack' could reasonably mean debugging firmware, mixing buckets of mortar _and_ writing React components, we are looking for you. Robotics experience not required!
https://www.monumental.co/jobs
Read a post from one of our forward deployed engineers about how we prototype fast: https://buildmonumental.substack.com/p/can-robots-build-pret...
Comment · 3 months ago
A lot of employer pensions will have limited fund options. (At least in the UK, maybe the US works differently.)
Quite likely that the only sensible one for most people (~global equities) will track S&P 500 internally. So essentially employees are being forced to hold whatever the index includes.
Hopefully it's less of a problem with Nasdaq, but it was a real worry.
Comment · 4 months ago
MONUMENTAL | https://www.monumental.co/ | Amsterdam, The Netherlands | Full Time | Onsite
We make robots that autonomously construct buildings, starting with bricklaying.
There's a lot of vapourware in robotics, but we're deploying robots across multiple concurrent sites today - and generating revenue. In the last couple of months, our robots have built affordable social housing, health care living units, canal walls in the historic city centre of Amsterdam, and a youth sports centre. Help us to build things that matter in the long run.
We're looking for experienced software engineers for many roles. You can help us solve problems like:
- Data sync and analytics queries across a fleet of robots (that can be offline for hours at a time)
- Modelling buildings in code and finding the right UI for operators to edit them
- Designing systems for robots to drive safely and fully autonomously around a building site
Check out the progress we've already made on Atrium, our operating system for robotics: https://www.monumental.co/atrium
We're rapidly scaling up operations and we need experienced engineers who can build the systems that manage all of that complexity. If you think that 'full-stack' could reasonably mean debugging firmware, mixing buckets of mortar _and_ writing React components, we are looking for you. Robotics experience not required!
https://www.monumental.co/jobs
Read a post from one of our forward deployed engineers about how we prototype fast: https://buildmonumental.substack.com/p/can-robots-build-pret...
Comment · 4 months ago
I only recently discovered that not only can you not uninstall Apple's bloatware - you can't even hide it in a folder!
I just can't understand why I have to have my list of useful apps interspersed with cruft like Books.app or Journal.app.
Comment · 5 months ago
MONUMENTAL | https://www.monumental.co/ | Amsterdam, The Netherlands | Full Time | Onsite
We make robots that autonomously construct buildings, starting with bricklaying.
There's a lot of vapourware in robotics, but we're deploying robots across multiple concurrent sites today - and generating revenue. In the last couple of months, our robots have built affordable social housing, health care living units, canal walls in the historic city centre of Amsterdam, and a youth sports centre. Help us to build things that matter in the long run.
We're looking for experienced software engineers for many roles. You can help us solve problems like:
- Data sync and analytics queries across a fleet of robots (that can be offline for hours at a time)
- Modelling buildings in code and finding the right UI for operators to edit them
- Designing systems for robots to drive safely and fully autonomously around a building site
Check out the progress we've already made on Atrium, our operating system for robotics: https://www.monumental.co/atrium
We're rapidly scaling up operations and we need experienced engineers who can build the systems that manage all of that complexity. If you think that 'full-stack' could reasonably mean debugging firmware, mixing buckets of mortar _and_ writing React components, we are looking for you. Robotics experience not required!
https://www.monumental.co/jobs
Read about a week in the life of one of our engineers: https://buildmonumental.substack.com/p/can-robots-build-pret...
https://www.rossng.eu/
[ my public key: https://keybase.io/rossng; my proof: https://keybase.io/rossng/sigs/k9hsrOjN6SnsHR-xW7TITjVZ7Xsd_I7wPgFMMYoJcO8 ]