Sileni

Part of that could also be how TV/Netflix can be in the background. I probably watch a few hours of a random Netflix show over the weekend. But I'm also doing laundry, touching up some hobby code, or just spacing out and drinking my coffee. It kind of falls into place as background noise when my brain doesn't need to be fully occupied by the task at hand.

I couldn't do those things while entertaining a guest. That requires much more mental effort.

This is a bit like saying "F1 doesn't produce useful cars", isn't it?

The point of a competition is to meet specific parameters as well as possible and push the boundaries of what can be done. It's not meant to create a "daily driver".

I realize he argued against this with the coin flip test, but that is why you'd ideally want to have many of these competitions over time. If you start to see the same names popping up at the top regularly, you know there's some sort of significance to them. Teams would ultimately want to trend towards whatever wins competitions most consistently, so they'd want to rely on models they think are the most likely to perform in a real world test. They wouldn't want to simply rely on a coin flip.

And in large competitions, you have the chance of batching the top performers together and seeing what is common between them. Presumably there's a reason these models pan out over the rest in aggregate; are they worth pursuing a bit?

I think we agree at the end though, even within my analogy. A huge value of F1 racing is the publicity the teams give their sponsors. They might learn some information that can be pushed down to their consumer vehicles, but it's marginal compared to team winnings and the value of saying "See? Our engineers are the best".

I refuse to replace my NVMe for this reason alone. That screw is going to get stuck somewhere and I'm going to have to take the motherboard out completely to get it, hoping the whole time I didn't fry anything.

Why. Why make a screw that small. It's torture.

In the larger scale type of manufacturing I'm working with, those small bots tend to have trade-offs that mean they're not really worth choosing over a larger, more traditional manufacturing robot, or a solution without robotics at all. Mounting difficulties, lack of range of movement, and lack of robustness being the core issues. In most scenarios, you're better off avoiding robots and going for something statically mounted. Failing that, choosing a Kawasaki model that's been in production the last 30 years. Then you know beyond a shadow of a doubt that it's going to run for the next decade without a hitch. You can find operators with experience relatively cheap. Every imaginable mounting head exists and has been in production long enough to know the issues you're going to face with it.

The big robot will survive in large scale manufacturing for the same reason Java survives in enterprise; it's part of the culture at this point. It does its job well, it hardly ever fails, and it's relatively easy to bring someone up to speed on working with them. Like Java, you'll probably see a number of companies pop up that prefer a newer technology, because it fits their use case well. But I'd expect the bulk of total money spent to continue to be on the kinds of industrial robots we work with now.

The place I can see small robots making an impact is knowledge work, such as laboratories or design. And realistically, in those fields we've never been time constrained. It's more common, in my experience, that the limiting factor is the number of good ideas a person can come up with. There's no way to reduce "hours formulating an idea" short of AGI. Scientists have to read papers, designers have to study a company or product to make all of the branding coherent.

All of that said, the newer, low cost bots will probably move the needle, but they won't accelerate the pace of automation significantly. More likely, they'll contribute to maintaining the current acceleration.

Two real ways to go about it, it works about the same as learning guitar for a specific genre. Either find someone competent in that play-style to tutor you, or take a beginner-intermediate class in piano. Up to that point it will conceptually be similar. Once you feel like your basic technique is sound (rolls, fingering, rhythm), start learning songs you like. You'll pick up the specific techniques you need as you go.

Taking a class early on is important though. You'll ingrain bad technique if you're entirely self taught, and reteaching yourself later when you realize your technique is holding you back is absolutely miserable. Taken from experience.

Watch out, you'll have a DJ before you know it.

Did a 2600x / Vega 56 build recently, and I'm honestly impressed with the value. Total under $1k after tax. I would have spent that before getting a GPU if I had gone Intel.

Usually 10s or so. Not a great user experience, but she mostly uses it to share recipes with friends or relatives. Once it's awake, it's pretty quick, faster than Google's App Engine free tier in my experience. If she wanted to generate traffic I'd have no problem paying the $5/month to keep the lights on, and Heroku's pricing seems reasonable as you scale up.

Running my girlfriend's recipe blog on Python + Django + Wagtail CMS on a Heroku server, wired up to Google cloud storage. It ends up being completely free with the dev tier Heroku server and staying within the free tier of Google's cloud storage.

It was mostly as a learning exercise, but it's a pretty flexible stack, and I'm a fan of the Wagtail admin panel; didn't really feel the need to customize anything there.

I imagine quite a few of those are either A) A place to get coffee and hang out B) Not making much money, but kept open by people who just want to own a bookstore.

A) is the model a lot of Barnes and Nobles are going with these days; they're attached to some sort of cafe and people leisurely walk around with their coffee and read whatever. This model doesn't make much money when people won't buy terribly overpriced coffee.

B) is all over Denver, with owners living in the buildings they run their bookstore out of. I have no way to confirm, but I can't imagine they're making much money.

Social Security in the US as well. Most of my generation that I've talked to have just accepted it as another tax; there's not going to be anything left of it by the time we would actually expect to withdraw from it.

Not OP, but I've done some work in the space. The market is just saturated now. It takes such little effort to start a dropshipping "business" that unless you have a really unique angle or spend absurd amounts on marketing, you'll probably make somewhere in the range of peanuts to beer money.

Even if you do find a successful niche market, it won't take long for a low budget clone to jump in, which invalidates a lot of the up front work in marketing and product validation.

I think this is a fascinating project, but I have to ask. How do you get your foot in the door with consumers? I'd feel a bit sketched out if someone showed up and just asked to follow me around for a while. What's the incentive?

Like I said in the first response, if you're willing to throw a huge excess of energy at the problem, sure. Calculate out the energy expenditure on any of those reactions. You're talking about burning thousands of times more hydrocarbons than are being recovered. It's a bit like saying you don't need to worry about algorithmic efficiency with a big enough computer.

> It takes a relatively large amount of energy to break down those bonds, and when you do, your end product is something far more stable than the original chemicals you started with.

Sure, you could theoretically break down most plastics to CO2 and the like. They're a lower energy state than most plastics. The question is why expend the energy to get something we have a huge surplus of. You're not going to be able to get volatiles such as methane or ethylene out of that process efficiently, because it's a higher energy state than the plastics. Tar sands and the like are a mixture of volatiles and heavier compounds; they're not a homogeneous compound the way most plastics are. The compounds going into a thermal cracking system, such as decane, are actually higher in total energy content than the products, such as heptane. They're just more difficult to work with, and as such less valuable economically.

Really, if you're not satisfied with the previous explanation you're going to have to look into an entry level organic chemistry textbook to understand it.

Chemical reactions are typically driven by moving from a high potential energy state to a lower potential energy state. Polymers are incredibly stable because of their binding mechanisms. It takes a relatively large amount of energy to break down those bonds, and when you do, your end product is something far more stable than the original chemicals you started with. Which means it reacts less readily than the chemicals you started with.

Take for example polyethylene, a product we can recycle relatively well. The first reaction gives polyethylene chains of length N. Because they're as long as a polyethylene chain can be, they're as strong as polyethylene can be, and have the best performance characteristics you can expect. Each time they're heated up to be remolded or have contaminants removed, and to a lesser extent just from use and contact with sunlight, some of those chains break. This creates more N/(2^x) length chains. This causes the plastic to get weaker over time. The energy cost to recombine those chains would consume more petroleum than simply creating new plastics, if it could be done at all.

Eh, call it a non-profit or charity. Give the kids who show promise in tech a chance to just start running instead of taking the typical college route. I doubt it'd be on the scale of 10k companies, but a thousand a year? That could be doable. Have the contracts be very generous towards the "students", and try to make up the difference with donations and alumni contributions. It'd essentially become a new form of secondary education, a trade school for tech in a sense.

My girlfriend and I were talking about a similar concept a few minutes ago. Our theory is this:

When you meet someone who's similar to you, or doesn't have much overlap, you tend to get along easily, because it's a frictionless surface. When you meet someone who compliments you, it takes time for the gears to lock into place. You're going to miss the connections a few times, but once they click, they're rock solid.

Any time you initially don't get along with someone, but generally think they're level with you in most ways, it's probably best to give it some time and see how it goes. They might compliment you a lot better than someone who's agreeable immediately.

The silver lining to jobs like that is after a year or two, you're the single, solitary person in the world that can keep the machine running as expected. Performance reviews become a breeze after that.

"We've been looking at your performance these last few months, and it seems you've stopped taking on new responsibilities..."

"The machine is running."

"Yes but..."

"I have other offers."

"Never mind, carry on. Here's your raise."

Honestly the closest thing to a religious experience I have most days (weeks...months...) is getting rid of the foggy feeling in the morning with a cup of coffee while reading whatever I'm interested in at the moment. I've often wholeheartedly thanked the coffee in front of me for saving my mental state. It's certainly a ritual at this point.

I guess I'm saying... Would they really be far off?

Doesn't have all the functionality that AutoCAD does, and there are some usability issues if you're really comfortable in AutoCAD already, but I imagine FreeCAD [0] would work well for your use case.

[0]: https://www.freecadweb.org/

Completely unqualified thought, but I think it has to do with how you organize information in your brain. Are you spatially oriented or do you think in lists?

I'm a chemist, and I definitely think spatially. Creating images of physical objects in my head and reorienting them is a major part of my job, and the "memory palace" has been the most valuable memory tool I've found.

I can't think if there's an extra set of papers on my desk. I tend to organize my tasks using the physical space on my desk, so the most urgent item is about 3 inches from my keyboard at any time. I start to get anxious if too many things pile onto my desk without intentionally organizing them into priorities.

I didn't read her article that way. I read it as "Creating a new box to push people into defeats the purpose of opening up the boxes of 'Women' and 'Tech Workers'". She's alright with the labels of "Woman" and "Tech Worker" because they're (relatively) open groups. There's a wide range of people who fit into them. On the other hand, when people are talking about "Women in Tech", there's an image, and expectations surrounding that.

Embracing her identity as a woman gives her a place to build her character from. Being a "Woman in Tech", the way she's using the term, pigeonholes her into acting or looking a certain way, for fear of the dissonance it might create for someone else.

The fact that they know there's an issue with replication suggests they're using the scientific method. Their experimental design might need work, but they're working within a scientific framework.

Insurance companies in the US have to pay out a certain percentage of the premiums they take in (80% last I checked) [0]. So they're also incentivized to let prices climb; their 20% for "administration and profit" is inflated when prices are inflated.

[0] https://www.healthcare.gov/health-care-law-protections/rate-...

I'm gonna flip this on its head a bit; I've been that "bad actor" in the past, when I honest to god could not afford a course/book/whatever. Not "This will cut into my entertainment fund", more "I won't be able to pay rent if I pay for this".

I'm not in that position anymore, but a lot of my later purchases were based on what I learned while I was broke. Now I naturally default to O'Reilly books, for example, if I want a technical manual. Mostly because I downloaded a handful when I was in college.

If you're expecting your company to be around a while, there's a section of customers which will "abuse" your money-back guarantee, then later buy products from you legitimately, that wouldn't be accessible if you made it difficult to abuse the guarantee in the first place. And as many people have stated here, the "abuse" ends up being only a handful of people to begin with.

Always have to throw this in there when I see articles about lead exposure:

Tetraethyl lead (TEL) is still being manufactured in the UK, and being sold in a handful of countries for consumer gasoline use. One company in the world manufactures the material. It's an easy lookup. They've openly said they won't stop manufacturing the material until they're forced to by government intervention.

Leaded fuel is still being used in aviation as well, even in countries where it has been banned for road use. The primary aircraft that require leaded fuel are small, personal use aircraft. You're being poisoned so some rich bastards can play in their toys.

As a VC? The unicorn fund. Which agrees with what the market has been supporting this last decade.

Given the same investments in each, the unicorn provides a bigger return. Because of economies of scale, it's more likely to gain traction and continue its success, especially in a place like tech where marginal cost is almost non-existent. Not to mention the overhead on managing a single investment vs. many. Not to mention the administrative costs of 5 companies vs one. Not to mention the benefit of choosing a company based on your interests and abilities, since most VCs have a more hands-on role than traditional investors.

It just aligns with the culture; the whole idea in most tech startups is to leverage economies of scale as much as possible. Often their profit per customer is tiny. They're relying on millions of people using the product.

The idea is that the venture capitalist's motivations aren't necessarily aligned with the company's. They're interested in creating a unicorn, because that one company will create the returns necessary to turn a profit on a huge number of attempts. So they attempt to quickly build huge companies with everything they touch, in an effort to get that one that will pay off. Many companies end up being overbuilt to a point where their sales can't sustain their size, in the interest of attempting to have the capacity for future sales.

No idea how you'd run into hardware restrictions; T440 is from 2013, and I have yet to run into a driver issue dual booting Debian and Windows.

I don't understand the bit about the console; I haven't met a dev who doesn't find terminals worlds quicker than hunting and pecking in a GUI. Maybe an argument to keep general users on Windows, not really an argument against devs running a linux distro.

I was suggesting you should understand what's running on your machine and why, and if you do, that $2k mac isn't doing anything for you that a machine worth less than a quarter of that will. Whether or not you have a top of the line machine, there's still reasons to reach for an AWS instance with a powerful GPU attached.