dominicdoty

Extremely cool. Amazon was at one point working on something similar to this concept. Feels much more plausibly useful with LLMs these days though. https://www.geekwire.com/2015/amazon-files-patent-to-transfo...

Whoa this is weird timing - just this weekend I did a little exploration of using Svelte to create documents and eventually PDFs.

Its really just a proof of concept at this point, but it might be of interest to you (and others).

Code: https://github.com/dominicdoty/sveltedoc

Rendered: https://sveltedoc.pages.dev/

Writeup: https://www.dominicdoty.com/2025/03/02/sveltedoc/

TLDR - I've been using Asciidoc a lot at work recently and was dissatisfied with it. This was an attempt at using Svelte to generate a document as a webpage that formats well when printed (or printed to PDF). All the power of HTML+CSS+JS when you want it, but the ease of use to just write markdown when you don't.

Shameless plug for my own project with a similar bent - write your own lunar lander autopilot in browser

lunar.unnecessarymodification.com

I think the counter to this would be that if you focused on the "listen to a song I want right away" problem - you would have invented Spotify. From a business perspective inventing Spotify is probably better than inventing bittorrent. Elegant solutions are lovely, but often miss the problem people wanted to solve. Sometimes a useful product is built on top of an elegant solution e.g. WireGuard vs Tailscale. Seems similar to academic research vs engineering. Both useful, different goals/outcomes.

Because the steering ratio is variable, the movement shown in the video is about the equivalent of two full turns of a normal steering wheel. I tend to agree with the parent, it'd be hard for a human to equal this performance.

I don't think I've seen anyone else suggest it- the Comma Body might be an interesting platform for this. No manipulator unfortunately but a decent place to start.

https://www.comma.ai/shop/body

The "95% reduction in the last 100 years" feels like a misguided argument since our improved abilities to handle weather events will not hold if the weather patterns we've gotten so good at handling, change. If you exceed design conditions, your 95% reduction can quickly turn into a Texas blackout.

I agree that optimism is critical to keep moving forward. However I do disagree with your implication that young people believe that we cannot handle nature and the climate. The view I (anecdotally) encounter most is not the belief that we are incapable of handling it, but that we will refuse to handle it till it's too late.

Couldn't cloudflare show a page to the next handful of http requests from an IP informing the user that "something on your network is participating in DDoS attacks".

All the big providers could do this, just inject a little turnstile like page in front of the next cloudflare site you visit.

I would love to know if there's a compromised device on my network, and I don't have any real monitoring set up to detect it.

It's not a full solution, but at least informing users there is a problem is a good start.

If they're interested in software and hardware, robotics is a fun place to start.

Line following, object avoidance, maze solving, all sorts of cool options.

A relatively cheap option would be the micro:bit [1] and a chassis [2]. The micro:bit can run CircuitPython [3] which is an simplified version of Python that can run on embedded systems.

This setup offers lots of room for growth from graphical programming, to circuitpython, and then on to C programming.

[1] https://www.adafruit.com/product/4781

[2] https://www.adafruit.com/product/4575

[3] https://circuitpython.org/board/microbit_v2/

This is very cool, I like the increasing complexity levels.

I actually made a similar thing based on writing your own autopilot for a Lunar Lander [1]. It's hard to make the difficulty increase linearly though. I like the use of different scenarios in this one.

[1] https://lunar.unnecessarymodification.com/

From an engineering perspective life is an incredibly sensitive rube goldberg machine.

We have yet to find another world that has the right combination of googly eyes and string and tape to sustain relatively stable complex life. We struggle to understand the far reaching effects that even simple changes have on our planets systems and ecosystems. We have evidence of the system throwing itself so far out of whack that huge portions of life have died off.

While I broadly agree with this, you have to be careful you don't slide too far into this mindset. Vacations become hard to justify if you view them as both the price of the vacation+lost income opportunity. It's easy to find yourself in a place where it's hard to justify doing anything but working.

A fair point, but even then 150 is probably on the high end. I commute 60 miles a day and made it through the first ~2 months using only a level 1 home charger (standard wall outlet). My total charge trended down through the week, and then made up for it on the weekend.

~10 hours of level 1 charging gives me about 50-60 miles. Slightly limiting for my commute, but all in all, not impossible to work around.

This is taken out of context a bit. What's said is that range doesn't matter if you're not doing long hauls (which he defines as 150+ miles).

I tend to agree with him, as the majority of drivers are rarely driving over 150 miles in a day. In that case any car with 200+ miles of range will easily meet day to day needs with no fast charging. I've personally found this to be true as I come up on 6 months of EV ownership. I've only needed to fast charge 1x, and that was due to me accidentally not plugging my car in all the way one night.

He explained his viewpoint more thoroughly in a post linked just after your quoted line:

https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2021/09/01/How-Much-...

I've always liked ultrasonic bolt length measurement as the ultra high reliability way of measuring preload.

It can also be used for confirming the correct preload is still present, with the downside of having to track the original length of every fastener (which isn't really a big deal in high reliability applications)