It's hilariously fucked up. They pay us O($1M)/yr and treat us like we're working on an assembly line producing Jira story points. And if they don't surveil us carefully enough we might steal a point from them! Or something? Who knows. It's not just Facebook, although what they're doing here is particularly bad, but this ethos permeates the entire American tech industry. With very few exceptions, it's like this at every company.
It's a tricky balance, and there's a nonlinearity in that it really depends on what technical risk you've already taken on. Like.. clever ideas are like children. A handful are fine, lovely even! But if you have more than you can adequately keep track of or properly nurture that's no good. So best to focus attention on the small number of clever ideas that actually matter for your business--the ones that differentiate you from all the other companies doing broadly the same thing as you.
There's no way this thing is stable enough or heavy enough to be even remotely useful for that application. They state 500kg including operator. No outriggers, all the weight is up high... that dog don't hunt.
Thanks for sharing this, that seems like a very cool setup. I have a very old good-for-almost-nothing laptop that would be perfect for this, might just have to copy you!
1.5) Having a compiler in the loop that does things like enforcing type constraints (and in the case if Rust in particular, therefore memory safety guarantees) is really useful both for humans and LLMs.
Very well said. When I'm working on a hard problem I'll often spend a few weeks sweating details like algorithms, API shapes, wire formats, database schemas, etc. These things are all really easy to change while they're just in a design document. Once you start implementing, big sweeping edits get a lot more difficult. So better to frontload as much of that as possible in the design phase. AI coding agents don't change this dynamic. However all that frontloaded work pays off big when it does come time to implement, because the search space has been narrowed considerably.
Such a person is just pushing a giant pile of cleanup work onto their colleagues. Unless they actually checked, the "cross references" are probably wrong in places or just entirely made up. Lower level employees by definition don't have the experience to correct the more subtle inconsistencies, so you've basically just constructed a high pass filter that lets only the worst failures through. Moreover, you're absolutely guaranteed to lose the respect of those lower level employees--forcing someone else to clean up your sloppy work is just cruel, and people resent being treated cruelly.
If something is actually important, don't put it on a computer. Don't let a computer be in the critical path of anything that actually matters. It's really quite simple. Even before "AI" this technology was not reliable enough for serious, important things--systems that need to be maintainable in adverse conditions (battle damage, etc), systems where failure is not an option (proving your identity, proving your children are yours, ...). If you care about your car, truck, tractor, or dozer being maintainable and reliable, don't get one with a computer in it. Until we can figure out how to make these things reliable and maintainable they're not to be trusted.
It's hilarious they're using "AI" as the excuse to do all this dystopian zero theorem shit. This is web3 all over again, just bigger and more "disruptive". AI isn't useful in and of itself, just as a blanket excuse to justify the craven impulses of the most ethically bankrupt tech functionaries. Disgusting.
Yeah I've been using an ESP32-C6 for the latest wifi connected project I'm working on. The RP2040 and RP2350 look interesting too, I have a couple of them but haven't really done much with them.
After seeing what new R-Pi stuff is selling for I went rummaging in the parts drawer and found the following:
- R-Pi Zero W
- Sixfab UPS hat
- Sixfab Cellular IoT App Shield
- R-Pi model 1B
With all this I should be able to make a multiply redundant always-on bastion host. It's awesome that alpine supports the armhf stuff, many OSes have dropped 32bit support entirely.
Tactics like this will make me get a dumb phone and stop using those websites. If that means no more credit cards, online shopping, etc so be it. You have to draw the line somewhere.
There's nothing wrong with Woodford but... idk if I was going to have a bottle engraved with my name maybe find something more interesting? Strange behavior though...
Yeah Bentley (and in some cases Haynes) make good aftermarket manuals too. And you can find good information on some forums. But you can also find a lot of bad information. Reliably sifting the good from bad only comes with experience--much like in software.
Speaking not as a professional mechanic, but as someone who maintains a car, two trucks, a tractor, a couple boats, and has googled quite a lot of torque specs in my time... If you're googling torque specs in 2026 you're gonna have a bad time. They're frequently just flat out wrong, especially the AI summaries ;). Use the authoritative source of truth--the shop manual published by the equipment manufacturer. Accept no substitutes.
IME they're often more than willing to share details about how broken and bad the software systems they use daily are. This is the kind of knowledge that can make you very successful as a technologist if you know how to look for it, but you'll never find it if you can't relate to people of differing backgrounds on a human level.
Good leaders always lead from the front. There's nothing special about this "knowledge work". It's the same as any other industrial job in this respect. A good foreman can do everyone's job better than them and knows how to keep the higher ups off your back. They're someone you look up to professionally. There's no way you can look up to someone who can't do the job well.
If you actually did talk to your plumber, or electrician, or mechanic, or anyone else you view as "lower" than you, you might have actually learned something. Interesting paradox, that.