I’ve found knowing the 1/e rule helps a lot with reducing stress when interviewing. It’s knowing that, if I haven’t randomly landed outside the first third, they should optimally say no to me, regardless of performance.
"No one is safe from the future" and all that. It feels sad on one hand that someone's legacy can be brought down so quickly. On the other hand, our legacies don't belong to us anymore, after we leave. When it's up to our children to decide how to run the place, they also get to choose their own idols.
The margins on hardware are terrible. Multiplied by how few people care about home automation and you get a project that’s probably not making money.
The two ways to close that gap are cloud service revenue (paid monthly or with privacy) or to charge thousands instead of hundreds for a thermostat.
Also, an ESP8266 costs 5-10$ and all the software needed to build your own gear can be one-click installed with the Arduino IDE. That’s what preserving freedom and privacy costs today.
I use a Samsung Odyssey G9 and it has both the distance and resolution of two 28” 1440p monitors. Thing is a dream for coding with but kind of terrible for both movies and games because of that crazy aspect ratio!
The photo shows an R0402 on it. 0805 is definitely doable by a beginner. 0402 though is at the edge of what could be done without a microscope and not something I’d want to touch with beginner gear.
I had this explained once by a civil engineer planning highway work. He said that teams who finish on-time and on-budget charge more. Newer teams less likely to meet requirements charge less to account for the higher risk. So it’s a risk vs. cost curve.
In civil engineering, risk is taken seriously and the cheaper pitches are less-often taken. In IT, decision makers don’t yet understand the risks so they always accept the lowest bid.
I switched out keycaps IRL, not in VR. The idea was that, not being able to cheat by looking down would help improve my typing faster by forcing me to memorize the keys better. I’ve only gone from mid-50s wpm to now about 60ish but it’s helped more with the uncommon keys that don’t move the average as much. It’s those uncommon keys that kill me in VR though so it feels like a bigger bump.
Most office work that I’ve seen requires text entry (email, spreadsheets, proposals, etc) and that’s always today done through a keyboard. Doing that work in VR where you can’t see the keyboard is surprisingly tough, even if you can touch type!
I’ve switched out my keycaps for blanks recently to try to force myself to get better at working in VR but I’m still struggling a bit with all the symbols.
I have an old grandfathered Oculus account and haven’t upgraded to Quest 2 because I don’t want to link my Facebook. If this ends up being true, they’ve made at least one extra sale.
I really wish I could understand this better because it seems important. If I have this straight, BDNF is a thing that makes neurons grow and trk is a thing that tells the neurons they have enough fuel (cholesterol) to grow. So SSRIs are promoting neuron growth to beat depression by tricking it into thinking it has enough fuel to grow, when there probably actually isn’t?
So many people waiting around patiently for an hour before starting to complain is crazy. People would definitely still fall for the prank today but that feels so tame for what a huge reaction there was.
Leaving a company is a six-week process where you give your notice four weeks in, after all your loose ends are already cleaned up. Part of that first section is finding out from both your manager and HR how they expect/want to get notice. There’s no way to do that without foreshadowing a bit, which also makes things easier when the time comes.
The easy way to get more data through a port is to add more data lines (and update the connector to support it). I guess the hard way would be to use fiber (another different connector) or maybe coax data lines instead of differential lines (connector might still work but connecting old and new systems would be interesting).
So if I’m understanding this proposal right, we will never live in a world where improving on USBC will happen?
That’s really nice of him to put together such a concise, well-described list of issues for them. Hopefully someone sees this and adds it to their issue tracker. It’s very rare to see anyone internal grab something from outside like that though.
It feels like the trend right now is that developers are more expensive than managers. So if they’re a commodity, it’s the most precious kind. If the power dynamic keeps shifting that way though, I bet we’ll see some more like artists and less like cogs in the machine. Maybe not so much artists and more like other professionals.
That thought was why I added “almost” right before posting! It’s free to run, just, except for the expensive parts... AWS still rents out GPU power, right? That might be a bit easier to get started with.
It was the high cost per API call that pulled all the fun out of GPT-3 for me. I hadn’t been following the company at all but believe you based on just that single issue. It looks like GPT-J has open sourced their entire model so I could potentially run it myself for almost-free? If so, that’s going to be much more fun. Thanks for sharing!
Just out of curiosity (I don’t mean this to be a dig and don’t carry either cards), why are Maxwell’s Equations good but Ohm’s Law is an instant no-hire? How I remember the story is that, when Ohm published his equation, it came as a huge shock because no one was expecting it to be so simple. There’s a lot of beauty in that simplicity. Maxwell’s equations aren’t that complex but they aren’t exactly _linear_. Valuing complexity is an interesting hiring tactic but would probably be a great filter on younger engineers?
I’m not saying that most people aren’t formula pluggers (and that’s a big problem) but, my first impression of that kind of card would be that’s it’s meant to be branding, not a tool. Someone is carrying around a piece of what they love.
I have a feeling that being in-office is a competitive advantage for the product and being remote is a competitive advantage for hiring. And also that being in-person amplifies the benefit of being in a good company where being remote lessens the blow of being in a bad company.
I still haven’t decided where I want to fall on those trade-offs but I think being somewhere that embraces remote but tries its best to get everyone together as often as possible might be the best trade-off.
> I've still been seeing some of my old team on weekends.
I think this is the key to it right here. The ones you chose not to leave behind were friends, not peers. After almost a decade, they probably are more family than friend. The rest of them though? Not even close.
I’ve been using an M1 MacBook so far. Optimizing for battery life and durability (in the sense of it won’t fall apart when dropped) and that’s where I’ve landed. I was using a Chromebook for a while before that (with the Linux add-on) and I think I liked that one a bit better. I like being integrated into the iOS ecosystem more than Android though, if I get to choose.
I don’t really like the laptop compromise. Where you’re trading performance (and maybe reliability) for mobility. This laptop seems like a good attempt at making the compromise less bad, but, I’ve gone back to desktops instead.
I’ve found that the majority of my work is always at my desk so I switched my main machine to desktop. It’s much, much more upgradeable/repairable than a laptop can be. I still keep a laptop for when I can’t be there but mostly just use it to remote into the main machine so it doesn’t have to be from this decade.
I’m looking forward to the moment I can plug a keyboard into my phone and connect into an EC3 instance or something like that and not worry about hardware at all.