Schwolop

They weigh 5g. A tonne of them is two hundred million of them. I very much doubt that many will be e-waste.

I'm in Australia, with Globird, and have their 3hrs free plus they pay $1 on days I don't use any grid power between the 6-8pm peak, and another $1.50 if I send them back 10kWh of the energy I was given for free during the day, during that peak. In winter, with bugger-all solar (maybe 5kWh generation if I'm lucky) I pull 10kW/hr into a 40kWh battery for those 3hrs each and every day, while also running the heating as high as possible to gain some thermal battery effect too. That 30kWh of battery charge is used up by late evening or middle of the night by fully-electric heating (RCAC split systems and a large ducted RCAC system), so the battery goes down to 5% where I stop using it except in the case of grid failure, and back up to ~75% each day. The idea that no one uses more than 24kWh of electricity each day is absurd - not only will I pull 30kWh to charge a battery, I'll also pull another ~30 or so just to keep warm. My house could easily use 100kWh per day if we heated it to a pleasant level instead of a warm-enough level.

The main problem, as Australians are no doubt aware, is that our houses are large and poorly insulated. I've done everything sensible already (ceiling + floor insulation, draft sealing, honeycomb blinds, etc) except paying $100,000 to double-glaze all windows, and it still feels like a tent.

Despite all this ranting, electricity is now effectively free in summer for me, and ~$5-8 per day in winter. Pre-battery it was in the ballpark of $10-25 per day. The battery should have a payback period of 4 years, but was heavily subsidized by the government. Due to how I'm charging and discharging it so regularly, I'm expected it might only have a 10yr lifetime.

That is hilarious. HackerNews was also the source of my blog's highest day of traffic. IIRC I quit a job and wrote about it and somehow a lot of people read it.

I often feel I _should_ blog more, but then I don't. And every now and again I go and read something I wrote ten years ago and feel a little embarrassed by my past self. But every so often I read something that makes me feel that I _did_ know a few things, or did some cool things, and even if no one else ever read about them it made me feel better ten years in the future and _that_ alone is worth it.

Also, my name is Tom and I'm also a juggler. Weird coincidence to be replying to your username... :-)

> Protection from what exactly?

I think jacquesm is advocating that you have multiple sources of income (clients) to protect from the possibility that you lose your one and only client and suddenly have zero income.

I take a different approach to my consulting. It sounds like you do too. I typically have just one client, but I charge them a metric shitload and tell them quite specifically that I do that in part to protect myself should I need to go months and months without a replacement client. Obviously there are limits to this and I'd have zero clients if I charged too much, but between that and a savings buffer built up from previous clients, I don't feel like this is a precarious situation at all.

But I also have to admit/concede that I do not think my advice is replicable. I only started being so aggressive about my rates once I already had the privilege of being able to survive for years without any income. For someone who _needs_ reliable income, jacquesm's advice is probably more useful than mine.

I'm a self-employed consultant, generally either CTO-style "make your company run better and build better software" stuff or, less often, specific robotics and automation stuff where I'm legitimately something of an expert. I have a PhD in decision theory / optimisation / meta-computing - and it was all applied to autonomous vehicles. A recent client I've picked up in the mining industry is paying me something like 300% of the highest salary I ever earned before setting out on my own.

In addition, I co-founded a company that makes Escape Rooms. We sold 13 turn-key rooms to other operators, then eventually invested in our own venue. We were the only company in the southern hemisphere to win a prestigious TERPECA award this year, so it's not a stretch to say our venue is probably the best in Australia. I've never earned a cent from this in eight years... But, this year is the one. Maybe. Probably. Hopefully?!?

Please tell me your employees are known as Mother Duckers...

I'm consulting with an Australian group called Control Bionics. They have a US company & office, with CTO and sales team in Ohio, but software engineering is done in AU. Their primary product is an electromyography and accelerometer hardware device to detect muscle activations or movements, and then most commonly used as a mouse-click substitute in conjunction with third-party eye-gaze hardware proving the cursor. (I've also designed them an autonomous wheelchair module, but that's another story...)

@pg - If your friend has not tried adding a mouse-click via something they can activate other than eye-gaze, this would be worth a shot. We have a lot of MND patients who use our combination to great success. If they can twitch an eyebrow, wiggle a toe or a finger, or even flex their abdomen, we can put electrodes there and give them a way forward.

Also, my contact details are in my profile. I'd be happy to put you in touch with our CEO and I'm confident that offers of funding would be of interest. The company is listed on the Australian stock exchange, but could likely go much further with a direct injection of capital to bolster the engineering team.

Cheers, Tom

I just set up a computer for my own kids and used Ubuntu from the get-go. About the only two things that have led to a bit of frustration from the kids have been that we can't play my collection of 1990s games on CDs (KOTOR, Deus Ex, etc) because they're all for Windows only, and that Roblox doesn't have a linux version.

I'm OK with them not thinking Roblox is a good way to learn to make games. Also, Steam on Linux with its custom version of Wine is awesome. And most 1990s games seem to cost about $5 to purchase again and not have to faff around with CD-keys...

There's a web plugin too. It can issue GET requests. That's enough to probe a lot of interesting things, and I'll bet there's an endpoint somewhere on the web that will eval any other web request, so now you've opened up every web accessible API - again, all theoretical, but at least not too far removed from an exploit.

I'll just poke my head in to say hello and thank you for all your blog posts and pod/vid-casts. I've learned a lot about the tabletop ecosystem from you, and I hope to pitch my "big project" game to your company when I get it back out my head and onto the table again. Your description about wanting to publish the "main event" type of games resonated with me, and unlike some of my other games, the one I'm thinking of here really nails that brief. Best wishes, Jamey!

I worked in a product development consultancy and a few of us decided to build our own escape room as an entry into the company's "startup accelerator". The company was thoroughly unimpressed with that as a money-making prospect and refused to fund it, but by that time we'd gone and tried a couple of local escape rooms ourselves. We found them to be fun but so undeniably crap that we were immediately convinced we could build something ten times more exciting.

Without much more thought than that, we did. One of the older and more financially capable of us decided he could use a bigger shed anyway, and rented a warehouse where we built our first game. We convinced ourselves the route to money making was to automate everything and thus never have to pay game-masters to run things, so I wrote a heap of python to network raspberry pis together and have them listen to and actuate hardware in the rooms. I wrote a DSL so that we could write more or less plain-english "stories" that would make the hardware do things when the players did things, accounting for there being multiple players and the potential for out-of-expected-order actions. We did all of this in a couple of evenings a week over the course of a year or so. We expected to then find the right venue and build this game and a few more there.

I don't entirely remember how but I bumped into someone at a gaming expo who led me to my country's largest entertainment venue company, and they sent a bizdev guy to check us out. Within a couple of years we'd sold them over a dozen rooms and became responsible for a decent percentage of their total revenue, all while taking a reasonable cut. I think I worked a two month period at about three days a week to get our first venue operating, but other than that I held a different full-time job the whole time.

Fast forward another few years and we've survived COVID and have opened our own venue with what is probably the best escape room in the world. Definitely in the top-ten. My co-founder works on the business full-time, along with a few others now. We're still entirely self-funded and are profitable with just this first room. Our next rooms in the venue go pretty-much straight to the bottom line.

---

So to answer the actual question - we just built something that people wanted. And that we wanted to see exist. The first part is bog-standard Paul Graham advice, but the second part is important too. We wanted it to exist so we were motivated to keep at it until it worked. Paraphrasing the common cliché; it's taken us seven-ish years to become an overnight success.

I was coming here to say that the term for a problem which when solved makes people question whether it was necessary after all is a "Wicked Problem"[1], only to then discover that that's not it at all. So now I'm stumped - what is the word for that?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_problem

  not counting appreciation

You definitely need to count that. Even with pretty conservative assumptions, it massively changes the outcomes. For those numbers, and assuming 5% growth of investments after inflation, you can retire in 23.5 years (using https://networthify.com/calculator/earlyretirement?income=28... for convenience).

It might be worth reminding Australians in the audience that possession of pornographic drawings or cartoons of figures deemed to be "childlike" is considered equivalent to possession of actual child pornography, in this country. As a result I suspect this kind of site and the diffusion model tech is dangerous for Australians to use until there are more deliberate guarantees against the creation of such images. Our laws will lag technology for many years, but the result here is a chilling effect whereby I'm not willing to even explore it much for fear of potential unintended consequences.

For those who've not seen this domain before (although it is showing up more frequently on HN these days), Psyche "is a digital magazine from Aeon that illuminates the human condition through psychology, philosophy and the arts."

Its essays are hit and miss for me (and there's a fair bit of miss from this one, even though I think the discussion here is interesting...), but there's more than enough interesting ones to keep me coming back. It's one of the few sites around that has convinced me to join its newsletter. And if you're in a cosmopolitan city (Melbourne, London, New York, etc) they host semi-regular philosophy night events too. Worth a look.

I have a first generation iPad from 2010 that still works. It's on iOS 4 or something. We use it permanently plugged in as a photo slideshow thingy, and play Jetpack Joyride and Peggle on it a few days a week.

I keep expecting it to just not turn on one day soon, but it's still chugging along happily. I plugged it into a laptop and updated the photos on it a few months ago, with the expectation that doing so would have a fair chance of killing it for good, but it handled that happily too and kept on truckin'.

After 12 years I think I've had pretty good value for money out of it!

You sound like a slightly older version of me. And then I read your profile and you work in precisely the same field. I honestly feel that robotics is one of the few domains in which this kind of play can yield a sustaining and continually interesting career. I'm currently building an autonomous wheelchair for about half my usual rates just because it sounded fun. :-)

I agree. The new name never stuck for me and I keep having to google what it changed to (Shortcut, FYI) so that I can find the bookmark to it.

One fun heuristic I've used for thought-experiments in futurology is to ask "what will be to cheap to charge for eventually, and what comes of that?" For example, electricity. Or water. Or fuel/energy for vehicles? Or computation? What would you do if you had unlimited internet bandwidth? What will have scarcity value when we can harvest asteroids for unlimited diamonds (or just... not stockpile them)?

There's the missing Step #2 problem, but it's still interesting to think through. And in my personal experience, it can also lead to you creating the future but too early for it to be truly viable. And that can 'waste' a lot of time, if you don't enjoy or value the the exploration in and of itself.

As an Aussie with Greek friends, I choose to treat this exactly as per the colloquial meaning of 'minimum', as in "minimum chips". :-)

I'm interested by #3, as it is imminently to be my own situation (by choice). The few people who know thus far are all close friends, and even then aren't completely aware that "living off my savings" comes with the additional "and I'm >95% confident that I can do so in perpetuity." My parents think I'll be bored in short order, which may be true. But I've no idea how the rest of society would see it. Envious? Pleased for me? Suspicious of how it was achieved? Something else?

Just as one counter data point to your observation of your social circles: 2020 made me reconsider things. I also did the maths and concluded I was already the FI part of FIRE. I thought some more about what I wanted to do with my life, stayed several more months to give myself time to reflect on things, and then ultimately resigned with no intention to find another job. I will wrap up in two weeks time.

There's a mistake in this: > I won’t go too deep into the math, but it can be shown that G achieves its maximum when f=1-2p

Should be f=2p-1

Is this a measure, or a target?

If it's a measure, _shrug_, I see it as fairly inevitable in a big enterprise. Some people will leave for good, bad, and miscellaneous reasons. 6% turnover at a big enterprise seems pretty low IMHO.

If it's a target - wtf? Actively forcing out satisfactory staff to hit an arbitrary number is a bizarre way to operate.

I know the media loves to suggest Amazon has horrible work practices, but seeing as one explanation of this number is sensible enough and the other is batshit crazy, I choose to assume they're applying it in the sensible way.

In what is increasingly a HN trope, the early comments on this link have predominantly been negative. Please don't let that fool you - QUT's Robotics group has been a driving force for Australia for several years now. It is a young group but led by a very experienced academic, Dr Peter Corke, and they are kicking goals.

As someone who holds a PhD from their biggest Australian competitor (Sydney Uni's Australian Centre for Field Robotics) I have nothing but respect for QUT's group.

And finally, Peter Corke (who gives most of these lectures) is a brilliant example of a great teacher. He is not only highly educated in the topics, but he's also highly educated in pedagogy itself and it shows in these lectures and his other freely available teaching material. If you want a general introduction to modern robotics from scratch, this is a great way in.

I learnt this one early on and definitely still encourage it (but aware of your caveat too). But I describe it differently when I'm coaching, and I think I've used the phrase "try to get your conditionals out of the way early".

My rationale is that having done this, I'm left with a smaller combinatoric mental space to work within. Like "if the program counter has reached this point then I know for a fact that X, Y, and Z don't apply - the function would have exited early if they did". And that then means the remaining set of things I have to keep in my working memory is reduced, which makes life easier.

Is that similar to how you see this advice?

I take your point, but maybe a more nuanced phrasing is that I don't want to check arduous parts of my safety equipment on every ride. For example, I might bend down and check that my brake pads are still OK before each ride, but I'm not going to unscrew the brake fluid reservoir to check for again or bleed the lines. I do accept that this airbag has a pretty straight-forward indicator that one would easily check before riding, and so it's fair enough to expect a user to check it each time.

However - no one can remotely disable my brakes over the air! So I can get to a position of not worrying about them much. In practice, I probably check the pads for wear every month or so. And that's good enough because I have an expectation that they're not going to change by themselves overnight.

With this airbag, the capability is there for someone to disable it without me noticing. I 100% agree they're not likely to do this intentionally. But it is under software control, as is the warning indicator, etc, etc. It's possible. And it's my life at stake.

Also, re #2 - my phones and computers aren't safety-critical, and no, my car does not have remote functionality. It's one reason I don't drive a car with over-the-air upgrade or CANBUS access functions. The safety benefits of more modern cars do not outweigh the added risks of turning them into internet-of-shit devices, for me.