milesvp

You should talk to musicians about digital equipment. They talk about latency in terms of how far away the instrument feels. It’s wild, good musicians can describe latency on the order of low tens of ms. What’s crazy to me is how good they can get at adjusting. If 8 play a game like rock band, if I don’t adjust for video and audio latency, I just can’t play at all.

And it gets worse, since equipment gets chained. If you add more than a few ms to the wet channel, it accumulates and can be very problematic if you ever feed the wet back into the dry signal.

Source: have shipped multiple digital pedals

> same amount of money to do less work

Um… work is not important. Value is important. Your employer is employing you because they expect your value to be higher than your cost. Moreover, if you are busy, your marginal value is likely declining. You are not taking the time to think about things that will actually have high impact. This to me is the biggest problem I see with AI assisted work, it makes it very easy to feel productive, when in reality you only worked on the easy low value things.

What’s more, is I have a very distinct experience working on a team years ago that decided to do less work. The team actively started turning down tickets and commiting to fewer tasks each week. And the counter intuitive thing, was that not only did that force only the higher value tickets get closed, we actually ended up closing more tickets. Was really wild to watch and experience.

In the fastest shrinking industry at the time? I think the phrase has something to do with blood and a turnip…

I was actually thrilled with my cola that year along with the required vacation time.

Honestly it was a very weird time. Less than a year prior I had worked in a real estate office, and there was a lot of scary stuff already starting to happen.

very much this. I was denied 2 rounds in 2008. I knew too many of the systems to risk losing me. Was sort of ok with it in at the time, and the length of the recession made me really happy in retrospect. Today I recognize offering to be let go as risky, since upper management may see you as a flight risk, which changes future layoffs and makes you slightly more likely to be included.

> "Your phone knows its position in space"

This is not wrong at the pop sci level of the video.

Your phone undoubtedly has a gyroscope, accelerometer, and magnetometer all in a single IMU IC. Data from this IMU can be used to create a position cloud.

Add in some other sensor data to help collapse the position cloud, and your phone absolutely knows its position in space. Incidentally part of why IMU have magnetometers is that it’s basically one more sensor data to help collapse position clouds from just the orientation and acceleration data.

I think the only leap is how precise your phone would be with only gyroscopes generating orientation and acceleration data. But the video sort of hints at this when talking about the first rocket design using this data.

The turning point against pro corporatism for me after years of schooling in economics happened a few years ago from a simple argument that I can’t get out of my head.

Technological advancements in an owner controlled factory leads to fewer employees. The same advancement in a coop leads to more leisure.

I know it’s super simplistic, and ignores pluses and minuses on both sides, but it really seems to sum up a fundamental problem with increasing efficiencies in society, and I can’t help but wonder if we are failing to capture the leisure that society has made possible.

10 print "hello"

20 goto 10

I’m still on the fence about closing the door for a short task like pouring milk. My understanding from the physics of opening the door, you’re mostly already replacing all the air in the fridge with air from outside the fridge. So convection already did its job of robbing your fridge of cold. Closing the door to open it again a minute later just gives you a second convection inducing action for air that might have been trapped the first time.

I would love to see someone at the level of technology connections do a breakdown of the physics here, and where the likely crossover point point is for different kinds of fridges. My current (probably illformed) belief from the suction and imagined resulting air exchange of all the fridges I’ve lived with is that leaving the fridge open on the order of seconds is better than opening-closing-opening-closing in terms of cold loss.

Your question seems disengenuous, and it’s not clear you read the post. But I would reckon many of us are having very similar experiences with how our daily activities are shaking out. The author’s story likely resonates with many devs here, who lament the loss of what many of them found interesting or compelling about the work they did.

> I believe you. I don’t need the details. Tell me what we're changing.

Yeah, for me in these situations it’s often about messaging to stakeholders, and so management in general feels like the problem has been addressed. I do think there’s one important thing missing from the final statement of the post, that he sort of covered briefly when talking about too much process, and that is what is the tradeoff/cost of implementing the change we’re making. Engineering is fundamentally about tradeoffs, and any significant proposed change requires some tradeoff and all too often I see management not asking about this explicitly. I’ve had enough once in a blue moon errors have retros, where the team decided it made no sense to make changes, and others, where the cost was high enough it was worth increasing workflow headaches. I think these tradeoffs being explicit are important at the director and above level, since there are potential real impacts to the team, and that is the level to deal with morale or headcount pressures due to changes to processes.

I had to stop reading one of my favorite authors when I was doing infant duty with my oldest. The books kept getting thicker, and I could no longer one hand them comfortably reading either end of the novel due to the book's balance. I found a kindle mostly solved my problems, and I could keep reading again one handed.

That said, it never occurred to me to just cut up my book, so I could continue to read it comfortably. I think I might have chosen to do so though, since I find the tactile nature of reading a physical book to be more memorable than digital. Where the words sit on the page, and the act of turning the page, the smell, all does something to my neurons. For my junk novels, I don't really care, but for the authors I cherish, the closer to the printed word I can get the better the experience I have, and the more memorable the writing in general.

I saw 10million quoted recently, and that sounds about right. 300k is a super safe withdrawal rate for that much money and you have a pretty comfortable life at that income level most places.

There’s a great lecture on giving lectures by an MIT prof. He says you can give no more than 3 ideas per hour, and you must repeat yourself at least 3 times for each idea. And while, part of his thesis is because people might miss something due to their attention, and needs of the group vs individual I think his experience is still highly relevant. I know that I don’t learn as much unless there’s room for almost boredom. I find there is a feeling similar to boredom that I have to experience to really internalize something. It’s almost like I can feel the neurons rewiring (though I suspect it might just be an emotion that encourages the energy expenditure necessary for learning). If I skim, or do doubletime, then that feeling usually never comes, and there’s a good chance my future recall will be poor…

https://youtu.be/Unzc731iCUY?si=Gfiq1tonSf5KLePy

Good to be skeptical. Remember, though, that there is zero cost to displaying ads. That means they get bundled at places like indeed. If you’re HR and have 3 openings, but have 4 ads you can run for less than the price of 3… Personally, I might run an ad for some kind of triple threat that has no chance of finding someone.

Also, the cost of screening ad responses is near zero compared to 30 years ago.

So we have economics that encourages ghost job listings. Personally I’d like to see big taxes on job postings scaling for company size, maybe duration too. Would solve this particular problem.

I had an interview once for a firmware position dealing with (relatively) high wattage transmitters. They wanted to know how I’d deal with some conditions where I’d need to turn off the power quickly. After talking a bit about my experience with hard real time deadlines, I sheepishly asked why they didn’t have diodes to mitigate the problem. I think it was one of the questions that got me an offer. Apparently having firmware engineers with even minor EE background and will think about analogue design is a little uncommon.

Today, I’d ask about more ways to push the responsibility away from the firmware to stop catastrophic failures. If the debugger pauses the CPU you can’t use the CPU to regulate things. I’ve worked on things where the failure mode can be explosive and it makes dev really harrowing if you can’t rely on hardware interlocks.

It’s the caps that fail. Electrolytic caps have the highest failure rate of any passive component. My team tries to avoid them in our designs as much as possible. But you’re right, caps in a good design can easily last 20 years, making a power supply the longest lasting component of most builds.

Could be c't magazine accidentally played the mp3 version louder. Human's have a known preference for louder music, and will tend to prefer louder samples over quieter samples. Rumor in the industry is that this was a trick MS used to try to push the WMA format, that they encoded some WMA samples used in some publicized tests at +3dB above the source sample.

I was suprised to see the use of wiremesh in sand castle building some years ago. Same concept though. You add something that helps with shear strength and you can build much taller sand buildings. It’s really counter intuitive to see too, since the sand could clearly sieve through the mesh.

Ha! just looked up the video, seems it’s another practical engineering video I was thinking of

https://youtu.be/0olpSN6_TCc?si=8woq9mRHNpWrwCKi

Most likely that’s the nitric oxide (not to be confused with nitrous oxide) that is a biproduct of vitamin d synthesis which requires UV light. It is a natural muscle relaxer and is generally considered good for blood pressure and heart health in general.

Having lived near the US border most my life, the way it was explained to me years ago, is that there is a strip of land at the border crossing, where you are in neither country. In this space, you are not privy to any of the protections you would be allowed were you in either the US or Canada. This is where you are taken when you are forced to leave your car. Part of the current controversy is that the US government is trying to treat this literal no man’s land as both international land as as federal land with the disparate charges they are applying.

Fun fact. Lack of parking is not a legitimate reason to attempt to drive past this region. I was once flagged crossing into canada on a day they were interviewing a lot of travelers. I spotted parking in what looked to me like an overflow lot on the other side of a fence, and when I slowly drove that direction sirens blasted and guns were drawn. Nothing gives you clarity like a gun pointed at you.

> is just going to be making up the missing data.

This is generally true. What I find fascinating is the application of information that is not present in the data but that can be confirmed by the data. I’m thinking specifically of deblurring algorithms people use to recover text. If you can guess what font is being used in a screengrab with, say, someone’s bank account blurred out, you can take the i formation contained in the downloaded font and try combinations until you match the blur algorithm that may also be information not contained in the image.

What’s also crazy, is that even if all you do is black out the text, kerning alone can still be used to guess the correct text with some degree of accuracy. I worked on redaction software at one point, and these were very much the types of things we thought about when dealing with text.

There are people working on this problem honestly. The general solution 10 years ago was a micro kernel. Today, I’m not sure. The linux model is starting to look dated, with similar problems elsewhere. Modern hardware design looks less and less like classic textbook design, with all kinds of random chips having direct memory access to memory the cpu uses on some shared bus. Where even things like on board blue tooth chips can become attack vectors on the system.

There was a good keynote on the topic 5 years ago By Timothy Roscoe

https://www.usenix.org/conference/osdi21/presentation/fri-ke...

Does anyone know if Ben Jordan's AI generated music algorithm would work here to spot fake voices? He's looking for compression artifacts introduced from the training data in the output music. I'd expect similar compression was used for training general voice data. Only issue I can think of is the compression of the audio link most of these scams are going to be using might mask the training data compression.

I first learned of kratom in the last year from Elijah Lemard

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0z5ixJIqbGY&t=267s

He's an odd guy who likes to investigate some really dodgy stuff. And I suspect many here on HN would appreciate him.

That led to 7-OH showing up in my feed at some point. In a nutshell, it's the strongest of the active compounds in the kratom plant, that binds to opioid receptors. 7-OH is the marketing name for the alkaloid 7-hydroxymitragynine that is being refined from kratom. It's not clear to me if it's simply extracted, or as some quick research suggests, it might also be a chemical alteration of the more commonly occurring compound in kratom mitragynine.

Anyway, this stuff looks super habit forming, and, of course, the refined version is that much more addictive.

I see this all the time with audio too. The amount of bits you need to reserve a

I still remember the days of servers as pets, rather than cattle, and I was harping about server uptime. A wizened server admin piped in and said he rebooted his servers once a week. Said, if you do it any less frequently, then the odds of catching an error causing change while the person who made said change (possibly himself) is still around and can remember what they did go down precipitously. So, to avoid headaches and potential downtime when it mattered, he would just take servers out of rotation and reboot them, and make sure they came back online.

You don’t need a deep dive to see supermarket consolidation that keeps happening year after year. When there is less competition to drive down prices, it is very safe to say to assume that consumers will get less and less surplus for any change a grocery makes.

That sort of begs the question about elevators and escalators. I’ve never been charged riding those, and I can’t imagine fares tacked on in Switzerland. Have they been ruled on? An elevator in a public building is very much public transport.

I know it’s stupid, but I’m genuinely curious now.

If you think your data isn’t being hoovered up I’d like to point out that every model is possible due to federal crimes committed to obtain the information they were trained on. Regardless of how much you are paying, your data is worth another petty civil infraction.

> the queue’s maximum size just needs to be greater than the spikes you expect

There is one truth I have come to know, said by someone far wiser tha me: A queue is either empty or full. Which is to say a queue can either handle all the data coming in, or it can’t. When it can’t it will fill to capacity. This is a probabilistic thing, and you can only decide how many nines to plan for. And it’s worse than it looks at first, because queuing theory is very non intuitive with non linearities that make it very hard to reason about wothout having your nose rubbed in it.

So that means, that yes, you can keep doubling the size of your queue. And no, you can’t ever make it big enough to deal with a poisson distribution. And while you’re at it you will likely need to add workers. And you’re still back to capacity planning and deciding how much money to throw at the problem.

What you may be getting at, and what the article sort of failed at, is that queues are still super valuable for smoothing small spikes, or even large predictable ones. But a queue alone, without backpressure, or overflow will likely cause systems to fall over. Sometimes in ways that are hard to recover from, especially if you have some kind of microservices inspired architecture, where one thing going offline causes another queue elsewhere to fill. Or worse, bringing a failed service back online stresses another system causing it to fall offline. (not meant to be a dig on microservices by the way)