aarongough

I have been lucky enough to work with a lot of great people, and I definitely found a lot of enjoyment in a lot of the work I've done, but I definitely wish that time had been spent doing work with more of a positive impact... Luckily there's still lots of time and I'm working on more impactful stuff now!

I'm 35. Luckily I'm now running my own manufacturing business where I get to work on a much wider range of stuff!

Correct!

Interesting point you make: there is definitely selection bias going on because of this, but I've honestly never thought about it that way before!

Unfortunately I agree with this. A great quote I saw a while ago:

“The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.” –Jeff Hammerbacher

Every paying software job I've ever had was in some way involved getting people to click on ads. Either directly making a product where ad click rate is a measured metric, or products that helped people make products where clicking on ads was a metric...

I have usually been able to find a lot of joy in solving the problems in the smaller areas where I was focused, but whenever I took a step back and looked at what I was helping work towards it felt very meaningless.

I think finding a job today where you feel like the work you do does genuine good for the world is an incredibly rare and difficult thing...

Ooof, that is a lot to deal with. Really hope things start looking up for you soon.

[citation needed]

Yeah I'm not sure about that either... All the parts look FDM printed too which is definitely way cheaper than that if you already own a printer. Perhaps they had some company print the parts?

Honestly for that kind of money you're getting kinda close to having them SLS printed which would be much sturdier and look nicer...

Methanol exposure through the skin can also cause a lot of issues: https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/ershdb/emergencyresponsecard_29750...

Droplets are produced to a lesser degree by just breathing or talking: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK143281/

Additionally as many as 50% of people who test positive for COVID-19 have virtually no symptoms: https://www.healthline.com/health-news/50-percent-of-people-...

This means that you can have the virus without knowing, and spread it without the need for coughing or sneezing, potentially infecting others who will go on to develop far more serious symptoms.

Wearing a mask is a cheap and easy insurance policy against these scenarios.

Off topic: over the next couple of years I'm looking to develop a small-scale ion-beam coating system for applying DLC as part of a single-piece-flow process cell. I currently send out my products for DLC coating, and the coater does a good job but they keep making process changes (which affects color) without warning me, so I want to bring it in-house to avoid that and to eliminate the need to batch components for them.

I would release the design as open source after it's completed. Sounds like you have some knowledge in this area so let me know if you'd be interested in collaborating!

The footage is hugely slowed down, hence the deep pitch of the rocket motor sounds (they are usually very 'hissy' at this size), and the slow speed of the sparks coming from the motors. Also if you listen closely when the rocket is descending and deploying parachutes you can hear the greatly-slowed-down sound of a DSLR shutter actuating repeatedly (ka-thunk-beep) as photos are taken of the descent.

Very interesting methods you used to detect the changes! Out of curiosity: was there a reason that taking an xray of the devices was not an option? Industrial/veterinary xray machines can often be had quite cheaply...

Care was taken to make sure these invasive species didn't get imported in the first place, but clearly that didn't work... What makes you think preventing the altered species from being transported back will be any more successful?

Interesting, I didn't realize that was done at scale... As the comment above me said, seems harsh to use CO2 for that...

Source?

I think this is poorly written in the article... Likely the Co2 gas is used to power bolt-guns which are in turn used to stun larger animals like cows before slaughter.

A friend of mine is a researcher in water quality, I asked him what the primary source of microplastics was and his answer surprised me: textiles.

Apparently things like fleece shed small plastic fibres constantly every time they're washed, and those fibers make up the bulk of most microplastics.

How is a 'mind' ever supposed to develop in a neural system with no sensory input?

Not to mention that the suspect really appeared to be attempting to provoke the officer into shooting him by brandishing something dark and acting like it was a firearm (was a cell phone I believe). The officer's response was very restrained which I think is a good thing.

I think it's fairly obvious that I didn't mean this situation would apply to everyone, I just wanted to supply another view/data-point.

Out of curiosity, what does your github look like? I know you said you have a lot of open source contributions, but what about personal projects on your github?

I don't have a degree and honestly have never had any issues with recruiters or interviews for intermediate/senior 'software engineering' positions. I never represent myself as having a degree, but I don't go out of my way to point out my lack of degree either.

Never once in an interview have I been asked about my education. One nice thing about software development positions is the interview process tends to be merit based.

I have mostly interviewed with small/medium businesses in Toronto, but have also done early stage interviews with Google where it was also not brought up. I declined further interviews with Google because I didn't want to move, so maybe it would have been an issue later on.

Farming in general is a dangerous occupation, even in the USA where machinery tends to be reasonably modern and well guarded:

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/cfoi.pdf

I wasn't able to find a source but my understanding is that being a farmer is many times more dangerous on a percentage basis than being a police officer, and that's only counting fatal accidents. I would bet good money that the rate of disfiguring/crippling injury is way higher.

I find Festo's work interesting, but the spider bot in particular looks really clunky overall in comparison to even some of the hobby level stuff that's out there. It would make sense to have a rolling robot if it was really fast (and could steer while rolling).

Here's an example of a hexapod from 6 years ago, I believe built from a kit but running customized motion control code:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAeQn5QnyXo

Skip to 0:45 to see it running. Still amazing to me and I haven't seen too many other legged robots that look this smooth.

> Software developers on average write only about ten lines a day

That is far too low of an estimate for any productive programmer. Perhaps when trying to solve some sort of insanely complex bug perhaps?

If you have a look through some of the Google datacenter tours you'll see they actually implement this idea on a massive scale, though I believe they use lead-acid batteries... Every motherboard in the datacenter has a small battery capable of powering it for a long enough period of time for the backup generators to kick on and take over.

It's definitely a clever idea! Makes maintenance much less risky as it's distributed, and also reduces the chance of having a single large UPS fail when it takes over the load!

Sweet! I've been looking for something like this for a long time, thanks for the link!

It's an FN F2000 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FN_F2000)

I would suggest starting by creating your own open source projects, that way you get to learn the ropes without anyone hassling you...

Once you feel more comfortable you'll contribute to other projects as if they were your own...

That's generally referred to as 'mutation testing'. There are a number of systems that enable this in dynamic languages, the one I am most familiar with is Heckle: https://github.com/ryansobol/heckle

Mutation testing is great, it highlights all the areas where your tests aren't written well, and teaches you to write better tests. I'm not sure that using it all the time is the best use of resources in most cases though...

AS an experiment I just implemented the GC tweaks for our test suite (we're using RSpec), it gave us a 42% improvement in run time...

  Before: 914 seconds
  After:  538 seconds

Awesome! Thanks to Jamis for sharing!