andyidsinga

Dang - this is a really cool viz.

Speaking about sailors and invincibility - there's a funny story that's circulated around (false according to snopes [1]) about a particular US and Canadian Navy interaction :) :)

Text snipped from snopes article:

Americans: “Please divert your course 15 degrees to the North to avoid a collision.”

Canadians: “Recommend you divert YOUR course 15 degrees to the South to avoid a collision.”

Americans: “This is the captain of a US Navy ship. I say again, divert YOUR course.”

Canadians: “No, I say again, you divert YOUR course.”

Americans: “THIS IS THE AIRCRAFT CARRIER USS ABRAHAM LINCOLN, THE SECOND LARGEST SHIP IN THE UNITED STATES’ ATLANTIC FLEET. WE ARE ACCOMPANIED BY THREE DESTROYERS, THREE CRUISERS AND NUMEROUS SUPPORT VESSELS. I DEMAND THAT YOU CHANGE YOUR COURSE 15 DEGREES NORTH. THAT’S ONE-FIVE DEGREES NORTH, OR COUNTER MEASURES WILL BE UNDERTAKEN TO ENSURE THE SAFETY OF THIS SHIP.”

Canadians: “This is a lighthouse. Your call.”

[1] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/the-obstinate-lighthouse/

Ha - nice Moby Dick reference! I would add Jack London's The Sea Wolf to that -- both for the collision aspect early in the book then life aboard the ship. Hell - add Dan Simmon's "The Terror" to that list too :)

its conceivable (even likely?) that they've developed some exotic peripherals that go along with the arm core in order to complete their asic ...which sort of gets them into the same ballpark of defining their own ISA.

I've found those people in tech, motorcycles, beer brewing ..geeze they're everywhere.

that said .. I've found just as many if not more of the opposite - welcoming people who are genuinely happy others are joining "the club" and taking part in a shared interest.

> However, all of these unlicensed bands have strict limits.

This is absolutely key here - even in unlicensed bands one cannot just start using the spectrum without careful consideration of regulations for that spectrum.

When I was working in the 902-928 Mhz (FCC and similar) and 860s (for ETSI) for RFID we had to do a lot of work to ensure our transmit power, power ramp up, frequency hopping and listen before talk were all implemented properly and demonstrable for certification. It was not trivial.

(I'm a bit critical in my comment below; Caveat being that I do appreciate David Edwards' exploration of the subject. Also, his talk is only 28 minutes. The additional material in the his book may well address what I've brought up below).

at about 9:29 :

> "The wall between the creator and the public is going away, and that it's becoming increasingly difficult to receive commercial value or to learn and not to co-create..."

I think this doesn't give enough credence the 1000 true friends / believers concept that Kevin Kelly and Seth Godin have discussed. The 1000 true friends theory is especially potent when the the absolute audience size is most of the people in the world, and only a tiny subset across that audience is patronizing the creator/artist.

Later in the video he talks more about the maker movement ..but comes back to "the lab" as a place that that can be captured and understood. I don't quite understand that..

At about 11:00:

> "kids are the ultimate pioneers"

I don't understand this - kids are certainly sponges for learning - but I don't think they're creative pioneers at all - calling kids creative pioneers is much too broad (IMHO). It seems kids are much more reactionary to the creativity that has been put in front of them; often in new mediums ...which means the creative pioneers already exist. Sure there are exceptions to the rule that are indeed kids.

Edit: re kids : in the video he shows a young child - and that is what I'm reacting to. But if you define "kids" to be people in their 20s ..well, that's different. That said, it would be interesting to have some statistics for creative pioneers who are kids (per some definition) vs others.

You should - many regulators around the world are modeled after FCC. When I was doing regulatory test work for RFID readers (which were transmitting at 1W ) IIRC Canada, Korea and Japan were very similar to FCC.

Additionally - if you are in Europe - regulations are defined by a body called ETSI (https://www.etsi.org/). For RFID these regs were quite different from FCC - we had to do listen before talk and a variety of other things to ensure compliance.

You might well be right on that. "damage" would be good to define in general for these kinds of things. I'm guessing the FCC regs talk about this to some degree.

So, reality is, this is likely very low-power and likely low-impact experiment and likely not cause a lot of issues with nearby devices that are designed to accept all interference and continue to function or fail gracefully.

But IMHO, it is a good idea for anyone doing these kinds of experiments to think a little bit about RF design and the impacts devices might have ..hence my other comment about the value of HAM technicians license & training (which is fun and pretty easy).

Yep - I totally understand that. I wasn't commenting on wires ability to act as antennas in general - I was commenting on the addition of this wire to the UART for the purpose of wireless comms.

That addition is what makes your original point wrong : "Nothing is happening here that doesn't happen already with normal use of the UART"

THIS! -- I was hoping a ham would chime in here :)

For anyone looking to do experiments like this - which are really cool to do - getting the ham technician licenses is pretty easy and very educational!

there is an antenna - just a wire - but that changes the equation a lot relative to what a normal UART does has part of a system that already meets FCC (or other) regulatory standards.

I'm curious about the gain of the antenna and what consideration has been made re trasmit wavelength and the antenna wire length.

as battery prices drop - it will be interesting to observe Jevon's paradox in action as demand increases for the batteries and surrounding technology.

yep - I think this is the original article -and a good primer / explainer for these patterns: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...

This reminded me of language / library attributes that I've been delighted by over the years ...here's a few:

C :

- function pointers combined with structs.

- Ability to use pointers to go anywhere on the machines address space (think embedded, kernel code etc) and muck with registers, shared memory etc.

C++ :

- smart pointers - shared_ptr and friends. I'm not a big C++ fan in general but when I learned about smart pointers I was really impressed.

Java :

- interfaces - after treading around C++ objects in the 90s, interfaces were a dream

- 'Runnable' interface and Thread class coupled with any object's wait(), notify() and notifyAll() methods.

- generics

Javascript :

- async / await ..once I figured out how this worked i was really impressed.

- object literal syntax. (Perl hashes were also pretty delightful years before - but not quite as much as JS)

Python:

- Iterators and the litany of looping and ranging constructs.

Thanks for chiming in here. I've been reading some of your others articles. I like the very practical style and results focus.

I think the section on customer acquisition cost really resonates with me.

The corollary, I suppose, is that once you have some customer traction, looking at where those costs are is where you want to spend time with optimization. However, this begs some questions:

If I'm spending $500 for a $5000 customer - should I change anything at all to drive down that $500?

...which leads to: At what CAC:Cusotmer Value ratio should I start trying to drive down that cost relative to other costs in the biz?

Anyone have any real experiences from their biz' they can share on this subject?

Anyone else read the Dear Polly part ...and just couldn't bring themselves to the Dear Haunted / advice part?

I felt like just trying to sit in that situation; sort of ponder the whole thing without coming to any conclusions. How many people do I know who could be Haunted? How many times have I been Haunted myself? What got me out of that space?

I just couldn't read the advice part.

I think to the points when I've been in that dreadful place like Haunted. A few friends reaching out asking "how are you?" without offering any advice and especially not sharing a fucking story riddled with survivorship bias. Those little acts seemed to clear the fog; and even better, I knew that they just wanted to reach out and ensure that I knew they were thinking about me.

looking at population increase - if unicorns exist at all - big if :) - then there should be more in absolute terms.

good points - completely different fields is sort of key to the article's points

edit: btw - when I read your first sentence - I was like "ah shit...duh" :)

I hear you on the tooling complexity side...

I like to think of myself as somewhat of a polymath in tech - enjoying and doing decent work in a variety of types of software at all different layers. I also enjoy other things that I would put myself squarely in the hobbyist side: small engine repair, metal and woodwork, plumbing etc.

So how would one determine if someone has 3 "top 1%" skill level (per the article)?

I suppose the answer is in 2nd half of the article?

Two types of more reasonably defined polymaths emerge - pick three skills and achieve a certain level of output in a reasonable time:

apprentice level 4% input, 64% output, 10 months

journeyman level 10% input, 80% output, 48 months.

thoughts??

just curious - why would web assembly make it easier for those tools to reappear?

I used to use hose 90s GUI tools - VB's, VC's, Symantec's and Borland's java gui tools. Although they did work well for fixed UIs (absolute positioning) -- they were rather hard to get non-fixed uis working. IMHO Bootstrap's grid system was a real leap in this regard and (to me) still a pleasure to work with.

its a great concept & prototype - really reminds me of the palm pilot graffiti writing system and alphabet [0].

after just watching the video - seems like adding a plugin system for targeting various UI library (ex bootstrap) would be really cool (I didn't read all of the text - maybe he suggested or already has this..)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graffiti_(Palm_OS)

well trade offs ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

EDIT : now that you mention it - micropython is pretty cool -- and I haven't used it - need to try that on the ESP :)

I use the ESP8266 and ESP32 for projects too - but the PI is sooo much easier to work with with a full linux distro and programming languages and libs to go with.

the ESPs are most definitely better for higher volume solutions

in his first sentence : s/need/dont want to

There seems to be anecdotal evidence. I've read about and talked to founders who have said things like "They just could't get hired" or "couldn't handle working for someone else" and "had no other option but to start their own business".

that said - very likely a survivor bias in those samples..

fwiw - as an addendum to that comment - I like using S3 to get my data off the zero w ASAP. ..then corrupt os etc doesn't cause too much down time and data loss.

This is pretty spot on - I hate to be the one arguing for "less thought" on a subject/concept etc. But I've definitely gone too far too often .. so I try to stop earlier more often now - for feedback (and implementation as you suggest) knowing I can always go deeper.

I find that asking one's self this question is helpful : "Are the barriers to believe for concept ________ technical or something else?"

If the answer is that there aren't deep technical barriers - its a good time to stop and start collecting feedback.

> 5. Smart people sometimes see in-depth thinking and reflection as the solution to every problem. Bright people are accustomed to succeeding through their thinking skills, but can sometimes overlook when a different approach would be more beneficial.

This really resonated with me.

One of the "problems" with over thinking things and "figuring out all the potential problems" is that when presenting the ideas/concepts/solutions one doesn't leave enough room for response by the target audience. You end up with responses like "well - you're really smart - you seem to have thought of everything". Often we really do want and need the audience to have a chance to respond, poke holes, describe what they find to be useful / not useful.