2,776 karma · joined July 31, 2013
Graphical "low-code" programming has been around for a long time in e.g. the control systems community, where people typically have strong math am physics backgrounds (e.g., knowledge of vehicle dynamics), but little experience with programming or software engineering.
Matlab Simulink and LabVIEW are well-known products that offer a low code approach to these fields. Large and complex projects are done with these tools.
IMO the complexity is shifted from interacting with the hardware to wrestling with the tools, e.g. version control, knowing what happens exactly and cooperation is really hard.
Not kiddie at all, AVR microcontrollers have been used commercially for ages and they have some properties that can be nice, e.g. they are fairly simple cores, they operate at 5V and their output pins can sink ~40mA, so you can easily e.g. drive a MOSFET gate.
The Arduino ecosystem is huge and it's great to get things up and running quickly.
This hypothesis is quite easy to verify: the sets of activities that I perform at work and in the time I have full control over are strictly disjoint.
It is indeed. But with experiments and theories getting ever more complex and difficult to verify [1], we are edging towards just having to believe what we are told. Verifying Newton's theory of gravity was relatively simple, just throw stuff from your balcony and verify that s = 1/2 g * t^2!
So we are deep inside the second Middle Ages, where the priesthood tells us what to believe and how to behave, without us having any chance of verifying their claims.
I greatly wonder if and how humanity will get out of this one, and what a second Age of Enlightenment would look like.
Of course, the agility here happens by accident, because in the first week of the program increment you realize that something is much harder than anticipated, and hundreds of person-hours of planning are thrown overboard.
[1] https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20210916-france-suspen...
You do not want your frame to flex while a spindle is cutting aluminium at 20kRPM. See Marco Reps and Kris Temmerman on youtube, they built formidable high precision CNC mills out of steel and concrete. For machines that rely on frames made out of extruded aluminium, flexing has always been an issue, even with much sturdier designs such as the Avid CNC machines.
Also, FYI, in a lathe the workpiece spins, and in a mill the tool spins.
Also, cool to see him pull a Knuth and writing his own typesetting and build system for the book!
I fail to see how the advertised "hyperfunctions" would make the process of analyzing such data any easier by adding web-services and SQL.
These are horrible indeed, and it gets only worse if liquid is spilled in the vicinity of those controls - who in their right mind would design a cooking surface that cannot handle spills?
The control knobs arranged in a linear fashion may be listed as an example of bad design in "The Design of Everyday Things", but little did Donald Norman know in which direction stove design would be heading!
If you need wireless and are not adverse to some tinkering, a pair of Arduinos, a button, a buzzer and a pair of RF 433MHz transceivers [1] may do the trick!
[1] https://randomnerdtutorials.com/rf-433mhz-transmitter-receiv...
deadsy built some rather sophisticated models, be sure to check out the renderings in the github README!
In case of service employees, the fix seems simple: raise minimum wages so people can earn a proper living, abolish tips.
In other fields with such power dynamics, it's much harder to fix, e.g. winner-takes-it-all fields like Hollywood, high-profile academia etc.
Measure never, cut wherever!
Also, operation of a bicycle does not need it to connect to a phone running an app. This is a guarantee that the device will be unusable within 5 years, when the app is abandoned, cannot be used with the iPhone 50, and Bluetooth 200.0 is incompatible with old devices, whereas I happily ride my 90's bicycle with minimal maintenance on a daily basis, while getting the additional benefit of a light exercise.
EDIT: Related to the actual product:
> With our connected app and custom GPS tracking system, you'll always know where your scooter is.
What does this mean? Is there a SIM card and an LTE subscription coming with the scooter? Or will I "know where my scooter is" while I am actually standing on it, with the phone in my pocket connected to the scooter via bluetooth?
My most powerful bash alias has become this one [1], where `subl` is the editor of my choice. I no longer search files, I find them. Really, fzf is almost indistinguishable from magic and has become crucial to my workflow.
[1] alias fzubl='fzf -m | xargs subl'