eschneider

After doing this a few decades, one of the things I've discovered that, working 15 hours a day is insanely overrated. A shocking number of 'impossible' problems become quite easy if you just think about them lightly overnight.

It looks bad on the insurance paperwork.

Cool. How many did they add?

Yeah...AGI isn't going to successfully replace Chris. But you know what this shit will do? It'll teach people that any information that they share about what they're doing or how they do it will ultimately be weaponized against them.

That'll work out well in the long term.

Failures in production remain expensive.

This...has been a feature on security cameras for at least a decade.

There's a fine line here when dealing with customers. Sometimes it works well to answer the exact question, if you can, and follow up with "Can you tell me a bit why you're asking so I can understand a bit more about the problem?" Once you tease out a bit more about how they got there, it's often possible to offer better solutions and it never feels like you blew off their original ask.

It's ok to reject for any number of (or no) reasons. Nobody needs to feel like a jerk for taking a project in the direction they want.

This seems...fine?

I know when I run into bugs in a project I depend on, I'll usually run it down and fix it myself, because I need it fixed. Writing it up the bug along with the PR and sending it back to the maintainer feels like common courtesy. And if it gets merged in, I don't need to fork/apply patches when I update. Win-win, I'd say.

But if maintainers don't want to take PR's, that's cool, too. I can appreciate that it's sometimes easier to just do it yourself.

Well, this is disappointing. They were my goto site for keyboards. :/

That sorta surprised me. Once I could identify a connector type from a schematic, it was almost never a huge problem getting them in small (1 to 5 piece) quantities. It's mostly a question of finding the right distributor.

Because when the AI customers explode N months down the line, you don't want to be on the hook for a new factory.

Interesting...1999 is probably a bit early for that Bosch to be running one of the usual ECU update protocols like UDS. It sounds like it's in the bootloader and looking for a valid executable. So the FW updater is likely in the bootloader.

If you can open it up and find the JTAG pads, it should be simple-ish to use a JTAG reader to dump the image and then you can figure out the update protocol from that. It's unlikely to be complicated.

ECU software development is sort of my day job. If you're going to go down this path, I seriously recommend getting the specialized plugs and connectors and making your own wiring harnesses to whatever size you need. It's absolutely easier than manhandling a full wiring harness or cutting one down. Cheaper, too.

I mean...you should always design with speed in mind (In that Jeff Dean sense :) but what 'premature optimization' is referring to, is more like localized speed optimizations/hacks. Don't do those until a) you know you'll need it and b) you know where it will help.

Ok, fellow old hacker here. I have a similar problem and I found that a lot of the hand pain was from mouse/trackpad usage. My hands have been a lot happier since going to a trackball because I don't do nearly as much gripping and pressing.

Non-technical founder? Can you line up investors or customers based on your pitch? That's pretty much the acid test.

They didn't go anywhere. Lots of excellent starship/space opera novels out there with more coming out each year. There's just lots there stuff too. :)

Nice! Old me and my old bike are sticking to 200kms this year. :)

Who wants to be on-call for someone else's buggy vibe-coded app? Sign me right up for that...

Very much this.

Yeah...I know some delta pilots and apparently the inflight computers were sometimes spending more time playing chess than flying the plane...

Alas, AI generated code is usually more tech debt.

Is my remote experiences strange or do other remote workers not have some sort of chat where people ask if you've got a minute and drop in a video conference link if they need a quick chat on something?

I've had to cook from scratch for many years because I've lived with people with various food restrictions and sometimes that's just the easiest way to do things.

That said, you really don't need to spend 1-2 hours a day on cooking. If you put a little time in and level up on some basic skills, you can make shockingly good meals in 10-20 minutes.

It's mostly a question of figuring out what you like and getting good at making those things, then generalizing the skills you have into making more things.

They'll figure it out. As Charles de Gaulle said "The graveyards are full of indispensable men."

Comments are a gift to future you. When you pick up the code again after 6 months/years/however-long-in-the-future and it looks like something you've never seen before, the comments you left should be notes you need to build context around what's in the code and (sometimes more importantly) what's NOT in the code.

Hmm...a lot? For a complex work, you'll sometimes do some number of sketches and studies and drawing and underpaintings...Lots of things get tried/discarded/modified before you land on a final painting.

As my old art teacher used to say, "You work on something and it gets better and better and then it turns to shit."