My business partner and I built AsUnit in ~2004. [0]
The first fully functional Unit Test framework for ActionScript. It was great fun and helped get my career off the ground.
388 karma · joined September 1, 2017
The first fully functional Unit Test framework for ActionScript. It was great fun and helped get my career off the ground.
The thing that finally worked for me consistently over many years, is carrying a couple folded index cards all the time.
These get lists and reminders.
Mostly shopping stuff and different random notes.
They're a lot more convenient than pulling out the phone and thumbing around for an app.
They can be segregated into a small number of independent lists. They're easy to toss when they get done or old and they naturally limit fetishizing.
I use the unfolded form for larger idea organizing, but the folded ones are great for not forgetting stuff across small time windows (days).
Neither side is objectively better or worse, but having experience in both has changed how I approach problems.
I don't think I would have appreciated it at different times in my career, but for me, right now, I'm loving every minute of it.
The biggest issue I've faced (beyond the obvious issues of getting anything to work at all), is how to organize the concepts.
The "Data-Oriented Design" folks have had a huge impact on that. Specifically, talks from Andrew Kelley, Mike Acton and the book by R. Fabian.
The second thing is registers. Just toss the HAL mess, pick up the Reference Manual and start poking registers. It's so much more enjoyable (and reliable) for firmware work.
I don't know about job opportunities as I'm running my own hardware business, but if you're feeling pulled in this direction, I highly recommend taking a closer look.
When I look at the two codes side-by-side with normal (full) brightness, the HDR one looks quite a bit brighter. If I dim my screen brightness substantially, the HDR one also gets a lot dimmer. Not sure if this solves that problem, though it could be an issue with my particular screen?
I'm assuming there's some problem with screen-rendered QR codes that this solves, but my quick google search mostly just resulted in listicle spam.
What's the problem this solves?
The core long tail claim, as I remember it, was that the _area_ under the long tail was larger than the _area_ under the head.
Sometimes much larger.
I vaguely recall a claim that many businesses chopped off the market tail because it was often too expensive to serve those tiny segments (inventory, retail space, distribution, etc.), but that new technologies were reducing or eliminating some of these costs and making it possible to serve emerging, smaller markets profitably.
I wonder if some portion of businesses that see pareto distributions in their sales are just lopping off long tail revenues? I thought that was the central claim.
I also wonder if those pareto variants (i.e., 95/5 splits) were businesses that had potentially over optimized on their largest volume offerings?
Amazon was the quintessential long tail example, and I'd be surprised if anyone could claim that their their SKU count has decreased since 2006.
YouTube comes to mind as another great example of a business capitalizing on this phenomenon.
Consolidating markets (like ??) may be counter examples.
Now I'm curious about how to choose when to push in which direction.
I'm really enjoying watching the progress on your motor controller!
We professionally design, engineer and manufacture accessible technology for disabled veterans and we are also developing robotic systems for industrial automation.
We have a half-dozen active projects running on Kicad and have been using it for almost 4 years now.
As with anything, there have been occasional frustrations with updates but overall, the tool consistently gets better over time.
The main decision to select Kicad was based on the plain text representation of project state which enables (1) improved workflows with Git, (2) scriptable bulk edits (3) simpler, sharable extensions / plugins and (4) easier continuous integration for build artifacts.
It still catches me off guard when I feel someone clenching up while we talk about ways to improve something.
I sometimes take those people through a tour of my own changes and talk through all the ways those could also be improved.
It's not difficult because the existing tools are poorly made (though most of them are), it's difficult because the core problem is extremely complex (in the Rich Hickey [1] sense of the word, e.g., braided, intertwined, complected, etc.).
In order to build a user experience, we start with some information that can often (though certainly not always) appear both simple and easy (i.e., unbraided and comprehensible). But then we must create a projection of that information onto a 2D (or 3D) plane and manage it's changing state over time.
This is where everything falls apart. We're usually trying to manage a very wide, very deep, loosely defined tree of state and we're trying to reflect an arbitrary number of user interactions and mutations instantly, and over time.
Exactly zero of our tools (programming languages, UI toolkits, Operating Systems, etc.) have strong support for managing change-over-time in a way that makes this type of problem fast, stable or enjoyable to present, use, verify or mutate.
I love that the OP showed the triangle of Performance, Adaptability and Velocity. I've been framing a similar concept with teams since 2011 which I refer to as, "Fast, Stable and Delightful."
It's my thesis that we need to balance these three requirements in both our activities and in the output that we produce. This balance is incredibly difficult to achieve and harder still to maintain.
Different organizations tend to focus internal power in one of these 3 nodes (e.g., Google on Stable, Facebook on Moving Fast, and Apple on Delight). Note that the desire to move "Fast," or even to be "Stable" rarely achieves the desired result.
The only organization I've seen manage these values effectively is Apple and I believe this is because people there have understood for decades that speed and stability are prerequisites for delight, but that neither speed, nor stability (alone or together) are sufficient to make something that gives humans the sense that someone, somewhere actually cares about how they feel.
I love how the OP is exploring this problem space and how they are digging into the existing solutions and trying to define the problem with some rigor. This is fertile ground for exploring new ideas and new approaches. Please do not discourage this activity!
[1] Simple Made Easy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxdOUGdseq4
I used to prefer Mouser because I thought their site was slightly easier on the eyes, and I felt they were basically interchangeable with Digikey.
A few years ago, I needed about 60 of a very specific, shouldered washer that only Digikey had. It was Friday afternoon and I needed it in Boston ASAP.
I called their support for the first time, with low expectations.
Within a couple hours, they were prepared to put a man from their warehouse on a plane to personally fly these parts to the nearest airport. It wound up being too expensive for the project, but their facility leadership burned multiple hours trying to help solve this problem for me, and I was a very small customer at the time.
After that experience, Digikey gets the lion's share of my orders, which have grown considerably over the years, and they continue to have incredible support, every single time.
They are our first place supplier and we only use alternatives if there is a stock issue, or the price difference is massive.
I've had other vendors try to tell me that Digikey charges too much. But when I get those same vendors to price our BOMs, Digikey is less expensive, has more stock and is far more efficient (e.g., I don't have to call and wait days to place an order and I don't have to order a lifetime supply of everything).
I heard the CEO on a podcast (Adafruit or Pick Place Podcast?) maybe last year sometime, and he came off as a genuine, nice human being.
Unless they somehow flip 180 degrees, Digikey has earned my business.
I was imagining a handful of billionaires "averaged" with a state full of people living in desparate poverty.
The census bureau [1] says that the median income in MS for 2022 (single earner family) starts at $47,446 and goes up from there.
Quite surprising IMO.
Just saving someone else the search.
[1] https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/SEX255221
I've been bootstrapping my startup with Regions bank for 3 years and it has been one unending nightmare after another.
It's been like having an active and hateful adversary at every single moment when you need help most.
I was extremely fortunate to be able to open an account with SVB late last year and it had been an enormous relief.
The unreasonable delays, hostile policies, nickel and diming, obvious incompetence, all gone.
Fast loading web experiences, instant transfers, employee credit cards, full service treatment, everything has been seamless with SVB.
My account is below the FDIC threshold, so I'm optimistic about Monday, but the loss is so huge and so much more than the money.
"Travelers" are paper packets that move through a manufacturing process with whatever material is being improved. Lots of machine shops have these printed out packets of specs, communications and notes that accompany a given order as it makes it's way through the process.
I'm pretty sure the "daisies" comment was related to how many shops escalate a given order by adding bright stickers or other obvious, visual indicators to the traveler, and shops can sometime become so overwhelmed that everything is escalated and all the bright travelers start looking like a field of flowers.
I'm an ex-Googler who has admired Golang for many years and have been considering it for use in my hardware startup.
The fact that opt-out-only telemetry was even considered, much less appears to be already decided(?), makes me far less likely to use this tool chain at any time in the future.
It seemed great until I tried to launch an existing Postgres container that required a more recent Podman version.
The Podman installation page [2] makes some effort to explain alternate installation steps, but doesn't make it clear why, or how far back you'll be.
Not complaining here, just giving folks a heads up.
Despite these issues, it does look like a great project.
Electroboom and Eeevblog are a couple great channels to get started.
The recommendation engine will pick up pretty quickly.
People be proud as hell of their box businesses!
I've found lots of value in looking at all kinds of systems with this lens, though, like all things, it helps to not overdo it.
I always thought "mouth breather" was referring to stupid, but tough guys who did so much fighting that their smashed noses don't work anymore.
Also, my nose has been broken a few times and I can't ever really get enough air through it...
Without a concealed carry permit, any law-abiding citizen who travels with firearms in California must keep them unloaded and in a locked container [0].
It used to be incredibly difficult (nearly impossible [1]) for regular citizens to obtain a concealed carry permit in San Francisco because they had a "Good Cause Requirement" which essentially meant that your cause was not good enough.
Apparently, that changed in June of 2022 with a recent Supreme Court Ruling [2].
There are also [3] many stories of victims who shoot their attackers either being prosecuted criminally or sued for civil damages.
Lastly, while the views on concealed carry vary widely throughout the US, most social environments that I ever encountered in Northern California would find it repugnant.
[0] https://oag.ca.gov/firearms/travel
[1] https://www.desertsun.com/story/news/nation/california/2022/...
[2] https://www.sanfranciscopolice.org/get-service/carrying-conc...
[3] Oregon, not CA https://www.gilmanbedigian.com/man-who-shot-intruder-in-his-...
Apparently, my mind created some very visual memories from the narrative.
Thanks!