373 karma · joined June 16, 2021
At my last job X=3 and we had around 40 engineers on-site so it was pretty dangerous.
At my current job X~5 maybe but we only have 2 engineers on-site, so it's safe.
I have a metahobby: I collect hobbies. Invariably someone will tell me I should try to make money from one of them and my response is always "I HAVE a JOB, and I like it. I do this for fun. But thank you."
Also, a lot of people don't realize the skills of {HOBBY_X} and the skills of {SELLING_HOBBY_X} are usually quite different and few people possess proficiency and interest in both.
Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, and I really wish somebody had told this to me.
All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But it's like there is this gap. For the first couple years that you're making stuff, what you're making isn't so good. It’s not that great. It’s trying to be good, it has ambition to be good, but it’s not that good.
But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you're making is kind of a disappointment to you. A lot of people never get past that phase. They quit.
Everybody I know who does interesting, creative work they went through years where they had really good taste and they could tell that what they were making wasn't as good as they wanted it to be. They knew it fell short. Everybody goes through that.
And if you are just starting out or if you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Do a huge volume of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week or every month you know you're going to finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you're going to catch up and close that gap. And the work you're making will be as good as your ambitions.
I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It takes awhile. It’s gonna take you a while. It’s normal to take a while. You just have to fight your way through that.Rather than directly handing someone an unlocked phone, I like to think of it more like the residents of high-rise buildings who leave their curtains open no matter WHAT they're doing in the apartment. They figure the chances that someone is looking in THEIR window is miniscule even though the technology to do so is cheap and easy to obtain. The thing is, I bet a LOT of high rise residents, especially on higher floors, do leave curtains open all the time.
For any satire published on the internet, someone out there is going to think "Now, THERE'S a good idea!"
Reading this it just hit me that GeoGuessr is basically doxxer training.
I had an idea years back to build crosswords on the surface of a truncated icosahedron (https://i.imgur.com/qlLl434.jpg) but I had no idea how to find sets of 5-letter words that would mesh like that. A very clever programmer friend of mine whipped something up in Perl over a weekend using hashes. Basically it pre-emptively runs through the dictionary and hashes all wildcard forms of a word back to the original word (l...s->leaks, etc), then at each stage of filling out the puzzle it just grabs the list of words that hash to the current pattern. Say you're looking for something that fits s..p. it would return [stops, swept, soupy] etc, then tries each recursively. If the list is empty, there is no solution at that level so it backs up and tries the next word at the previous level.
I learned enough Perl to be able to make the code able to accept different polyhedra. The program takes quite a while to run on larger models, like say the rhombicosidodecahedron, so I've been looking for ways to speed it up. My background is with assembly and embedded C so I'm sure my implementation of these hash lookups would be slower than Perl's. Are there any other, maybe compiled, languages that have fast hash lookups like this?
https://www.amazon.com/Blackwing-One-Step-Long-Point-Sharpen...
Give up and start a metahobby of collecting unfinished projects. The real treasures are the friends you made ^h^h^h^h^h things you learned along the way.
I have found that I learn something and increase my skillset with every unfinished project. That leads to, over the long run, being able to get more accomplished in less time on newer projects. Plus, as a hardware hacker, I now have a tremendous inventory of parts that can be culled from the corpses of previous "failures" with no regret because the project as a whole doesn't function anyway. I've managed to ride out the RPi apocalypse on just my own inventory.
Occasionally I finish something because the planets align, I have all the parts I need on hand (or they're available REALLY quickly), my attention/hyperfocus lasts long enough, and I can reduce scope to a manageable level.
Maybe I'm lying to myself and I'm actually just lazy and don't have enough determination to finish under my own motivation. Meh, whatever, I'm comfortable with it and having a blast.
If you're trying to make money from your side projects, I have nothing for you, sorry. I like my day job and don't need the money enough to let my hobbies become another. YMMV.
I developed a 3-D crossword tile-building puzzle. Everyone that tried it was vociferous "You should sell this!" My response was always "I already have a job and I like it. This is a hobby." And I consider it (mostly) completed, not abandoned.
Meanwhile, if you think that sounds interesting I’d highly recommend the documentary Helvetica.
While “octopi” has become popular in modern usage, it’s wrong.
I used to be a stickler for correct vocabulary usage and then I saw a documentary about dictionaries (can't remember what it was) and someone from OED said basically this (from https://www.oed.com/public/oed3guide/guide-to-the-third-edit...):
The Oxford English Dictionary is not an arbiter of proper usage, despite its widespread reputation to the contrary. The Dictionary is intended to be descriptive, not prescriptive. In other words, its content should be viewed as an objective reflection of English language usage, not a subjective collection of usage ‘dos’ and ‘don'ts’. However, it does include information on which usages are, or have been, popularly regarded as ‘incorrect’. The Dictionary aims to cover the full spectrum of English language usage, from formal to slang, as it has evolved over time.
(edited for formatting)
Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, and I really wish somebody had told this to me.
All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But it's like there is this gap. For the first couple years that you're making stuff, what you're making isn't so good. It’s not that great. It’s trying to be good, it has ambition to be good, but it’s not that good.
But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you're making is kind of a disappointment to you. A lot of people never get past that phase. They quit.
Everybody I know who does interesting, creative work they went through years where they had really good taste and they could tell that what they were making wasn't as good as they wanted it to be. They knew it fell short. Everybody goes through that.
And if you are just starting out or if you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Do a huge volume of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week or every month you know you're going to finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you're going to catch up and close that gap. And the work you're making will be as good as your ambitions.
I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It takes awhile. It’s gonna take you a while. It’s normal to take a while. You just have to fight your way through that.I ended up failing out of college (I was young and stupid, too) and when I returned 5 years later I ended up changing my senior project to a leg controller for a hexapod robot.
Geiger Tube-->ESP32-->MQTT-->Raspberry Pi-->Node Red-->InfluxDB-->Grafana
Regret? Nah, I learned a lot and it's a great conversation piece.
Bokode: Imperceptible Visual Tags for Camera Based Interaction from a Distance
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/215457339_Bokode_Im...
It's probably more apologetics than anything else, but as an EE my first thought is that the pixels are some kind of OLED that is transparent by default, so every pixel that is not lit up saves power. Lighting up a full background on that handheld in the second pic would literally take thousands of times more power (obviously only taking into account the screen, not CPU, etc.).
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLowKtXNTBypGqImE405J2...
I recommended it to my daughter when she was taking a class in R and asked "But how does the COMPUTER know what to do?"