roland35

I feel like ai essentially reduces the effort to both produce and parse through text.

Right now most of my day is spent thinking about what to build next. If ai is gone, a large chunk will go back to reading and writing code again!

So pretty much the same path but much slower

With the correct tools and materials soldering can be very easy or with the wrong tools very difficult!

There are probably some great videos on soldering on YouTube, luckily it's a mature field so not much has changed!

Some random tips...

Lead solder is easier to work with, but with lead free make sure you are using the right flux and temperature.

It helps to preheat things as much as you can. You want to have a hot pad and hot lead, then add solder to that. As opposed to putting a blob of solder on the iron and trying to apply it like glue.

Too much heat can damage the board or part of course.

Use the right tips. Fatter tips can help more evenly apply heat.

If there is a lot of copper like a ground plane, it can take longer to heat.

Watch for cold joints!

Just overall think about getting the parts you want solder on hot, touch solder to it, remove heat.

Don't eat it!

Patrick McKenzie (patio11 fame) had a great blog post in credit card rewards

There is a lot that goes into it, and it is interesting how customers like me who literally never have carried interest and have to made thousands of $ in rewards over the years still make the banks money....

https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/anatomy-of-credit-car...

Uncle Johns Bathroom Reader was a popular series of books back in the 90s!

Those are some long turnaround times!

I actually had a positive, although a bit weird, experience with Microsoft. First, I got a response 3 months after I applied to schedule an interview! I figured it was due to the holidays. After the interview the recruiter called me personally and gave me the bad news that I didn’t get the job, but actually gave me specific feedback on where I did well and poorly on the interview. I was shocked! I think it’s the only time I’ve ever received non generic feedback.

I’ve heard a lot of bad experiences too, so unfortunately I think I was an exception!

Neovim is where it's at. You can use lazyvim which has tons of languages you can select to add LSPs for.

You could maybe, but water tended to collect on the surface (this was exhaled breath, so pretty humid).

Maybe if it was ambient air and not breath the humidity might not be as bad?

I had a project miniaturizing nasa tech for detecting hypoxia with o2 and CO2 sensors. It used a phosphorescent dye that changed a delay flash (ie you blinked a light, the dye would absorbed and blink back after a delay) based on temp and o2.

CO2 was measured with infrared but water also absorbed it, so you need to heat things up enough to not have water. It can be small, but not watch small.

All and all interesting stuff!

Yes, I think in that way it is dumb. But in another way I think it could be justified as a way to try and blaze some new trails and see what's possible by having users not worry about cost in the beginning.

Sure most token burning ends up being a waste but some ideas pan out?

Not disagreeing but it's another way of looking at it IMO

Its interesting, I think people sometimes think there is some binary existence of furniture sometimes! What's nice about todays modern economy is that there is a whole spectrum of tables I can purchase.

I can get a ultra cheap mdf Walmart table, a slightly less cheap Ikea table, maybe a midrange crate and barrel table, or a very expensive hard wood table from the local furniture store. Here in the Midwest we even have hand made Amish furniture available. So buy what you want!

I've found llms themselves get way more long winded in their responses once context starts to fill up. Fortunately it's not impolite to tell Claude to be more concise!

Like it or not it's true. I only worked at meta for two years before getting laid off myself but it seems to have greatly helped getting interviews.

I am much happier not working there though, getting laid off was a relief. Things changed a lot after the first layoffs and when the stock was around $90!

I found if you delete your cookies the overlay goes away. I use the mobile site and found that both desktop mode and old.reddit is pretty hard to read, so at least there is one workaround (for now!)

This isn't a surprise at all. I saw the exact same thing at Meta. The incentives are so strong to improve your individual performance that it's hard to resist, literally hundreds of thousands of dollars at stake.

Now with the fear of constant layoffs at Microsoft and Meta too, it's even more critical for individual engineers to optimize their performance review or you might lose your job. Sadly this is hard to line up with putting out a good product.

I had a side project going off and on for YEARS. I thought it was a great business idea with some interesting technical challenges.

I asked Claude and ChatGPT about it, and they both shot the idea down as a viable startup. It was a liberating feeling honestly! I have since focused my efforts on other projects and have been more successful with those.

I don't think it's bad code that's necessarily the problem - it's bad architecture and systems which will bite you! Often bad code can be easily replaced if it's easy to refactor.

Of course, bad business can ruin it all. I wrote a beautiful and reliable distributed rust agent, but was later laid off due to the company doing poorly.

I am staying away from sports betting, but I have done fantasy football a few times. I was constantly on edge from it all, even when I was winning! Constantly thinking of who I needed to pick up, who to trade, which matchups were good, it was a time sink.

And I ended up losing to my 10 year old nephew for the championship game!

That's true, but I think there is a gray area in between. As things scale up in one way or another, having high quality is important for both #1 and #2. Its hard to extend software that was designed poorly.

The question where experience comes in is when quality is and isnt worth the time. I can create all sorts of cool software I couldn't before because now I can quickly pump out "good enough" android apps or react front ends! (Not trying to denigrate front end devs, it's just a skill I dont have)

I would be shocked if he ever does that. Much more likely is just say something completely different and pretend that has always been the case

For better or worse, Claude is my intuitive interface to jq. I don't use it frequently, and before I would have to look up the commands every time, and slowly iterate it down to what I needed.

Business majors typically. I remember seeing a small graffiti in my engineering lecture hall that said something along the lines of "limit gpa -> 0: major= business administration"

A true prisoners dilemma!

I am not huge fan of Meta but I wouldn't dismiss them quite so much. I think reels is probably doing pretty well, and despite being cringeworthy FB itself is still going very strong. There are a lot of behind the scenes AI work improving their ads.

There are absolutely a lot of high profile failures though, with the metaverse being #1 (along with the name change to boot!)

No need to proselytize please. I think recommeding a community is not a bad idea obviously

If we want to stretch this analogy a bit - I believe all world-level chefs have a team of sous-chefs working for them. Doing things like chopping ingredients, prepping things, in fact probably doing a lot of th cooking. I think building with ai is pretty similar.

I think learning vim is definitely relevant. To me, vim is the fastest and most effective way to navigate and interact with text. Even with AI, I think those skills are not going out of style.

Thanks for sharing, I remember reading about tinypilot back when I was interested in starting my own thing!

I had an idea for a hardware business for years and it was nice to dream, but thinking about it more and reading this story makes it pretty clear that it is way way waaay easier to continue my career at big tech, for better or worse (sad cry emoji)!

Yeah solar viability is highly dependent on your local conditions and electricity costs. Also on your utility’s buyback program.

I have low electricity costs, no time of use pricing, and I don’t think I can sell back. I also live in a very cloudy city. So solar doesn’t make much sense!

Those levels are based on the electronics themselves. Earlier circuits used TTL which needed higher voltages to signify a "High". Newer CMOS based electronics need less voltage.

Lower voltages help with power savings. Higher voltages can and do work better in high power, high noise environments though! 24V as you see is still very popular and useful inany applications.

You should look into the slate truck! This is exactly what they are trying to do