DrNuke

Is anything like Android (for mobile) and ROS (for robotics) still needed for legacy and new universal testing machines (the likes you use for tensile and compression tests of materials)?

If you know the fundamentals, AI agents become horses/cars/rockets and you have the reins.

Wasn't "tiny" the magic AI buzzword just 12-18 months ago?

Both… I think subscribers are generally happy for what they get, and there a number of interesting providers. I also can read about a few providers not being happy. Are you on there in some capacity?

Thanks… and you are right, of course! I’m just wishing to suggest them a path towards something fungible or pivotable at the end of the road, whatever their success as entrepreneurs. At the end of the day, it’s their time and their life.

I’m afraid the boss’ boss was talking with the wrong part of your team, in that his criticism really seems made for your boss, not you? That said, you were not treated like a novice at all, being given a fair share of high-level feedback. Take it as a nudge to improve and do better, without thinking too much: it will be your manager’s job to assess your output fairly.

It’s a numbers game really depending on the role and the hierarchy level, though? I mean, we should know in advance what to expect by going into that process, and the cohort we are willing to join. It’s just a preliminary fit, at any level. If employers want prospective employees to bark and you enter that race, you bark.

Innovators combine new technologies to improve or expand human capabilities, and that’s happening in many many sectors indeed!

How can I move to this "next level" of prototyping and small scale manufacture?

Maybe opening a small lab for youngsters, schools and happy triggers in your neighborood? You would personally benefit from new, like-minded acquaintances while keeping your running costs covered and surveying business opportunities.

Nobody can really tell what’s going on with your attempts, yet ten years are a long time for showing no success from a number of projects. Maybe, just maybe, you are in love with the idea of “build a side-project, and passively make money of it” without fully practicing or proficiently practicing these well-defined (from startup or lifestyle manuals) number of plan + commercial + technical + communication steps needed to ship and sell competitive solutions? If the case, you might even reconsider some of your unsuccessful projects from the past ten years and give them a more focused go.

Gen-IV forum is a worldwide consortium with a long-standing effort in making nuclear fission viable for the second half of this century. It is less glamorous than fusion but much steadier, and at least three of the six Gen IV reactor designs under development are now approaching the technical readiness level for demonstrators. China and Russia are a bit ahead, to be fair, but the European Union is also doing well with their sodium and lead fast reactor concepts. This white paper just shows they care about more issues than blunt commercial viability. Also consider that they cannot rely upon Russian gas for much longer, and that the C02 zero emission target for 2050 is going to be tough, without nuclear (if they put it into the incoming tassonomy). United States are more pragmatic, and with a dual path: big national laboratories + commercial startups.

Yeah, sales person! An introductory or formative period will be surely needed, possibly keeping you busy for a few months or even a couple years in order to have that job growing into you… but once you are at ease with the attitude, the techniques and the tricks, you will have a looooot of margin to accommodate any assignment as you like, because any employer will reward you for sales, not billed hours. Salesmen are the most paid people in any industry, and they often carry a leisure life through events (fairs, conferences, meetings) and networking.

Of course, being so young and still out of the job market in any measurable capacity, you need to try and bite at a number of available opportunities before finding your place. That said, if you really want to develop a skill that might afford you both money and time, would you consider sales maybe? No office hours, no burn out, your own pace… You just need to develop your social skills and become an attentive extrovert, starting from a theatre acting course, maybe, or a customer facing role if arts are too far away your current set up and inclinations. Good luck!

Walk, walk, walk. Whenever something goes to your head, just go out for a 30 minutes stroll and let your body/mind relax. It will not solve any of your problems, but improve your attitude for sure, which is a step in the right direction.

As a salesman, maybe… you may even be able to land a few appointments and treat them all as a boutique. As a developer, a marginal chance exists in the fintech, if you are able as a quant or as a janitor for very exotic and often old codebases.

Use Twitter to follow the most widespread tech magazines maybe? Wired, IEEE Spectrum, Quanta Magazine, and so on. You will get a comprehensive number of articles and references about the hottest takes and the flavors of the month.

You can work within a niche domain or an applied industry, for which ML/AI is just another tool in the bag (admittedly: sometimes revolutionary, many other times irrelevant); or you may want to do bleeding-edge research, only to find that you just cannot compete against the top dogs (even the wonderful fast.ai couldn’t follow suit without refactoring heavily every six or twelve months). What’s the point, then? Set yourself a clearly interesting and achievable target (learn and find a job, get a paper published, release an applied library, etc.) and a challenging deadline with milestones (say, 3-6-9-12 months). After that, wrap up and move forward or move on.

Some combination (sequential, parallel, meta, whatever convenient shape) of single tasks executed at super-human ability (computer vision + path learning are there already) would inevitably lead to some sort of singularity when coupled with just SoA motion, handling and decision making / optimization. Generalizing occasional singularities, though, still seems a long way ahead.

Log-ins & pwds pretty much everywhere, now with 2 and 3 security layers which means more and more SMSes going through the phone and even more being shared among recovery accounts. It’s safer maybe, yet it is a time consuming, irritating madness. Where do we stand with the much praised biometric access procedures yet?

Try and join the network of a local hub / co-working set up for startuppers / lifestyle devs maybe? Such an environment should not leave you in the dark.

If at some moment in time it becomes coherent with your professional trajectory, then possibly yes. Say, for example, you are willing to move on from a very different industry, or you wish to enter a niche standardized industry, or you are coming from a really outsider set up. Your narrative will be one like you spent time/money in a few certifications to kickstart a relevant transition and prove at the very least that your intent was legit.

Difficulties are there to suggest that we must fight to shape our own life the way we want, which is a valuable lesson itself. If uni is not working for you right now because the context is boring, find a sustainable way to transfer to a different, more lively uni without sacrificing your elected STEM degree? On the contrary, a gap year would be a radical turn, and nobody can honestly tell how and where you will be at the end of 2022. Good luck!

I've found some who are great and many others who suck.

Seconding this, and LinkedIn being more viable than Indeed. Serious recruiters, at the very least, have a clear incentive to find suitable candidates. On the contrary, though, so many offers coming directly from employers are just used to test waters: therefore, you need to send them a direct e-mail to stand out from the pile of applications.

The hiring people may just want/need to know how you spent your “void” time for legal, security or safety reasons. They also need to understand if you can still function within a working environment: the dynamics, the pressure, etc. After that, you can tell them anything, provided that it can stand a possible background check.

You surely stay and do your best until your employer calls your team’s day imho? After that, which is option 1, it is not the job you signed up for anymore, then option 2 or 3.

Start submitting your results to reputed conferences, maybe? Getting one or two acceptances will surely strengthen your case and show prospective grad schools that you are right on top of the field as a self-taught outsider and, more importantly, gladly willing to dig further in the next 4-6 years? Good luck!

Is there any particular reason cryptocurrencies are so divisive while other subjects are not?

At this day, end 2021, for what concerns the daily life of billion people worldwide, they are still a very small niche for first-world, trading-like unauthorised gambling? From a technical point of view, sufficient progress has been made… it is politics now, geopolitics and environment, if you like, preventing wider, global deployment, maybe?

Take 1.5 month, until 1 Jan, to close in finished form (1- why you wanted to do that; 2- how you did that; 3- what you achieved and what you learnt) as much as you can from your past projects… these will be your portfolio, the starting point for any approach, discussion, opportunity. Good luck!

- Happiness time: how long I can stay happy (or content, at least) through a single day.

Before this turns rough, philosophical or greedy… it is just related to pretty basic fulfillment of a pretty modest life.

You're in an excellent position of having been at the intersection of a bunch of cross pollinated fields, and you'll have a new skill to bring them together and do wonders. All the best!

That’s it, really, even without the gloss: OP’s background should stay firmly relevant to make him stand out. The new tool he adds to his resume is vertical (aka applied to his own domain expertise) and widens his professional reach… in this perspective, learning Python to perform industrial analytics, predictive maintenance, data-informed financial analyses, etc. seems a smart, openly justifiable move.