katzgrau

Pursuit of growth

This article describes drone physics. Audience should have familiarity with introductory linear algebra, introductory calculus, and introductory classical mechanics.

Having familiarity with all 3, as soon as I read this sentence I knew it was all down hill for me.

The real unlock is at line 149 of bin/burn

The issue is that it’s relatively low effort to make false and unverified claims. Defending and refuting it is a much higher effort task for the person doing the work to everyone else’s benefit.

RubyLLM dev literally had to take time to provide code samples and doc links.

No issue with listing legit limitations, but be a bro and fact check claims before wasting a volunteer’s time - and potentially leading other developers on a public board astray.

“Yak shaving”

It’s a classic move.

Start a new diet, so you join a gym and or buy a bunch of workout stuff.

I won’t knock it though. An important minority of my yak-shaving endeavors have led to long term positive outcomes.

It probably would’ve been easier if I didn’t use Rust and just used the Arduino libraries, or if I used a different board. But I was really married to this blog post title idea

Worth it, nicely done

There’s a lot of meeting hate here and as a developer, I used to feel the same.

But after bootstrapping a SaaS company and at times struggling through cross-team execution, I’ve come around. A short weekly standing meeting, like the one described in the book The 4 Disciplines of Execution, is actually a powerful tool.

Without it, maintenance, admin, and firefighting will expand to fill the entire week. The meeting forces space for focus, clear commitments, and basic accountability.

It’s not obvious early in your career, but once you’ve got some scars, it starts to make a lot more sense.

When your dreams and visions die, you don’t have any reason to believe in yourself, and you’re pretty much the walking dead

When you’re deep in a thoughtful read and suddenly get the eerie feeling that you’re being catfished

But the real threat isn't either of those things. It's quieter, and more boring, and therefore more dangerous. The real threat is a slow, comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing. Not a dramatic collapse. Not Skynet. Just a generation of researchers who can produce results but can't produce understanding. Who know what buttons to press but not why those buttons exist. Who can get a paper through peer review but can't sit in a room with a colleague and explain, from the ground up, why the third term in their expansion has the sign that it does.

I’ve seen this too. And with AI, it’s empowered even more people to spam, imitate, steal and remix others’ work, research and artistic expression.

The big grift is on - and sadly, our fearless leader is the epitome of it.

I think you missed the point of the parent comment.

The money (from advertising) that used to go to news now goes elsewhere (Google and Meta).

It’s left very little in terms of resources for staff.

Think about what the quality of commercial software would be like if there wasn’t enough money for QA and testers and top tier devs capped out at $180k with starting roles at 30k and 40k.

That’s the news industry right now. Poorer quality product.

As a news publisher (RedBankGreen.com) I’ll tell you that pretty much nobody is in it for the money anymore, at least at the local level.

It’s passion and love of the community, despite the many struggles and drawbacks.

AI bots scrape our content and that drastically reduces the number of people who make it to our site.

That impacts our ability to bring on subscribers and especially advertisers - Google and Meta own local advertising and AI kills the relatively tiny audience we have.

I dread the day that it happens in realtime - hear sirens? Ask AI who already scraped us.

A few things:

1. You can't judge the person, you can judge the behavior

2. To judge the person requires the ability to quantify the unquantifiable (circumstance, sequence of events leading to the outcome, going back to the literal beginning of time).

3. To judge the person implies a superiority to that person

Sure, one can take/justify simplistic shortcuts for practical reasons. But some forget that's what they are - shortcuts that bypass the nuances/reality of the situation.

The role of cause and effect is unshakeable.

If everyone would make the same choice, then free will doesn't exist. It's only one step away from what you said.

I didn't say anything about free will. "One step away" is where you went, not me.

If you believe free will and determinism are logically incompatible, that's your own theory to prove.

I'm simply saying that everyone would make the same choice given the exact same circumstances and starting conditions.

To believe anything otherwise is magical thinking, and basically implies a moral superiority to someone else.

I didn’t say anything about free will. What I did say is irrefutable.

It presumes people do not have choices.

No, there are choices. It states that given the exact same starting parameters and sequence of events, you would make the same choice.

It’s not really subjective if you don’t believe it’s your place to judge the human to begin with.

If you were in their exact life circumstance and environment you would do the same thing. You aren’t going to magically sidestep cause and effect.

The act itself is bad.

The human performing the act was misguided.

I view people as inherently perfect whose view of life, themselves, and their current situations as potentially misguided.

Eg, like a diamond covered in shit.

Just like it’s possible for a diamond to be uncovered and polished, the human is capable of acquiring a truer perspective and more aligned set of behaviors - redemption. Everyone is capable of redemption so nobody is inherently bad. Thinking otherwise may be convenient but is ultimately misguided too.

So the act and the person are separate.

Granted, we need to protect society from such misguidedness, so we have laws, punishments, etc.

But it’s about protecting us from bad behavior, not labeling the individual as bad.

You’re correct that belief is a powerful driver of prosperity/poverty - and that believing that you’re headed for either can lead to you to different modes of decision making. I’ve experienced and witnessed both.

An unexpected windfall will amplify the psychology of the recipients. For people who have lived without, the mindset is frequently “live today like it’s your last” or “enjoy it while it lasts” and blow it or self destruct.

Some will be obviously be more mature about it though.

I had, by chance, taken the same approach when reading the Zen and Art of Motorcycle Maintenance years ago.

The title failed to inspire but I heard it was worth the read and stepped through line by line.

It hit with a depth that I know with complete certainty I would not have gotten if I worked through at my usual pace or took it in as an audiobook.

Nassim Taleb’s books are also favorite slow reads of mine.

All this said, I collect books faster than I can read them so there’s always a feeling somewhere that I should be pushing through a little faster.

Ah well, in the end I think that really comprehending a handful of quality books is about as good as a shallow comprehension of many more.

For Grateful Dead fans, a little while back I made an interface for digging through show recordings - all sourced from Archive.org

https://katzgrau.github.io/jerry-picker/

I also (usually) go looking right away to see if the syntax makes me feel warm and fuzzy. I’m so shallow.

As a Y! employee for a couple of years - although my time was brief, I can say with confidence that had Yahoo successfully acquired Google or Facebook, both would have been destroyed in short order.

+1 from someone who also bootstrapped a side project into a 7 figure business, and just happens to be absorbing some lessons from Poor Charlie’s Almanac on Audible recently.

Re border radius… The coveted rounded corner, the mark of a really slick design before that property made it easy :D

I think media queries/responsive is what did in the last bastion of CSS resistors.

Eh, I’ll go ahead and trust that life is about as long as it needs to be. Any “things of note” apart from genuinely helping someone else out on their journey when you had a shot is totally irrelevant from the broader perspective.

There are easily installable databases of IP block info, super easy to do it synchronously, especially if it’s stored in memory. I run a small group of servers that each have to do it thousands of times per second.

At some point, can’t we just admit to ourselves that we operate from a human-centric worldview and that clouds pretty much all of our thinking on what makes humans special (if anything)?

As a species we definitely have some narcissistic tendencies.

I’m pretty convinced that if you just show up to class, be nice to the prof, and do all of the assignments you’ll get a mercy C or D regardless of how you performed.

I’ve never tried this (finished with a 3.9) but observed my friends.

Some would do the above and miraculously pass courses they, according to exam scores, were certain to fail.

However, my friends who had poor exam score and spotty attendance never made it through. In fact, sometimes they were so convinced they’d fail that the dropped the course or no-showed the exam — so they did in fact fail.

Hard work, maybe — simply trying is easy. But more than that, persistence.

IDK, I went to a state tech school and the huge majority (including myself) were from union/working class parents with no degrees. For at least my parents, getting a degree was seen as a ticket to a better life.

At the time, that school was also the cheapest (and consistently ranked at best value) so I think it just kind of self selected.

The competing private tech university however … I’m guessing those kids had parents with degrees.

Pitched some well known VCs, YC reject, 3x TechStars reject (2x finalist), lost to Uber-for-Lawnmowers in one of those XD

But if you want it, there are a lot of people out there who have bootstrapped. And TBH, if I'd successfully raised money I probably would have blown it.