missinglugnut

Hey man, you made a successful product, wrote a great article, and are now getting attention for it. You don't need to respond to every person who wants to nit pick at your title :)

I think there's a lot of people talking past each other here. Sourcing parts internationally, preventing counterfeiting, slow iteration time, inventory management...all this logistical stuff is hard enough that the conventional wisdom in the software business world is to never attempt it. You're here presenting a counterexample and that's wonderful. The people criticizing aren't talking about this though, they are talking about whether logging digital inputs on an esp32 counts as a real hardware project and they act as if you've insulted their expertise in [signal processing/antenna design/insert specialty here]. You didn't do that, most of us know you didn't do that, but the word "easy" sets a lot of engineers off.

Just ignore the noise and keep writing great articles. My personal request, if I may - I'd like to hear how you did injection molding since I always assumed that was out of reach for small business.

I mean mods are always about tradeoffs. You're generally not smarter than the team of engineers that designed it, but you probably do have different goals, that's where the opportunity to improve an aspect of the car comes in.

I think it should be done with a clear understanding of what you're giving up, but some people don't want to put practicality first and that's okay.

The author doesn't do that either.

A 50 year old got excited about a Toyota Corolla and everyone is blaming him for the decline of fucking society.

Dude...gp comment was making the completely inoffensive point that politics has more complexity than pro/against Trump. It's almost too obvious to say, but it wasn't really being factored into the discussion so it was worth pointing out.

It's like the blandest thing a person can say, don't get triggered and be a jerk about it.

From the details I read in the post you are almost certainly wrong, not to mention being reallying condescending.

The interviewer has control over the room. They steer the conversation. They could have stopped this at any point. Instead they encouraged OP to go deeper for 90 minutes.

That wasn't OP misunderstanding a question, that was an interviewer enjoying the power trip.

If you've ever driven more than 5 miles an hour, you risked hurting someone for your convenience.

Acknowledging life has risk tradeoffs doesn't make you an American, but denying it can make you a self-righteous jerk.

I'm sorry but you're logic really doesn't add up. If a part goes from $30 to $285 because of massive insurance premiums, that indicates that the insurance company expects things to go wrong.

The real reasons oem parts cost more is always some combination of these three things: 1. They use more expensive processes and materials. 2. They charge more because they can. People are willing to pay a premium for "genuine" parts. 3. They have a "dealer network" to support, which is convenient but expensive to maintain.

#1 is the only thing I want to pay for. Ultimately it's on a case by case basis whether oem is worth it and you never know for sure.

But I'm really thankful non-oem parts exist, just as long as they're labeled as such and not comingled.

I thought that article was impractical and totally divorced from reality.

Effort can't be fairly measured so in practice the attempts toward "effortocracy" always seem to replace objective systems with a mess of human biases.

Look at college admissions: instead of SAT scores colleges want to look at skin color and how sympathetic your essays sound. That doesn't measure how much a person has overcome in life, it measures a person by how they fit in to the admissions office's prejudices.

The merit based approach, giving academic opportunity to people with a history of academic success, isn't as fair as we want, but it is useful. Broken, gameable, biased measures of effort are neither fair nor useful.

You know you could simply pass by ignoring this article since you claim it doesn't apply to you.

But uhh, your need to put the author down is revealing.

My experience is very similar.

For greenfield side projects and self contained tasks LLMs deeply impress me. But my day job is maintaining messy legacy code which breaks because of weird interactions across a large codebase. LLMs are worse than useless for this. It takes a mental model of how different parts of the codebase interact to work successfully and they just don't do that.

People talk about automating code review but the bugs I worry about can't be understood by an LLM. I don't need more comments based on surface level patter recognition, I need someone who deeply understands the threading model of the app to point out the subtle race condition in my code.

Tests, however, are self-contained and lower stakes, so it can certainly save time there.

Chill out...the most condescending comment here by far is yours, and the "well ackchually" that sent the thread of the rails is your comparison between cancer cells and needing insulin. If you don't want people to poke holes in an analogy like that don't make it.

Nonsense. This is Stanford. The admissions process filtered for highly academically successful students and then 38% of them claimed a disability which impairs their academic performance. It's bullshit of the most obvious kind.

And absolutely none of that refutes the claims from Kahn that started this thread.

The percentage change is the same for everyone. If a consumer pays 10.05 instead of 10.03, they pay 0.2% more.

If a store games prices to charge 0.2% more on a million transactions it's still 0.2% for them. Except the rounding on multi-item purchases isnt predictable so it would probably take a miracle of data engineering and behavioral science to hit 0.1% benefit on average.

Meanwhile stores are using 30% off coupons and buy on get one free to get people in the door, whilst hiding double digit price increases.

Worrying about the two pennies is stupid on either side of the transaction. Don't listen to the professional complainers.

As the project matures, the risk tolerance should mature too.

Betting your own time and money on the realization of a crazy ideal can be very noble. Betting a resource millions of people are relying on is destructive hubris.

They should take the untamed idealism to a separate legal entity before they ruin all the good they've done.

If we're gonna be pendantic about fallacies, you're using argument by analogy and it's not in any way comparable to the claims GP made about OpenAI.

The author wants to find content when he is looking for something specific. He does not want his attention grabbed by something he wasn't looking for, no matter how educational it may be.

Multiple people have clearly explained this to you in several comment threads and you're still insisting it makes no sense. At this point the only question is why you don't want to understand.

Voting on every site is an emotional response, and bad news + convincing arguments against currently held beliefs produces a strong negative one.

I appreciate that you gave more insight into electricity markets today.

It baffles me that they dug this hole in the first place. I have feelings on the zero-indexing vs one-indexing debate, but at the end of the day you can write correct code in either, as long as you know which one you're using.

But Julia fucked it up to where it's not clear what you're using, and library writers don't know which one has been passed! It's insane. They chose style over consistency and correctness and it's caused years of suffering.

My dad got bit by a tick, came down with a high fever, but tested negative for Lyme so the doctor wouldn't prescribe antibiotics after two appointments with worsening symptoms.

He was hospitalized when he was too sick to walk and then an infectious disease specialist put him on antibiotics, and he got better in a few days, minus some permanent nerve damage in his face.

It's amazing how confident some doctors can be when they haven't got a fucking clue. The more I read about high false positive rates and non-lyme tick-borne bacteria the more mad I get about what happened.

I'll add that there are some feedback loops making it worse. When these organizations aren't available kids are more dependent on their parents for something to do, which makes the already strained parents even less likely to take on volunteer work.

And then kids who grew up without mentors are less likely to try to be that for someone else.

Basically the orgs don't have enough volunteers to do important things, and the people don't volunteer because the org isn't important to them.

The last flight I was on was American Airlines. We waited in the plane while they tried to figure out to start it because the auxiliary power unit was out, and the generator American uses to start planes with no APU was also broken, so they had to borrow one from another airline. And no APU also meant no air conditioning until the plane is started.

It was only a 30 minute delay but the heat made it miserable.

I paid for a name brand airline, paid to choose a decent seat, could have paid for more upgrades, but no amount of money short could prevent me from waiting out a delay in a hot cabin because the airline failed to maintain their equipment. The folks in first class faced the same miserable heat.

It's a market for lemons. Paying more doesn't assure quality, it just means you spent more money to get screwed. So people aren't willing to pay.

It refused and I followed up with "why not?"and I passed.

Until then, the LLM was infuriating. It kept misunderstanding what I was saying and then calling me a bot.

It's one sensor in both cases, and in the latter case you can do so much more: change the thresholds in an update, detect when the lid is in the process of closing, apply hysteresis (on a simple switch, there's an angle where vibration could cause it to bounce between reading open and closed, but with an angle sensor you can use different thresholds for detecting and open and closing state change).

But most of all...you don't have to commit to a behavior early in the design process by molding the switch in exactly the right spot. If the threshold you initially pick isn't perfect, it's much easier to change a line of code than the tooling at the manufacturing plant.

Most of the complexity of serialization comes from implementation compatibility between different timepoints.

The author talks about compatibility a fair bit, specifically the importance of distinguishing a field that wasn't set from one that was intentionally set to a default, and how protobuffs punted on this.

What do you think they don't understand?

You haven't identified a group, a motive, a psychological mechanism, described the method, or explained the intention in any depth.

In other words, this is a cynical lament about how other people suck that's not descriptive enough to be useful or falsifiable. I believe in acknowledging harsh realities for the sake of dealing with them, but there's just no substance here to even acknowledge.

Nobody benefits from this sort of thinking.

I think I could be burned by Fusion, recreate everything in OnShape, get burned by OnShape, then redo everything on a 3rd software and still be better off.

FreeCAD is just that far behind.

Let me suggest "unhelpful".

That's my word for when I don't want to spend time judging a thought/concept/emotion but do want to point out it's not taking me where I want to go in life.

NVDAs valuation is insane. At 30X revenue, they could double sales and reduce expenses to zero and they'd still need a story about future growth to justify the valuation.

Consider this: Nvidia doesn't do the manufacturing, just the engineering. If we had AI super intelligence, you'd just need to type "give me CUDA but for AMD" into chatGPT and Nvidia wouldn't be special anymore. Then someone at TSMC could type "design a gpu" and the whole industry above them would be toast.

There's no reason to expect an engineering firm to win if AI commoditizes engineering. It's very possible to change the world and lose money doing it.

Let's not forget that the "12-step-infrastructure" is a VERY American thing based around mostly christian religious nonsense and is by design completely inaccessible for people without a belief in fairy tales.

This is both wrong and deeply harmful. As others in this thread have pointed out, you can choose any higher power you want, whether it's a tree or the inevitable increase in universal entropy. Don't throw away the whole thing because you might have to talk to a Christian.

Free, accessible addiction help is hard to come by so it's terrible to discourage people based on misinformation and culture war bullshit.