peteforde

Right... except I'm asking so that I can apply his techniques to my PCB, which you know nothing about.

Very happy to hear about your success!

I'm curious to hear more about your anti-counterfeit strategies beyond just enabling encryption. I'm curious if you feel like anti-counterfeit and open source firmware are mutually exclusive. I made the choice to embrace an open firmware approach on my project while keeping the hardware closed, while knowing that if someone tries hard enough they can completely reverse engineer if they put their mind to it. Desoldering caps and x-raying PCB layers etc.

I'm also very curious to hear more about your adventure in injection molding. What starting resources do you recommend, how much did it cost? Would you do it the same way today, or have the recent innovations in 3D printing forms for injection molding present superior paths?

Finally, I'd love to hear about your certification process. What certs did you get, how much did it cost, what were the gotchas?

Again: getting a call is enough to knock someone out of deep concentration.

Anyhow, in addition to not hating LLMs, I would add "try not to use dramatic, hyperbolic devices in casual writing, it makes you sound ridiculous" to my advice.

That's really interesting about German law. I didn't know that, so I appreciate learning.

I suspect that if we were having this debate over dinner, we would agree on far more than we disagree on. I think we're speaking past each other because we're operating with slightly different notions of what mentoring implies.

From my perspective, I think that there's an obvious and reasonable expectation that you make best efforts to be a good team player. That means doing your part to participate in planning, knowledge transfer, group morale and of course making yourself available to work through tough problems with people regardless of their skill level.

What I think is far more dubious is the relatively recent slippery slope towards the notion that someone should reasonably be expected that career progress dovetails with some sort of natural law that says you are not being a good human if you aren't willing-to-excited to spend 70% of your productive time in a semi-permanent state of continuous partial attention because the people around you demand priority access to your time and attention, above any of your personal priorities or job responsibilities, often without compensation beyond a rote "thanks".

If you can't ship inside of a deadline because your ephemeral "mentoring" took implicit priority over your actual job, then something is very wrong with people's expectations of how key talent's time should be allocated.

I wish I was there with you to witness the look on your face as you slowly begin to realize that something as simple as a call can and often will absolutely pull you out of the flow state.

Someone sneezing nearby can pull you out of the flow state.

The idea that the onus is on the person who you're trying to distract to distract themselves to tell you not to distract them is just so broken if you think about it even just a little bit.

I'll defer to John Green, here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80SCl6n0TEo

It is a skill that you can develop.

$0.02: the way to read more books is with a really good pair of earbuds.

The Libby app (with Audible to fill in the blanks) makes it incredibly easy to train up your listening speed dramatically, making it possible to finish several books per week for free, while doing your morning rituals, commuting, washing the dishes.

The thing you have to absorb is that reading more does not come at the cost of doing other things, unless those other things are podcasts or recorded music.

You just have to be somewhat assertive about realizing that if you shave for 3-4 minutes, that's 1% of a novel at 2.5x speed. All of those interstitial moments in your day add up, fast.

It seems as though you want things both ways.

The notion that an experienced person should automatically consider mentorship to be part of their job is not backed by any code or contract that I'm aware of. It's just increasingly been pushed on people who haven't pushed back enough to keep a new generation from feeling as though they are entitled to it.

You can sample as large a pool of senior devs as you want; I suspect that if you can find 1-in-10 who have specific wording and structure in their employment contracts about the percentage of their time that they should expect to allocate to mentorship, you'll be beating my own estimations. No, what you're doing is attempting to codify a very polite form of exploitation. Yes, those people are usually among the most well-compensated, but it doesn't change the fact that they have their own job to do and a finite time in which to do it.

Please note that I am not suggesting anyone on a team could somehow work in a vacuum. Also, even the most experienced person frequently needs to ask for help, guidance and clarification. Being experienced is pretty much the opposite of knowing everything and is much closer to a measure of how much you have forgotten.

Nor am I implying that senior people have any business being rude or dismissive towards team members who legitimately have good reasons to interrupt someone's flow state. Timely clarification is important to a project regardless of who is doing what.

What I am saying is that if you run a company you might legitimately be horrified to learn that your most critical team members are spending 70% of their productive time mentoring, especially if that remaining 30% of their time is so fragmented that it never resembles a true flow state. You need those people to Build The Thing.

If you don't get that, then you're not living in the same reality I am.

Context switches are not free.

Dozens of "quick questions" over the course of a day will drag down your productivity to about one third or worse.

I know that for me, it takes about 45 minutes of focus to enter a flow state, when I'm at my most productive. If I can never enter the zone, then I'm not really doing the thing that made me such a valuable player in the first place, am I?

Alternative take: the assumption that senior engineers get pressured into agreeing to mentor without it formally being an acknowledged part of their job - that is, that a significant percentage of their time is supposed to be allocated to making themselves available to juniors - is fundamentally a problem.

There is so much stigma associated with being an senior engineer that simply wants to spend 95% of their day working on the problems that they were hired to solve. The worst part is that the vast majority of people in this situation are not compensated for this time, and they are expected to keep up with their actual assigned responsibilities.

This state of affairs is a relatively new thing. The idea that you would join a company with the expectation that the most important people to the success of a project should drop what they are doing to context shift to someone else's problem several dozen times a day is not something that would have been remotely normal twenty years ago.

I am not saying that mentoring is bad or that asking for help is bad, just that there's been a change and the unspoken vibe is that if you're not happy to work at ~30% capacity because you need to mentor people, you're some kind of antisocial jerk.

If a company wants seniors to mentor, pay them to mentor. It's very simple.

You're projecting several layers of bias onto this scenario.

The more busy you are, the more valuable your time... the more expensive context switching is. When you are known as the person with the answers, your day is at least partially structured around getting people to leave you tf alone so that you can actually concentrate on getting your own work done.

There's a really toxic expectation that people who are senior should stop what they are doing XX times per day to help other people figure out their issues. Usually there's zero consideration given to how much each one of these interruptions takes away from them. Resentment builds cumulatively.

Before LLMs, this conversation usually went like this:

"What should I do?"

"What do you think you should do?"

"X"

"Do X"

There's only so many times that can play out before you really want everyone to just fro.

Anyhow, you should try hard not to "hate and despise" LLMs. Life is too short to invent paranoid reasons not to use the best tools available. That's another instinct you learn as an experienced dev.

It is surreal to me that a comment stating that being able to do a certification pre-check on site before booking testing got downvoted.

Sure, maybe this isn't the device for that... but the idea that what I said was objectionable is just bizarre.

I was almost through the checkout flow last week before I realized that this configuration only supports a relatively narrow frequency range.

I work primarily in sub-GHz radio. Please wake me up when they launch their LoRa version, that would be an instant purchase for me.

That's absolutely missing the point. EMC/EMI testing is expensive, time consuming and requires scheduling and experiment design.

Being able to do local soft-run testing on-site to be sure that you eliminate the easy 90% of issues before you get to the lab would be a huge win.

Kudos! This is impressive work. Even the 3D viewer is working.

I honestly believe that folks confuse disappointment with an inability to notice their own window for what should be considered impressive continues to shift further into legitimate sci-fi territory.

Louis CK's wifi on a plane bit is funny because it's true.

I disagree, but not in a downvote sort of way. I think your position is defensible, but there is a valid second perspective.

The sorts of folks who "won't be missed" put pedantry over productivity. To paint with a very broad brush, it's been my experience that they also tend to be stubborn and frustrating team members who don't understand that there's a time to debate and the rest of the time is for shipping.

Bingo.

These days, my only deps are TinyUSB and LVGL - stuff that would be completely pointless and absurd to recreate.

One thing I find impressive is that this part has GPIOs equal to the total number of pins minus two. Economical is the word that comes to mind.

There's a little pop-up quiz in the bottom right of this page. "Describe your studio setup" and my mild dyslexia kicked in. I almost clicked the first answer because I initially read it as "just one or two bedrooms full of vintage synths".

First, you'll probably never know and this is one of those ouroboros questions that can drive you a little crazy if you let it. I urge you to not let it, because the only actual answer is that if you did work you were proud of and met the mother of your children, it quite literally doesn't matter. We should all be so lucky!

Second, very few things in life are so cut and dry. Legal cases are by nature simplified abstractions that attempt to render a three dimensional situation that unfolded over a long time in a few pages of a graphic novel.

Third, this sort of thing is so incredibly common. Often the only difference between fraud and IPO is whether it worked or not. That's not cynicism, just pragmatism.

If you ever read David Graeber's Bullshit Jobs - and you should - you'll quickly decide that the real fraud is late capitalism writ large.

I think your pushback is reasonable, but I want to speak up in defense of delis-thumbs-7e's comment, which I don't read as dismissive in a negative way.

In fact, I'd like to suggest that he's championing free range childhood by not making decisions for young people who might very realistically resent it as adults.

I know three people with perfect pitch. One of them thinks it's great (and is kind of annoying about it). The other two are constantly telling people that perfect pitch just means you're always exercising patience when your friends are singing, counting down the moments until they stop.

That sounds like a version of hell to me.

It's called the Osma Pro.

https://www.engadget.com/osma-pro-cold-brew-coffee-machine-r...

Sadly, the company that made it flew a bit too close to the sun. I'd be genuinely sad if mine broke.

About 6-7 years ago I bought a machine that prepares single-shot cold brew with ultrasonic cavitation. I like my caffeine potent and chilled, so this has worked out extremely well for me.

When I have a guest that wants a hot coffee, I just pour the shot into a mug and top it up with hot water to their taste, which works great.

What this isn't is anything new. That doesn't make it bad, but it's not novel.

To be clear, you took something that I said generally - and is not just easily defended but obvious - and made it all about you and your comment.

The pattern I'm talking about is easily repeatable. Someone says that they used LLMs to do something, people demand to see proof, and no matter what it is a sockpuppet army arrives on cue to insult and snipe. It doesn't matter if it's total shit or really impressive, it's the kneejerk aspect that makes it unsane to actually take the bait.

Meanwhile, everyone in this thread seems to assume that the website Mr. Johnny was talking about having used LLMs to build quickly was the one linked in his profile. Maybe it was, maybe it wasn't, but the river of snark was flowing before anyone had any confirmation of what they were actually supposed to be shitty about.

That's the tip off that you are a member of a pack of bullies, whether you're consciously aware of it or not. If you were actually offering opinions in good faith, you'd clarify the subject before jumping to snark.

That is not a coherent reply to my point, which is that you guys are like school yard bullies to people naive enough to throw chum into the water.

We've seen this play out so many times. Nobody working on anything serious is going to volunteer to be a target for your BS.

I sincerely wish that people would stop falling for the "prove you're not hallucinating" trap. If winning was possible - and it's not - there would be no prize but more snark and harassment.

You sound very much like you need a long walk and/or a long hug.

Please go touch some grass.

At this point, why would anyone in their right mind respond to this question and paint a target for all manner of negativity ranging from snark to harassment to malicious action?

I was excited by the headline but then when I got to the page

1. I saw it was React

2. Nothing loading, just a page full of spinners

I truly wish React could be launched into the sun.