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scottlawson

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I'd actually argue it has some wicked problem characteristics. The input space is enormous (all possible audio), perception is subjective and nonlinear, and there's no objective function to optimize against, only "does this feel right?". Every solution you try reframes what "good" means. It's not as hard as social planning but is way harder than it sounds, no pun intended.

I didn't go into much detail about it but there's a whole rabbit hole of color theory and color models. For example, the spectrum effect assigns different colors to different frequency bins, but also adjusts the assignment over time to avoid a static looking effect. It does this by rotating a "color angle" kind of like the HSL model.

I really like your LED installation in Rosetta Hall, it looks beautiful!

what I meant with "DevOps won't want to support it" was someone saying this before DevOps had even been asked, and by someone who wasn't even on DevOps, who just assumed that they probably wouldn't like this sort of thing.

the "good for them personally" reaction is so true. It's almost like a team-level version of the inonvator's dilemma, where protecting the thing you already own feels more rational than supporting something that might replace it.

That's fair. The title is provocative and probably overstates my actual position, which as you note is closer to "the way people practice critique in meetings is low value and here's how to do it better". The point about making critical thinkers feel worse is taken too. The people I'm describing in the post aren't the careful, thoughtful critics, but instead the reflexive ones. I could have drawn that line more clearly.

I like that angle a lot, and this very thoughtful comment. Distinguishing between the idea and the person is a good way to think about it. I think sometimes people cross that line without realizing it. Your point about making sure people still want to bring ideas next time is really what it comes down to.

you're right that a good idea should be able to survive scrutiny. The issue I'm describing isn't "someone asked a tough question". It's when objections pile up so ast that nothing can survive long enough to be properly evaluated. That's not a rigorous process, that's just a kill zone. The difference between a productive and unproductive kill zone comes down to culture. Teams that default to "here's why it won't work" end up very efficient at producing nothing. The teams I've seen do this well still kill ideas but they just do it after giving them a fair shot. The proposer has to do their homework but the environment has to let them get far enough to do it.

Heilmeier Catechism is really interesting, thanks for linking that. I like how the questions break down different major aspects. It treats risk as one of the dimensions of evaluation but not entire conversation. That's the shift I was trying to describe. Critique is valuable as part of a complete picture, not when it is the only lens.

Thanks for posting this. I'm glad I'm not alone in the monorepo club! I really believe in the benefits. Especially for a personal monorepo where the amount of code is not usually enough to run into the limits of git.

I'm curious about your CLI tool, what do you use it for?

thats fair, I appreciate your feedback very much! Initially, I typed out easily two or three times as much text as what made it into the final post, and had to trim and summarize what I wrote down to size. I totally hear what you are saying about generic structure and prose.

it isn't quite true that the categories are static, in fact, I've changed them a fair bit as I've reorganized containers. Sometimes I realize that two different containers should really be one container, and when that happens, I'll write down the sum of the dots on the new box label and continue it, so I don't lose the information. Less often, I'll take some parts out of a box and put them in a different one, accepting the loss of partial information. But I generally do that because I notice a subset of parts doesn't really belong in the box, and so the dots weren't really conveying information about those migrated parts anyways. It's more fluid than you might think at first.

short term memory, but I'll admit it isn't perfect and sometimes I'm pretty sure that I might be double labelling. But that's okay because even an occasional mistaken double label is still a partially valid signal that the box is being used a lot.

they aren't plastic, but surprisingly, I'm able to remove them with fine tweezers and transplant them when needed. They are 6mm diameter so pretty small and I've never seen them shred like larger labels/stickers.

sometimes I see no dots on things that are cool and I have this innate urge to want to hold onto.

One example is a Picomotor piezo actuator. It's a really cool piece of technology. I want to believe so badly that I'll use it in a project someday.

but after four years and seeing zero dots on it, it's like having concrete evidence PROVING that I'm delusionally optimistic about how useful it is. I can't ignore the reality.

the Picomotor is my version of your ice cream maker. the lack of dots gives me the evidence I need to finally donate it to a better home

I definitely see the appeal of an electronic version. I think it really depends on what you care about tracking. Food? Maybe use the same barcodes already on the product. Clothes? maybe RFID patches that are unobtrusive.

Things that are subject to a lot of wear and tear and handled a lot will not work well with dots as they will come off, but I don't find that to be a problem for the front of storage boxes so it works for me.

While I don't have an electronic system for tracking parts bins, the one exception is parts I place on PBCs. This is a small subset of my total parts and to track them I have an electronic database that's much more rigorous, tracking part numbers, data sheets, footprints, symbols, and it is much closer to the kind of part database that a site like digikey would use than the dot system.

I don't need dots to track parts I put on PCBs because I can do that all programmatically to scan the files and see what parts I place the most often.

I don't quite know what you mean with your question about whether it would be useful if I didn't have dot totals but still tracked them. I do find the dot totals to be useful, and comparing across years also helps me identify things that were used a lot, but maybe only two years ago. Stuff like glue and magnets seem timeless and are used constantly every year though.

The thesis that in the past it was safe to share ideas and projects because the execution was hard, and that now things have changed because of AI is an interesting AI, but I wonder if it is really true.

It certainly seems true that for small projects and relatively narrow scoped things that AI can replicate them easily. I'm thinking specifically about blog posts where people share their first steps and simple programs as they learn something new, like "here is how I set up a flask website", "here is how I trained a neural network on MNIST".

But if AI is empowering people to take on more complex projects, perhaps it takes the same amount of time to replicate the execution of a more advanced project?

In other words, maybe in the past, it would take me 10 hours to do a "small" project, which today I could do in 1 hour with the assistance of AI.

And now, with the assistance of AI, I can go much farther in 10 hours and deliver a more complex project. But that means that someone else trying to replicate this execution is still going to need around 10 hours to replicate it.

Basically, I'm agreeing that AI can reduce barrier to replicating the execution of another person's project, but at the same time, that we can make more complex projects that are harder to replicate. So a basic SASS crud app is trivial now but a multi-disciplinary domain specific app that integrates multiple systems is still going to be hard to replicate.

the legacy of Voyager 1 is crazy, this spacecraft launched decades before I was born and yet I see it regularly talked about even today. Seeing posts about how the Voyager 1 was leaving the solar system led to me learning about the heliosphere. Hearing about the Pioneer anomaly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_anomaly led me down a rabbit hole of learning about thermal radiation and radiation pressure (granted this is not Voyager). Then I learn about how it is powered by radioisotopes, its kind of cool how many things I've learned from these "ancient" spacecraft.

Benzene at 200 1 year ago

I love articles like this that give the context and history to important but not often talked about molecules. I enjoyed this as much as the "chemicals I will never work with" series.

If the issue is panic why not create a wrapper func with recover and present the same interface that you want?

Actually, a tutor can be someone who plans and guides your learning process, as you described. But there is nothing to stop you as the student from inverting it, designing and planning your own leaning goals, and then going to a tutor for specific advice.

I do this for foreign languages. I plan out everything and my own syllabus and goals, and hire a tutor for speaking practice. I give instructions and context to the tutor so they can best help me.