I'm honestly impressed by how...well it works. Considering it's building an entire, totally custom Linux distro from scratch it requires a surprisingly little amount of hand-holding.
My main motivation for impactfulness is just making my job more pleasant: Nothing is more soul-sucking than fixing the same kinds of issues over and over because the powers that be are convinced they're doing it right, and you're the one stuck fixing the issues they create.
I built a lot of weird 'inventions' in university, such as an airsoft sentry gun to keep squirrels away from the garden. I was also in a student club.
I don't think any project specifically made potential employers say 'wow, we definitely have to hire this guy', but I think having actual experience doing stuff and demonstrating an interest for the field goes a long way towards landing you those first couple of jobs.
What's nifty about an e-bike is that they're cheap enough to co-exist with your car. I still have my trusty Honda, but I also do many trips by bike now. I fill up with gas way less often, don't have to deal with traffic and parking, and get a bit of exercise to boot.
> Does it infect C/C++ programmers who've dared to sample it once, turning them into noisy advocates, a la addictive drugs or parasitic fungi?
It definitely did that to me. I remember trying out Rust and was amazed at how much abuse I'd put up with from C++ for all these years. Now I just want to try out Rust in a large enterprise project to see if it will just be replaced with a different kind of abuse...
Employers don't require their employees to be members of a professional order because they think professional orders are nifty- It's because certain jobs are only legally allowed to be performed by a member of said order. If you were a dentist and ran your own clinic, you'd still need to be a member of a professional order (at least in Canada and the US afaik) to practice dentistry legally, which would come with obligations outside of your usual working hours.
Software engineering exists in a sort of gray area where you can often be a professional software engineer without having to be a member of any order, which is great in many ways. But I feel like one could argue that the informal expectation of software engineers to care about software outside of their work is similar to what is expected in other professions with more rigid governing bodies.
Sometimes you can declare "self-learning", depending on the order.
But anyways, that's not really my point: My point is just that in professions it's not uncommon to be expected to perform some kind of extracurricular activities related to your job. Often software "engineers" aren't members of a professional order, but I'd argue that the idea still applies. Tbh learning by working on a hobby project is way more appealing to me than watching some PowerPoint presentation...
I can sympathize, but keep in mind most professions expect you to commit to a certain number of hours of continuing education. Often you can convince your employer to let you do this during work hours (or even pay for it!), but not always.
Hah, to me flashing an MCU over UART is a luxury. When I first started working with MCUs I needed to use a chip programmer that cost several hundred $ and flashed using a high-voltage (relatively speaking) parallel interface. Then there were serial programmers that used a proprietary protocol to talk to the chip. And then finally we had bootloaders and self-flashing MCUs that made this whole process sane and affordable!
And of course to our ancestors, we're spoiled kids with our electronically erasable ROM ;)
It's funny, I work in embedded systems and much of this is still relevant to me. RS-232 itself (as in the specification for the physical layer) isn't used as much, but the underlying UART comms protocol is still alive and well. A Beaglebone dev board, for example, can be booted by uploading the bootloader over XModem.
Engineers prefer direct language and concrete examples. Unfortunately it's not always engineers looking at your resumé, and they love buzzwords and flowery language.
Well according to the article, if you're an Expert Beginner you might just end up with a checks notes... well-paying stable job and lofty title. Oh no!
It was my first exposure to...scalping? I remember that for some reason, chocolate was very valuable in the game. There was a chocolate shop in the game that was consistently sold out, but if you hit refresh often enough and at the right time, you could catch it right when it "restocked" and nab one of those rare chocolates. Then I would sell it in my personal store at a tidy profit.
Timing the refresh just right and grabbing a super valuable chocolate was quite a thrill, probably even more than the games themselves.
And then obviously no-one will spend $220 million on a movie anymore because, hey, we can just use generative AI. So I guess subsequent AIs will be based on the outputs of a previous AI? Or will all movies from a certain point onwards be wholly based on a corpus of existing movies used for training? Maybe AI companies will start shooting small film segments in meatspace just for the purpose of training or providing some base input to their models?
I'm curious what the answer was. I've read plenty about how the boutique finance sector is basically a parasite that only benefits a small cohort of already wealthy individuals, would like to hear what the other side has to say.
Funny you mention Rad, they seem to be another golden-boy eBike company that grew too quickly and is struggling. I have a Rover 6+ and am concerned about being able to get parts quickly in the future...