I have about 20 or 30 fountain pens. I do system architecture diagrams, with notes in the margin, using pen and ink. It does help me think. I actually find it relaxing and fun.
Ha! I had a similar story, Om saw me and a group of other engineers that our boss briefly introduced as he was walking through our offices, and Om remarked: "You are working these guys too hard ... they look like they don't get enough sleep." Which was true ... we were pulling all nighters to get our release in shape for demos. It was nice to see a visitor acknowledge our health sacrifices for the company ... a whole bunch of other journalists came through too ... and nobody else commented on our appearance/health.
It's interesting that saying the Earth is more than 10,000 years old is not haram in Saudi Arabia. I thought it would be, since they are so religious, but it turns out the Koran doesn't make any claims about the age of the Earth, so you are free to say that the Earth is billions of years old and not be accused of blasphemy.
The UPI payment system in India seems to work really well. I'm not sure about the architecture exactly, but there seems to be a way to generate one-time passwords that you can use to pay people a fixed amount. E.g. you go to a website or store, and they display a QR code for payment, which contains the payment recipient information and amount of the charge. When you scan it, you are taken to your bank app where you authorize the recipeint and the amount, then you are given a special code in the form of a QR code or alphanumeric code. The person recieving the payment can scan the code to recieve payment ... or if you are online you can paste the alphanumeric code. No other information is exchanged. There's nothing that can compromise your ID or account info.
Pretty amazing!
Insane that a developing country has something so seemless, and meanwhile in the USA my credit card number is stolen online every 3 to 5 years, necessitating cancellations and in some cases (as with Chase) I had to close the entire account as they could not stop the fraud even after issuing 5 new cards over the space of 6 months--somehow the new card authorizations were being ported automatically into some subscription systems.
How much of this action by Bambu is driven by the fact that they're being threatened from Washington DC that they will have to be able to prevent people from printing "illegal" items, like gun parts, in the future?
Oh lord. If this is the trend, I probably can't avoid improving my Rust language knowledge in the long term. I hate reading Rust so much right now. I guess I just have to get over that hump.
Was interesting to read this post because I've always been an extrovert and have never had trouble making friends. I usually make friends quickly ... and my problem is in the other direction ... I have too many friends and people get mad at me because I don't have the time to keep up with every relationship I've built in 40+ years.
I've been a best man 6 times. A groomsman 20+ times. I'm spread really thin now that I also have kids and a wife and family commitments.
Sometimes I actually crave solitude more than anything else.
Reading this post is almost like reading about another tribe from a distant place, and what it feels like to live their lives.
Is it weird that I'm kind of envious of this guy and his life? Not enough to trade places ... because I'd miss my wife and kids and close friends ... but if I could just like be him for a few weeks and then come back to my life.
My biggest gripe with Rust, which certainly reflects my own shortcomings, is that when I go back and revisit simple Rust programs I wrote more than a year ago, it takes me a long time to understand what I was even doing in a particular part of the program. This is my weakness ... I'm not great with Rust and I don't use it enough to get better. But it is what it is.
In contrast, when I go back and read Go or C code I wrote years ago, I have no trouble at all quickly figuring out what I was doing in the small programs I write.
The way these issues manifest themselves, as it recently did, was I went back to add a simple addition to a CLI tool I wrote for myself a year ago, and I was having trouble doing it because I couldn't quickly understand what I had been doing a year ago ... so I just had an AI agent do it for me. This was the kind of change that if it was a Go program, I would've done manually myself in about 5 or 10 mins.
Somewhat related. My mom once yelled at me for losing a necklace she really liked. Then we were moving her stuff out of her house and found the necklace behind a wardrobe, wedged between it and the wall. It had been there for like 40 years, layered in dust.
Law enforcement being lazy, dumb, and incompetent is not an unpredictable bug. Its predictable. The smartest human capital does not go into law enforcement in this country. They go to other industries. Flock needs to have procedures for whitelisting plates when errors are discovered because these kinds of issues are very common.
This issue of large organizations making shitty products seems to infect every company except for a handful. Even Google, with all its good intensions, by 2010 was full of political animals climbing ever higher on the corporate ladder while management struggled to set incentives correctly to make the company product focused.
Its just unbelievably hard to nail the culture and incentives in large organizations. Some notable exceptions: Sony in its first 3 decades, Toyota in the 70-90s era, Apple after the return of Jobs and till his death, and one could even argue Microsoft in the era of Windows 95 till about Xbox 1. Maybe even Tesla and SpaceX.
Something hard to quantify happens when the culture of product erodes and the culture of politics virally infects a company. I witnessed it at a couple of big companies ... Intel in the late 90s, Google in the 2010-15 era (working as a contractor looking in).
Hats off to people like Jobs and Musk who could grow product culture at scale ... I can't even say I've been successful at fostering this kind of culture in startups under 500 employees.
What a coincidence. Just today, someone on my high school alumni group just posted an album they "made", which is 100% AI generated music. They claim authorship because they created the prompts to the AI.
My feeling is that if the AI is this good, the audience will just prompt the AI themselves and cut out the middleman.
I had no idea there was an entire OS written in Rust that was this far along. Is all the bootstrapping from assembly directly into Rust, or do they still have a dependency on C and gcc just to get things going?
Reminds me of this game show episode. I was watching it with friends, and I'm not sure if we all picked out who the smartest person would be, but I do remember we definitely figured out who one of the lower-ranked people would be just based on her blathering (I won't give it away here since people may want to enjoy the episode themselves).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAlI0pbMQiM