I've been DM'ing randos on LinkedIn for lightweight consults and found that offering to pay up front and asking strangers to price their own time can help to show seriousness and often results in free interactions or buy-me-a-coffee pricing. e.g. "Hey I love your work on X, I've been thinking about / working on related thing Y and would love your feedback on aspect Z. How much $$ to rent your brain for 20 minutes? I'm mainly wondering what you think/know about specific questions A, B, and C." They can either reply with a price, suggest a time for a short call, or just answer directly
I'm new to embedded systems programming and looked into ROS recently, without using it, while figuring out a minimal software stack for a UAV project (px4 over ArduPilot for the flight controller, but what to run on a "companion" computer is open ended). [my XP is in cloud infra, RESTful microservices, web apps, videogames]
Researchers, hobbyists, and some industry professionals (for prototyping?) seem to love ROS for its big community, logging/debugging/visualisation tools (rosbag, rviz), the pub/sub architecture (easy integration and loose coupling with third party modules), existing support for many sensors/peripherals/hardware components; plus off-the-shelf libs for SLAM, navigation, inverse kinematics, etc.
But ROS is hated by others for its custom build system (on top of CMake), the custom language-agnostic IDL for message types (like Protobuf but worse, esp. for versioning and backwards compatibility), non-determinism and untestability of the pub/sub model (esp. for safety-critical stuff), overengineering and layers of indirection / learning curve, poor performance, and high platform lock-in.
Looking at ROS as a robotics noob, it seems like useful 'muddleware' for toy projects, but where every sub-problem that it abstracts away from you can be solved better by other existing tools. I'm looking more into: Mobile Robot Programming Toolkit [1], Yet Another Robot Platform [2], genom3 [3], and Open Robot Control Software [4] (all C++). Or the Rust ones like RoboPLC [5], Dora-rs [6], Copper-rs [7], and Basis [8] (which supports Protobuf!).
If you're not using ROS for a "serious" project, do you use other middleware offerings or just pick 'n' mix lower-level libs tailored for your use cases?
I read this at a poetry evening recently, to much laughter. From Titus Plautus, a comic playwright, we have an early example of a rant about disruptive technology or - possibly - a satire about technophobia!
I think the alternative to having a social life "dictated by a machine" (a machine which, in this case, encodes the intentions of its programmer) is to have a social life dictated by chance and by other's intentions - coincidences on public transport, social media posts ranked by a black box, the noisy patterns of our recollection, etc... what is so 'authentic' about sacrificing one's attention to these forces, which may only align accidentally with our priorities?
I've kept a spreadsheet for about 5 years of people I know from my hometown, from uni, past jobs, in other countries, family of friends, etc... ranked roughly by how frequently to contact them, and it has been so helpful and fun for me (and them!) to use it. This might not be helpful for everyone, depending on what you care about and the size of your network, but it seems more "sad" to me that people let chance and social media control their patterns of interaction.
I was on a gap year after an MEng in Computing when covid lockdown v1 hit the UK. Unsure what to do with my life I watched Downton Abbey with my parents and baked lots of banana bread. I'd picked up ukulele to de-stress during exam seasons and weeks before starting my first full-time engineering job I decided to make a rap music video with some vfx, animation, and... juggling?
This attitude seems to overlook that there can be a tension between present and future fulfilment. There are things you can do (or avoid doing) now that will make your life a lot less enjoyable later on. Activities that 'make you a better person over time' often require effort, discomfort, or sacrifice of some kind in the present (exercising, studying, therapy, etc...).
I don't think it is a good idea to maximise pleasure in the present - at least not at the expense of future pleasure - but to maximise the total pleasure you get out of your life, which will often mean doing something right now that you don't find intrinsically rewarding.